PAR FOR THE COURSE
Tanner looked down at what his friend had been working on for the last two months. "It looks pretty useful, but why did you have to use those colors? It is actually giving me a migraine just looking at it."
"That was all the hard ware store had available in the quantities a needed at such short notice. Besides it will just add to the challenge," Price looked like a proud father as the two of them examined his creation. Stretching out before them were one hundred square meters of the most elaborate firing range/obstacle course Tanner had ever seen. If it hadn't been for the sickening pink and lime color scheme, it would have been almost majestic. It was a good thing so many of the parts had come prefabricated, otherwise it would have taken the seven firearm users the rest of the year and probably part of next to finish.
"I still don't understand why you felt this was necessary, couldn't you just have used the hard-light building?" Tanner asked, confused.
"Well yeah, but... Its just different doing it for real, under the real sun. Besides with your uncle backing us on this, even Ozpin agreed to let us build it on school grounds. So we did."
"Well it's here now. Someone should test it."
"Yep! Hey Hazel, give it a go!" Price yelled as he moved over to the monitoring platform, pulling a stopwatch from one of his bottomless pockets.
/
Hazel stood at the beginning of the course, and as she waited a buzzer sounded. She darted forward instantly. The first room was small with three crash test dummies. She fired a shot all three without slowing down. The hallway between this room and the next contained a low trench with barbed wire stretched over the top.
Aegis Rixator morphed back into gauntlets and she dropped, army crawling through the course. When she got out of the trench two more targets popped out in front of her, she slashed one across the throat with her pata, and shot the other with her cannon and kept on running.
The next rooms were standard target rooms, but the tenth room had was a massive set that was designed to replicate a battlefield back when trench warfare had existed. It had a row of four trenches as deep as Tanner was tall. And what's more there were more targets here than in any other part of the course, and these targets weren't just dummies, they were decommissioned Atlesian military training mechs. The mechs moved using military tactics and they were split into two distinct teams. Each team occupied two of the four trenches, and they would fire on each other and the obstacle course runner as well. Luckily they only had stun rounds.
This room was the core of the whole exercise, and it had been funded by Tanner, Mark, and even Xandria. It was well worth the money, it gave the prospective huntsman a target rich environment, but they couldn't slip up. The mech's rotary cannons would punish any mistakes mercilessly.
As Hazel came to the room she decided to go for a stealthy approach. She rolled into the first trench and waited for a lull in the firing then jumped out landing in the next one. One of the mechs saw her land and turned to fire, but before it could she fired a shell into its face. The students had to use stun rounds on the course as well, the mech's were to expensive to replace constantly. The mech registered the headshot as an instant kill and dropped. Hazel was moving deeper into the maze of trenches before it even hit the ground.
/
"Huh, your girlfriend is a lot better at running solo than I would have thought," Daniel said to the Scotsman as they watched Hazel "kill" a group of three mechs.
"Aye, the lass has sharp teeth, her bite is far worse than her bark," Price said proudly, then he quickly added, "Don't tell her I said that. She might take it as an insult."
/
A few moments later Hazel emerged from the course, she hadn't even taken one hit to her aura. Price was proud of her, but he secretly hoped that didn't mean the course was too easy. She had run the whole course in only four minutes. Only time would tell how fast or slow that time was.
Price realized he shouldn't have worried about the course's difficulty after Jacob got taken out by concentrated fire from all the mechs in the room. Price decided everyone should run the course that day, and he didn't receive any arguments.
The next to run the course was Daniel and Mando didn't disappoint. He decided stealth was too impractical for a man of his size and just ran the course, machine gun blazing. He ended up absorbing quite a lot of damage, but he finished after only three minutes and fifty seconds.
Seras ran the course making good use of cover, simply taking out all the mechs with well placed shots. Her time was easily the fastest at first, sitting at an extremely quick two minutes and fifty four seconds. Nearly a full minute faster than Daniel.
Xandria decided she wasn't ready to run the course yet after watching Seras's performance.
Mark went next, and proved that having to use a bow isn't always a disadvantage. He sniped all the mechs from the door of the trench room. Then casually strolled through the room, but his time reflected the his patient approach. It took him nearly five minutes to finish.
Finally Price stepped up. He took only a single small pistol into the course with him. As they watched him run the course everyone but Violet, Wulfe, and Hazel slowly decided he was more of a threat than they had realized. He didn't stop running at any point during the exercise, and yet he was still firing with incredible accuracy. He only needed to fire one shot at each mech and none of them even came close to hitting him with return fire. His final time was only two minutes and three seconds.
Author's Note: This one was just a fun chapter, and yes the idea of this is slightly ridiculous, but the students offered to fund the whole thing and do all the work. Plus if Ozpin ever needs the land he can easily have it dismantled so I see no reason he wouldn't allow it.
