Chapter 7
Bullets
Well, thought Nes, that’s settled. He always had doubts about the less conventional, mentally-focused training Dastou put all students through during their time at Ornadais Academy. That whole “up-shifting” thing, technically called Open Iris, didn’t feel right. Starting from his freshman year, he stuck to his guns, literally, and became proficient with firearms, figuring that was the way to go. The old entourage members that became faculty at the school had faith in what they were teaching people to do, so Nes had practiced it like anyone else. Many of those instructors told him he had an affinity for the skill that surpassed ninety-percent of the student body, but those practice sessions and field tests were in controlled environments where he didn’t think he was going to get hurt too badly.
Bullets flew overhead, continuously hitting concrete, and his thoughts were occupied by a single amazing fact: when it came time to act or die, he could make himself as fast as a Saint. The training worked. Alright, alright, enough chest pounding and back to the problem at hand. With Nes’ mind in the immediate and unplanned hyper-activity he put himself in, there was precious non-panic-filled time to examine his surroundings.
The concrete maintenance steps that served as cover did their job, and Nes was not in great danger. He had made sure to land on his side to avoid damaging the assault rifle buckled to his back. Trenna was next to him, lying closer to the ground thanks to her size. She didn’t take the landing too well, getting her breath knocked out from the impact and hitting her hip hard against the edge of a step, but she was fine for now.
The consistent whizzes and pews of ammunition flying around, hitting everything but their targets, made Trenna keep a hand over her head instinctively while the other was on her injured hip. She shook with fear, a cry escaping her whenever a bullet hit something very near their cover, crackling against a concrete wall or the floor of the center boarding platform. At least she had the bare minimum amount of composure needed to keep from running and screaming back down the tunnel toward her living space, getting riddled with ammunition along the way.
Across the nearby left side gap, the Saint was in an identical position to the corporal, keeping his bald head down. A slip of adhesive-backed wax paper was on the gravel where the trio stood a moment before. The paper held a set of four intricate symbols that created a hypnotic suggestion – “ignore” to be specific. Looking up to the balcony above Dastou, three men were changing positions to fire on them from somewhere else; it was a life-saving difference in enemy location. When had Dastou put that Stitch on the gravel? The corporal’s temporarily inflated ego lost some of its pressure upon realizing how cunning his friend was in the heat of an ambush.
Nes also became aware that he was getting used to the ambient brightness. The five sets of lights washed almost all the detail out of the world, even when looking down and away from them. He checked one of the pockets on his supply belt for a small metal sphere, removed it, then held it in his palm. Before using it, he needed to check with Dastou. Nes’ throat mic was active, so he turned up the volume by thumbing a knob on the transceiver on his belt. The vibrations from his words were the only thing the patch on his neck caught, thankfully, because the attempted murder happening all around was very noisy. He shut down his Open Iris and spoke clearly.
“So, this is a trap then?” Nes asked.
“Jackass,” responded Dastou, his own mic already on.
“Says you while hiding the same way I am.”
A couple of big pebbles of concrete bounced onto the Saint’s head after being shot off from the top of the maintenance steps, distracting the man for a moment while Nes noticed a change in the consistency of the triggers being pulled.
Dastou spoke after a surge and subsequent downturn of gunfire. “It sounds like they’re trying to conserve ammo, firing in bursts. They probably wanted us closer and with nowhere to hide.”
“Thanks for explaining surprise attacks to me, Your Lordship,” Nes said. He paused during a short eruption of fire near his own skull. “Now, what the fuck are we going to do about this?”
“I’ll go up the southbound platform escalator, the one closest to me, you go the other way. If a prisoner can be taken, I’ll handle it. You, though... you do what needs doing, Nes.”
The order was clear, but Nes had never killed before. He barely got his next words out without his voice cracking. “Yeah. Yeah, I got it.”
Nes turned down the volume of his earpiece using another knob on the transceiver. He changed his tone of voice to carry over the gunfire, and moved a bit closer to the girl so she could hear.
“Trenna, we’re going to be moving soon. Can you handle that?” he asked, his voice hard to catch in his own ears.
She looked at the injured side of her hip, then back up at Nes and gave a pained, unsure nod. Nes’ mind would have to be equally focused on the conflict and keeping the girl alive, so he took her not-quite-ideal agreement as the best he’d get out of a civvie and didn’t bother saying more. Nes put his attention on the flashbang marble taking up space in his palm. He pressed two buttons on the surface of the small ordnance, saw small indicator lights glow, and chucked it straight up with a hard, fast, tight movement of his arm that kept the limbs nice and concealed. He covered Trenna’s ears with his hands and blocked her line of sight as soon as the device was airborne, careful not to break her glasses. He closed his own eyes as tight as possible, and preemptively grimaced.
The marble exploded after it reached the second tier with a flat, anti-climactic whump. The cranked-up brightness of the construction equipment diodes washed things out, made it impossible to do much without closing your eyes to slits, but they were not weapons. The flash grenade, however, emitted a sudden, pain-filled brightness that was damn near like the sun. It would make the mild headache the diodes gave him seem like a pinch on the rear by a flirty partner compared to what his enemies would feel. The detonation was followed by an abrupt and complete halt in gunfire. Those members of the ambush group whose eyes were not in the direct line of sight of the blast would be stunned by reflections alone. That was only the first of two functions for the marble.
Almost immediately following the flash was the bang: a powerful, short range sonic pulse. It felt like too-close thunder without the full breadth of noise, and Nes’ whole body vibrated. The distinctive sound of glass shattering took over, meaning the construction lights were out of play – along with the very closest storefront windows on the second floor. Eyes still closed, the corporal felt small pieces of glass rain on him, and other than that tink-tink-tink it was dead quiet outside of moans and complaints from blinded foes. It was time to counter. He pulled back from Trenna, opened his eyes, and deftly released the assault rifle on his back with one hand near the stock, a quick thumb press unlocking the two connected mechanical buckles. He pulled the weapon forward and put both hands on it, the entire process of getting the rifle only taking about as long as the exhale that accompanied the movements.
He popped up from cover with considerable speed despite the awkward position he forced himself into for the steps to protect him. Three attackers were still visible from their chests up in the middle of the walkway near the center spotlight, making themselves easy targets as they rubbed their eyes. Nes’ vision was still a little fuzzy, but he was able to see well enough. He put the rifle’s stock to his shoulder and fired. A single short, sharp pop-pew from the DSF weapon echoed through the silent hub, and a bullet to the chest took down the guy in the middle. Two more trigger pulls and the next bullets from the corporal’s gun hit a woman in the shoulder and sternum, a mist of blood filling the air near her as she went down. Nes forced his breathing to stay calm and his eyes to stop staring at the blood in the air.
Next up was someone who, despite the swiftness and accuracy of the counter-attack, realized what was happening and tried to duck below the retaining wall of the bridge. That was an unfortunate decision since now the only spot to aim for was his head. Pop-pew, and a bu
llet entered his temple and came out of the other side, neither happening cleanly or quietly. Wet, staggered wheezing could be heard after the echo of the gunfire faded. It was the woman, the second one he shot at, her breathing a discordant mess. She must have a lung pierced by either a shard of a bullet or a shard of splintered bone. The sound was a horrible, moist, desperate stuttering. Nes worked hard to keep his own breathing calm after that noise infected his ear drums.
He ducked down again, the hub silent except for dying breaths from the woman and groans from the numerous others that are stunned. Nes looked to the other set of low concrete steps; Dastou was gone, as expected. Nes slipped in two slow seconds of Open Iris to calculate that from the initial sounds of gunfire, the space available to the enemy, and locations of the five construction lights, there were at most eight more of the assailants for him to take down. Dastou’s side didn’t count, as the Saint would tear through anyone there without issue.
After he slipped smoothly back to normal brain function, Nes put his attention to the far right of the hub, where Dastou told him to go, and saw two men running down one side of the escalator. Those two must have only been hit by reflected light from the marble’s flash, their vision good enough that they decided to rush down. They weren’t trying to hide their advance, making them a notch above target practice. Nes came up above the edge of the steps, revealing only his eyes and the barrel and sight of his gun, then pulled the trigger confidently.
He fired twice, in rapid succession, his aim perfect. The shots came with almost no time in-between, recoil moving the barrel the slightest amount, and each man was shot in the heart. The dead men tumbled down the metal escalator stairs, the clattering of their guns making more noise than their bodies as they fell. They finally crumpled on top of each other at the bottom. The flashbang marble’s blinding effect should be wearing away completely soon, so Nes would have to move to a safer position. He squeezed Trenna’s shoulder to get her attention.
When she looked up, eyes red behind her glasses, he spoke. “Wait here, keep looking in my direction. When I give you a signal, come toward but stay near the wall.”
Nes had to hope that his instructions weren’t too much for an adrenaline-filled civilian. He got up into a half-crouch and rushed up the short set of steps he was using as cover and onto the middle boarding platform. When he saw no immediate threat, he stood up and ran. He descended the other side of the middle platform’s maintenance steps in a leap and promptly crossed the track gap beyond, passing the other tunnel opening on his right in this symmetrical hub. He bounded up the stone steps leading to the next boarding platform, getting down on one knee in a firing stance as soon as his feet were on something flat.
He was on the exact opposite side of the room where Dastou would have gone up, and had a good view of most of the first level. He shifted his weapon along his eye line in swift motions, trying to find targets. Nothing yet, so he got up ran in a half-crouch to the escalator, making sure to do a visual check on the two bodies that rag-dolled to the bottom. They were pretty dead, not much blood pooling at their location since their hearts stopped instantly.
He was momentarily distracted by the fact that these bodies were so close. He’d not only never killed anyone before today, he’d never been in real combat. The metallic smell of blood, as little of it as there was thanks to his aim, gave him the beginnings of a new headache along with the sudden need to vomit. He forced himself to pay attention to what he was doing and his food to stay where it was. The last thing he needed was for his burgeoning “DSF Badass” persona to go completely to waste when Trenna slipped on his thrown-up lunch.
Nes held the rifle at the ready and faced the girl. Trenna had poked her head out of cover just enough to see him. He nodded deeply at her, the signal he told her to wait on. Trenna got up and started to jog with a limp, using the wall as a crutch to help with her injured hip.
When Nes touched her shoulder for attention earlier, he had attached a piece of paper to Trenna’s shirt – an ignore me Stitch, similar to the one Dastou used when diving for cover. It flapped as she limped along, only half of the adhesive backing removed because he’d been in a hurry, but at least it was staying on. Anyone looking down would see her for only a second, and then their minds would register the hypnotism and disregard her entirely. Trenna crossed the gap and passed tunnel on her right, going the exact same way Nes did. She passed up another chance to run away, out through that second tunnel, and this time the enemies weren’t likely to kill her for the effort. Nes wouldn’t have blamed her for going into the tunnel and running away, but she followed his orders and kept moving toward him, climbing the steps to the boarding platform.
Nes put his palm up toward her, and she stopped. He scanned around for targets again, then waved permission for her to come to him. Trenna walked as quickly as she could, clearly in pain. Nes’ headache was getting worse by the second, the distinctive scent of blood getting to him, though he had at least quelled the need to barf well enough to do his duty. Thank the black his aim was good; he didn’t think he’d be able to deal with the explosion of blood that would have been everywhere if he hit a jugular. At that imagined scenario, his lunch knocked on his trachea like a door.
When Trenna reached him at the escalator, she practically collapsed to her knees, but he caught her and set her down more gently. When she looked at the raggedly-dressed bodies on the rise near her, she couldn’t help but say something.
“Jakob, and Bray. They’re...” she tried to say before Nes took her chin in his hand and yanked her attention to him.
“Not now, understand?” he said firmly, leaving no room for misinterpretation. “Not yet.”
Trenna got the gist, and blinked back tears. Nes pointed up the escalator, gesturing the need to crawl up. She said nothing, and he knew she’d follow. She was willing to see this through to the end, maybe because these were her former friends, close friends, trying to kill her for some reason, and she had to know more. That was his guess anyway, because that’s how he would be.
“Stop rubbing your damn eyes and look for them!” someone said from the balcony above the pair on this side of the room.
Someone very near the first speaker complained. “I am looking, and I don’t see shit at the tunnel. They’re gone.”
The ignore me Stitch worked – this person must have been scanning the area during Trenna’s progress to the escalator and been hypnotized by the symbols on the paper to neglect the person with it attached.
“No,” the first man said, “they wouldn’t just leave. Get everyone still moving and search this place. Fucking kill that goon, and don’t forget the acolyte bitch like we were told.”
A quick glance at Trenna and Nes saw a confused, sad look on her face that told him exactly what she was thinking: “I know these people; they wouldn’t say those things, talk like that.”
Nes started crawling up the escalator using knees and a forearm, holding the rifle near the trigger with the other hand. It was a rough go, the steps metallic and somewhat jagged on the edges. Trenna was close behind, getting the hint to be quiet after hearing those two voices. Nes never saw anyone trying to keep their fear, real fear, in check before, and figured Trenna would be a textbook example.
Two-thirds of the way up the escalator, there was lot of movement, mostly footsteps, and getting closer. Nes was thankful for something to concentrate on, and he shifted his mind into high gear again. Five sets of footsteps, coming diagonally toward me from the left, all armed thought the corporal, and he figured approximate distances. Looking down at Trenna, he saw that she hit her breaking point when the footsteps came, and froze in place. Tears streamed down her face, but she was still silent, thankfully. The Stitch he attached to her shoulder was gone, only a white corner of the rectangular paper remaining on her t-shirt. Nes looked past her and saw the item further down the escalator, snagged on the lip of a step and impossible to recover safely.
In a moment of selfishness that he indulged in only
because his brain was over active, he wished he had thought of another way to get Trenna to him without losing a completed Stitch. Those things grueling to write for non-Saints, requiring intense meditative concentration for hours just for the four symbols on that lost sheet of wax paper he was staring at. The bigger issue, once Nes stopped being a whiny baby, was that Trenna’s best protection was gone, and she would be saved only if he provided the necessary distraction.
The corporal kept Open Iris on and went ahead with what was probably a terrible idea, and started barking a pretend order in a half-whisper. “No! Stay down there, at the tunnel. I’ll check the balconies when you’re safe.”
His acting couldn’t have been all that good, but he heard the noises that forced his hand stop almost entirely. The ambient clicking and ticking noises that revealed weapons was more apparent now, and he imagined nervously waiting hands with fingers on triggers. The enemies would be getting ready to fire wherever he popped his head up, thinking that he foolishly and accidentally revealed his position. Trenna grabbed his ankle and looked at him from lower on the staircase, scared of what he was planning. Nes looked down at her sternly, knowing his eyes were slightly brighter when using Open Iris, then softened his expression to show he’d be careful. She let his ankle go, a look of worry taking a place alongside her fear. He had to agree with the sentiment.
Nes took a siopane shockwave marble out of a pocket of his combat belt. A single activation button was flush against the marble’s polished chrome surface, and he pressed down on it until he heard a teeny klik. He took a deep breath and threw the petite sphere overhead, aiming for his enemies’ general position. The grenade exploded with a bassy, powerful, distinctive cha-whump! that drowned out every other sound for a split second. The noise was quickly followed by the sound of human bodies being thrown to the ground and Nes hauled ass.
He bounded up the last handful of steps on the escalator. On the second level now, he purposely ran within view of the ambushers, sprinting fast enough to light the muscles in his thighs and calves on fire. The siopane-fueled marble, meant to be a non-lethal crowd-control solution, had enough force to toss the five enemies to the ground, but they were already poising their weapons to fire upon seeing him while on their backs. Faster than he ever dreamed, Nes took in the rest of his surroundings and formulated a plan. He might have seen a glow on the more reflective objects, like a dream, but that was probably from a combination of exertion and his worsening headache.
He saw the clothing of his enemies, again similar to Trenna’s ill-fitting and dirty attire when they found her, noticed that two of them were women, figured out their age range as between late twenties and late thirties. Some of the had new cuts and scratches on them from glass flying around or breaking thanks to his grenades. Focus! Nes screamed inwardly as his mind got lost in all the data being absorbed. He wasn’t good enough to soak up the level of information a Saint would and still take action, and he needed to drill down into what was important, especially not running at full speed like he was.
Straight ahead of him were tables and chairs for the restaurants on this side of the second tier. A construction light was a few meters to his left, halfway between him and the closest seating area. Every casing for the light’s diode bulbs was shattered, and there was glass on the floor below the construction equipment. Nes knew that those last pieces of information, the position of the light and the glass, were important, but couldn’t put it all together.
Focus, goddammit!
The enemies that he needed to dispose of were behind those spotlights. The tiled, dusty floor with glass on it could be exploited. A square, sturdy-looking table was closest, it’s thick, centered single leg bolted down. There, done, Nes thought with great relief. He’d gotten what he needed to do things during only five meters of running and could get started.
Nes brought up his rifle and pulled his trigger three times on the move, using longer than usual bursts and keeping the rifle close to his body for control. He saw that one of the women and one of the men on the ground would not be getting back up, the air pink with a capillary mist. Two of the remaining three ragged attackers retaliated when Nes’ position was blocked by the construction light. Because they were still on the ground, the angle of their fire was pretty much useless, and all they hit with their basic-looking assault rifles was the spotlight or the wall far beyond it. The pings and pongs of ricochets filled the air, and that kept the strangers from pulling their triggers again, if only for an instant.
Still rushing, Nes flung himself down and slid on the tile and glass, the thickness of his uniform and its lining making it so he didn’t slice himself up. He skimmed on the side of his butt for a second, reached the table, and in an impressive display that he regretted no one that would be alive to talk about it, ended the slide by shifting to his knees as his momentum slowed under the table. Fucking incredible.
The second he stopped, Nes dropped his gun on the ground and with as much force as he could muster, lifted himself up so that his shoulder slammed into the table, jarring it from where it was bolted down. The grating squeal of metal on tile meant screws from the metal base of the table came up out of the floor, but it wasn’t enough – the thin flat base of the leg was still half-bolted in. Nes grunted as he grabbed the edge of the table and pushed up with all the power he could put into his legs, arms, and shoulders. His burning effort was rewarded when the table tilted forward, the base ripped out of the ground, and the top came down hard. The edge of the square surface hit the floor accompanied by a booming thump! and the cracking of tile.
The furniture-based makeshift cover worked, and when a few shots hit the hardened wood only one went all the way through. It hit Nes’ armor-lined uniform jacket below his heart as splinters almost got in his eyes. The armor would do its job against the projectile, so he disregarded the eruption of intense pain in his chest.
The corporal picked up his gun again, peeked over the tabletop, and fired twice into the chest of a woman that looked like she was about to unload. Nes went down into cover, sure that she’d be no more trouble, and put his back against the table. He took his second siopane shockwave marble from the same small pocket as the first and pressed the activation button as soon as it was in his palm.
A barrage of fire hit the table with flat, low smacks that would have been the worst of it if a handful of bullets didn’t pierce the word. The artillery slammed Nes in his back like a bunch of sudden, full-speed strikes from a ball pine hammer. The surprising, shocking agony made his eyes flash red and overrode the oh-so-important need to hold the marble properly, and it slipped out of his hand. The little sphere fell to the floor at Nes’ feet, and the activated grenade’s green status light blinked happily at him, signaling that it was ready to do its job.
“Oh shit,” Nes said before jumping away from the table.
Cha-whump!
The shockwave hit Nes as he jumped, spinning him in a half-circle parallel to the ground. Every piece of furniture was thrown away from the center of the blast, creating an empty space where his cover once was. The table he toppled was hit the hardest thanks to its position and spread out surface area, and it hurtled toward the remaining two attackers at high velocity. The table flipped in the air like a coin thrown laterally and clipped the closest construction light mid-flight, causing the spin to wobble violently.
Nes struck the ground with the small of his back and saw in his peripheral vision that the flying, spinning, tilting furniture hit one of the enemies in the gut, a thunderous impact that was not survivable. The table and gut-checked dead man flew together toward the balcony’s retaining wall a couple meters past the impact point, and they both got flipped over the handrail onto the track gap below. The landing a moment later had a crunch that was a combination of broken bones and splintering wood, made worse by the fact that it couldn’t be seen. Nes’ mind automatically figured trajectories and velocities, injury to internal organs. He nearly vomited again, this time at the horrifying accuracy
of the damage tally, and forced the sensation away one more time.
There should still be one person left, and the corporal stood up fast – this wasn’t the time yet to register his own damage, not with someone left that could get to Trenna. He looked for that final enemy, but the man found Nes first and tackled him. Nes took the hit hard, landing on his side in the empty space made by the grenade, and the attacker didn’t try to catch a breath before he started swinging fists. This last member of the ambush group had no gun, probably losing his rifle when hit by the second shockwave. Normally being struck by two of the specialty grenade’s kinetic blasts was enough to knock pretty much anyone unconscious, but a lot of the direct force of the second blast was absorbed by his own cover, meaning this guy was in the perfect spot he’d only be slightly stunned, his life saved by pure chance. Good for him. So, awake, hurt, and with no proper weapon, the final enemy opted to try and pound the DSF agent to death bare-handed.
Nes couldn’t see his own gun, having also lost it thanks to the marble. His head was fuzzy from the headache that was throbbing at his temples, causing him to move sluggishly to block punches, Open Iris or not. The ambusher’s face was all tightened muscles, an unchanging grimace and spittle, a twisted combination of rage and pain, but his swings were weak. Honestly, Saan-Hu hit him harder when he forgot her birthday last year. The corporal figured he only had to block the hits long enough to find an opening to grapple. Then the enemy saw something nearby that was worth halting his anger-laced barrage for, and lunged for it. Nes barely saw that the guy was making the sudden move for damn good reason: he was going for the corporal’s own assault rifle.
Every one of the quick calculations running through Nes’ head ended with him not being fast enough to stop the rifle from being used against him. Trenna Geil, though, was not a part of any of those equations, and neither was her running from the escalator to grab one of the enemy assault rifles, which is exactly what happened. She had the gun in both hands and discharged the weapon as a cry of shock escaped her, the recoil too hard for her to handle without preparation. She had aimed at the pissed off assailant and fired as he was leaping off Nes to get the loose gun. Four shots thudded into the enemy and another six went wild, hitting or ricocheting against furniture, walls, and farther off, still intact glass.
The body of the raggedly-clothed man fell limp half on top of Nes, dead eyes staring into his living, gray-tinted ones. That was the last straw for the corporal’s brain, and with no more immediate danger to keep track of, it down-shifted at last without him controlling it. This fight was over – all that was left was the pain.
~~~~
Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1) Page 10
