The Russians at the rear seemed to have suffered slightly worse with it going off at their feet, as they were still shaking their heads clear and blind firing back at the police. They managed to defend their flank against the police without any casualties, but were distracted by the ongoing ambush Jimmy and Gadot were engaging them in from their formations front.
“Watch out for their stealth player, he’s around here somewhere too!” One of the Russians in the rear shouted the warning an instant before Kurt dropped into the trench behind him, grabbing his arm and twisting it up as he shoved the Coonan into place above his armored vest and fired. He stepped up behind the dead player as the larger man slumped against the wall, using him as cover while hiding behind his body and glancing back to confirm an encroaching police presence. Four players at the rear of the formation turned to see what had happened, coming back around the corner just as Kurt began firing his magnum into their faces and necks while emerging from the falling bits of armor, weapons, and dust that had been their friend. The element of surprise worked in his favor, as only one of them got a round off. It struck his armor and blasted the air out of his lungs for an instant, before the flare of pain faded.
Climbing up the wall of the trench on a ladder to avoid the police, he spared a glance at his health, noting that it had dropped by only a quarter, and his bar of armor had dropped by about a fifth. Rifle bullets hurt. His magazine dropped out automatically as he moved towards the exit of the room in an attempt to reposition. Gadot appeared again, taking down two more Ursa players before they drove her back once more. She ducked down and scooted backwards across the top of the space ship, rolling over to reposition for her next strike.
“Shit, he’s behind us!!” The panicked shouts caused a grim smile to appear on Kurt’s face as he kept to cover and performed a reload. Jimmy edged slightly around his corner, blind firing his M60 to keep the bulk of the remaining Russian forces in their trench. Kurt used his time wisely, darting between animatronic soldiers and repositioning himself near the rear of their formation once more. A group of four players was ready for him, each back to back and pointing rifles or automatic shotguns at the lip of the trench.
He ducked low, waiting for his moment while switching to the Maxim 9. The police made their presence known again, surging into the room and distracting the group in front of Kurt. As they began to fight the police NPCs, Kurt took careful aim and hit two of them in the back of their necks with whisper quiet gunshots.
“What was that?! Where is he?!” The players seemed close to panic, firing their weapons seemingly at random. Kurt winced as they took apart the animatronic soldier he hid behind, shredding it with shotgun blasts, but not seeing his prostrate form on the ground behind the hapless robotic dummy.
Jimmy and Gadot were quick to capitalize, each peeking out from their cover to take down a target before being driven back by the dwindling return fire of their opponents. Kurt stayed where he was, switching weapons to the magnum once more and biding his time. As their numbers dwindled, the players became more and more twitchy. One of them called for a charge on Jimmies position.
“Rush the next room, it’s only one guy!” The player who shouted that fell dead as Jimmy turned the corner and stood out in the open, laying waste to player after player with barely controlled fully automatic fire from his M60.
He ignored their return fire and even began walking forward into the room, bullets ricocheting off his armor and sending up puffs of material where they struck. “Yeah! Rush him guys, c’mon!” Jimmy stood out in the open, daring them to assault his position.
The remaining Russians clustered up behind a curve in the trench, causing Kurt to make a mental note to buy some grenades. Their dots on the map fluctuated as they spoke to each other, the volume of their voices causing shifts in the vibrancy of their dot and the size of the ping their sounds made. Kurt made another mental note of that before he sprinted and leapt directly over the top of them.
“The hell was that!?” One of them shouted in a somewhat panicked voice, after firing a few rounds into the air after Kurt. He ducked low and moved back ahead of them, staying on top of the trenches area and out of sight. “He’s trying to get behind us!”
Kurt moved to flank the Russians, keeping out of sight of the police NPCs. He noticed one NPC wearing a forest green uniform and carrying a grenade launcher with six rotating chambers. As Kurt watched, the NPC dropped to one knee and fired four grenades into the air, stepping back to reload from a bandoleer across his chest. Smoke began to billow from the grenades, and choking tear gas steadily crawled across the room. Glancing at his phone while trying to suppress his coughing, Kurt noted that his health bar was ticking down, but at a slow rate.
Moving to keep his position similar to the police NPCs, Kurt put an animatronic soldier between them and opened fire on the remaining Russian players. Jimmy and Gadot joined him, and the players were all wiped out in a matter of seconds. They turned their attention on the remaining police NPCs, similarly destroying the opposition.
Reloading his magnum with a fresh appreciation for the pistol, Kurt moved back to his friends as Gadot climbed down from her perch. Choking slightly on the tear gas fumes, they moved out of that room into a new area, leaving the clouds behind. “Thanks for the warning about grenadiers, by the way.” Kurt doubled over, coughing violently for a moment before wiping at his mouth.
Jimmy chuckled. “You did fine. Everybody needs to get flash-banged to understand the mechanic.”
Kurt made an annoyed face at his friend. “And what’s the mechanic for tear gas?”
Turning away with a shrug, Jimmy shook his head. “Get out of it?”
Gadot raised a hand to her mouth, alternating between coughing and laughing. “Grenadiers are not that scary, they only use nonlethals on us. But they can use breachers for doors and high ex on walls at higher Heat levels to help the bulls get to us if we hole up.”
Jimmy was crouched over his M60, replacing his ammunition box with a new one that had a painting of a morbidly obese goblin jabbering wordlessly and wielding a turkey leg as a weapon. The box had a forest green band around the bottom of it, in addition to the strange fat goblin painting.
Pulling her rifle around her shoulder, Gadot scowled at the new ammunition box. “Is that…?”
Standing up and pulling the bolt to prime a round, Jimmy chuckled with a nod. “Fat boys.”
She cocked her head slightly and dropped out her own magazine. “That’s…actually really smart. Never seen anybody use them in a frigging machine gun, but who cares if you spend a quarter mill on a single mag of ammo, right?”
Shouldering the machine gun, Jimmy looked around before replying. “With my skillset, it’s closer to 180k. But yeah, fate of the city and all. Seemed a better thing to spend my money on than a moving safe house, for example.” He graced Kurt with a quick glance at that comment, before turning to move again.
Following his friends, Kurt scowled at the ground in confusion. “What are fat boys?”
Gadot dropped her own magazine out, checking various pouches and pockets until she found the correct replacement she wanted and slapped it into the bottom of her rifle. “That’s not what their name is, people just call them that because the bullets are bigger than average. They’re Siegebreakers, and they are one of very few fantasy bullets in the game. Not based on any real-world rounds. They cause little to no health damage but destroy armor really quickly. Mostly used against players like Jimmy here who armor up to the gills.”
Kurt nodded, accepting the explanation. “Oh. Ok, that’s boring. How are we getting out of here?”
Slipping the UMP45 out of its holster on her thigh, Gadot lifted it and began walking into the next room, scowling slightly at Kurt with a snorting laugh. “Dick.” After a quick shake of her head while smiling, she continued. “This whole park has security hallways behind everything. All four of the main walls have a hidden security door someplace along the wall. This ride is flush to the wall, so
we should be able to get into the hallway and through the door. From there, we get to a nearby parking garage, get in the car I called for, and get the hell out of here.”
“UGH! Can’t we just die and respawn instead? This place is crawling with cops and Ursa, and we’re not getting paid. I just wanna be done here.” Kurt indulged in a little bit of whining, causing his friends to shake their heads.
“You can’t, no. Half the city is looking for that stealth gun of yours, thanks to the hit on GoonStorm yesterday. I’ve seen tons of pictures of it all over the forums, and it doesn’t matter if you equip it to your sidearm slot, they could still see it on your body before you dust out. We can’t have the Russians track the hit against them away from GoonStorm, it would undermine everything we’re doing here. Besides, I’ve never died in this side of the game, and I don’t plan to start because you’re feeling lazy.” Gadot turned and gave him a mildly scornful glance, causing Jimmy to chuckle as he moved to follow her.
“Yeah alright, I don’t really want to lose to these guys anyway.” Kurt followed them, chagrinned somewhat.
They made their way carefully through the ride, fending off the occasional group of elite police forces. Kurt learned that the cops with Taser rounds in their shotguns were noticeable because of the bright yellow shotgun shells they kept in bandoleers across their armor, and that they typically punished players who failed to properly clear their corners. He also was educated further on methods of dealing with shield carrier police, as Jimmy used his M60 with Siegebreaker ammunition to destroy one and Gadot simply picked another off through the glass in his shield with an armor piercing round from her sniper rifle. After a few more themed rooms in the rides line, they diverted off to a wall and Kurt knelt to pick the lock on a security door.
Jimmy stepped up behind him and kept his gaze moving between both doorways, watching for police incursions. “Hey since you’re whining we don’t warn you about stuff, something you should probably know about Heat when it gets this high.”
Kurt glanced back at him, lips pursed in interest. “Oh?”
“Yeah. Bosses. At ranks eight and nine, you can get Boss fights. Inconvenient at best, insanely difficult at worst.” Jimmy blinked rapidly a few times while speaking, clearly remembering some unpleasant experiences. “Great loot if you can down em though.”
Scowling at his partially filled timer circle, Kurt thought for a moment before asking his next question. “Wait, how can boss fights work in this?”
“Well, in the good old days you had dungeons with bosses at the end of them. In this game, everything is a bit screwy, but still follows that general vibe. Bank jobs and the like are basically fast paced dungeons, the bigger heists tend to be a bit more like raids. You get the idea. So yeah, they still have bosses, but now they come at you when you are least prepared, usually on the run. It’s all themed from popular movies and shows of the era, so sometimes you get better bosses than others.” He spoke matter of fact, clearly not aware of the confusion he was causing his friend.
“You ever faced McLane? I really hate that one.” Gadot sucked on a length of her own hair, mildly bored as she looked around the room.
Jimmy shrugged. “He’s not so bad, you just have to keep him pinned down. He likes to skitter off and keep picking you apart little by little. The worst is Reeves, I don’t ever want to fight him again. That was nightmarish.”
Gadot snorted a laugh. “Yeah, Reeves is like…endgame content. You don’t even GET him without some complicated set up stuff. Don’t you have to like…burn his house down or steal his car or something? How bad was it?”
Shaking his head, Jimmy looked away. “You’ve seen the movies. He cut us down like wheat.”
The door clicked open, and Kurt gave it a slight push as he stood and took a step inside. “Finally. Done.” He smiled as he entered the doorway, looking back over his shoulder. Before he could say anything clever, he was hit with a Taser slug and fell over backwards twitching.
Stepping into the doorway over him, Jimmy swung his BAR up and sighed down at his friend. “C’mon dude. Corners.”
Rolling her eyes as Jimmy began firing down the hallway, Gadot knelt and used the butt of her UMP45 to swat the slug away. She smiled slightly at him as he stood back up, shrugging before taking a breath and holding her submachine gun to her shoulder and following Jimmy around the doorway into the security hallway. She tucked in close to his back and covered the hallway he had already cleared as he turned around the door to clear the other side.
Gadot peeked around Jimmies side, using his bulky armor as cover and firing a few bursts down the hallway while he fired single rounds and moved steadily forward. Kurt picked himself up and frowned as he followed them into the hallway. He drew his automatic Glock and kept an eye on their back while they proceeded to clear the hallway of police NPCs. Kurt turned to say something when the door slammed shut behind him, the lights blinked out, and a squalling static sound burst into his ears from his phone. He reacted at once, pulling up his wrist phone to mute his coms and noticing that his map screen had turned to static. His HUD was still working when he went to the phones home screen, but it blinked and wavered with lines of static.
“Well that would be Clancy. Shouldn’t have talked about boss fights.” Jimmy immediately put his back to a wall and dropped the magazine from his BAR, replacing it with another and flicking on a small flashlight attached to the underside of the guns barrel.
Gadot ducked low, tucking into a corner of the hallway and reloading her gun as well before turning on a flashlight. A high pitched electronic squeal filled the air for a second and her light became unbearably bright before shattering and going dark. “The hell? He got me already. Kurt, where’s your light?”
“I’m supposed to have one?!” Kurt hurriedly pressed his back to a wall, turning back and forth in the darkness, trying to see. He heard the sounds of footsteps as Jimmy started a chuckle that was cut off by a grunt. When he turned, Jimmy was on the ground, his flashlight flickering and going out.
“Shit. Back to back Kurt, right now!” Gadot ripped open a Velcro pocket on her armor and produced four small thin flares, each the size of a pencil. Popping the caps off all of them at once, she allowed them to sizzle into life before throwing two in each direction in the hallway. She and Kurt pressed their backs together and nervously eyed the darkened areas around them.
Three glowing green dots appeared from around a corner in front of Kurt, wavering in the air for a moment in a triangle formation at roughly head level. “Umm.” He managed to lift his weapon towards the green dots before they approached him at an alarming speed, a static squall becoming louder again with the dots proximity. Opening fire blinded him briefly, and he didn’t see where the dots disappeared to, but mere seconds later Gadot also began firing bursts down her length of the hallway.
“Clancy is a stealth based boss, elevated risk with electronic counter measures. If he gets within melee range, he knocks you out. We all go down, we get busted. Stay back to back, watch for the green dots. He only takes a hit or-ugh!” Gadot stopped midstream, and her physical presence against his back vanished. Kurt squeezed his eyes shut tight for a second, opening them and looking back to see her knocked out on the floor behind him.
Moving fast, he snatched a flare from the tiles directly in front of him and turned to fling it further down the hallway, darkening the alcove he was in. Backing into a corner, he dropped out his magazine and slapped in a fresh extended one with 9mm +P. As he clicked his slide closed, he noticed the green dots slowly lowering from the ceiling a few feet in front of his position. At this close range, he could see the man attached to the dots, wrapped in a matte black body suit and covered with various gadgets and weapons. He wore a set of night vision goggles, and only the lower half of his face was exposed, a grim jawline covered with stubble.
Tilting his wrist and bracing his gun hand against his stomach, Kurt opened fire at the ceiling and was relieved to see the dots vanish back up into what he
assumed was a ventilation duct. He ran towards the end of the hallway, snatching a flare from the floor as he ran past, a plan beginning to form. Kurt hurriedly lifted the flare to each door he passed, gripping his Glock as he glanced around the hallway in paranoid fear. Twice he fired blindly at what he thought was movement, unsure of Clancy’s presence, before he found what he was looking for. ‘Employee Locker Room’
He kicked the door open, not bothering to keep quiet and raced to the other end of the room, past rows of lockers. Paranoia seeped into him quickly, and he jumped at shadows, clearing the side of the room he was on as he moved. The exit door stood in a small alcove at the end of the last row of lockers, and Kurt dropped his flare directly in front of it. Retreating a few steps to the first bank of lockers, Kurt quietly opened one and slipped inside, closing the door most of the way before pressing his gun barrel to the opening and waiting, practically holding his breath in anticipation.
Clancy stepped into view, moving un-naturally silently. He cautiously approached the flare and stopped, going stiff as he realized his vulnerability. His head turned a fraction to look over his shoulder, and Kurt fired the Glock until it clicked empty, squeezing his eyes shut and hoping. He held the door closed and shook his head, waiting for the blinding flash of gunfire to fade, cringing in anticipation of being knocked out by Clancy. His fears were unwarranted, as the lights clicked back on overhead and a quick glance at his wrist showed his phone working normally again.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Kurt stepped out of the locker and took in the sight of Clancy dead on the floor. He immediately moved to exit the room and return to the hallway his friends were occupying the floor of. Stepping out into the hallway, Kurt watched Jimmy and Gadot begin stirring from their positions on the floor. He leaned against the wall and tried to adopt what he hoped was a cool pose. “Hey.”
The Life- Illusion Page 20