Chapter Ten
Erik kept his back against the hard rock. A spray of bullets knocked rock and dirt from a nearby boulder into his hair, but the enemy mercs were firing blind through the thick cloud from his earlier smoke grenades.
Today’s training session wasn’t going his way. Two dead mercs from his team lay next to him, victims of a comically old-fashioned trap: a tripwire linked to a grenade. Emma had set up the simulation, and she’d only promised she’d program the simulated mercenaries as competent, not brave or extraordinarily skilled. She wasn’t petty enough to cheat by making his set less skilled than Jia’s.
Erik couldn’t blame poor AI for not taking point and Jia exploiting that. If he’d been in front, he would have checked and avoided the boobytrap.
It didn’t matter now. He was ou
