“Assault team, lock target on the main gate,” Specker ordered.
Reggie knew he was one of the scouts, so that didn’t apply to him. Not wanting to remain near his last known location, he cranked the accelerator and skirted the jungle’s edge from the cleared ground around the facility.
As Daisy followed the wall of the installation, a mountainside came into view. From farther away, the jungle had obscured it. Close up, Reggie’s low vantage had been blocked by the wall. Now he could see that the wall ran right up to the mountain’s edge. High above, there was a hangar door built into the rock. Targeting computers came back with a range of 1500m.
Double-checking the range on his DF Ballistic Cannon-150, he noted that 1.5km was just inside his max range. Reggie took aim, and with a stationary target, even at the maximum range of his gun, the hit percentage indicator continued to rise.
75%…
80%….
95%…
Reggie couldn’t hold the aim any steadier than that, so he locked the gun in place, made sure he hadn’t jostled it at the last second, and pulled the trigger.
Stupidly, Reggie realized he didn’t even know what kind of ordinance this gun carried. High explosive, discarding sabot, armor piercing, squash head—he could have just fired anything up at that hangar.
An atmospheric craft launched from the hangar just before Reggie’s shell arrived. A blast of smoke belched from the hangar bay like a dragon’s cough.
“High explosive,” Reggie said with a satisfied nod. A 150mm shell packed with CL-20 high-explosive compound could do a lot of damage in a closed space. He could well imagine the carnage inside that hangar. If that’s what 3 points of damage looked like in this game, some of the higher-powered weapons must have been absolutely brutal.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Targets of Opportunity 2/4]
“Fan out,” Specker ordered. “Take cover behind the buildings.”
Reggie regretted not being in a bigger, more combat-capable machine. He watched as the mission objective ticked away while he kept the perimeter clear.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 4/30]
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 7/30]
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 15/30]
Reggie couldn’t take it anymore. There was nothing left outside for him to scout. Without any forthcoming orders, he took the initiative and circled back to the main gate of the compound.
The site was a blasted ruin of laser-scorched steel, both from the gate itself as well as the defenders who had guarded it. Juggernauts lay in pieces, some barely recognizable piles of metal plating still wafting smoke from residual fires.
Without the wall muffling the noise, Reggie heard explosions and the high-pitched sizzle of laser fire. Laser weaponry probably shouldn’t have made any noise at all, but thanks to Star Wars and Star Trek, everyone seemed to expect it.
When a stray laser passed blindingly close to his cockpit, Reggie decided it was time to seek cover. The compound was a small military base, complete with apartments and shops for the personnel. Reggie pulled in behind a yellow brick coffee shop and looked for targets that Daisy might be able to handle.
The defending juggernauts were all a matching shade of red. Lousy tactical choice, given that red stood out from literally everything else in the base. Anything in the gray-brown spectrum might have offered some kind of camouflage, but these guys seemed more interested in fearsome team colors than keeping from getting shot.
“Alpha Squad, fall back and take control of the main road,” Specker ordered.
A pair of unfamiliar juggernauts in the dark blue of Reggie’s side withdrew and regrouped a couple blocks from his position. Throwing a quick crosshair on them, Reggie IDed them as Wyverns. That was more the style of juggernaut he’d hoped to start out with. Bristling with varied armaments, the Wyverns’ bulky limbs were layered in armor. So what if they weren’t as nimble as a Pixie? You couldn’t outrun lasers.
Reggie picked up movement and saw a red juggernaut coming around to flank the two Wyverns. Still settling into position behind an eight-story apartment building, they hadn’t set up a lookout vantage capable of spotting it.
Targeting the oncoming juggernaut, Daisy identified it as a Jackal—so that’s what they looked like from a third-person view. It had damaged armor, but all its weapon systems were intact. Quickly relaying the targeting information to his unit, Reggie decided to slow down the Jackal to buy time for his boys to dig in.
The DF Ballistic Cannon-150 was probably a tricky weapon for most new players to get used to. Judging speed of the target against the flight time of a shell was something a computer was supposed to handle. But every good tank gunner knew how to wing it when the computers were offline. You didn’t get through tank school without knowing how to lead a moving target.
Even though the hit indicator wobbled at 17 percent, Reggie knew he had this. The shot didn’t need to make a clean impact. The running Jackal’s vulnerability was the asphalt road as much as its own legs. Reggie pulled the trigger, and Daisy shook with the cannon’s recoil.
Three points of damage to a parked civilian ground vehicle left a crater and an uneven patch of ground that the bulky juggernaut couldn’t navigate at a full run. It stumbled, losing any gun stability it might have possessed on the move. When the two Wyverns popped out of cover, one blasted a leg out from under the Jackal, ensuring its fall. The other fell atop it, firing a laser at point-blank range into the back of the Jackal’s head.
Reggie watched the Jackal’s wire frame in his HUD. The cockpit turned from blue to red without ever showing a blip of yellow in between. The whole wire frame went black.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 22/30]
The rout was on.
Reggie eventually found the Friendly Forces status screen and checked out the unit in a grid view. They’d lost only four juggernauts. The rest of the enemy force didn’t have the massed fire to take out the mediums and heavies of House Virgo as Specker ordered damaged juggernauts to fall back to a rear guard position.
It was time for Daisy to see about keeping a gun in the fight without becoming the fifth friendly casualty.
Fortunately for Reggie, the enemy forces were far more worried about juggernauts with guns that could do real damage. As much as he was beginning to appreciate the capabilities of the DF Ballistic Cannon-150, he knew it wasn’t a match for the massive laser and exotic weaponry the bigger juggernauts carried.
He picked off a second reconnaissance drone that the others had been too distracted by mop-up bloodlust to bother with.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Targets of Opportunity 3/4]
Eventually, the House Virgo forces finished off the last of the opposing juggernauts, and the mission objective came up in bold green.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 30/30]
All that was left was the satellite relay and one mysterious target of opportunity that had eluded them.
The satellite facility was a locked-down bunker at the base of the mountain. However, it contacted a satellite, it must have withdrawn into its protective rock-and-steel shell at the start of the battle. House Virgo’s juggernauts lined up in ranks to bombard it with everything they had. Lasers weren’t much help, but anything explosive seemed to do the job, from shells to missiles.
“Hmph,” Reggie grunted to himself. “Why not?”
He had a basic high-explosive cannon at his disposal. Why not join in?
The hit points of the bunker were ludicrous—quadruple digits. The status bar slowly ticked down.
1245/1300…
1188/1300…
1104/1300…
The only major jumps were when Specker launched salvos from the missile launchers on his Elephant-class juggernaut. The rest of the House Virgo forces just gnawed at the target.
And every five seconds or so, Reggie joined in with 3 damage of his own.
But as the facil
ity’s hit points wore down, just as Reggie pulled the trigger, he saw something magical.
3/1300…
A 150mm shell exploded.
0/1300.
Reggie got the final shot, and the satellite facility exploded with a glorious, earth-shaking boom.
[Primary Objective Complete: Destroy Satellite Relay]
Oh… Reggie was getting a nice XP bump from that.
[Mission Successful - 1100 XP - 3,200Cr]
∞
Reggie sat back in a plush-upholstered chair and sighed. Dr. Zimmerman’s office was—like the rest of the hospital—bland and nonthreatening. If he had held that against the place initially, he now made a silent apology to the structure. It was a damn sight better than insistent, needy, and prying.
“I’m a little surprised to find you back so soon,” Dr. Zimmerman replied. “Your scans came back clean. You’re cleared for unlimited use of the pod. I figured you’d be good for a few missions before coming up for air. What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Reggie replied, looking toward the window. Pale light brightened the flimsy curtain blocking his view of the outdoors. “Leveled up, and everyone made it their business to tell me how to spend my skill points.”
“And how did that make you feel?” Dr. Zimmerman asked. Though he was quiet about it, Reggie could see him fiddling with a tablet out of the corner of his eye.
“I don’t need a bunch of civilians telling me how to drive a tank, even if it’s a made-up, walking tank that has lasers and shit,” Reggie said. Cursing felt good after being unable to in Armored Souls. “My first mission in an underpowered light juggernaut, and I leveled up. Sure, I’m getting my feet wet on the basics, but that’s just some light reading between missions. Been meaning to ask, can I get a tablet or a phone or something? I just want to read up on some of the background data.”
Dr. Zimmerman shook his head. “I think we’d better stick to the blackout on internet access. What else did the crowd at the pilots’ lounge feel like? Describe it in adjectives.”
Reggie didn’t know he was getting an English class project in this session. “I dunno. Crowded. Noisy. Fake. I mean, you’d never get a place that crowded with no music playing.”
“Try to see if you can stick to single words.”
Fists clenched at his side, Reggie tried. “Noisy. Close. Forced. Disguised. Half those people in there probably don’t even look that way in real life. There were kids in that bar, I bet. One of the other warriors mentioned a 21+ rule, so seems natural that there were some minors mixed in.”
Dr. Zimmerman set the tablet on his desk and leaned forward. “What else? Did you feel a sense of camaraderie? Of friendliness? How did the other warriors treat you?”
He was being baited. Reggie could sense it. The more normal Reggie came across, the sooner he’d be back in command of a tank—a real tank, on real missions. “Sure, there was that, too, I guess. I was the new guy. Gotta expect a little crap from the old guard, even if the old guard goes off to work at a convenience store or tire warehouse when they log out.”
“And that’s why you logged out early?”
The doc’s eyes were like laser rangefinders. He had Reggie in his sights and wasn’t losing his lock. “Didn’t know I was on the clock. Wasn’t trying to punch out early, boss. Won’t happen again.”
“You’re not putting in hours for the sake of the hours. Spend as little or as much time in the game as you like. I’m just trying to understand why. No bullshit, right? We agreed on that. This hospital is dull as plain toast. In your position, I’d be spending as much time as possible getting away from here.”
A smile twitched Reggie’s lips. He patted a bicep. “Don’t wanna get soft sitting around playing video games. I’m planning on keeping up with calisthenics even if there’s no gym around here. When you green-light my head, the rest of me’s gonna be ready to roll.”
The doctor left him after offering up a skeptical, condescending smile.
When noon rolled around, a tray arrived with his lunch. Reggie was just finishing up a set of fifty pushups and went straight for the water that came with his meal. When he finished chugging it, he lifted the plastic lid that had steamed over, obscuring the contents of his meal.
Inside, he found a vegetable soup… and a single slice of plain, dry toast.
∞
“King!” a voice shouted from across the juggernaut hangar. It was Larson. The pink hair made her stand out like a flower growing through a crack in the pavement. Everything else in the hangar was bare steel, orange welding sparks, and grime.
Except for the juggernauts themselves, of course. Those often had colorful paint jobs. Reggie realized that the red and blue colors he was seeing out in the field was a visual overlay—a sort of team-based IFF system.
Reggie had been staring at a kiosk, browsing for ways to spend the 1500Cr he had earned from the first mission. Daisy loomed over him just a few meters away.
“What’s up, Larson?” he called back as she approached.
“Call me Iris,” Larson replied.
He stuck out a hand. “I’m Reggie. Thought irises were purple.”
Her face froze as she shook his hand. “Heard a rumor you were in the army on the outside. What’s an army sergeant know about flowers?” She sounded incredulous, as if he’d just blown his cover and revealed himself to be a florist.
“Guy learns a lot being married,” Reggie answered with a disarming smile.
Iris snatched her hand back like she’d been caught robbing the till. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to imply—”
“Relax. Been divorced almost five years. Still some of the oddball stuff you pick up never fades.”
“The hair color’s not to match the flower,” Iris replied. “I just like it. Catching a little attention behind the bar helps with tips. A $10 bottle of hair dye pays itself back the first night. Helluva lot cheaper than implants. I just happened to have mine pink when I scanned for character creation.”
“What color is it now?” Reggie asked.
Iris bit her lip. “Now Reggie… giving out personal details is against the terms of service.”
Considering he’d told her half his life story, he knew she was just playing with him. He’d be up half the night imagining different colors of that hair.
“Hey!” Grant called out. The level-6 Pilot was beaming as he strode toward them. “Just the man I wanted to see.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Iris commented dryly. Grant swept her up in a kiss that looked perfectly natural for both of them. Reggie hadn’t picked up on anything coming back from their last mission, but his head hadn’t been in the game, either. He felt like an ass flirting with her.
With an arm around Iris’s shoulders, Grant fixed his attention Reggie’s way. “Listen, one of our regulars bailed. Our platoon’s got an open spot. Figure even a level 2 in a starter juggernaut’s plenty good with a solid pilot aboard. You interested?”
“I’m just figuring out how to spend my haul from last mission,” Reggie replied. He wasn’t sure he wanted to make any commitments in game when he could be released from the hospital any day now, never to be seen by these people again.
Grant glanced at the kiosk over Reggie’s shoulder. “1500 credits won’t get you much. And pouring credits into a pile of bleep like a Pixie isn’t a good long-term investment. I’d spend 500 on a basic sensor upgrade and save the rest for your next juggernaut.”
“When’ll that be?”
Iris chimed in. “Buy, borrow, or salvage. Best way’s to get lucky with a cockpit shot on a high-value jug.’ Then you salvage it whole and just pay the cost of repairs. Voila. Discount combat juggernaut.”
“Don’t sell this pile, either,” Grant added. “Resale is shitty value, and there might be times when a mission just needs speed and no firepower. Recon missions, fast convoy escorts… not everyday stuff but still not a bad idea to hang onto it.”
“I keep two,” Iris added. “I’ve got a Chi-Ri and a L
eprechaun, which is a special one from an event back around St. Patrick’s Day. They’re nothing spectacular, but they’re pretty nice.”
Grant snickered. “Always said you had a nice pair of jugs.”
Iris elbowed him in the gut.
Clearing his throat, Grant turned serious. “Anyway, I’ve got a mission lined up for us, but I wanted to go out with a full platoon. Not like you get bonus XP or payouts for playing with one juggernaut tied behind your base.”
“You do have to split the scrap, though,” Iris added.
Grant shrugged. “Doesn’t come up that often. Usually it’s all just extra credits to split. Only those one-in-a-thousand luck shots that take out a pilot clean are worth arguing over.”
“So, you in?” Iris asked sweetly, still clinging to her in-game boyfriend. “It’ll be fun.”
Fun.
Reggie hadn’t really thought about Armored Souls like that. It was a game, but games like this were more about the adrenaline rush than amusement in the traditional sense. Playing poker and shooting pool were fun. The excitement of combat was easy to confuse with fun if you were still too new to have experienced the wet, red aftermath firsthand.
But this was a game. Nobody died. There was no shouting for a medic who was already too late to do anything. There wouldn’t be funerals to attend or letters to write to friends’ parents.
Reggie gave a curt nod. “Sure. Sign me up.”
[Platoon Invite: Cold Brotherhood]
Yes and No buttons hovered as midair holographs. It felt a little contrived until Reggie also noticed the subtle up-down arrows on the Yes and left-right arrows on the No.
Reggie nodded again, this time serving as an in-game command.
[Platoon Joined: Cold Brotherhood]
∞
The drop ship left Reggie and his new platoon mates of the Cold Brotherhood on a desolate moon. There was atmosphere enough to kick up dust storms, but there didn’t appear to be any plant life to break up the rocky landscape.
Elevated on a plateau, overlooking the wasteland, was a House Virgo mining outpost.
[Primary Objective: Destroy Invading Force 0/8]
[Secondary Objective: Capture Enemy Drop Ship]
Dead Mech Walking: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 1) Page 4
