by Arthur Stone
As they reached the edge of the next forest, March’s ability spotted something inexplicable. It resembled a hidden, highly developed infected. Fatso slowed down just in case, lagging behind in order to lure the suspected enemy out into the open—so that they could get a look at it, at least. Always best to know what was hunting you. The pickup had often pulled similar moves during the campaign, either pulling out in front or lagging behind. It was both the vanguard and the rearguard. That was not ideal, but they had no other vehicle with mobility to match.
Cheater found himself wishing again that they had more people and more cars. He also caught himself being grateful for the two dubious friends of their healer. Without them, they would have had a tough go of it. Not enough people to man all the vehicles.
At last, this slow leg of the journey was over. They emerged onto the solid, smooth pavement of a wide highway. A gas station sat to the right, near the expansive acres of an industrial farm.
The lagging pickup caught up. It overtook the truck in the rear and nearly reached the front one, as Cheater became alert and aimed the two machine guns at the sign announcing the prices of gas. He could see a crossroads further down, but not any more of the road crossing this one. Trees and the gas station roof and buildings interfered with his line of sight. Since the view to the left was clear, with hundreds of yards of open space, he considered this other direction the most critical to keep an eye on. Anything could be hiding there. His Flash of Omniscience could not reach that far, and March’s sensor abilities were spotty. Especially while they were non-stationary.
Yet as they drove past the station, Cheater succumbed to temptation and fired Omniscience. He had missed his abilities, especially this one, in Rainbow.
The familiar monochrome jumble of semi-transparent lines and shapes established the background.
And there, among them, he saw the bright spot of a developed infected hiding behind the building.
Cheater could not determine the exact level of the creature, but he knew it was a young manmincer, at least. Its impressive dimensions and overly swollen shoulders, plus the fact that the ghoul did not immediately leap out at the sound of the convoy, led him to this conclusion. It was either considering an ambush, a planned attack on the rear vehicle in the convoy, or realizing this quarry was too tough for it—and so trying to hide.
The more developed an infected became, the smarter it was. Self-preservation instincts returned to them at last at the higher levels.
Cheater immediately reached for the radio. “Infected at the gas station. Manmincer or worse. It’s hiding.”
A radio message was hard to miss, unlike a sentence in the game chat. Everyone would hear it at the same time, and it was faster to transmit than a typed alert. Radio was best in combat.
Cheater expected to be answered immediately regarding this beast, but he was not. “To the right!” March cried out, his tone tense.
Cheater blinked at the radio. He knew the creature was to the right, but the beast was still hiding behind the building. His Flash still lit the monster brightly. He could not be mistaken. It seemed like this one was not going to attack.
So what was March on about?
Then, Cheater saw the beginning of the answer.
Another convoy was emerging from behind another stretch of forest.
In front, he saw a military armored personnel carrier, reinforced with steel grates to protect against RPG rounds, and augmented with hinged steel sheets in some places. This was clearly no outdated tech. Its tower was already taking aim at its target.
Its body was covered in familiar heraldry.
Damn those Devils!
Where have they even come from?
He had no time to reflect on the question. Cheater cranked the guns to the left, pushing as hard as he could, but knowing he could not make it in time. The enemy was already aiming the barrel of his large-caliber machine gun at Cheater’s truck. The volley would come in one second, if not sooner. 14.5mm at that distance would tear them apart. It would tear anything short of a tank apart.
He had no time to think. So, he hit the place his eyes were locked on with Tranquility.
He was looking at the barrel of an enemy machine gun.
That moment, the APC ground to a stop, accompanied by the moan of bending metal. No, the barrel of the gun was not bending, nor being torn off. The ability’s sphere of action encompassed part of the tower and part of the top of the hull. Those areas were rendered unable to move. However, the vehicle itself was moving at a slow but steady pace. The inertia of its multi-ton frame was considerable. Weld points gave way. It was not an immediate catastrophe for anyone inside, as the vehicle was simply not capable of great speeds, but the sound it made was impressive.
Perhaps the gun was now permanently out of commission. If not, it would be, at least for the next 13.5 seconds.
A good chunk of time in combat conditions. You could do a lot in 13.5 seconds.
The APC was out of the game, for now—but a second vehicle was emerging behind it. This was an ordinary truck clad in steel armor. Quality steel armor. This was the work of the best craftsmen, using the best materials. It had a half-open gun nest atop it, with a machine gun and an automatic grenade launcher poking out.
Everywhere he had been, the Devils had been hounded—but apparently some could still live a rich life.
They knew how to keep to country where they were not the hounded, but the hounds. Cheater’s party had nowhere to hide. The terrain was utterly flat, and only a thin forest offered shelter. It could not save them. Hopefully the armored car would hit the vehicle out front first, figuring it was the most dangerous. That would give Cheater a few seconds. He would not squander them. First, he would pummel the truck with both machine guns. 12.7mm bullets could push through its armor, thick as it was. The vehicle would be crippled.
Then, if he was in luck, he would have enough time to tackle the APC before it returned to the fight. It had not yet reached the intersection. Meaning that its side—more weakly armored than its front—faced Cheater. Still, he wasn’t sure if he could deal with even that armor. Yes, the distance was only about fifty yards, so the bullets would strike at speed. Each tenth round in his ammo belts was a special armor-piercing round. Tungsten carbide, with much higher penetration power.
If this tactic failed and the pickup started shooting at their vehicle, Cheater would have to somehow use his remaining abilities—or even one of the Unnamed One’s gifts which provided invulnerability—to buy some time. He could then snatch the grenade launcher from its side rack. It was strong enough to punch through the steel grating. As long as he hit, the APC would suffer significant damage.
And Cheater was good at hitting.
All of these thoughts flew through his head faster than any bullet. His body tensed in anticipation of the first incoming volley. Perhaps he could not win this, but he would take some of them with him when he went.
Cheater could handle the whole convoy if it was not too large. He would do as he had done in the Devils’ fortress. Yes, his primary trump card would be expended in the process, but it would save the crossing.
Start shooting first, and then you can decide.
There was no predicting the outcome yet.
However, the first shots fired in the battle came from the antiaircraft gun. With amazing agility for his size, the Janitor had pivoted the huge weapon precisely and fired from both barrels. No, its ammunition did not have tungsten carbide cores. It did not need to. This was an artillery weapon. Twenty-two-millimeter shells at a range of under a hundred yards was a death sentence for anything on the Continent, save perhaps tanks.
Cheater saw the high-explosive rounds detonate against the armored personnel carrier. These were nearly useless for the circumstances, but Janitor had fired both guns. The gun on the left had explosive rounds—the gun on the right, armor-piercing ones. This was not the time to be sparing.
Cheater began pummeling the truck, as planned. With his Accur
acy, he did not need to use the sight, especially since every fifth bullet was a tracer round. That was enough for any experienced shooter going after a large target at close range.
Cheater saw the tracers dig into the side of the vehicle. They scattered their sparks in all directions. One hit steel and ricocheted directly up into the sky. Another followed suit, but in a horizontal direction.
But there was no clear damage. Cheater had good eyesight. He should have been witnessing the flimsy armor coming to pieces, the windows of the cab shattering, and the punctured tires sighing and collapsing to the ground.
Either his eyes were playing tricks on him, or the truck was enchanted. This was the Continent, after all. One of the passengers must have somehow used a special ability to protect the truck. A protective ward. Such defensive specialists were held in high regard everywhere. Because of this one, Cheater’s spent ammo had gone to waste.
He had never seen such a skill before, but something about the information he had gathered and his common sense came together to suggest that even a high-level opponent would be unable to hold such a force field in place for long. It would either have a very short ability duration or it would only be able to defend against specific kinds of damage, or a specific amount of damage. In simple terms, a few more volleys should take it down.
Cheater fired on. Each gun had started with 150 rounds loaded, enough for 15 seconds of continuous fire. It was best not to fire continuously, of course, or you would have to change out barrels along with bullets. Swapping out barrels was a quick affair, but in battle, every moment was crucial.
So Cheater fired in bursts, looking to each side in the intervals. He liked the view to the left. The APC did not have a force field specialist—or, the man had failed to activate the ability in time. The Janitor hit the turret first, going after the vehicle’s primary threat. Once it was obvious that there were no survivors there, he moved down to the main hull. It was not exactly annihilated, but one glance was enough to tell you that the vehicle was done for.
A third vehicle emerged from behind the trees. It was also a truck, but it did not have an armored cargo area—it was more like the vehicle carrying March, Clown, and the Janitor. In other words, it carried a huge weapon on an open platform. Its pièce de résistance was a four-gun emplacement whose member guns were either machine guns of a massive caliber or smaller automatic cannons. Cheater had never seen anything like it before.
He did not stop to determine more about it. He had to respond to the new threat. The enemy was experienced enough that the gunner had pointed the multi-muzzled weapon to the left in advance of clearing the trees, so as to aim more quickly at its emerging first victim.
These damn double guns. We should have just put one up here. One! Of course they didn’t listen to Cheater. No way. The split second he had was not sufficient to attain the correct angle. The enemy opened fire. Thankfully, he chose the lead vehicle as his target, so perhaps Cheater could take these villains with him.
Low-power grenades exploded to his left and rear, showering the pickup with shrapnel. The second enemy vehicle was, at last, in the fight. It was the gun which had been protected by the ward ability. The shooter was either cross-eyed or overwhelmed with excitement, and had missed. But such luck would not last long. The machine gun would follow. Cheater had a few seconds at most to take suppressive action.
He aborted the swivel towards the new threat and turned back.
Just as his aim was nearly there, the pickup charged forward, its engine screaming at maximum RPM. Had the driver come under fire? Nut whirled the steering wheel in panic as he flew around the artillery truck, which was experiencing a shower of shrapnel, and they rushed ahead, cutting sharply over to the left side of the road.
Swiveling the turret to the right, Cheater tried to fire on the enemy vehicle just behind the artillery truck. But he only managed to hit the leading APC and the vehicle behind it, which was simultaneously but unsuccessfully attempting to fire at his nimble pickup.
Cheater hit, but not enough. Nut was going, well, nuts—zigzagging along the road in a way that cut any odds of aiming down to single digits. Even with his Accuracy, Cheater may have missed a hundred-yard-long blimp under these circumstances.
Staying in the truck was hard enough.
At last the pickup crossed the highway and surged into a ditch running alongside the road. The world was tossed into the air like a pancake. Cheater had been trying desperately to turn his guns back towards the enemy, and suddenly he found himself six feet in the air, and flying. He tried to reorient himself—and slammed into a road sign.
The shock to his system was followed by vicious bites from pieces of asphalt jutting from the soil. An explosion half-deafened him. A subsequent one completed the job. He could perceive sounds still, but only barely, as if through a thin pipe half a mile long. The picture of the world caused his mind to revolt at its implausibility, as if a computer game, with excellent graphics, suddenly had its gamma and brightness sliders pumped to maximum.
He relaxed instinctively, trying his best not to move. Only then did he realize that he had been ejected from the pickup and was lying out in the open. The ditch was dangerously shallow. His body was in perfect view of the enemy truck’s guns. The flashes and explosions had been from grenades fired after the fleeing pickup. Perhaps the shooter who had fallen out would garner attention.
His instinct to remain motionless was spot on. Faster than his conscious mind, it had determined that playing dead was the optimal strategy. The ditch, shallow though it was, had saved him from the first round of grenade blasts. Minimal shrapnel had hit him. His enemies would hardly calculate this, however—a man lying still in full view after such a fall and such a shelling was clearly dead.
He still had a chance to participate in the fight, if he played dead for now. Once he came to his senses. And once his opponents had their focus turned elsewhere.
That’s right. Nothing to see here. Just a corpse. Look the other way.
Sadly, the shooter from the first truck had other ideas. He was likely deeply offended at Cheater, as the latter had, at the beginning of the fight, furiously emptied his ammo belts into the shielded truck.
Tiny pieces of ground near him gave way as they were riddled with bullets. Instinct prevailed again, and Cheater activated Smile of Fortune. One of the bonus properties of the skill was immunity to all threats. His feats had extended this invulnerability’s duration to a full three seconds. That was an insignificant span of time, but in the Devils’ fortress, it had saved him from the blast of his own grenade.
It saved him again now. The machine gunner fired another volley and made sure that the bullets hit, and that the target body twitched, and—despite Cheater’s misgivings about his ability to imitate a man riddled by bullets—decided that the player was, indeed, dead. It was all the time he could allow, as there were other threats. Much more important targets. The machine gun roared again, but no little bits of earth flew into the air. It had a new target.
Cheater had managed to use the “riddling” motions to turn his body, giving him a view of the battlefield. Most of this view was blocked by the slope of the ditch and the roadside grass, but he could see what he needed to.
The truck which carried most of the party had been moving. March had been slotted to drive it originally, but the last-minute replenishment of the party’s numbers had anointed Goblin as the driver. He was no race car driver, but he was good enough to take the rear.
Or so they had thought. The man was abandoning the front of the convoy, instead moving quickly through the structures of the gas station. He was not panicking. Goblin turned behind the main building, and then turned again, heading out into the field along a vector that kept the station’s buildings between his vehicle and the enemy convoy.
“Fool!” Cheater wheezed. The artillery truck was in bad shape, its cab torn apart and smoking, with the antiaircraft gun’s barrels pointing sadly towards the sky. The shielding in front of the
gun now resembled a sieve, and Janitor was nowhere to be seen. The pickup continued to rush across the open field, and the Devils had enough long-range weaponry to go after it. Nut would be taking an arrow in the back.
Nothing stood between the enemy and total victory. Only the rearguard truck remained combat ready, but instead of contributing to the battle, it sped off into the field, allowing the Devils to take up positions and unleash as many bullets its way as they needed to.
It was then that a third party intervened.
The infected which had been hiding behind the gas station. No one could have guessed what it was thinking. Perhaps the beast had thought that Goblin’s rush was an attack, as the man had driven straight towards its hideout. Instead of attacking that vehicle, though, it leaped at the Devils’ convoy.
The convoy, for their part, were not thrilled at the encounter. The truck with the multi-barreled gun rushed towards the intersection, as if trying to save the life of its gunner, who had nothing to protect her from the beast’s fangs and claws. The APC was unable to help, still immobilized in the place where the antiaircraft gun had pinned it to the ground. It blew plumes of smoke from its numerous holes, windows, and hatches.
