Right at that moment, a countdown started.
The number 240 against a black background.
The next second, it said 239.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Why did she just start shooting?” David wondered aloud. He jumped over to the next barricade.
An RPG-7 expelled a ton of exhaust smoke to the rear after each shot, so it would tell you exactly where it was fired from. That made it easy to get counterattacked after every use.
As he rushed, he kept his hands busy, reloading the launcher. From his storage he pulled out a grenade head attached to a long, narrow tube and jammed it onto the launcher. Then he pulled the safety pin from the head, so that it was ready to fire.
It took only a few seconds, because he’d practiced the process to perfection.
Once it was ready, he slid on his knees behind another barricade and warned, “Second shot! Watch out behind!” in case any of his squadmates were nearby. Then he leaned out around the barricade and took aim at the middle of the tower this time.
The second rocket shot into one of the holes created by the machine gun where it struck the spiral stairs, activating the fuse and exploding. A bunch more stone blocks were blasted out of existence, including some on the far side of the tower.
At last, the climax of their Jenga game arrived.
“It’s gonna fall!” Summon warned the others. The tower slowly tilted over from the middle, its top falling southward.
Then, from a few yards below that, the collapse began.
Not topple, but collapse.
When it started to lean over, the part of the tower significantly weakened by all the gunshots was unable to support the additional weight, lost its item durability and crumbled, or in some cases, just vanished altogether.
A chain reaction of destruction and gravity took over. The tower began to collapse straight downward.
An unpleasant sound of stone scraping stone filled the air, the earth below them shook—and then dust enveloped the area, hiding everything from sight.
Once the sound of destruction died down, David continued to wait for the dust to stop blowing past the barricade.
“Did that do it…?”
Bold promptly ran up to him and began to switch their gear. He was not going to need the rocket launcher up ahead as much as the assault rifle. David picked up his familiar weapon again and loaded it, bullet and grenade.
The members of ZEMAL were trading their gear back, too, so that they had their regular machine guns now. The three aside from Vivi had their backpack ammo-loading systems equipped. The end of their ammo belts went into the guns.
They took formation, the three of them surrounding Vivi, and approached the tower.
Although there was no wind, the system ensured that the dust cleared after a certain amount of time. In real life, it would still be dropping thick and heavy for a while, but this was a game. Like mist, it would steadily clear at a comfortable rate.
ZEMAL approached the tower from the southeast, and MMTM from the southwest. Facing the tower, ZEMAL was on the right wing, while MMTM was on the left.
As usual, they moved carefully, guns up, covering for each other, winding from barricade to barricade. By the time they were seventy-five yards away, the dust had totally cleared, and the nine of them could see clearly what was left of the tower.
The lowest fifteen feet or so of the structure was still remaining, but all the rest of it had fallen to pieces. The base was buried in the stones that had fallen from above, and the stairs were completely covered up. No one could still be alive under there.
Around the base were hundreds of stones that still had some item durability left, piled into a mountain about thirty feet tall and across.
Aside from the chipped ones that had been shot, all the other stones were still in their pristine shape, which made the scene appropriately video-gamey. It was like a pile of toy blocks.
The tower was now a mountain of stone, but there were no red DEAD tags in sight.
“Vivi, can you see any tags from over there?” David asked through the comm.
“Not a single one,” she replied.
“That’s so strange… Are they buried underneath?” he wondered aloud.
It seemed physically possible that the dead bodies could be under the stone—if they were originally at the bottom of the tower, for example—and simply far enough down that even the tags weren’t visible.
Even still, there were seven of them after Rosa, so you would think at least one more would be in sight.
“We’ll shoot. Watch out for deflections,” Vivi said.
“Roger that. Give me a moment.”
David sent some hand signs to the rest of MMTM, who pulled back behind barricades. At seventy yards away, it wasn’t unthinkable for machine guns firing from their right to deflect off of surfaces and hit them.
“All right, you’re clear,” he said. Huey and Max started shooting.
Twin trails of machine-gun fire lashed at the hill of collapsed stone, tearing up the blocks. A number of the stones that had already been low on durability simply vanished. Bit by bit, the mountain of stone got lower and lower.
They paused after five seconds of continual firing. A faint cloud of dust was rising, and the pile was getting smaller, but there were still no tags to be seen.
“Did they fall off the opposite side…?”
“It’s quite possible. But if they fell, we wouldn’t be able to see them.”
The two squad leaders weren’t sure what to do yet.
If all of Llenn’s group had fallen to their deaths ten thousand feet below, the only thing left to do was kill each other.
But they had totally lost the right timing to decide on that. It was like a sumo match in which neither side had won, and they were just standing around awkwardly.
Either they needed a foe nearby to turn all their firepower against, or they needed to stop and reset.
David and Vivi faltered for just a few seconds, uncertain of what to do next.