A hologram projection shows breaking news. A man is in the middle of his news report, with a slideshow of images to his left, showing pictures of UFO sightings across several areas.
"...these images have been leaked all around the world. Many speculate they're either photo-shopped images or truly real, existing extra-terrestrial creatures lurking about in the skies. In other news, another instance of strange occurrences has been talked about."
The news cuts to footage of the authorities picking up frosted carcasses, placing them into body-bags.
"Victims in multiple countries have the unfortunate and unusual fate of being frozen to death. Some of the bodies' remains have been seen to be in hundreds of fragments, others horribly sliced up. What caused this? Has a new terrorist group went on a rampage with a new type of warfare weaponry? And could this be linked to the alien sightings?"
A man with grizzly sideburns continues to watch the news through the hologram a little further, doing so by having two fingers against his temple. He stops his imaging module and crosses his arms, sighing.
Beside him is a teenager with bleach-white hair, who plainly stares at a bunch of cards scattered over a table from their game last night. Although he may not look like it, he heard everything on the news.
"Hey partner," says the grizzly-faced man. "We gotta do something other than running around and hiding."
"Like what, destroy the cartel's bases?" the teenager replies.
"Exactly. We just need a team-"
"Ugh...Maxima, really? You almost bit the dust with those mercenaries."
"Yeah, but we held them off pretty well. We were able to get some of our buddies outta there...with unfortunate case of us splitting up in the middle of it all."
Maxima's talk of this topic brings his mind to focus on his right hand. It's encased in a special glove of dark crimson red and black.
"Hmph," the bleach hair says as reaches over to get some beef jerky from the table. Maxima was going to comment on that he did get some food appropriate for the morning, but knowing K', he decides to continue his discussion of the cartel. K' chows it down as Maxima continues.
"I've been improving my cracking skills lately. Maybe I can pinpoint one of N.E.S.T.S.' locations."
"'Aight," his buddy says as continues to wolf down his breakfast meal.
"C'mon K', not in my face," Maxima grimaces as he brushes off some beef jerky spat on his face. K' gets up off the couch just as Maxima places his fingers onto his temple.
He creates a holographic image showing the tunnels of cyberspace. K' was going to walk off to somewhere else, but just stands as he looks at the image. A small beat passes, and Maxima finds the location of a base.
"Alright!" Maxima says with quite the enthusiasm. The shape of South Korea flashes as his scanners found suspicious activity in the country.
"Hey, is that where I think it is?" K' asks. "I mean, I heard the others saying that the base over there is a bitch to infiltrate. One guy did make it through. 'Heard he didn't come back out."
"Mm-hmm," an occupied Maxima replies as looks through the clusters of locations.
"Darn, N.E.S.T.S. has put a defensive system that prevented me from looking in their whereabouts further. They gave me a chunk of scrambled coding. I need to decrypt it first, and it looks like it's pretty long. My decrypter isn't the best nor the fastest in the world, so it'll take ages if I do it. But we don't we have time." Maxima turns off the hologram again.
Suddenly, the cyborg stop in place as he hears something outside. By second nature, K' raises up the blinds slightly with a pair of stolen binoculars.
"See anything?"
"The mercs!" K' turns around and snatches up his black leather jacket.
"'You sure?"
"Of course. I remember that dude with the red scarf. He always looks mad as hell."
End of Chapter 1. The first paragraph had originally described what the news reporter was saying, making it a bit monotonous to read. Also took out a bit of hackneyed dialogue between K' and Maxima. Even then, I'm not satisfied with how I wrote Maxima trying to track down the bases, but then again, this was a couple months after I made that Metal Slug story back in 2014.