In an era of nearly-total reliance on combat cybernetics, it’s all but unheard of for un-augmented or even lightly augmented mercenaries to find work- or live long enough to earn a reputation. When your opponents can have grenade launchers for arms, nerves tuned for inhuman reaction speeds, subdermal armor capable of shrugging off anti-tank rounds, being a (mostly) factory model is begging for a quick and gristly death.
Perhaps that novelty is what keeps Kamila Reede going.
The mercenary pilot has a fearsome reputation, both as a high-scoring ace and for being someone who has survived the impossible time and time again, often by grit- or idiot luck. Aside from the optical implants and nervous interfaces required for modern flying, she bears no other obvious cybernetic enhancements, yet she has felled opponents whose reaction times and capacity for punishment far outweigh her own.
Notoriously hard to interview, the merc only had this to say when questioned about her success:
“Don’t care how many toys you stuff into your brainpan- if you don’t have the guts to fly the razor’s edge, to tell death to fuck off, you’re a corpse- and I’ve never seen augs that give you that.”
- Blood and Bullets, July 20XX