“Fuka! Do it!”
“Aye, aye!”
That was when Fukaziroh started blasting with her grenade launchers.
✦ ✦ ✦
The audience in the pub witnessed Fukaziroh point her pair of MGL-140s into the air and begin launching.
The massive rotating canister chunked and changed angles with each shot, loading the next grenade of the bunch directly into the barrel. Then that one, too, would be launched into the air.
“That’s the spirit! Fight back!”
“Hit ’em hard!”
Displayed in close-up on the big screen in the pub, Fukaziroh was hanging from a rope. It was tied around her waist and thighs, with her feet planted firmly against a vertical wall to keep herself steady.
In fact, it was almost exactly the same as how Shirley was hanging when she shot off the tower.
The difference here was that Fukaziroh’s boots were not pressed against the side of the tower, but against the sheer cliff that was the outside of what remained of the castle itself.
There was nothing but ten thousand feet of empty air behind her now.
Or should that be more like 9,990 feet? She was actually a bit lower than the flat, level area where Vivi and everyone else were standing now.
Just to the right of her, Llenn was dangling in the same fashion. On her left were Clarence, Shirley, Boss, Anna, and Tohma.
The ropes the seven were dangling from were tied around the base of the tower. Llenn had created two holes with her photon swords that they then tied ropes through. Since the base was still intact, the ropes would not come undone, even if it was covered by rubble.
This was the one means of survival Llenn had come up with, based on Fukaziroh’s nonsensical rambling.
Even splitting up the duties among them, it had taken time to prepare the trick, and so they were still inside the tower when the M2 started shooting at them. The only reason none of them got hit was that Huey had kept the angle reasonably high to avoid shooting the ground.
They escaped down the side of the cliff on ropes when the RPG-7 had started shooting. While they were hanging, they had to face the anxiety that the tower would surely be destroyed and possibly fall off the cliff with them attached, or that big chunks of rock would land on their heads. It was all a gamble.
But Llenn’s lucky streak was once again going strong.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Grenade!”
David heard the soft, silly pomp-pomp sound of grenades, followed, contrastingly, by the horrifying recognition of their imminent destructive power.
Then he saw the extremely high arc of bullet lines bending down toward them.
“They were behind it!”
From that location, Fukaziroh was firing in an almost totally vertical position, with just the tiniest angle toward them. The grenades soared high, high into the air and would soon give up and let gravity pull them down—toward his team.
And what if they were the same plasma grenades that utterly demolished his hideout from about an hour ago?
“Don’t run! Shoot them down!” he barked to his teammates, but ZEMAL was already firing.
Vivi’s order to her men was “Sweep the sky clean.”
Four machine guns unleashed their full power on the bullet line above them.
MMTM followed suit a beat later.
The projectiles were traveling in a very high, soaring arc and hadn’t yet hit their peak. You could see on the bullet line that they still had over half of the distance left to cover.
Nine machine guns and assault rifles began to spray bullets into the sky.
“Knock ’em down, knock ’em down!” David raved at his men. His gun was going at full auto, too, of course.
“Don’t worry, as long as you keep shooting, one of them will hit it,” said Vivi, very calmly and gently in comparison.
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
It was a shower of bullets, falling upward from the ground instead of the other way around.
A large blue sphere appeared high in the air. In the sky over ZEMAL, a blue firework exploded, stretching to a diameter of sixty feet. Another firework went off at the edge of it—a chain reaction of the grenade that followed it.
Over MMTM, similarly, more fireworks went off: one, two, three.
The blue orbs hovering in the sky actually became the shield that protected David and his squad, ironically. The plasma surge would not dissipate right away. So when another grenade followed the same path, it would hit the explosion and go off, too, expanding the overall blast zone.
The explosions went off in overlapping circles, like star mine fireworks.
The reddish GGO sky regained some measure of blue color, illuminating the faces of the players below.
✦ ✦ ✦
The big screen in the pub blazed blue.
A dozen plasma grenades were fired off in succession, each one setting off the next in a chain reaction. There went another. And another.
“It’s a chain!”
“What is this, a falling block game?”
“Fireworks go boom!”
“Kaboooom!”
“See, kids, there used to be this old video game called Missile Command…”
The audience was in an uproar over the latest burst of excitement.
A moment later, the camera pulled back to show the full extent of the scene. There was blue, blue, blue covering the sky in a span of dozens of yards and stretching sixty yards tall.
“If they’re gonna do a fireworks show, I’d appreciate a bit more color variety.”
“Don’t complain about a free show.”
There was another explosion, another blue flower blooming, then another…
“You know, it looks like they’re getting lower.”
The height of the blue surges was getting closer to the ground.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Shit! Gotta make it in time!” David shouted, glaring frantically into the sky.
He wasn’t shooting anymore. He’d run through his entire magazine.
The air overhead was glowing blue, and there was a red bullet line coming through it, meaning that any new grenades that could hurt them would be caught in the blast, too.
But it was clear at a glance that they were coming lower and lower.
That only made sense, of course; as the grenades exploded and spread, they were on a downward vector, so the sphere of destruction would drop as well.
They were a full twenty yards across, so if they exploded low enough, and the orb touched the ground before it dissipated, it would obliterate MMTM with it.
“Make it in time!” David shouted, right as the wind blast of the initial explosion, and those that were set off in chain reaction behind it, slammed into the ground.
The pressure was tremendous. It was like five typhoons, all hitting them at once.
“Aaah!” David grunted.
“Eek!” Vivi shrieked.
It hit the other seven as well, not only bowling them over backward, but powerfully beating them down as well.