Respawn: Nightmare Mode (Respawn LitRPG series Book 4)

by Arthur Stone

  Ahead of them stood a long armored personnel carrier, stretched across the road. Several equipped soldiers were hastily setting up on either side of it, weapons pointed at the approaching car.

  The turret atop was also turning. Soon, its heavy machine gun would be directed straight down their throats.

  The party would be done for, in a single volley.

  Clown was driving, and he made the right move. One moment after the situation came into view, he turned sharply to the left, forcing the turret to turn further. The maneuver wouldn’t save them, since the infantry could shoot the car no matter where it was, but it won them a second or two.

  Cheater knew this was the time to activate all of the trump cards. All at once, or they’d be a second too late. These were probably bots, and from three dozen yards away, a bot squad could cut their car to pieces in seconds without a single miss or hesitation.

  Activating Smile of Fortune, he hastily gathered his legs under him and jump out sideways to avoid getting run over by the diesel cart.

  The shots began. Somehow, Janitor’s machine gun was the first to sound. The bots had, beyond a doubt, known the players were approaching before they rounded the bend. They had been getting ready to meet them, but some hitch had caused a delay.

  Cheater landed badly, painfully abrading his forearm along the asphalt strewn with stone. In one motion, he rolled to the side, off the road. There was a very slight rise from there up to the roadway.

  In terms of protection, it was better than nothing.

  His rifle and bow had stayed in the car. All he had was his pistol.

  Unholstering it, he pointed it at the group. Barely avoiding a bullet that ricocheted in front of his face, he aimed at the only bot he could see and fired. The enemy was rushing hurriedly to a pile of stones. He twitched, but kept running. It took two more shots to bring him down. This was too far away for a pistol, and the enemy had body armor.

  But Cheater brought him down. Now, where were the rest?

  The armored personnel carrier was in the same position, its tower still not fully turned around. Janitor was firing one volley after another, trying to kill the crew. Its armor was weak, especially on the sides, and the quasi’s machine gun could pierce it well enough for the most part. It seemed he had handled some of the infantry—a couple of figures in desert camouflage lay dead on the sand. But two or three others had to be hiding somewhere.

  Fatso had jumped to the pavement as well and fired a long volley. He was shooting parallel to the ground. Where? At the APC’s wheels? Good. Now Cheater knew where the other bots had gone.

  There was simply nowhere else for them to hide. All they had was their vehicle and the heap of stones which Cheater’s victim had failed to reach.

  He leaped up and rushed along the road, at a slight angle away from it. Twenty yards later, he crouched down and at last saw the side of one of the bots, hiding behind a wheel. He fired twice.

  The bot slumped, probably dead.

  The other bot realized that there was crossfire, which nullified the wheels’ use as shelter. He pointed his machine gun towards Cheater and promptly collapsed into the asphalt after receiving a bullet to the cheekbone.

  Accuracy was a marvelous thing.

  Cheater lay prone, reloaded, and jumped up at the very moment Janitor finally ran empty and did what needed to be done.

  Fired the grenade launcher.

  No one had any complains that he had waited. The launcher took a few seconds to fuss with, and his machine gun had been ready to fire. It had been the only way out of a certain death at the start of battle.

  Everyone would be dead if Janitor had not pulled that trigger.

  The grenade exploded at the base of the APC’s machine gun tower. Smoke had already been rising from the carrier before that, but now it burned in earnest, its machine gun pointing to the heavens.

  Hopefully the explosions had a strong negative effect on the health of the bots still inside. Cheater ran around to the other side, waving his arm. He wasn’t waving away flies or playing hand airplane in the wind, but signaling to his comrades so that they didn’t shoot him out of confusion. Someone was still shooting, despite no enemies being in sight. In an environment like that, a nervous party member could fire a couple of bullets at any movement near the target.

  Rounding the armored personnel carrier, he bent down under the puffs of smoke. He shot a weak bot, and that was it. No one else was there, no targets to shoot, no movement visible.

  Were all of them dead?

  He backed away from the APC and waved to signal that everything was fine, but only in this location. Cheater had no idea what was happening on the other side of the vehicle. He hadn’t seen it, except for at the very beginning. Perhaps a bot or two was still there, taking shelter. How many of them had attacked was unknown.

  A gust of wind covered him in smoke. Cheater held his breath and backed away to escape. The wind took it the other direction, away from him. He jerked his arm up, aiming at the figure that appeared. It was Roach.

  The man smirked, cursed, and began shooting quick volleys into each body.

  March shouted from the car that they had to quickly collect whatever was still intact and get out of the area quickly. Where one bot vehicle was, there might be others. Well, Cheater couldn’t make out the exact words, but that was the essence of it.

  A long message flashed before his eyes, listing the levels of the slain bots and the rewards earned.

  Cheater ignored it. He had a more important task at the moment.

  Ignoring the nearest couple of bodies, he made for the bot lying near the front left wheel of the APC. Dragging him out from under the vehicle and out of the smoke, Cheater quickly looted him.

  The man’s pistol would come in handy. Plus a holster and a spare magazine. The grenades were coming too, of course. In addition, Cheater picked up the knife, as it looked sharp and quite throwable, especially by a person with high Accuracy.

  But the most important prize of all was the heavy rifle. It was a monster.

  Self-loading AS50 Rifle. Ammunition: NATO 12.7х99. Condition: working. Negligible wear. Additional devices: Nightforce BEAST 5-25x56 F1 optical sight. Special properties: special bot weapon. Two successful modifier installations guaranteed. Installed modifiers: none.

  Cheater had never seen such a weapon before, but its appearance and description were enough to prove its value. Even without mods it was worth something. If he added mods and got lucky with the results, it could be worth many thousands of spores. The downside? It was heavy. But high-level players had such excellent Strength that twenty or thirty pounds more didn’t bother them in the slightest. Strength also could reduce the weapon’s infuriating recoil to near nothing. That violated the laws of physics, of course. But this was the Continent.

  Everything was possible here.

  It was an ideal weapon for a player with high Accuracy. So he had to grab it now, before the others looked on with envy. The man had five magazines with five rounds each. It wasn’t much, but it was better than he might have expected, and the bot had filled his vest with extra rounds. Forty or so. That was the best he could hope for. Carrying a whole box of ammo around with you was too prohibitive.

  And so he ended his looting spree. Others with more experience in speedily collecting booty were handling the others.

  Only two players did not participate in the fun. March was one. He was sipping on yet another beer. Apparently the burning truck had contained a fresh supply. But judging by the sadness on his face, that can was the last, or at least the second to last.

  Button did not engage in looting either, of course. She had more important duties to attend to.

  Two icons had gone black: Clown’s and Tat’s. In the very first few moments of battle, the bots had managed to fire dozens of rounds at the car before the survivors had managed to take shelter behind the wheels. They had probably aimed at Janitor, but he was impervious to many smaller rifles even at point-blank range, s
ince he was protected with home-reinforced body armor. Of course, the car had taken a pounding. Its windshield was filled with holes and cracks. Cheater was amazed that only two people had died in the onslaught that killed the car.

  Five had been in the cab, plus two in the trunk. No armor was protecting them. The bullets could travel wherever they pleased. Only two deaths, and two fingers from Fatso’s left hand. Roach was all smiles. It was not often that death did not affect him, and in this battle, he hadn’t even suffered a scratch.

  Amazing given that the squad had just met a full bot ambush. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t amazing. Perhaps it was just good fortune.

  Smiling fortune.

  Would Fortune smile on them again? Clown might just come back to life and say that the car was fine—that they had no need to walk along the rocks.

  But if Fortune were to smile again, it would be without Cheater’s help. He had nearly 24 hours of cooldown to wait through.

  Chapter 21

  Life Eight. Ever Closer

  The car could still drive, but something was clearly wrong with it. Something beyond the numerous carefree whistling noises its new air holes made. No, it sounded like an important part was about to fall off. And somewhere, fuel was leaking out. Plus, there was the endless shaking. Earlier, things had been rather smooth even on the desert road. Now, the trunk-dwellers’ teeth were knocking even when the road was clean and level.

  Personal inconveniences were the least worrying part of their trip, though. He would gladly accept a ride in a running washing machine just to get to the other side.

  No, something else worried him more. The gorge turned out to be the entrance to a labyrinth of rocky ridges, hills, bowls, and even cliff drops with bridges running across them—or ledges running along them. If they were caught in such places, there would be no escape and no cover. March’s gift could not always see an enemy before the enemy saw them.

  Worse, the road just continued on. There were no intersections, no forks, no side roads. He wished they would see a trail branching off. Or anything at all resembling a turn. But no, the road continued, the only way they could go.

  No alternatives were presented to them.

  Cheater doubted this road went straight for the border. No one got that lucky. So they were likely traveling in all kinds of other directions.

  The bots were unlikely to have been alone. There had to be others. And those others would be traveling along the only road through the area, of course.

  If they ran into another armored car, they might all be dead before he knew what they were up against. Janitor had no more grenade launchers, little ammo remained for his machine gun, and his armor did not play well against heavy machine gun turrets.

  The encounter with the bots had helped them out rather than hurt, arguably, since it had allowed them to pick up some ammo.

  This did not mean Cheater wanted to see them again. To hell with the elevated experience and pretty weapons the bots had to give up as loot. New adventures could very well end the party.

  His mirror had been lost in the battle. Now there was simply no way they could see what was up ahead. With his whole body he listened to what the car was doing—how could he ignore it?—feeling for any new signs of trouble. Janitor’s face helped, too. Although he did not have the most expressive visage, he would probably react predictably if more bots appeared. He would bound to his feet and fire.

  Suddenly the car made such an abrupt turn that Cheater slammed into Fatso, who was busy slamming into the side of the trunk. They looked at Janitor as they did so.

  Clearly peaceful cliff-side rides were a thing of the past.

  How long had it been? Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen, but no more.

  Janitor swung around so swiftly he might as well have teleported. He aimed his gaze and his gun towards the front right.

  And fired. Cheater tried in vain to recover his balance, and nearly went numb with shock when he tried to evaluate the scene. Several light armored vehicles swept past, one after the other. Bots loved those kinds of rides, as did players lucky enough to capture bot vehicles. They were large SUVs, without serious armor but outfitted with all kinds of machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, and sometimes even anti-tank missile launchers and medium-size mortars. For a weak party like theirs, any of them were formidable opponents.

  Now, a crowded electric car was rushing past. They zipped passed a mere two yards away as Janitor fired a near-continuous burst into the sides and wheels of the APCs. In this case, it seemed the players knew about the bots first. They had taken the turn at just the right time. Their opponents made no attempt at returning fire—only one gun was firing on the entire field of battle, and it was Janitor’s.

  Had March managed to see the bots with his ability and warn the party? Why had they rushed into danger, then, when they could have backtracked? Not that there was another road, but they could have abandoned the car and proceeded on foot. Though inconvenient, that had to be safer than trying to rush past a company of bots.

  The shaking subsided, and Janitor turned back as he emptied the last few inches of his ammo belt. Cheater craned his neck and managed to see the vanguard of the enemy convoy a moment before the car took a turn. It was a modern APC. Characteristic look. The kind that the locals loved to include in beginners’ brochures, along with a warning that such vehicles were extremely dangerous. They were hard to defeat with a heavy machine gun, and not even a grenade launcher was guaranteed to cause any significant damage. It was capable of hitting back hard enough that even a tank should be worried.

  He strained his memory, trying to remember one statistic that was much more important now than armament, armor, and complement.

  How fast could the predatory tortoise move? If its speed was comparable to that of, say, a barely-functioning overloaded electric car towing a generator and quasi on a rickety improvised cart, the future was not bright.

  Perhaps there would be no future at all.

  He could do nothing about it but hope that the armored monster was simply too slow and that the curves and obstacles would prevent the bots from getting a good shot at the fugitives from a distance.

  The rocky cliffs on Fatso’s side of the road disappeared. Cheater hoped desperately that they had simply moved a bit, out of his view, but he suspected otherwise.

  Somehow gathering his legs under him and clutching the edges of the trunk, he sat up and turned his head to get a view of the region. If they did not end up dead immediately, they would evacuate the car as it was pounded to dust. Best not to wait until then to get a look around. Advance awareness of the battlefield’s layout was always preferable.

  The ridge on the left was indeed still there; sadly, it was now situated a great distance away. Dozens of yards lay between it and the edge of the road, though this region was covered with piles of reddish boulders, green cacti, and withering shrubs here and there. Attempts to find good shelter from shelling there were unlikely to succeed. An SUV might be able to handle the area at ridiculously low speeds, but anything else would find it impassable.

  On the right lay even fewer possibilities.

  They could drive that way, but not for long. Just beyond the road’s edge, a precipice dropped, falling dozens of yards down. He could not tell whether it was vertical or not, but it was hardly drivable.

  Then Cheater saw how far back the bend in the road was. An APC came into view. Terrifyingly strong, with desert camouflage and an autocannon in its tower.

  Cheater was not the only one who saw. Clown began turning the wheel, zigzagging the car to make the shot more difficult. So violently did he do so that Janitor stopped reloading his machine gun and grab the top crossbar of his cart to hold on.

  Fire danced around the edges of the cannon’s exit. Wind whipped by Cheater, a feeling as though a truck had driven past on the open road. Another shell exploded ten yards behind them.

  Then, one more severed the semi-rigid coupling that bound the car and the diesel engine. The car
t surged backwards, then held for a moment, connected only by the power cable. Alas, it could not hold for long. It snapped.

  Clown slowed down for a moment and kicked into a sharp turn. The cart, still rolling on its own momentum, caught up. By some miracle it still balanced on its own two wheels as it traveled. It might have caught up with the trunk, but the road was turning and it could not, so it rolled further on towards the left side running around the bend.

  Straight towards the abyss.

  Janitor turned at the last moment, baring his inhuman fangs in wrath that was beastly and terrifying—yet utterly impotent. As he plunged into the abyss like a captain going down with his ship, he threw up his hand with the middle finger outstretched.

  Then, he disappeared from sight.

  Cheater moved again, accidentally kicking Fatso, and looked back once more. Their view was no longer blocked by the generator cart.

  The APC was still behind, but now behind a rock that sat at the inside of the very bend from which Janitor had taken flight.

  Soon, it would have another shot. It seemed like the enemy’s vehicle was quick, and they likely had more than one. The quasi could not possibly have shot all of the others into disrepair. Bots were stubborn beyond all feelings of fear and discomfort. They would pursue the party until they lost the trail, or until everyone on one side was dead.

  Thankfully, this electric car had a high maximum speed. Moreover, its diesel cart and heaviest occupant were now out of the picture. It broke away.

  Yet they all knew that the battery only had enough charge for a couple of miles. Unless they found another vehicle, they would have to proceed on foot in this new open area. The bots would easily catch their prey with their SUVs and armored vehicles capable of traversing nearly any terrain.

  Luck was all they could rely on now. Cheater had plenty of that, but Smile of Fortune was still many hours away from its next use.

  And in their current situation, even ten minutes of survival seemed unlikely.