The Tale of Ezra: Book 1

Chapter 6: Our first mission

The next day the HQ alarm had sounded. It was 6:00 in the morning, not my usual wake up time. I remember Chris saying in his briefing with the whole squad that if you were not up and ready by 6:30, you would be punished. I got out of my bed and went to wake up Finn. I don't know how he was able to sleep through that alarm. Jay had already woken up, he probably woke up 20 minutes before the alarm because he came back from the bathroom all dressed up and ready to start the day. I went to the boys bathroom to brush my teeth and take a shower, I heard the shower on the other side flowing meaning that the girls were up. 
30 minutes had went by and I was ready and went downstairs. All the squads were supposed to meet downstairs. I saw a lot of people down already which meant we were the last group to arrive. 
"Settle down everyone" Luke said. Everyone stopped talking and focused their attention on Luke. "Today you all will take the remaining tests. You will first take the written test and then take the other tests" Everyone looked so down like their moral was crushed or something. I had made up my mind though, I wasn't gonna let this put me down. I was gonna move on. I could see that Anna was also more confident now. Same went for Jay and Ariana. I wasn't so sure about Finn, but I guess he forgot about it. 
We were taken to a huge room where we would take the written test. The test had 3 parts. It wasn't so hard; it took me about 20 minutes to finish all 3 parts. I saw that Finn was struggling a lot, so I let him copy off me. It's like they weren't even trying to not let us copy off each other. Everyone was copying and the guy who was watching us was just on his phone the whole time. 
After everyone finished the written tests, they were graded pretty fast. I got a 100% on the whole test, Finn somehow got a 93% even though he copied me. Anna and Ariana both got 100% and Jay got a 85%. I could tell that he wasn't really good at this stuff. "Man, my brain really hurts after all those tests" Jay said. "Glad it's over though" Finn said. We still have the physical exam, the shooting exam, and the speed exam left" I said. "I know I'm failing the shooting exam," I followed up. I wasn't confident at all. I didn't know how the physical would go but I definitely knew how the shooting would go. We did shooting exams all the time at the academy and I failed every single one of them. We did the speed exams next. We did a 100-meter dash. Honestly I didn't know why they were giving this easy exam to us. We used to do 100-meter dashes everyday at the academy. 
Everyone lined up and we started. I was doing pretty good and I finished in 11.605 seconds. But there were a lot of fast guys. This one short kid ran really fast and finished in 7.908 seconds. He was the fastest no doubt. Other guys also finished in less than 10 seconds which was really impressive. For people who finished in 15 seconds or more they were going to be forced to do speed training everyday. Luckily none of us finished in 15 seconds or higher. Finn finished in 14.208 seconds. Ariana finished in 10 seconds exactly, Jay finished in 13.639 seconds and Anna finished in 12.57 seconds. 
After everyone was finished, everyone was tired. I did 100-meter dashes everyday for a whole year but this one still made me pretty tired. Next was the physical exam. We had to punch this cube and it would measure our strength. Getting a score from 0-100 was bad. 100-500 was average, 500-1000 was good, and 1000+ was above average and really good. Most people that I saw go got scores in the hundreds. The highest at the time was 439. Finally it was my turn to go. I was a little nervous. I saw that all the captains were watching me. Jake did some gesture to try and signal me to punch it with all my might. Finally, Austin's training would pay off in this very moment. I punched the cube as hard as I could, and the numbers started to skyrocket. Finally they stopped at 789 and that was my score. 789 was the highest score so far. I was sure that no one could beat that score and I felt proud of myself. Except when Ariana went that was when my pride and ego would get crushed. She punched the cube and the numbers skyrocketed even faster than mine. Her final score was 1008, the new highest score. Everyone was shocked and even the captains were impressed. "She's strong" I heard a voice say from the crowd. I was shocked that she could beat my best score with ease. She looked at me and had a little smirk on her face, probably telling me that this wasn't her full strength and that she could make the numbers go even higher. Finn however noticed her looking at me and got a little...jealous. At least I could tell from his facial expression. Jay went next and got a score of 524. Finn's score was 560, and Anna's score was 800. 11 numbers higher than mine. Well, I wasn't really surprised, Anna was way smarter, way stronger, and basically better than me at everything. 
Now we moved on to the shooting exams. We had to shoot the gun and hit a target that was 10 feet away from us. The exam must have been the easiest exam for many people since most people were hitting the targets. Nobody had hit the center of the target, no one's aim was that good, maybe Anna's was but I was sure that the others aim weren't as good. When Jay went, I had a feeling he was gonna flop or something but the way he shot it made me realize that he should of been put in the sniper squad instead of the raid squad. He hit the target right in the middle. "Dang! You saw that precision" Finn said surprised. Jay's accuracy was amazing, he could of probably shot from way farther. Jay had managed to impress some of the girls who were watching. I heard one of them talking about how handsome he looked. All of my groupmates had gone, and it was just left with me. I was surprised however that Anna wasn't able to hit the center, but she did hit a place that was close to it. Finn hit the target but hit it pretty far from the center. Same went with Ariana. 
Finally, it was my turn. When I held the gun though I felt this sort of queasy feeling, my hand was shaking, and I could barely hold the gun. I couldn't even aim well. Everyone was looking at me like I was some embarrassment. But at that moment my main concern was how I would look like if I missed completely. It would be extremely embarrassing since everyone hit the target whether it was close to the center or far away. Finally, I shot the gun, I hit the side of the target chipping off that piece. I stood up from my crouching position and dropped the gun. The captains didn't seem very impressed. Well, I was missing shots since the beginning of my academy days.
That was it, that was the final test that we had done for that day. The division officials did this to measure or strength level and where we were. Training days would start next Monday. We would have to sign up in one of the captain's training camps and train with them every day. I was probably going to sign up for Captain Hannah's training since I couldn't take a slugging from Captain Jake every day, Captain Ezekiel and I didn't have good history together, and Captain Johnny seemed cool, but his training camp would probably be focused on shooting and aim practice which was what I was the worst at. Captain Jalen was probably the scariest out of all of them though, he was the captain of the destroyer squad. They're basically like the suicide squad, I'm glad I didn't get put in their squad, but his training camp would probably be like a survival training camp or something. He would probably put us in the dangerous wild for a week and expect us to come out alive. Not only was Captain Hannah my squad captain, she also seemed the most lenient out of all the captains. 
Me and my group went back to our unit. "Should we do our first mission?" Jay asked. "We should probably train more" Anna said. I went to the kitchen and opened the fridge, I was hungry as hell but there was almost no food. "You know, we should probably start doing missions so that we can get money" Finn said. "Wait they don't pay you until you've done a mission" I asked sounding so stupid. "Yeah of course that's the whole reason why we do missions" Finn said. We heard a knock on the door. Jay went to go open it and it was Chris. "I have a special mission for you guys" he said. We all gathered around the door to hear what Chris was going to say. "Your mission is to infiltrate the Georgia aircraft flying between the boarders." Well, we were in the raid squad, so infiltration and raid attacks were what we were going to do mostly. Regalia must be really trying to make sure that Georgia isn't trying to spy on us or anything. First, they built a wall to keep out the immigrating Georgians and now they want us to take out their aircraft. 
"The reason why you guys need to infiltrate the aircraft is because the aircraft has been flying in Regalia's side for a while. This gives us full authorization and authority to destroy the aircraft since its trespassing on our side. However, you guys will have to infiltrate find any important information you can and return back safely. Report anything you see back to us." We all understood what we had to do, basically get inside the aircraft and find out information and see if Georgia is planning to attack us or start something. This quest seemed pretty simple, but we had no idea what we were in for.