A/N: I just want to say that I don't own Maximum Ride, but I own the army and the ideas of weapons shown in the next chapter.
"Duck and roll!" someone shouted behind me, and I followed the instructions without hesitation. Something came flying right above my head, missing it by inches. I rolled onto my stomach and army-crawled into the underbrush. A bullet hit right by my head and I rolled to the left, again on my stomach, before finishing my frenzied crawl into the bushes. A bellow came from behind me and I turned while remaining on the ground. I stared at a pair of feet right in front of me and shuffled backwards some more. The end of a gun smashed a centimeter from my nose and I froze in an instant.
"No one's there!" the same voice from before shouted. "You just proved it." The feet left my view, and suddenly I got hit on the shoulder with the gun and sucked in a hissing breath. There was a great tactic - lure the prey into a false sense of security and then attack. I tucked and rolled out of the bush, jumping to my feet. This was the worst scenario yet! My one partner-in-crime (literally) was being held still by two Erasers, werewolf-looking guys who were attacking. That just left me against ten Erasers, including those that held my friend.
Personally, I didn't like the odds, one against ten. But these scenarios had never been fair, had never been easy. They were to test Tauros and my endurance, our strength, our wits. Tauros had lost this one big time, since he'd failed to escape and to take down our enemies. He's lost as many as he's won.
Right now it was just me, my strength, and my endless hours of training coming into play. I jumped backwards, did a flip and landed in front of a tree, before jumping, grabbing a branch, and hawling myself onto it, all in one fluid motion. The Erasers stared at where I'd been standing before, dumbstruck. My shoulder ached from the strain I'd used to pull myself up and from the attack.
Down below, the Erasers had figured out where I'd gone and were advancing, feral smiles on their faces as they sniffed out their prey - me. Before even thinking - since that would lead to thinking too long and getting caught, as I'd been taught - I jumped from my perch. My feet plowed into one Eraser, taking it to the ground underneath me. I'd hit it in the face and it was out cold. I crouched there for a moment and Tauros was grinning from where he was. Suddenly everything sprang into life.
The Erasers all pounced at once. I kicked one down, but was quickly pinned to the ground, my arms held down by heavy Erasers, as well as my legs. One punched me in the gut and I sat up as best I could, gasping for breath. Then I got a kick in the face. I felt my lip split and could taste blood. I coughed it up and got kicked in the side. I groaned and moved my head, then got a boot slammed right into my face. My world went dark right afterwards.
I woke up a half hour later, lying on my back in the hologram room. The reality-hologram-projection was just something the whitecoats had perfected in order to train us, their mutant army of ninjas. They called us spies, but I thought of us more as ninjas.
Someone was talking near the door, arguing: "He did perfectly fine until then! We need to increase his strength and speed so that he can avoid those kinds of attacks." They were referring to me. The leader of the mutant-army.
"That might work. We need to train him on some simpler scenarios first, however. We had completely skipped the sixteenth through ninteenth to get to this one. Him and the team need work on all of them," another voice argued.
"Why not just go to scenario fifty? We'll train the whole team at once there," the first said. I sat up, aching all over. My lip was dripping blood onto the floor and down my chin, I could feel an eye swelling, and it felt like one of my ribs had been cracked. Another had probably been bruised at least. The pain in my shoulder seemed muted in comparison, though it was still there.
Two whitecoats were arguing heatedly near the door but stopped when I groaned, wiping blood from my lip. One of them left and the other, my main tutor, came closer. "We would have moved you, but we didn't know how serious your injuries were. How're you holding up, Master?" he asked politely. He was only ever this kind when I was hurt, otherwise he was really strict.
"Fine," I said thickly. "Just need to rest." The whitecoat pulled me to my feet and helped to steady me - I felt lightheaded and about ready to fall. He supported me while I stumbled towards my room. The army had their own rooms in the lab, since we weren't prone to running away and the whitecoats had ditched the cages. There weren't any other experiments to use them on, anyway. All those had been killed off - we were ones that wanted to stay and fight. All thirty of us.
The whitecoat led me to my bed and I fell down on it instantly, welcoming the soft cusioning it provided. "Thanks, Dad," I muttered, burying myself in my covers.
"Get some rest," Jeb said kindly before leaving the room.