“What should I do, Captain? Should I shoot Llenn?” asked Lux from the top of the spire. David was still down in the maze presumably.
He was bent over in a crouch, aiming his FD338 on a tripod, with the scope reticle trained right over Llenn. His finger was not touching the trigger, of course.
He was ready to shoot, if he should feel like it.
It was a fair distance and at a downward angle, plus Llenn was running nimbly over the tops of the maze walls, so it might not be easy to finish her in a single shot—but the FD338 was auto-capable. He could shoot many bullets, and with the power of the .338 Lapua, he only needed one bullet to dispatch his target.
This was their best chance of any Squad Jam at taking out Llenn.
The pink devil had done so many unspeakable things to Team MMTM over the last few months. And now he could kill her.
Three seconds later, Lux had his answer from David. “Got it. I hear your orders. Say hi to the lady for me!”
He took the FD338 off the tripod, lowered himself flat, and hid. If any snipers climbed the other spires, he could easily get shot. He had checked them earlier, but there was no guarantee someone wasn’t climbing one now.
Better to avoid getting picked off before he could regroup with the team and utilize their collective power to its fullest in search of triumph.
And because of that, Lux just barely missed seeing something as he withdrew to safety.
He missed seeing Shirley, running down the massive bridge connecting the rampart to the keep, as fast as she could go.
If he had seen her, he would have been able to shoot her. It would have been quite easy, in fact.
Llenn’s good luck had rubbed off on Shirley, it seemed.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Let’s get going, too.”
“Yeah!”
“Okay!”
Slightly earlier in time, as Llenn and Fukaziroh started running on top of the walls, M, Boss, and Anna began to run as well.
The enemies around them were being distracted in amusing ways by Llenn, and nobody wanted anything to do with the rest of them.
Since the two who’d covered the rear were gone, the remaining three changed formation.
M placed two panels of his shield vertically, spreading them out, and Boss and Anna each took one with both hands. They would take the lead down the corridor, with M following them. He had his heavy MG5 machine gun propped up on his shoulder like a rifle.
They moved quickly. Boss and Anna turned right at an intersection and saw three enemies. They knew they’d be there, thanks to the cursors. The distance was ten meters.
“Huh?”
“Wha—?”
“Oh, crap…”
The three were so distracted by Llenn running overhead that they totally failed to react until M opened fire on them in brutal fashion. Boss and Anna ducked down so that the storm of bullets could pass over their heads.
“Gah!”
“Guh!”
“Goh!”
The three victims sang a little tune in sequence. The men whose eyes had glinted with the color of gold were now glowing red and were quickly sent on their way to the waiting room.
After a quick look around, Boss checked her watch: 2:26 PM.
“Four minutes remaining,” she reported to M.
“We’ll make it in time. Take the next left.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The crowd in the pub could see how the players in the maze—the donut section surrounding the middle of the castle—steadily made their way toward the center.
It was easy to tell, because they had an aerial view of the area, with cursors indicating each player’s location. There were too many to count at once, but there were probably at least forty or fifty surviving players at this point. They couldn’t tell how many were in the keep, because those cursors were not displayed.
It was 2:27 PM. Three minutes left until the collapse.
“The folks still lost in the maze are goners at this point.”
“Yeah, they should just stop and write a will.”
“Well, they can’t use a brush. There’s no time to grind up the ink.”
“They’ll have to use a ballpoint pen instead.”
Some players were stuck wandering in the maze, almost certainly too late to find their way into the keep at this point. But others had made it through and rushed through the entrance leading to the top of the center arena.
One guy had reached a point in the maze where the corridor ran up against the side of the keep but had no entryway in, keeping him trapped outside and out of luck. The poor guy just sank to his knees on the ground. He was shouting something—probably filthy insults toward the sponsor-writer. That had to be it.
“Uh-oh, is that…the leader of MMTM…and the chick from ZEMAL?” said an eagle-eyed watcher, looking at an array of smaller monitors. David and Vivi had just reached the end of the maze and found their way to the entrance to the keep.
It was shown on the biggest screen in the house, the one hung on the wall. Out of all the many monitors in the pub, the screen on the wall was designed to show the scene attracting the most attention. It was a VR environment, so the system could keep track of exactly who was paying attention to what.
On the big screen, David had his STM-556 in hand, checking out the six-foot-tall rounded tunnel.
It was pitch-black inside, so he was confirming that there wasn’t someone waiting just inside the entrance to pick them off, and that there weren’t any simple wire-and-grenade booby traps ready and waiting.
Vivi’s sawed-off RPD machine gun was ready at her hip, trained on the maze behind them.
“No surprises from those two. Except that they’re temporary buddies.”
“Yeah, very impressive. By the way, are they going out?”
“You really should fix that assumption you have that any man and woman standing in the same place are a couple.”
“I assume the same thing when it’s a man and a man. Does that make it better?”
“No.”
✦ ✦ ✦
David and Vivi vanished into the blackness of the tunnel to the keep interior. It looked like a mouth of darkness swallowing them whole.
The screen abruptly switched to show Llenn’s position.
“Oooh!”
“Did they make it?!”
The audience buzzed with greater intensity.
At last, Llenn and Fukaziroh had reached the center of the castle.