“Dammit! We can’t win against this!” swore another man as he was sent to Heaven. Or back to his squadmates, whichever you preferred.
He had been desperate to earn that hundred million credits, until the PKM shredded the barricade he hid behind, and one of the Dragunovs picked him off after he lunged for a new safe spot.
It was still seventy yards to the tower. You’d have to be incompetent to miss at this distance. They could see the bullet lines coming from the tower, of course, but that wasn’t going to help them when they were this close.
Of course, they weren’t all going to die hiding and running. Some of them bravely shot back. They realized they were being shot at through holes in the tower and decided they would shoot back through the holes.
“You won’t get me this way! I won’t let it be that easy!” one shouted, rather stereotypically, and started shooting at the muzzle flashes he was seeing. In no time, his magazine was empty.
“Blebhgh!”
Llenn’s merciless P90 shots pierced him through the head and body. GG, my man.
Clarence’s AR-57, which used the same magazines as the P90, exhibited the full extent of its power: a spray of fifty rounds at full auto.
Though they were small and didn’t pack as much punch, all it took was a few of those bullets to make a barricade disappear.
“Oh, crap!” exclaimed a man huddled on the ground behind one, now fully exposed for all to see. The other forty-plus bullets took care of him, though it was certainly overkill.
Even as he was shot through like a pincushion, he allowed his mournful parting words to mingle with the air of Gun Gale Online.
“Aw, man… I wanted that million yen…so I could take my mom on a hot springs vaca—”
While the group was getting shot, one player got quite close to the tower entrance: the man with the desert camo and M16A4.
He was calm, cool, and collected.
As soon as the shooting started, he dropped to the ground, watched the bullet lines coming from the tower very carefully, and moved from barricade to barricade while other targets were getting hit. He managed to approach without taking a single bullet, until he was only twenty yards away.
He was now huddled behind the final barricade. There was nothing but flat ground between here and the entrance to the structure.
Using a handheld mirror, he peered around the side of the barricade at the tower. Tanya’s body was facedown next to the entrance. The tower itself loomed very tall over everything, and beyond that was empty sky.
The man checked the pocket next to his magazines, where he had his hand grenade stock. They were M67s, just your garden variety shrapnel grenades. Not the powerful and significantly more expensive plasma grenades that swallowed up all matter within their midst in a blue sphere of destruction.
“Should’ve just splurged on the plasmas,” he muttered, but it was too late now.
If he had plasma grenades, plural, then he could have possibly knocked down the tower just by throwing them at his current distance. Or if the whole group of twenty temporary teammates had actually compared notes on their weaponry and come up with a plan, they might have learned that someone had plasma grenades, so they could keep him in the back while the rest opened the way forward…
But there was no point lamenting what could have been.
Even if they had succeeded, they would have broken down and fought over who would get the hundred million credits. Split it nice and clean down the middle? No. That would never happen.
If working with others only got him five million credits, or fifty thousand yen, he would have tried for the full million yen instead.
In that sense, the prize amount of a million yen was perfectly balanced.
It was realistic enough that you could imagine someone actually paying it, but also hefty enough to have a magical allure that made people do reckless things for it.
“Money’s a scary thing,” he murmured, trying to make an obvious statement sound profound.
Then again, “I’m still alive; gotta see how far I can get with this one…”
He placed his gun over his shoulder, grabbed a grenade, and pulled back behind the barricade. The plan was to throw it into the entrance, and when it exploded, rush in for himself. Assuming he didn’t get shot in that last twenty yards, of course.
He pulled the pin, cocked his arm back, and tossed the grenade.
“Take that!”
But his estimate was off, and it was just a tiny bit short. It landed six feet early and came to a stop when it hit Tanya’s body. The grenade did explode, but the dead body was invulnerable to any kind of damage and sat as still as stone with roots in the ground.
If not for Tanya, it might have rolled onward through the entrance. But like this, not a piece of shrapnel even flew in from the blast.
Even in death, she protected the tower.
“Ahhh, dammit!” he howled. The barricade he was hiding behind came into Rosa’s sight as she shifted positions, and her machine gun made quick work of it.
“So much for that.”
He hunched up in anticipation, just before Tohma’s shot passed through his skull.
✦ ✦ ✦
Of course, as you might expect, some of the group saw the inevitable and decided to cut their losses and run first.
“Let’s get outta here!”
When they saw the men in front of them falling like sacks of potatoes, the ones bringing up the rear of the group—the slowest of the bunch—promptly turned tail and ran.
If they were any faster, they’d already be dead. Sometimes being slow will actually save your life.
One of them said to a fellow escapee from a different squad, “We got screwed over! That Vivi chick knew this would happen! She knew they’d shoot at us from holes in the tower! I’m outta here, man!”
“But what are you gonna do after running?” asked the other man, who was doing the exact same thing.
“I’ll find a place to hide! And once ZEMAL comes to tackle the tower, I’ll shoot ’em from behind!”
“Sounds good! I’m in! Let’s buddy up!”
“Yeah! Our fight is just beginning!”
As if to say Not so fast, the bullets started flying at them.
They were coming from the friendly fellows they’d passed earlier, with the shoulder patches of a skull with a knife in its teeth: MMTM. After the men had passed by the barricades where they waited, the squad started shooting them in the back.
There was no chance to return fire. The men were hit in the back and the head, dying as they fell forward. The ones who came after them, and the ones who ran in different directions, suffered the same fate.
All was quiet around the tower.
There was distant machine-gun fire, but even still, everything was much, much calmer than before.
“How many are gone? Asking you, Summon,” David asked, reloading his STM-556.
Summon had been monitoring the tower area. “I see twelve,” he said, counting the DEAD tags in the air.
Kenta and Bold, who had been down on the ground, reported in with their results.
“I beat two.”
“Three for me.”
David had dispatched two of them. “So that’s nineteen confirmed. That sounds about right.”
In his mind, they’d killed all of them. So he switched the channel on his comm and reported as much to Vivi.
✦ ✦ ✦
“That’s enough. Cease covering fire,” she commanded curtly.
“With pleasure!”
Huey stopped shooting, and the world was quiet again. There were two used barrels resting next to his machine gun.
Vivi had known that all of these things would happen.
“Listen up, everyone. The last battle of SJ5 is about to begin. Our battle to avenge Shinohara and Tomtom,” she told her teammates. “There are only two orders I have for you. Strike down the foe who delivered an unjust death to our comrades. And take those machine guns you love so much and shoot them to your heart’s content. Can you do that for me?”
Three hearty bellows arose from different spots around the area. They were earthshaking roars. If the comm didn’t have automatic volume adjustment, Vivi’s eardrums would have been in trouble.
“Very good. Then shall we prepare the weapon that is the embodiment of our souls?”