Warden

engineered from birds and octopuses?” Bardain asked. “They’ve got serrated suckers running across the entire length of their tentacles, and in their mouths, you’ll find teeth that can crunch through most metal. They have weak vision, and while not completely blind, their sight is mostly useless except at close range. They make up for this deficiency with a weak form of echolocation. They’re relatively easy to handle when you catch them alone, but unfortunately, they usually hunt in packs.”
The lone Karg multiplied to a pack of six. The creatures stood there, pawing at the ground, tentacles quivering angrily beneath their underbellies.
“The key to taking out a Karg is targeting its tentacles,” Bardain explained. “Those appendages are extremely sensitive, and by scoring a successful hit on one you’ll cause the Karg an extreme amount of pain. Sometimes this backfires and caused the creature to charge you all the harder, but most of the time it’ll retreat to lick its wounds, abandoning any companions. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to stave off a Karg stampede simply by shooting each of them in the tentacles a few times.”
“Do you really mean to call those tentacles and not testicles?” she asked, only half joking.
“Funny girl,” Bardain replied.
“And if I’m unlucky?” she continued. “And the stampede isn’t stopped by a few shots to their tentacles?”
“Then you’ll have to keep hitting them until they go down,” Bardain said. “Little tip for you: the carapace, legs, and head are all extremely well-armored. Avoid them. Instead, you’ll inflict the most damage if you target the tentacles as I already described, or the underbelly. In an ideal world, you’d want to slide under them and fire your pistol into the underbellies at close to point blank range. Unfortunately, you’ll probably find yourself ground up by the tentacles of the first Karg you tried that on. But it’s something you can experiment with in training.
“Bear in mind that while the bioweapons you encounter in training are designed to mimic their real life counterparts as closely as possible, even to the point of including random strength and body variations, there’s no guarantee the creatures you’ll meet in the wild will be similar. Expect variations and surprises. Now then, let’s see what you can do.”
He gave her the training pistol and started the session.
The Kargs all spotted her, and immediately stampeded through the street toward her. Because of their size, they could only fit three abreast.
She concentrated her fire on one of them, aiming for the tentacles that hung down between the legs, as Bardain taught. She missed her first few shots, but finally scored a couple of hits.
The creature screeched, and immediately tried to reverse course, plowing into the Karg immediately behind it and bringing them both down.
She aimed at the next Karg, but it was too close… she let off a shot and leaped up, toward a nearby lean-to. Her robotic strength allowed her to travel the full two meters to the rooftop, and she landed on the edge with bent knees and rolled forward. She scrambled to her feet in time to see the Kargs leaping onto the roof behind her.
She dashed forward, and her hood fell from her face. She scooped it back into place and hurried toward the roof of the next building.
Another Karg leaped in front of her and tried to cut her off, but she shot, hitting a tentacle and send it squealing backward.
“Nicely done!” Bardain said over the comm. “But if these were real Kargs, those buildings would have never held their weight—the creatures would have fallen through the roofs, bringing you down with them.”
Motion at the periphery of her vision drew her eye downward, just in time to watch a Karg wrap its tentacle around her leg. Her body flashed white on the HUD, indicating a successful hit.
“Well, you just lost a leg,” Bardain said. “And most likely your life. Reset.”
The tentacle disappeared, as did the source Karg, and the other bioweapons with it.
“Get down, and we’ll try again,” Bardain ordered.
For the rest of that day, she cycled through different scenarios, which included the other two main types of Outland bioweapons. Bardain had her pause occasionally to work on her target practice, usually after a particularly dismal performance against the creatures, with her teacher dismissing the bioweapon overlays and replacing them with darting spheres. After around fifteen minutes of that, she went right back into the bioweapon scenarios. Bardain began to throw more difficult situations at her as the day progressed, making multiple types of creatures stalk her at the same time.
She lost the scenarios most of the time, usually becoming overwhelmed by her attackers. All it took was a single strike from a tentacle or limb for the AR system to count her as dead. Rhea argued that that wasn’t entirely realistic, that she’d still be able to fight back if she lost an arm or leg, but Bardain wouldn’t have it. He was quick to point out: “It’s not the winning or losing that matters, but rather, I want you to develop a healthy respect for these creatures. I want you to understand their strengths and their weakness, yes, but most of all, I want you to learn to avoid them. That’s the only truly sensible strategy when it comes to bioweapons.”
To that end, he soon started taking her through various stealth scenarios. These involved her sneaking past either roving or stationary bands of bioweapons. The Zargs proved the hardest to avoid, because of their echolocation abilities, but she found that if she remained stock-still when a group of them passed, usually they would avoid noticing her if she were upwind. Downwind, and she was screwed either way: the only recourse in that situation was to run every time. Run, take cover, and hope to hell they didn’t ferret out her hiding place. She was starting to understand why Bardain had told her that once she repaid her debt, she should get out.
When that long day finally ended, she returned