Waking up in the mornings were never easy for Jack. He could easily pull an allnighter, and even stay awake for a couple days, but whenever he had to wake up in the morning, his body always complained, unless his life was in danger, or he had a nightmare. This time, it was a dream of zombies and demons. Which was odd, as he never encountered both of them at the same time. The zombies were encountered in Italy by him, and later in Michigan, while demons...

  Lazily opening his eyes, Jack felt as if he was still in a state of delirium, confusing the colors and surroundings. Or, as he thought about it, might have still been dreaming. With a grunt, he moved his leg, causing the suit of armor he was still in emit a soft buzzing noise, which was slightly more noticeable than usual. After looking through the HUD and system messages, he noted that everything seemed to be in working order, except for the sensors 4, 6 and 10, which seemed to be interfering with the video feed.

  Shrugging, he decided to play the most recent recordings, while he moved through what seemed to be a giant desert, with ashen sand and purple sun high in the sky. It wasn't normal for sun to look like that, after all there was no way a red sun could be combined with blue sun to produce a purple one, worst case, they should've produced white or yellow sun. Shaking his head, he looked at it once again, and remembered that the blue suns have about ten times the temperature of red sun, about 30 thousand celsius. That was one of the relatively recent trivia he was curious about when Central was talking about recent StarBomb.

  He felt his mind wandering from the tiny window in his field of vision, playing through the recent encounter with what looked like a floating featureless human with comically enlarged head, lacking any facial features, save for a mouth with rows of serrated teeth, and an oddly shaped protrusion made of yellowish white material, located at the top of it's head. The creature stood amongst corpses of many people, mostly researchers and lightly armed security guards, with the screen behind the creature showing a lady talking about emergency protocol. Only, the feed seemed to be corrupted, and the next moment the timeline was skipped, and in place of the single creature a number of other, slightly smaller creatures appeared, in the similar environment, but instead of screen and corpses, there were ravaged exoskeleton suits and robots.

  The feed seemed to have the other uncorrupted section with a massive floating brain with multiple eyes, serrated teeth and a sort of glowing red aura, for the lack of better explanation, and with the said massive brain having a plasma blast cleaving through it's center, leaving a gaping hole behind, and an odd crystal dropping from it. The three videos allowed Jack to remember some of the events happened at U/T-0. The quick and easy 'rescue' mission turned into data recovery, with a number of his own troops getting eradicated during the extraction process.

  Sighing, Jack started looking through his power armor interface, noticing a number of issues with it. The power levels of the core seemed to have dropped significantly, leaving less than a third of the charge, the oxygen supply was compromised and his armor switched to filtering the surrounding air, which seemed to breathable, considering he was still pretty much alive, and his weapons were mostly out of ammo, with the LR-19c staying in compacted mode and stored on the belt, and Mjolnir mk2 hanging behind with a spare magazine hidden in storage, same as his RX-47 combat knife, and RM-99 revolver.

  If the worst came to worst, he could engage more of the demons, and considering he was no longer in the enclosed space of an underwater complex, he could finally use the grenade launcher without reservation, even if it only had thirteen grenades remaining. He wished that Alliance would provide at least some information on what they were to encounter, but considering everything, even if they did, he would just laugh in the face of whoever told him about demonic invasion, but at least he would bring chainsaw with him.

  Shrugging once more, Jack noticed an oddly shaped icon in his field of vision, which seemed to glow in light blue color, instead of green, yellow, orange or red. He wondered if something happened, but the icon was more of a box with three dots, which seemed to be a lot like a chat app on a phone.

  Concentrating on the message, Jack noticed that it didn't acknowledge the usual input, making him think that somehow he got a virus in the systems. Sighing, he tried to close the window as per usual, but it lacked the cross to do so.

  “System Diagnostic.” Jack said looking at the lack of output from the armor, but at the same time the blue app disappeared, along with the blue window.

  Jack looked at yet another blue window in his field of vision. Whoever was in charge of programming his suit of armor was going to be in a lot of pain for pulling such a prank in combat situation. But at least they had decency of activating it after the battle, and not when such distractions would cost him dearly.

  Sighing, He opted to shut down the armor in case it was a virus and perform a factory reset, even if it would limit his combat potential in the next encounter. All better than to have a virus roaming through the systems, potentially causing malfunctions during combat situations. But as he set the armor in standby mode and was going to exit it, he noticed that the blue windows weren't a part of the armor, instead, they seemed to be part of his visor, which might have been even worse, as he relied on said visor for the communication with most of the combat technologies, as well as having the universal translator installed in there.

  “Sigh... really funny guys. Alright, you can turn off the simulation.” Jack said as he climbed out of his power armor, revealing his tight black suit he wore under the exoskeleton.

  “I said cut it out. And Central, if it's you, I am activating deadswitch on your toys if you don't get me out in the next five minutes.”

  “Sigh. Fine, let's play some stupid MMORPG, but if I don't have extensive injuries, we are going to have a real long talk on how you don't prank your superior officer. Hate these pranks.”

  “What about 'Do not use your real name in virtual reality', huh, Central?” Jack groaned. “Also, didn't I tell not to use that surname anymore?”

  “And here I expected you to set Clone instead. Well, whatever, assign me a magic class and get me through tutorial already. The faster I get to kill a few NPCs the better.”

  Jack looked through the chat boxes containing the information and shrugged. He didn't have a book with him at all times and he wasn't actually religious, unlike the rest of his family, which weren't as religious as the usual Italian mafia. Not that they were Italians.

  Sighing dejectedly, Jack nodded and grabbed a nutriment pill from his belt, before gulping it down, with an annoyed look on his face. They had three times the nutritional value of the protein bars per serving, with all the necessary vitamins, microelements and other necessary, but with the flavor of raw beetles.

  Jack looked at the popped up character sheet and shrugged. He was long overdue for a vacation, and having said that, even if it was a 'survivalist' scenario, it was still better than following orders of some incompetent fool from Alliance. The democracy was good in concept, but having a leader change too often would wreck havoc on the long term goal, even if the new leader would adhere to the policy of the previous one. If not for China, the Alliance would be already disbanded and the greedy politicians were already tearing eachother apart for a specks of political power.

  Maybe he would assassinate the Chamberlain at some point for some 'low' price, or just for the 'honor and glory', and maybe it would lead for more assassination contracts. He missed them, they were much more fun than commanding troops to clean up the mess of some pomporous fool, even if they paid way more than assassinations. But assassinations provided him with the enormous tips, as his targets pleaded to end their lives.

  Shrugging at the thought, Jack moved onwards through the desert. If it was a survivalist simulation, he had to find an oasis, or another source of drinking water, before he got dehydrated. It would've been much easier time if his power armor, or as Central liked to call it, exo-suit, were to be one of the reconnaissance types, with their own moisture absorbers and recycler units. But saying that, having a 'proper' power armor was a better thing overall, as the reconnaissance types were known to be rather fragile, comparing to the assault types at least.

  Sighing, Jack thought about closing the annoying character screen in front of his face, and much to his surprise, it no longer was obstructing his field of vision. With this, he finally found a way to remove the cluttered space, and stopped at the welcoming message.

  “Shop, huh? So... this simulation has pay to win mechanics?” Jack asked checking the message. “I can close windows by thinking, then...” Jack thought about opening a shop screen, which immediately overwhelmed his senses and made it impossible to look through the categories. “These cretins can't even implement microtransactions.”