Spy School: Danger is my Middle Name

Danger is my Middle Name

"Boy, you do suck at weapons," Mike said, watching as I barely managed to hit the target. "I could make that shot without even trying!"

"You don't have to clarify it," I muttered, reloading my gun once again and failing to aim correctly. "Just rubbing it in won't do you any good."

As the bullet flew out of the barrel, Mike laughed in my face. I resisted the urge to smack him to the floor with the flat of my pistol and sighed.

Despite the fact that Erica had been training me for the past few weeks, my aim had barely even managed to gain an edge on itself. I'd gone from missing the board completely to missing the board by a small margin, which, by itself, was already some kind of improvement.

Mike, on the other hand, had been practicing hitting his bulls-eyes with machine guns. Meanwhile, I couldn't even hold up one of those things unless I wanted to get crushed by its weight.

Typical day in the life of me. Struggling to keep up with my fellow students, and completely obliterating them in trivia and contests that actually involve thinking. Anything that included athleticism, I was completely out of hand with.

But there was a difference today. We weren't at the Academy, we were at a hotel in Orlando, Florida.

And why is this, you say? Well, for multiple reasons. One, this is supposed to be the next spot the Croatoan at planning to attack, and two, well, there are theme parks that I am dying to go to.

We had quickly booked a few hotel rooms, brought along the gang, and settled down in a firing range a few miles away from our stay. Everybody was with us: Zoe, Erica, Jayden, Kylie, Trixie, James, Cly, Jawa, Chip, yeah. You get the idea.

Sidenote: If you don't recognize some of these characters, then please visit my first fanfiction. This is a sequel to my first one, so I'd recommend you read that one before this, or else you'll be immensely confused.

So we were at the firing range, watching as Erica managed to pull off acts of athleticism dubbed for the gods- or maybe better. If anyone could hold six guns at the same time and reload all of them within a timestamp of three seconds, then that's god level.

Jawa and Chip were trying to get a higher score than each other, as usual. They were both high on the competitive edge, unlike me and some other people that came along with us.

Jayden, Cly, and me stood along in our own ranks. We were the least athletic by far, at the wide end of the spectrum. Well, at least Jayden and Cly could aim weapons and be at least a bit deadly on the battlefield. Me? Well, I specialized in doing nothing and getting lucky.

Meanwhile, James, Erica, and Trixie stood on the high, high, high end of the spectrum. James was actually trying to overtake Erica in the I'm athletic competition, holding eight guns and attempting to reload all of them, and to the looks of it, he was actually succeeding. 

James was the only person I had ever met to be better at Erica at more than one skill. He could aim, reload, fight, and pretty much do everything at the same rate Erica did, if not better. He was the Ice King, but not as cold. (See what I did there?)

Jawa, Chip, and Kylie were in the middle. Better than at least ninety percent of the population, but not as good at the gods. They could at least beat a grown man in a fistfight, and some trained athletes.

Kylie was the relatively new person to attend to our group, and quickly I was growing closer to her (as friends, of course). She had an awesome personality, an aura of friendliness, and killer cooking skills. If you read my previous adventure, you'd account for a rather embarrassing situation when Kylie cooked a meal for Jayden, and it was rather impressive. 

We had decided to lay off of Adult Supervision on this trip, since we didn't really need people to supervise us, as we were about fifteen or sixteen by now. And to be honest, I'd doubt anybody wanted a grumpy Cyrus bossing us around for no reason.

Anyways- onto the mission statement. We're here to stop the Croatoan, who have been rampaging across America. They've already destroyed much of it, but only the major cities. Based on their path, I had predicted that they were going to attack Orlando next, and so here we are.

Unless my algorithm was wrong, the Croatoan will be planning to attack Disney World, Universal Studios, and much of the city in a few days. I don't know the exact time, but we're searching the place for any suspicious behavior, so we'll probably know when it's going to happen.

Stopping them is the easy part since usually, they will go for the most simple attacking method you can think of, which is placing bombs in high-population density areas. The bombs will be easy to defuse (thanks to Erica), and soon enough we'll be moving to the next location. Our immediate goal is to stop the Croatoan, but that's going to take a while, considering how long it took for SPYDER to finally stand down.

I walked over to where Erica and James were competing, shooting bullet after bullet of perfect aim. I didn't want to interrupt their competition, but I also needed to talk to Erica.

"Ben, this isn't the time," Erica said, furtively taking a glance at my body approaching. "I have a loser to demolish."

"Who are you calling loser?" James catcalled, starting to increase his tempo of bullets. Soon enough, his amount of bulls-eyes started catching up.

"I'm calling you a loser," Erica said, and with this, she rattled out her final bullet, which struck the exact spot where the precious bullet had landed, robin-hood style.

"You always get the good guns," James mumbled, retreating as Erica smiled smugly.

"Excuses," Erica said. "Anyways, Ben, what did you need?" 

"When are we going to leave?" I asked. "Aren't we supposed to be doing our daily scan of the city by now?"

Erica rolled her eyes in exasperation. "So that's what you interrupted my competition for? Ben, you really need to get something to keep your athleticism going. With this stamina rate, I'd doubt you'd be able to keep up with us."

"But it's 9:30 AM!" I said in a counterattack. "We're thirty minutes late to our guard posts!"

"Ben's right," Mike said, butting into our conversation. "We are thirty minutes late. And Erica, I thought you were never late to anything."

Erica sighed. "Alright, alright. Everybody, pack your stuff! It's time to get going!"

The rest of the gang started quickly shoving their equipment into their bags, and I took another glance back at Erica.

"Give me another reason that I should start learning how to risk my life in more ways," I said. "Isn't that just going to increase my death chance? Why should I be included in more battles against the bad guys?"

"Because danger is a spy's middle name," Erica said, smiling slyly.

Alright, I had to admit that was true wisdom. Anyway, I'll be back when we arrive at our posts. Until then, see ya.