The audience in the pub observed it all on the screens, enrapt.
“This is brutal…”
They were watching the ultimate team, ZEMAL, absolutely annihilating their opponents.
“They’ve seriously improved so much…”
“They’re like different people—I mean, a different team entirely. Even though their names and faces and weapons are exactly the same.”
“Well, they always had firepower… I guess it’s what they say about nature versus nurture. They just needed the right circumstances.”
“Who is that Vivi anyway?”
The castle keep was now the only environment left in SJ5. In the southeast, three of ZEMAL’s surviving members were leaving an unstoppable wake of destruction on the orders of their goddess.
Huey the macho man, with a rooster haircut and an M240B machine gun, stood at the head of their A-shaped formation.
Thanks to the bullet circle feature, he didn’t even need to hold the gun up to his shoulder so he could peer through the scope. Like a badass movie star, he held his weapon at his waist and was able to shoot accurately anyway. Thanks to the backpack belt feeder system, he could shoot somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand bullets without needing to stop and reload.
He strolled around the side of a barricade, where he spotted a team in reddish-brown camo about a hundred feet ahead and unleashed a torrent of 7.62 × 51 mm NATO bullets.
One of them was unable to run and was shot through the head and killed instantly. Two others panicked and hid behind a barricade. The wall blocked a few of his subsequent shots before vanishing entirely, leaving them exposed and helpless. They followed their teammate off the map a second later.
At that moment, about forty yards to Huey’s left, a member of T-S bravely leaped out from behind cover. He charged with a Steyr AUG assault rifle tucked under his arm, willing to take a few shots first. The Steyr model had been customized to be what they called an HBAR, with a longer barrel and a bipod attachment.
The heavily armored man with the long rifle charged like some medieval knight. This kind of bold advance could only be attempted by someone with enough defense to believe that 5.56 mm bullets would not stop him.
“Ohhh!”
“Will he make it?”
The men in the bar stirred with anticipation. One of them rose a little from his seat, fists clenched.
“Awww…”
He didn’t make it.
The man on the left leg of the A formation, Max—who played a Black avatar with a fairly common Minimi Mk 46—promptly cut the man down with a hail of bullets.
On top of that, Vivi, who took the center bar of the formation, began to shoot a short-barreled RPD light machine gun.
The Steyr AUG slipped out of the T-S member’s hand and got blasted away. It would need repairing to work again. Pretty, colorful sparks began to shoot from all parts of his body.
The bullets that hit him weren’t penetrating the armor, but he was still getting smacked with their full kinetic force. He quickly lost his balance and toppled to the left.
Even still, he tried to fight back and get to his feet, but the hailstorm did not stop.
He was being showered like a flower receiving water. Too much water. Enough to drown the delicate flower.
Max and Vivi must have had plenty of extra ammo, because they simply did not stop.
“They wanna beat him to death.”
“Nah, I think they just enjoy holding down the trigger.”
Perhaps that was right.
Their victim was getting shot continuously, all over his body, and couldn’t get back to his feet due to the impacts and pain, even if he wanted to. It was difficult to watch.
“I swear I’ve seen this scene before in RoboCop. The original one, from 1987.”
“There you go, bringing up classic movies again…”
“I bet that T-S guy is thinking Kill me, just kill me right about now.”
“You never know. He could be a woman.”
“Absolutely no chance. But it would be sweet… I would totally nurture that T-S member back to health, brokenhearted and scarred after being unable to fight back…”
“No, I’ll do it! Me first!”
“I’d like to hear less from the virgins in the crowd.”
The audience members carried on, their imaginations getting the better of them. But in the meanwhile, the T-S member decided that giving up would be preferable to taking more of a beating.
In other words, he chose to quit the game.
He waved his left arm and then fell lifelessly to the ground. A tag saying RESIGNED appeared over his body. The machine guns stopped, and the world was quiet.
Then the camera centered on Vivi, who began to walk slowly out of the middle of their formation.
On Vivi’s right side was the smallest member of ZEMAL, Peter, who was identifiable by the bandage he stuck over his nose. His weapon was an Israeli Negev 5.56 mm machine gun. He moved right and left along with Vivi, ensuring that he was always within the space ten feet in front of her.
At a glance, it seemed like he was extremely agitated.
“Is that guy holdin’ it in or something?” someone suggested crudely, eliciting a wave of laughter.
“No, he’s changing position based on the barricades nearby to act as a shield for their team leader,” someone else said casually, drawing their attention.
“Wow… Do you have combat experience or something?” someone asked.
He smiled back. “Yeah. In GGO.”
On the screen, Vivi was shouting something. She was using a megaphone, which was very similar to those handheld devices you saw people talking into at school festival days, but this one was sci-fi looking, all angles, and rather small.
The men in the pub were just learning for the first time that such an item existed in the game. But they had no idea why she would have brought that with her.
Vivi was shouting into the megaphone. They couldn’t hear her.
“What’s she doing…?”
“Probably sending a message to the players around her…”
“Oh, I got it!” said one man, drawing everyone’s attention. “She must be recruiting others to go after the pink shrimp!”