“At this point, we’ll just have to break through the enemy’s containment. Well, that’s always been true,” M admitted.
“Exactly,” added Boss.
“That’s what I intended to do,” Anna chimed in.
Just then, M snapped, “Enemies dead ahead!”
He slammed the bottom of the shield in his left hand against the ground.
“Llenn, Fuka, crouch down in the back! Boss left, Anna right!”
Even Llenn could tell what had happened. There were two cursors visible to her straight ahead, moving fast. The readout on the cursors on the far end of the passage beyond M had originally indicated seventeen and sixteen meters of distance, but in the next moment, they were already at fourteen and thirteen. It was a rapid approach.
There were four meters of space between Llenn and M—and a corner about seven meters ahead of M. The two enemies were surely rushing right for that spot. They would pop out right in front of the group.
“All right! Bring it!” roared Fukaziroh, getting Rightony and Leftonia ready.
“Stop!” Llenn snapped, shoving her head down on the ground and flattening herself as well.
“Fire!” M commanded.
The next moment, the air was suddenly full of the sound of shooting.
M’s MG5 was in full auto, while Boss and Anna fired their Strizh pistols from the wings just behind M’s large body and shield.
The sound of the gunfire echoed off the side walls, as well as the far wall ahead of them, lashing at Llenn’s eardrums.
“Gah!”
It was so loud. The shooting was about as loud as you could possibly bear in the virtual world. If you were the one shooting, adrenaline would go a long way in helping to ignore the sound, but it was agony for those who were just listening. Sheer agony.
The MG5 in M’s hand howled like a hound whose owner had just died. The mechanism pulled the ammo belt inward, spitting out nothing but empty cartridges and links. Bullets came out of the muzzle in a stream of fire with no end.
“Aaagh!”
“Hrrg!”
The shots punctured the legs of the two men who came darting around the corner.
In fact, what they did was less puncturing than severing.
A stream of consecutive bullets could easily cut off a limb. The men leaped around the maze corner and into the hallway with Llenn’s team, just as anticipated. But the bullets hit their legs, cutting them off and causing them to topple forward with no means of propulsion.
And then, at almost the exact same moment—they exploded.
Ba-ba-ba-ba-bakam!
With a blast that vastly overwhelmed the gunfire, a series of grenades went off all at once, blowing the toppled men to pieces.
In reality, this would have been a gruesome butchery, with blood, flesh, and scraps of organs splattering everywhere. But in the relatively peaceful virtual world, it was just a scattering of obviously fake polygonal chunks: body parts with wire-frame cross sections, hands and heads and legs and torsos, launching up to ten feet in the air and spraying apart. Yeah, it was still pretty gross.
“Wha—?”
Llenn had no idea what had just happened.
M stopped shooting the MG5 and explained, “They were carrying a ton of grenades. They pulled the pin and started charging us. They must’ve thought they could rush through the shots to reach you, Llenn. A suicide bomb attack.”
“Yeesh…”
Their tenacity was disturbing.
“I had a hunch about them, so I shot their legs out first to make sure they fell.”
Scratch that; M’s calm descriptions were more disturbing.
“Well, well, must be hard to be so popular,” grunted Fukaziroh, who was pressed flat to the ground under Llenn.
“Anyone coming next?” wondered Boss, switching from the Strizh to her Vintorez, now that she had fired all the pistol’s shots. Both she and Anna were changing from the nimbler pistols to their longer guns, the Vintorez and Dragunov.
“No, we should be fine,” M said, and Llenn could see why. No other cursors were rapidly closing distance.
“Hmph. Those two were the only ones bold enough to try us. Thank God for that. The worst thing for us would be if they’d all come at once,” Boss replied, replacing her Strizh’s magazine and sticking it in the holster.