[hider=Post Check]	
	Nothing had prepared Ahza for this moment. Six years of training, on which she had placed such little importance, did not prepare her artificial nerves for the staccato of gunfire spraying bark-like chips as it traced a heavy line along an adjacent wall. She reeled back, synapses firing, fingers scrabbling for purchase as she stumbled. Her senses buzzed, overwhelmed by the instant cacophony of warfare. Sounds became muddled, distant vague yelling over the hiss of blaster fire and the pinging of ballistics off of metal armor, obfuscated by explosions that rippled through the earth beneath ear. She stumbled again, taking a step back from the near-physical force of the chaos, aghast and wretchedly terrified by the surreal presence of being in the midst of an active warzone. She felt the etheric pulse, knew it for what it was by the way it crawled across her senses. She fell to the ground, feet gouging the hard-packed soil as she scrambled away from blaster fire charring a line between building. Sprays of steaming pebbles and hot earth rained around her.

	Panic gripped her. Desperately she recovered, awkwardly stumbling to all fours, then to her feet as she moved to the opposite end of the wall she had been hiding behind. She had no time to gather her thoughts as a chunk of the wall erupted into a cloud of shrapnel. Ahza ducked, instinctively covering her face with her arms as she turned away from the explosion. Fragments of wall whizzed by, lacerating her silicon skin and leaving pieces embedded in her arms and back. She staggered back the way she had come just in time to see one of the others warp away. Others were firing, dashing from cover to cover. Some fell, collapsing beneath sprays of gunfire. There was too much to follow, too much for her disoriented mind to process. It was all so noisy, deafening with its violence. She had no idea what was going on. 
	
	She turned back again, looking for a way to go, her mind frozen between action and inaction. She tried to recall her training but she couldn't regain her composure. Everywhere she turned there was gunfire and death and noise. It was terrible, but she had to move. Had to do something. She staggered out from behind her cover, watching as a Tarrhaidim soldier was emulsified into a cloud of fire and dust. Fragments of the armor that had been bolted to his body skittered and bounced across the ground. Ahza stared at the surreal sight, unable to take her eyes away from where the soldier had been standing. Her organs constricted and emulated nausea oozed through her. She cursed her mother's obsessiveness and ran passed the smoking crater. She darted out from cover, glancing towards the opposite end of the village in time to see one of the robotic combatants leveling a large weapon at her. Frantic, she sprinted towards a building and flung herself in through a window. The window hadn't been open, but she crashed through it in a spray of shattered biomass. 

	Ahza crashed to the floor inside the dwelling and lay there, radiating heat from the state of her agitation. With a wall between her and the outside world, the sounds of combat seemed muted - less so after she had put a big hole through one wall. She looked over at her arm, by her gaze slid past the dirt and detritus clinging to her, ignoring the shards of mossy-bark stuck into her silicon skin, to a pair of soldiers crouching beside an unopened window on the other side of the room. Those didn't look like the allies she had road in with - but maybe... No. They were definitely not friendly, a fact supported by the act of a pair of carbines being leveled at her. She tried to roll out of the way but she hadn't been nearly fast enough. Gunfire raked across her, peppering her body with precisely placed shots, metal shells slamming into her chest and head. Her body rocked from the impact, staggering her as she tried to climb to her feet, but not enough to stop her from rising fully. The metal slug that slammed into her knee, however, was more than sufficient to send her careening back to the floor. Posted at the entranceway was a third soldier she hadn't seen.

	The third soldier fired a second slug into Ahza's side as she tried to rise, sending her back to the floor once more. Bewildered and senseless, the only course of action she could think to take was to try and rise again. The slug thrower kept a careful aim on her as the other two dumped their mags into her, targeting areas on her body where any other synthetic might have an exposed vulnerability, searching for a joint or seam to exploit. Ahza, huddled on the floor, listened to empty cartridges rain around her, sprinkling the earth as the vibrations from the gunfire rippled through her. The whine of a blaster came from nearby. Her head jerked as the blast scorched the side of her face. Silicon oozed and dripped from her, exposing the gunmetal alloy beneath. 

	"What kind of synthetic is that?" a muffled voice asked in between the hail of bullets.

	Ahza barely heard registered the voice. Instead her eyes focused on the flattened metal shapes littering the ground around her. She realized they were bullets. Bullets that had been flattened after impacting her metal shell. She laughed then. Embarrassed, feeling foolish and dumb, she laughed. She rose to her feet and a slug hit her. She rose again, taking a second slug, leaning into it, watching the fat chunk of solid metal burst apart into a whirlwind of razor sharp steel. She had no idea what kind of weapon [i][b]THAT[/b][/i] was, but it looked incredibly lethal. Instead, the thin slices of whirling metal simply bent and twisted around her. The soldier reloaded, exchanging some kid of box-fed magazine for another slung across his hip. Ahza let him. He fired again and she braced herself - the slug hit her directly in her chest and she felt her armor harden in response, returning the force of the blow, compressing the slug and forcing it to burst apart into its deadly shrapnel.

	[color=9fc5e8]"Hah!"[/color] she cried in triumphant mockery, [color=9fc5e8]"You can't hurt me!"[/color]
	
	In retort, the soldier shot her again. Angry and overconfident, Ahza rushed him. She threw a wild, uncalculated punch and put her fist through the wall where the soldier's head had been. Grunting with frustration she ripped her hand free and turned to face her four opponents. She took a martial stance, feet set, shoulders squared. Wary, the other soldiers divided into two groups, forming up on either side of her. She glanced from one side to the other, her confidence fading into uncertainty. She waited, and they waited. Outnumbered, Ahza wondered why the soldiers didn't attack first. As if to answer her unspoken question, the wall behind her disintegrated into cloud of fire and ash. She hurtled across the room, crashing through an opposite wall, a bookshelf, and a sectional couch. She stopped on the other side of the living area, half-embedded into the furthest wall. Through the hole that had opened up behind her came the mechanical unit from earlier, wielding some kind of large cannon on its arm.

	[color=b6d7a8]"Engaging safety protocols."[/color]

	[color=9fc5e8]"No! Salas! Don't you dare! I have it under control!"[/color]

	[color=b6d7a8]"The asset must be protected."[/color]

	[color=9fc5e8]"Burn you, Salas! Ash burn you and scorch your eyes!"[/color] Ahza cursed bitterly, but her protests were futile.

	Salas took over.

	Prying himself from the wall, Salas stood and assessed his opponents. Four humanoid targets, presumed organic; One mech, equipped with some kind of large, explosive cannon. A brief assessment of his body showed no damage - not even a scuff. These soldiers were likely not equipped to surmount the mnemonic shell - but he presumed that they could be in his calculations. The mech stook a firing stance and fired a ball of blazing hot light. Salas didn't know what the projectile was comprised of, metal or plasma, perhaps, but it didn't matter. Casually, he turned and the projectile slid by his vision, so close he could feel the heat off of it. He braced one leg as the wall beside him erupted in a shower of bark, moss, and biomatter. Flaming debris flung outward, pinging off of his body. The force pushed against him, but braced as he was he he didn't fall. Instead, his foot punched into the earth. He pivoted, falling into a runner's crouch, and then flew forward. Alarmed, the soldiers opened fire.

	Salas ignored the bullet fire and, closely watching the barrel of the slug-thrower, he simply moved out of the way. Once in the midst of the soldiers, he was too close for the mech to fire on him again. One of the soldiers drew a knife, the edge humming with a blazing orange glow. Salas fell low, catching himself on one hand and spinning a foot into the soldier's side. Armor crumpled, bone fragmented, and the knife-wielder's chest ruptured into a spray of gore. The second soldier, the one who had been paired with the knife-wielder, wiped frantically at his red-stained visor but Salas rotated further, carrying his momentum and leveling a heel kick that shattered his opponent's jaw and snapped the second soldier's head back with a resounding [i]CRACK[/i]. The second soldier crumpled to the floor. Salas didn't even pause to register the man's death or the red geyser that bubbled from his neck. Salas hurtled into the mech's leg, using the full force of his body to buckle the knee joint and send the machine crashing to the ground. It whirred and buzzed angrily as Salas slid through the earth, raising trails of dust as his fingers gouged furrows into the floor, seizing his momentum and allowing him to turn and rush back. The robot twisted, trying to level its canon at Salas. Instead, Salas leapt and put the toes of one foot through the robot's wrist, severing the joint and relieving the robot of its hand. He also relieved the bot of its cannon, aimed it at the other two soldiers and pulled the trigger. They vaporized into blazing clouds of dust and gore, bits of armor shooting in every direction like a shrapnel grenade. Then, Salas aimed directly downward, and the robot burst apart in a similar fashion. The mech absorbed the kinetic force and then its mechanical body tore asunder and hurtled in every direction.

	The fight was over in seconds. 

	[color=b6d7a8]"Asset secure."[/color]

	Ahza said nothing as Salas returned control to her, bitter about having her control forcibility taken away. There was no getting around it. She was a very expensive investment. She looked at the carnage around her, awed, baffled, and sulking bitterly. She knew she was being petulant, but it was hard not to be. She stared at the gore, at the smoldering crater, at the smoking bits of metal and melted circuitry. It was all so surreal. Nothing like seeing it in a video, or experiencing it in a simulation. It was unreal, bizarre, so far removed from her day-to-day reality that she didn't know how to process what she was feeling. This was supposed to be her life now? Impossible. She had gone from a panic attack, to full-on panic, into an existential crisis. Was this her purpose? Death and blood and fire? She looked at the cannon in her hands, at the mangled firing mechanism she had crushed in her grip. With disgust she dropped the weapon.

	[color=9fc5e8]"Thanks Salas..."[/color] she said, melancholic. Thanks for what, exactly? For turning her into a killing machine? Or for protecting her? Why hadn't anyone had the foresight to give her a gun - did she even want a gun? Did she want a weapon at all? Did she even want to be here? Doing this? War raged outside, people were struggling desperately, fighting for survival, dying... and here she was contemplating if she wanted to be a part of it. Did that make her a bad person? She looked at the red streaking her feet and legs, at the ashy-char that coated her like a fine dust. Little spots of blood dotted her body like gruesome freckles. She felt sick.

	[color=b6d7a8]"You are welcome, Ahza."[/color]

	Somewhere far away in the distant reaches of civilized space an interested party frowned at a paused video feed. The image twitched and jerked, the signal weak and distorting as it showed a first person perspective of Azha looking at her dirty, bloody hands. The silicon around her fingers had melted, exposing the sleek, shimmering metal beneath.[/HIDER]