James had been your usual drunk/drug addict/lowlife since anyone can remember. If you ask him he was just waiting for something “REAL” to fill the void. In 2000 he tried a brief stint in the military, get his head straight ya know? Things went well for Ol’ Jimmy for the first year or two, clean living and lots of exercise can do that to a man. He was beginning to plan a future, was thinking of girls again. He hadn’t thought of sneaking those little vials of morphine the docs carried , in god knows how long. He felt good, he felt alive, and he was finally starting have ambitions beyond getting high.

          Unfortunately, the gods have a way of fucking things up for even the most pious of their followers. In 2015 they collected 200 of the best soldiers the corps could muster at the time. There was no question James was among them, no coincidence here.  There was to be a lottery among the tournament winners. Those who passed/survived the tournament, and won the lotto would be receiving a set of upgrades, physical, mental, neurochemical, you name it. Many of the young guns surmised the lottery system was just to keep recruits from flooding the system with requests. They couldn’t have been more wrong (as greenhorns usually are).  It was better to keep the unpleasant side effects on the hush-hush, most had’t even been proven yet.

        So there could be no disputes as to who were the best in combat, riflemanship, hand to hand etc. a tournament for each had been laid out. The idea was to choose the top combatants in each category and use them in the lottery. James had been a brawler all of his life, a natural with a rifle, and with the urban/room clearing tactics instilled in him by the corps. he felt he had as good a shot as any of these pencil neck punks with their too big grins. Not to mention most of them had never lived a hard day in their life outside of the corps., anything they knew they knew because the corps. told them to. That thought gave Ol Jimmy a shiver of pleasure.  He had been a match for any of them before coming into the force, an extra couple years of killer training had turned him into a mean sonofabitch. Some days it almost didn’t seem fair that other men had to walk the same earth as him. He took great pleasure in being the most ruthless, depraved, violent, lunatic one could possibly be. His only restriction was that it didn’t get him kicked out of the corps. Here they paid good money for people like him, and he wasn’t about to lose that opportunity.