Unyielding Resolve - Cecilia Alcott x OC

Chapter 3 - The Black Eagle

Bold: Time/Location
Italic: Character Thoughts/Internal Monologue
Underline: Author's Note(s)

Infinite Stratos Academy - James' POV

Chifuyu guided me through the halls of the academy after telling me that there were no rooms available since I arrived so late. "What kind of place takes reservations and then can't even provide a room...?" "You'll be sleeping here tonight." she said as we entered the classroom we just left not even five minutes ago. I looked at her, unsure if she was attempting to make a joke. Didn't matter to me one way or the other. "Yes teacher. Thank you for your assistance." I could tell she was slightly taken aback, even if she didn't show it. I moved over to my seat and dropped my satchel to the floor next to it. "You'll only be here until we have another room available. Bathrooms are down the hall near the dormitories, and you will need to use the stream outside for anything else. Understood?" "Yes teacher." I replied without a second thought. She nodded and left the room, turning off the lights.

After a few moments, I unpacked my belongings, which were not much. Just some grooming products, a few extra clothes, a charger for my electronics, a pistol loaded with dendrotoxin rounds for non-lethal pacification, and various other items. Since I needed to brush my teeth before I went to sleep, I placed my sunglasses on the desk and left the room with my toothbrush and toothpaste, and headed to the stream Chifuyu mentioned. Reaching the stream, I thought about what director Black had told me 10 months ago while I cleaned my teeth.

The Fridge - 10 months ago

I was in the operations bay at the base preparing for my upcoming assignment in roughly 10 months. Using this new IS was proving to be a challenge to say the least. Some scientists were in an observation room toward the upper wall of the bay, observing my vitals and performance of the suit through the reinforced glass window. In just two months, I came close to mastering various forms of martial arts in the suit. I'm already extremely proficient without the suit, but having to work with this is like having to fight with bricks tied to my limbs. The operations team said it shouldn't be like that, but I didn't care. The first weapon I requested from the armory was a close quarters combat knife for the suit in the event I was unable to use conventional weapons.

I was in the middle of neutralizing my last unmanned opponent when the director walked in. "Having fun agent?" I crushed the head of the drone with my IS' left hand and tossed the mangled metal corpse aside. "I do what I have to do sir. Joy is irrelevant." He looked at me with slight concern when I said this, but I meant what I said. After what I went through, I only had one thing on my mind, anything else was trivial. As he walked forward, he asked "Have you picked the rest of the arsenal for your new toy?" I nodded at him in acknowledgement and responded "Missiles. Lots of missiles. I've been studying the latest trends among IS users, many of them seem to favor close quarters combat. My strategy is to make them too preoccupied with evasion to attempt getting close to me. The ones that prefer long range will suffer even more, as typically they prefer to be stationary when engaging opponents." The director looked at me, and asked a question. "How do you plan on having that many missiles on your suit? It's not like we can pack an entire arsenal into it." "I'd like the weapons specialists to design a module for the suit which can divert power from the propulsion and navigation systems to a specialized replication module which can generate new missiles from the IS itself." I answered.

He raised an eyebrow, clearly intrigued by my idea. "Like a siege mode of sorts?" I nodded again, confirming his assumption. "I'd like the option to have different types of missiles. Gas, napalm, flash, EMP, smoke, decoys, flak, HE, and AP." He smiled at me listing my desires as if a child was reading a Christmas list to Santa. "And what if your assailants have countermeasures for this exact strategy?" he asked. "I would be surprised if anyone was prepared for the amount of missiles I plan to send at them." I quipped. His smile on his face grew slightly more. "Packing quite the punch I see. Just in case, I'll tell them to attach a rotary cannon from one of the jumpjets to your arm. In addition to that, I'll also order them to throw in a full S.T.R.I.K.E. surveillance suite. Reflective cloaking panels, communications jammer, encrypted comms array, recon drone, ECM suite, hacking module, flares, infrared vision, the works." "Understood sir. Will that be all?" He turned around to leave and asked one final question to me. "Picked a name yet?" I looked at the floor in contemplation, spending the last two months thinking about that very question. Finally settling on a name, I looked back up to him and gave my answer. "The Black Eagle."