“Pesky bastard.” He grunted and saw a rocket fly through the air, soaring past Genos before pivoting forty-five degrees and detonating while still airborne. “Pick a door and move,” he ordered. “Flynn, we’re getting out of here. You coming?”
“Little busy,” Flynn responded, taking a shot at a raider who fired wildly around the room. The shot skewered the man’s arm and halted his frantic shooting before Flynn followed it up with a shot through his helmet. The body disappeared, dropping the red Honor points icon in its place.
“How come the other initiates didn’t drop anything when they died?” Kaiden asked.
“Because they were killed by doppels, not other initiates. It should have tipped the others off, but the shock probably meant they weren’t thinking straight,” Chief explained. His eye went wide. “Kaiden, your left.”
Kaiden saw the initiate with the blade charge toward him. Chiyo turned and fired several shots. The attacker blocked some of them with their free arm as it lunged at them. The ace flipped his rifle around, strafing to the side as the other initiate lashed out. He knocked the blade away and then slammed the end of his rifle into the aggressor’s helmet. It cracked, and for a moment, it became a blurry image and the head of the doppel-bot underneath. Chiyo kicked it to the floor, firing five more shots into its chest before her gun ran out of ammo. The initiate twitched for a moment before falling still, and the hologram disappeared to reveal another defeated bot.
“Two for three,” he sneered. “We have an opening now, so let’s get out of—”
“Look out,” the infiltrator shouted, pushing Genos down before she leaped at Kaiden and knocked him over. The two rolled on the floor for a moment as he heard a crackling noise overhead, followed by a loud explosion. He looked up to see the demolitionist in the distance, looking at them while charging his cannon.
“What’s wrong with you?” he hollered.
“This is your fault, you asshole,” the other man barked. “We could have been out of here by now if it wasn’t for you and—”
“Don’t pin this on me. Those were doppel-bots,” he snapped back. “Can your bitching and piss off. We’re getting out of here. If you stay here and keep attacking people while you’re all alone, you’re going to die.”
“I’ll take you with me,” he roared, pointing his cannon at Kaiden and Chiyo. “Then I’ll find you back in the Academy and kick your ass again.”
The ace’s first instinct was to take aim and shoot to knock him back or destroy the cannon, but he no longer had his Raptor. He’d lost it when he tumbled. As he watched the demolitionist’s cannon nearly reach full power, he saw Marlo run over and shoulder-tackle him to the ground. The cannon went off and a shot skimmed just above the ground. It caught the back of the leg of an unfortunate initiate in its path, where it exploded, vaporizing the initiate in a blast of plasma energy.
The demolitionist rolled over and tried to stand, only to be greeted by Marlo’s boot on his chest as the fellow demolitionist pointed his own cannon at him. “You’re a real idiot,” he muttered, slowly pressing the trigger. His cannon stirred and began charging. “Attacking Kaiden was a bad move, but even worse was doing it around a demolitionist who is better than you.” He kicked the demolitionist, who skidded a few feet away. “Who happens to be a friend of his.” The titan fired the partially charged blast right at the demolitionist on the ground. The blast destroyed most of the armor and fried the exposed skin. The man was thrown back and rolled across the floor, his skin sizzling and charred. He took a few ragged breaths before trying to reach for his hand cannon, but his hand stopped moving and fell to the side as he de-synced in another flash of white light.
“Nice save, Marlo,” Kaiden said, thanking the big man as he helped Chiyo to her feet.
“Not a problem. I like making sure that my fellow heavies remember their place.” He scowled. “The bigger you are, the more you gotta stay humble. Plus, he was an ass.”
“Just took out a doppel,” Flynn announced. “Was that the last of them?”
“I took out two of them. I only saw three, so I would imagine so,” the ace affirmed.
“We would appear to be the last ones in here,” Genos noted, looking around the chamber. “The rest have either fled or”—he looked at the broken or charred pieces of armor and weapons strewn about the room—“have been incapacitated.”
“Then we’re in the clear.” The marksman sighed. “For now, my guess is there are plenty of bloodthirsty initiates running around along with all the other problems we have waiting for us.”
“Does anyone need a patch-up?” Amber asked, taking out her stim ray.
“I think we’re good,” Kaiden said, looking at his team and seeing no critical injuries. “Might check Chiyo. It looks like she got a little banged up, but we seem to be in pretty…good… Why am I woozy?”
“Kaiden, you’re bleeding, mate,” Flynn shouted.
He looked down to see blood pouring from his left leg and the right side of his chest. “When did that…happen?” His words were slurred.
Genos walked behind him and placed his hands on his shoulders to ease him to the ground. “We were shot at from all sides. Like Chiyo said, we were as likely to be hit by stray fire as from direct attacks.”
“Laser fire, from the looks of it,” Chiyo said, examining the wound on Kaiden’s leg. “The wound is cauterized but he’s still lost a lot of blood, probably from a kinetic shot,” she surmised. “Here on his chest, next to his ribs. You’re lucky your armor took most of the impact. There’s another one here on his shoulder.” She placed a hand next to the injury.
“Ow! Chiyo!” Kaiden winced.
“Oh… Sorry, Kaiden,” she apologized and pulled her hand away.
“Let me take a look.” Amber hurried over and ran her stim ray over the wounds.
“Maybe it’s a bad time to mention this, but it’s kinda nice to see you can be wounded, Kai,” Marlo admitted. The ace cocked his head and looked questioningly at him. The titan held a hand up defensively. “I mean, most of the time, I see you shake it off or work through it. Been awhile since I’ve seen you take real damage.”
“Don’t forget the times he’s blown himself up or gotten himself killed doing some stupid stunt.” Flynn chuckled.
“Might I remind you that the first time you saw me get blown up was to help you beat that war machine in the Division Test?” Kaiden pointed out.
“I’m just saying it makes you seem a bit more human, you know?” Marlo stated.
“Kaiden has always appeared to be one hundred percent human to me, just as all of you do,” Genos interjected.
“You saying we all look alike to you?” Flynn asked sarcastically.
“Human, huh?” Kaiden hummed wistfully, then winced as Amber ran her hands over the wound on his ribs. “Considering how I’m feeling right now, being human bites.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Genos picked up the last of the Honor point icons littering the floor, then watched it burst open and signal that he was awarded two hundred points. He looked across the room to see Flynn pick up the last of his batch, nodding to him as they walked back to the group.
“All finished?” Marlo asked.
“Yep, that’s the last of the bunch. Hell of a crazy moment there, but it was good for the score,” Flynn mused. “You finished as well, Amber?”
“He’s all patched up.” She nodded and helped Kaiden to his feet.
“Feeling better?” Chiyo asked.
He rolled his shoulder and stretched his leg. “Yeah, much better. That stim ray of yours is a lifesaver. Even healing serum still leaves aches.”
“We keep her around for a good reason.” Flynn chuckled, earning a cross-armed glare from the battle medic.
“Keep it up. I’m the one in control of the painkillers.” She huffed dramatically.
“It doesn’t look like there’s any reason for us to stay here,” Chiyo stated. “Even the console has shut down.”
“The
n I guess let’s get out of here.” Kaiden glanced at Flynn. “Thanks for the help during all that.”
“No worries, mate. We’ll get together and compare who owes who later.” The marksman chuckled.
“Where are you guys heading now?” Marlo asked.
“We’re heading deeper into the sublevels.”
Flynn cocked his head. “We had just run through the bottom level. There’s nothing down there but a giant cave system, which we found while wandering around the island. We were lost for ages, shooting the occasional bot or merc we found, but nothing much else. At one point, we thought of trying to double back until we happened to stumble onto the service elevator that brought us up here. What are you hoping to find?”
The ace looked at Chiyo, wondering if he should explain their plan to the others. She shrugged and nodded, giving him the go-ahead. “We’re searching for something—testing a theory of ours.”
“What kind of theory?” Amber asked.
“We think there’s some sort of EI in the system, guiding things along. It’s the reason these maps and scenarios change so often and so rapidly with so little error or warning. We figure if we find it, that could be the real way to ‘win’ that the head monitor mentioned during the orientation.”
Flynn, Marlo, and Amber traded looks before turning back to Kaiden. “You’re willing to risk everything on that?” the marksman inquired.
“It’s not like we haven’t been getting points along the way.” Kaiden shrugged. “Been dealing with plenty of bullshit on the way here. I thought about saying ‘screw it’ a couple of times now. Think about it from my perspective. I’m choosing to play a game of hide and seek instead of seeing if I can beat my personal headshot high score.”
“Which is why it’s all the more baffling that you want to possibly toss it all away on a hunch.”
“I suppose it’s my competitive nature,” Kaiden said with a shrug, “The way Zhang was talking about this… I don’t know, it made it seem like the victory would be hollow if we didn’t follow the ‘ancient path’ or whatever you wanna call it. Only one other team was able to do it. I’ve taken all the other records so far this year, and I wanna go for the three-peat.”
“That certainly seems more like your style,” Marlo agreed with a laugh.
Kaiden chuckled, nodding at his teammates. “Plus. Chiyo did all the research to find out about this in the first place, and Genos has been a hell of a good sport up until now. They both wanna try it this way, and I think they deserve the chance. This is supposed to be a Squad Test, after all—democracy and all that.”
“You’d choose a Squad Test over a Deathmatch?” Flynn snickered, his tone almost disbelieving. “Hard to believe you’d do something so selfless—getting all mature and shit right before our eyes.”
“You should follow suit sometime soon,” Amber teased.
“Keep it up. Remember who’s the best shot here,” he retorted playfully.
“You should remember who has the big-ass cannon,” Marlo jeered, placing said cannon against his chest. “And that I like Amber better than you.”
“Oy, I was only playing,” the marksman pleaded theatrically. “We’re all being friendly, right?”
“Where are you guys heading then?” Kaiden asked.
“Up, I guess?” Amber made it a question.
Flynn nodded. “We’d stick with ya, but I feel like we’d get in your way. None of us have any clue what you’re talking about, and like I said, we almost got lost down there.”
“Yeah, no offense meant, but we’ll stick to doing this the old-fashioned way,” Marlo added.
“But hey, if you do win, we’ll do our best to be a close second,” Amber promised.
“Really shooting for the stars there.” The marksman chuckled.
“We’ll be rooting for ya while dodging whatever else this place throws at us,” Kaiden said, his tone encouraging as he gave them a thumbs-up. “By the way, you mentioned an elevator? Which way to it?”
“It’s down the hall from where we came in.” Flynn turned and pointed to the right wing of the room. “Go through the doorway and down— What was that?” he asked. He and others began to lose their balance as the room seemed to shift.
“Is that stupid maze starting back up again? Was it on a timer?” Kaiden asked.
“No, I made sure to shut it down,” Chiyo responded. “This isn’t linked to anything. The room is changing.”
“To what?” Marlo exclaimed.
“Look out,” Genos yelped and jumped back. “The floor. It’s disappearing.”
Kaiden saw a small hole form in the center of the room. It expanded, growing wider as it inched toward them.
“Fuck. This. Place,” he roared.
“Move,” Flynn ordered. They all ran to the end of the room. The ceiling above them began to crack and shatter, sending chunks of metal and rock crashing to the floor. They dodged the falling debris, losing speed and momentum as they tried not to get crushed.
“Bots,” Amber shouted as several Assault droids appeared in front of them. They opened fire with their shock pistols and pulse rifles. Their weapons weren’t much of a physical threat, but if they were hit, they could be stunned and fall into the growing pit.
“Keep moving,” Kaiden demanded, yanking out his rifle, and fired ballistic rounds at the group of droids, destroying two or three with one blast. He was nearly out of ballistic rounds, but he didn’t have time to shoot them down one by one.
“More droids,” Flynn warned, sending several shots clean through the heads of the new batch of attackers. “We made a path. Get through— Shit!” he cursed as he slipped and almost fell through another hole that had formed beneath him.
“Flynn,” Amber shouted.
Chiyo ran up and reached down to help him. “The entire room is destabilizing. We don’t have enough—” Another hole appeared beneath her. One of her feet slid through, and she fell to the floor. The gap widened as she held onto the marksman, and only a small bridge of flooring kept them from plummeting down as the original rift continued to widen.
“Genos, take out as many as you can and then get out,” Kaiden called. The Tsuna nodded, charged his cannon, and sent a blast at a team of droids as they were teleported into the room. They were barely able to take a step before they were scattered by the explosion. Kaiden put his rifle away and dashed toward Chiyo. Marlo was already making his way there.
The demolisher reached Chiyo first. The hole she was in danger of falling into widened, and she lost the edge she was holding on to. He gripped the neck of her armor and pulled her up, tossing her out of harm’s way into Kaiden’s arms as he turned his focus to Flynn. The marksman had already slipped, and when Marlo reached out to grab him, he just missed his hand and he began to fall into the abyss below. The titan pressed a button on his chest, and his cannon fell from his back as he jumped into the hole.
Kaiden helped Chiyo to stand and pushed her toward the doorway before running over. He grabbed Flynn’s sniper rifle as he ran, expecting to see nothing but a dark pit. He hoped that Marlo had made it in time. As he danced along the edges of the many forming pits and out of the way of the falling debris, he saw Flynn fly out of the hole.
“Marlo,” the marksman screamed as he turned and looked back into the pit.
“Flynn, what happened?” the ace asked, holding the marksman back. He seemed to be reaching back into the rift.
“Marlo jumped in. He grabbed me and activated his bouncepack. It looked like we would make it but it died before we got to the edge. He tossed me back up,” the man explained, his tone frenetic and breathy. “He fell back in…”
Kaiden was shocked, silent for a moment before he felt the ground around him begin to give way. “We have to go,” he shouted, shaking Flynn’s shoulder. “We’re going to be next if we stay. Move!”
The marksman snapped out of it, nodding as he stood and jumped across a ravine. They made their way back to the edge of the room. Genos helped them across and to
ok out another two droids in the process. They ran out into the hallway and Kaiden slammed the button to shut the doors. As they closed, he fell against the wall and slid down, taking a deep breath. “Everyone all right?”
Amber, Chiyo, and Genos nodded. The battle medic walked over to Flynn. “What happened? Where’s Marlo?”
“Lost him. He saved me from falling, but he didn’t make it back,” he lamented.
She pressed a hand to her chest and looked down. “I’m sorry, but you know that he’s all right, yes? This is the Animus. He’s waking up in his pod right now.”
Flynn leaned back, his helmet knocking against the wall. “Yeah, yeah, of course, I do. But for a moment— Maybe I got swept up in the whole thing, or I wasn’t thinking straight because I was about to be the one to fall, but… I honestly thought I lost him there, even if it was only for a single second.”
The others glanced at him before looking at each other. Over the school year, Kaiden had been in dozens of training sessions and missions with the marksman, but he had never seen him act like this after one of them had fallen, even Marlo. He wondered if it was getting to him after all this time.
Flynn placed two fingers on the side of his helmet. “Hey, mate, thanks for that. I’ll be sure that Amber and I end this on a high note for you.”
Chiyo walked over and knelt beside him. “There aren’t any outgoing comms during a test, Flynn. He can’t hear you,” she reminded him, placing a hand over his.
“Yeah, you’re right. I'm an idiot.” He sighed and lowered his hand. “Thanks for your help too, Kaiden.” He rolled his head toward the ace.
“We’ll tally up who owes who after all this, right?” Kaiden said, repeating the marksman’s words back to him.
Flynn chuckled quietly and nodded. “Yeah, gonna be a lot of tallies on that list after all this.”
“No doubt,” Kaiden assured him. He held Flynn’s sniper rifle up. “I’m assuming you’ll want this back?”
“I’d let you take it for a spin”—the marksman stood and gripped the barrel—“but since I’m still kicking, it’ll be at its best in my hands.”
Animus series Boxed Set Page 87