Hellworld A-2485239/JS was a planet with ten times the diameter of Earth, putting it firmly in the category of “Super Earths”. It was unique in that it was 90% land and only 10% water on the surface, but instead of being dry and arid, as one might expect, it was entirely covered in lush, tropical foliage. From orbit, it looked like a brilliant emerald, and seemed like it would be a nice place to take a camping vacation every now and then.
But that wasn’t the case at all.
Code named “Jurassic Planet”, Hellworld A-2485239/JS was home to some of the most vicious species that Nova could design using all of the processing power at her disposal. The foliage was all either carnivorous, venomous, or poisonous, and the inhabitants were modeled after the most aggressive dinosaurs that could be proven to exist, then run through countless evolution simulations to crank up their lethality to a ridiculous degree. Essentially, everything on the planet would eat anything that couldn’t run fast enough to escape.
With a gravity ten times that of Earth and an atmospheric oxygen content of 41.82%, almost double that of Earth’s 21%, everything on the planet grew to nearly eight times the size of an earthbound equivalent. And due to the foliage constantly expiring moist, warm air, the entire planet had one thing in common with tropical rainforests and jungles on Earth: it rained almost constantly. That contributed greatly to the general lack of water on the surface, as the greenery would thirstily absorb any water on, or even under, the surface, and what little watering holes were left became death traps for smarter predators to prey on less intelligent predators.
Everything on Jurassic Planet was prey.
......
Jose stepped out of his coffin, his uniform shedding the impact gel that had cushioned his impact with the surface. As the green slime pooled around him, he looked down and noticed that the tip of a root had poked through the surface detritus to investigate the moisture and heat source and was greedily sucking the liquid out of the gel, rendering it into powdered concentrate. Soon, he was left standing in a pile of vomit green powder.
He saw the root tip questing around, and when it neared his boots, he made the wise decision to relocate to somewhere else. Everything on the planet was a complete unknown to him, in order to raise the standard he would be required to meet in order to successfully graduate his reaper training. For normal missions, the briefings entailed a mass of information; essentially everything he could possibly need to know would be stored on his implant for later recall, and everything he needed to do in order to accomplish the mission would be told to him by the person briefing him.
He stepped back and looked at an innocuous evergreen tree about twenty meters away from where he was at. He crouched, then, with a mighty thrust of his legs, leaped to the base of the tree he had spotted. Extending the climbing spikes from between the fingers of his hands and the soles of his boots, he scampered up the tree and took refuge in its thick cover of densely packed needles. Luckily for him, he was covered from head to toe in the most durable fabric the researchers at Lab City could come up with, because the tree he had just climbed was a hybrid of a gympie-gympie tree and poison oak, and its “needles” were actually a symbiotic plant that had evolved from poison ivy.
(Ed note: The gympie-gympie is one of the most vicious examples of Australian wildlife. It’s a venomous tree that actively stings you and injects you with some of the most painful venom known to mankind; people have been driven to suicide by gympie-gympie stings. And the first aid for a gympie-gympie sting? Pour hydrochloric or sulfuric acid on the sting site after removing the stingers themselves.)
But he would discover that later. Likely the next time he had to wipe his ass, given how active Sergeant Murphy tended to be during missions and deployments.
He created a nest for himself, then turned and looked out through the tight foliage. His coffin had already completely disappeared, and now resembled nothing more than an unremarkable lump of greenery against the veritable sea of green in the background.
Checking his surroundings through all of the different optics available to him, Tekillya made an initial map of his surroundings. Thanks to the size of the planet, the horizon was much farther away to begin with, and with the added height from the unnamed tree he was in, he now had a general threat map of everything within a fifteen-kilometer radius of where he was. He designated his landing spot as Point Alpha and headed out, nimbly leaping from tree to tree and occasionally swinging from vines.
He leaped from a tree, targeting a vine that was hanging down from a branch about ten meters away. It should have been an easy leap, but the vine jerked away from his reaching hand just as he was about to grasp it. Then he realized his mistake; that was no vine, but a snake!
The snake had been coiled up on a tree branch, camouflaging itself as a vine in order to entrap incoming prey. It’d long spotted the comparatively tiny figure and had just been waiting for him to fall into its clutches. As Jose fell to the branch below him with a thud and the creaking groan of stressed wood, the snake released the branch it had been waiting on and fell directly after the hapless reaper trainee.
Jose wasted no time and blinked in a specific pattern, disabling the safety on his eye laser. Firing it would destroy the biological camouflage of his left bionic eye, but remaining hidden in a sea of humanity wasn’t his mission this time. Survival was.
He opened his eyes wide and, when his targeting reticle passed over the snake, he fired the short-ranged eye laser at the rapidly approaching reptile.
