At 2:53 PM, there were eighteen survivors left in SJ5.
They were as follows:
From LPFM: Llenn, Fuka, Clarence, Shirley.
From SHINC: Boss, Anna, Tohma, Rosa.
From ZEMAL: Vivi, Huey, Peter, Max.
From MMTM: David, Jake, Kenta, Bold, Summon.
And one member of BOKR. Wherever he was.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Let’s go,” Vivi said casually.
“With pleasure!”
Huey began to fire the M2 at full power.
After they assembled the gun, they carried it to a spot about two hundred yards from the tower. For the M2, that was practically too close of a range.
He sat behind the gun, firmly planted on its tripod, with his legs splayed out in front of him. The vertical grips were in both hands, where his thumbs could press on the plate-style trigger between them.
Dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud.
It vibrated the ground beneath their feet.
A bullet of this size shook the air when it passed through, especially at that speed. The pressure of the gas escaping the muzzle was phenomenal. The amount of air it punched was enough to make your head hurt, not just your eardrums.
And it was happening ten times a second, which turned it into a continual explosion instead.
How did it feel to shoot a gun like that?
“Hya-haaaaaa!”
Huey’s delighted smile told you all you needed to know.
The thick barrel extended from the side of a barricade and fired at the tower. Extra ammo and barrels were within reach to the side. For now, he just kept repeating full auto, ten bullets a second.
✦ ✦ ✦
The massive bullets began to gouge chunks out of the tower.
The sheer kinetic force of the projectiles was over five times that of 7.62 × 51 mm NATO rounds, by rough calculation. The amount of dust it created when striking stone was phenomenal.
Each bullet tore about half of the wall’s thickness out, so a second one would punch a hole through it. Eventually the stone would lose enough of its durability as an item that it would vanish in a puff of light. That started happening here and there all over the tower.
Huey adjusted the vertical angle of the M2, sweeping his bullets all over the tower from top to bottom. The tripod had a fixture that would hold the gun’s height, with a dial for fine-tuning the angle, but they weren’t bothering with that. This wasn’t long-distance sniping, so the gun worked fine for their purposes without it.
His bullets riddled the tower from about fifteen feet up, all the way to the top at 150. Dust kicked up from the stone all over, holes opened up, and eventually entire chunks of stone started to disappear.
Summon from MMTM had his gun ready to shoot into the tower if he spotted any counterattack, but for now, there was no sign of that.
Jake had his HK21 machine gun pointed at the entrance, but there was no one coming out there, either. If they had, he would’ve pumped them full of lead.
The non-Vivi members of ZEMAL had switched out their regular weapons for the M2 parts and ammo, so the only things they still had left to shoot with were M17 pistols using 9 mm Parabellum bullets.
Max took on the job of refreshing the ammo box, while Peter’s role was to exchange the barrel once it overheated and no longer functioned as well.
Exchange ammo boxes, reload, exchange overheated barrel, and shoot, shoot, shoot some more. After about a hundred seconds, the M2’s roar briefly stopped, and the dust cloud surrounding the structure cleared.
The tower was still standing.
About half of the stone on the south side had vanished. It was now a lousy, bug-eaten tower instead. At times there were huge holes nearly three feet to a side in the wall, revealing the spiral stairs on the inside.
When Kenta saw that it refused to fall yet, he commented, “It’s like a really long, expert game of Jenga.”
Vivi used the comm to speak to David. “That’s enough from us. I’m sorry, it’s just—the ammo.”
She did not clarify whether she meant “the ammo is gone” or “the ammo needs to be saved for later,” and David didn’t press for details. This was an adult conversation.
Instead, he offered a guess. “No refill, huh? I guess that means nobody inside died. They’re tough.”
It seemed that no one inside the tower had died yet. He could only assume that they had fled to a part that wasn’t shot up yet.
“Can I ask you to take over for us?”
“Even if I end up killing Fukaziroh?”
“I would be delighted to see it.”
“Very well.” David grunted and rested the RPG-7 on his shoulder. It was his role on the team to fire their ultimate weapon.
Not because he was the leader and demanded to have the spotlight. It was because they had done a shooting competition, and he proved himself to be the best with it. David assumed that Huey was shooting the M2 for a similar reason. But as a matter of fact, it wasn’t that—Huey had simply won the rock-paper-scissors tournament they had held before SJ5. But that was neither here nor there.
“It’ll be a bit of a letdown to have you die this easily, but we don’t want you surviving, either,” he muttered to his distant targets, cocking the RPG-7’s hammer with his thumb.
By peering through the simple optical sights and putting his finger against the trigger, he created a huge bullet circle in his field of view. There was no wind, and the distance was close, so as the circle contracted with his pulse, its edges did not go over the side of the tower. He was close enough that there was no way to miss the target.
He took aim at the middle of the tower, height-wise, and was just about to pull the trigger.
“Captain! Get down!” Kenta snapped. David promptly fell to the ground and rolled, disengaging from the gun, of course.
“Enemy at the top!” he continued, right as the shooting started.
A PKM machine gun’s low thudding sounded, and bullets hurtled down at the barricades from above.
From over the corner of his barricade, David could see SHINC’s machine gunner leaning out from the top of the spire, spraying bullets all around the area.
MMTM promptly started firing back, so Rosa withdrew and hid behind the low stone wall around the belfry. Once the shooting stopped, she popped up and started shooting again.
Fortunately, she wasn’t shooting in David’s direction.
“I’ll get her first!” David snarled, leaning around the barricade, taking aim, and firing.
The RPG-7 was a cannon.
By pulling the trigger, the powder ignited, propelling the heavy rocket inside the tube forward. In order to cancel out the powerful recoil, the launcher had to expel a ton of gas out of the rear—a recoilless launcher.
Once shot forward, the projectile’s rocket lit up at about thirty feet and rapidly accelerated. In other words, a tandem charge.
The exhaust of the rocket enveloped David. It was like having a very heavy, hot blanket tossed onto you. The rocket shot forward at nearly the speed of sound, expelling combustion gas, zeroing in on the bell-less belfry at the top of the tower.
It struck the underside of the roof and exploded.
Even without coming into contact with the fire of the explosion, the sheer shock wave of the blast itself was incredible, slamming the inside of the belfry.
The person inside was pushed outward, back-first, into open air.
“Nwaaaaaaa!”
Rosa wailed and flew, along with the PKM resting on her shoulder.
She was hurled southward, fell 150 feet, and landed on her head. She was dead, of course. One less SHINC member.