“Thanks.” Jimmy resumed his firing position, attempting to ensure none of the interceptors snapping at their heels could get close enough to run them off the road. His gun ran dry at an inopportune moment, allowing one of the heavily armored Corvettes to come up on the driver’s side. It immediately shoved at the side of the Mustang, causing Gadot to scream a curse as she struggled to keep them from spinning out. She swerved into the concrete barrier and held the car there, keeping them from a lethal spin, but losing momentum as they spread paint all over the freeway.
Kurt shot the Mustang’s other small rear window out with his Maxim 9 before dropping it and hauling the Messenger out of its holster. He aimed carefully before firing the gun once, smashing the interceptors window and turning its driver into black smoke. As Gadot used the Mustangs powerful engine to shove the Corvette off them, she swerved back out into the middle of the lane as they finally emerged from the firestorm of the city.
The freeway they had taken led through the edge of the city by the airport, angling around to the north and leading up the coast. As the smoke finally cleared, they could see the full force of a ten bar Heat coming against them. The coastal freeway was clear of all civilian traffic, leaving nothing but the tanks, transport trucks, and high-speed interceptors for Gadot to contend with.
Jimmy glanced behind him at the front windshield, let out a deep sigh, and began reloading his weapons. His metal mask was dropped on the floor as he cranked his window open and shoved his way out, sitting on the lip and trying to steady his aim.
“I’ll try and warn you guys about stops and swerves but looking at that road…yeah you might be on your own for most of it.” Gadot chewed at her lip slightly, taking a few seconds to plan her route before nodded and pressed on the gas. The Mustang rocketed down the road with a chirp of tires as they passed the ruins of a flower shop on the side of the freeway.
“How long??” Kurt slid a fresh tower magazine into his Glock and started trying to crack the bulletproof windshield of a nearby interceptor. It swung up alongside them, bullets sparking from its front end before it tapped the Mustangs rear wheel well.
“Shit!” Gadot managed to keep them on the road, swerving the Mustang back and forth a bit. Once steady, she flipped up a plastic cover on her shifter and pressed a vibrant red button. The wheels boiled as flames erupted from the exhaust pipe and the Mustang shot down the road.
Jimmy swayed in his perch, grabbing at the doorframe as he struggled to breathe in the high wind. Once he scrambled back inside, he gave Gadot a significant look. “Thanks for the warning babe.” When she smiled wryly at him, he chuckled and reloaded his Beowulf rifle again. “That’s a hell of a sweet upgrade though. How long until it recharges?”
“Uhhhh, two minutes.” She shrugged. “Not great, but I’ll take it. Better than any NOS upgrades available normally anyway.”
The windshield cracked after Kurt put another magazine into it, cursing exultantly under his breath. As that interceptor fell away, three others dodged around it to pursue. “Jimmy?! …Help!” He fumbled for a new magazine and came away empty handed, checking his wrist to see his fragmentation rounds on cooldown.
Jimmy’s rifle cracked several times in quick succession and one of the interceptors fell away as flames peeked out from its hood, but both of the others swept in on top of them. They moved in and squeezed together on either side of the Mustang, applying brakes and forcing the lighter car to slow. Gadot slammed the car into a lower gear and applied pressure to the accelerator, trying to struggle free by wrenching the steering wheel back and forth.
“Get em off me!!” Her voice sounded desperate, and when Kurt glanced at the count-down on their windshield, he understood why. They still had to keep the Heat focused for three minutes.
He fell over backwards, gripping the Messenger again and aiming between his legs at the window. A single gunshot shattered the passenger window of the interceptor, and the breach clicked open. He grunted and dropped the Messenger, reaching for his ankle and producing two smoke sticks. He lurched forward and tore the caps off as the passenger in the interceptor opened fire with a handgun at point blank range, striking both him and Gadot. All the air was driven from his lungs as the gunshot he had suffered registered, and he gasped in sudden excruciating pain. It was far worse than any gunfire he had sustained. With the last strength he could muster, he flung the smoke sticks into the interceptor and collapsed on the rear seat trying to breath with patches of black swimming across his vision. The interceptor swerved away, thick white smoke billowing from its windows as it struggled to keep a straight course. It strayed into the center divider and immediately flipped into the air, trailing smoke and fragments of metal in a graceless leap.
Gadot screamed in agony from the driver’s seat and partially collapsed over the steering wheel, clutching at her neck. Jimmy turned and pressed the barrel of his automatic shotgun to the driver’s window of the remaining interceptor, before holding down the trigger and blasting the cars interior to pieces. He then immediately grabbed the steering wheel and held them steady on the road.
“I’m sorry babe.” Jimmy muttered while pressing Gadot’s knee and keeping their speed up. Within a few seconds, she got her breath back and nodded at him, blinking back involuntary tears of pain. He nodded back and let her take over again, going back to providing cover fire. Looking down as he reloaded, Jimmy smiled at Kurt. “Rubber bullets. Hurts a bit, huh?”
“Fu….yes!” Kurt sputtered while checking his wrist. His health hadn’t taken any damage, to his surprise. “What the hell? No damage?”
One eye squinted closed as he tucked his cheek into the rifle butt, Jimmy smirked a bit. “Yeah, it’s a really messed up mechanic. The rubber bullets cause no damage, even to critical hit areas, but they hurt like they would in real life. Armor helps…a bit.” He fired the rifle, baring his teeth at a miss. “Ten bar Heat man.”
Kurt shook off the last of the feeling, reaching down and holstering the Messenger again. He grabbed a recently recharged fragmentation round magazine and slid it into the Glock, clicking the slide closed with a flick of his thumb and an angry glare out the back window.
“Dozers!” Gadot shouted over the rushing wind and gunfire, smacking Jimmy’s shoulder to get his attention.
Looking forward, Kurt saw a roadblock ahead consisting of a single large yellow bulldozer settled into the middle of the lane, with almost no room on either side of it. “Oh shit…”
Jimmy started playing with his wrist as Gadot pressed hard on the gas pedal again and the car shot towards the obstacle. He glanced back at Kurt as he gripped the loose seatbelt in both hands and tucked into the seat harder. “Better hold onto something.” Kurt wondered how he kept so calm as he gripped both handles on either side of the car’s interior roof.
Gadot lightly drifted the car towards the center divider, squinting in concentration as she rolled on the gas more and increased their speed. An instant before the bulldozer, she twitched the wheel and drove them partially up the side of the divider. The Mustang screamed sideways past the bulldozer in a haze of tearing metal and burning rubber. As they flopped back down on the other side, Kurt noticed the handle he gripped was no longer attached to anything. A corner of the roof on the passenger side had been torn free, and he went a little pale as he stared at the severed handle.
Their windshield had spiderwebbed from the impact, so Gadot reached out and flicked the map lower, getting it out of the worst of the mess. Jimmy went back to playing with his phone, swiping at the air above his wrist before nodding and speaking, seemingly to no one.
“I need some strikes, yes.” He shook his head and sighed. “Fine. Just clear our path right now then.” With that, he swiped his phone away and turned to look at Gadot and then Kurt. “We get three strikes to clear the road, then the Stronghold is away. Smells like a balance mechanic to me, I’m positive they could hold more ammo than that.”
Kurt’s eyes narrowed at that, but he was quickly distracted, looki
ng out the driver’s side window. The Stronghold descended from cloud cover over the ocean, moving in to fly ahead of them. Bright streaks of light lanced from its side into the road ahead of them, sending up eruptions of flame and annihilating the next handful of roadblocks awaiting them.
Gadot maneuvered the car to weave between the wreckage and rubble at speed, carefully aiming to squeeze between the blasted hulks of bulldozers and transport trucks. “Thirty seconds!” Kurt glanced at the cracked windshield, confirming they were nearing their goal.
“How do we escape this kind of Heat??” He had to shout to be heard over Jimmy’s rifle, leaning away from the barrel as it spat fire and lead next to his head. “Could you not for a sec?!” Jimmy merely grinned at him, swapped magazines, and resumed fire.
“We don’t!” Gadot tilted her head back to shout. “You can’t really escape ten bars, they’re meant to shut down troublesome players like us, wrecking the city and so on.”
Kurt swallowed hard, sitting back for a moment. The Stronghold off to his right banked hard, climbing aggressively towards the cloud cover as it fired a series of flares from its tail. A fighter jet swept by overhead, firing missiles and banking out over the ocean. The missiles intercepted a couple of flares and erupted safely behind the Stronghold as it rose into the clouds, and Kurt started watching its progress on the map instead. As the timer counted down, its dot pulsed regularly, followed by the fighter jet. Once the counter reached zero, the larger dot of the Stronghold vanished.
“Clear!!” Jimmy smacked the roof of the car in excitement. “We just stole three billion dollars!!”
Gadot grinned, glancing over for a second. “We’re famous now boys.” She scowled for a second. “Actually, I was already kinda famous. And now that I think about it, Kurt’s famous for the Fox thing.”
“…I’m famous…” Jimmy adopted a smug expression and sat back in his seat, crossing his arms behind his head.
“Yes, you are baby, congrats. Also, we’re rich now I think. Like, real life rich maybe.” Gadot swerved suddenly to avoid an interceptor, ducking in her seat as Kurt opened fire on it. “Ok, I’d like to stop doing this now. You guys have invites to my safehouse, let’s all just spawn there.” She popped open the nitrous boost button and pressed it again, sending the car rocketing down the freeway.
“Wait, what?” Kurt turned back just in time to see a massive bulldozer blade fill the cracked windshield. He heard the initial crack of glass starting to smash and a quick scream of metal, but everything went black before he could even register the impact.
The black nothing of his respawn waiting period was interrupted by floating text. “Your respawn location is temporarily unavailable. Please choose a spawn point.” He reached an ephemeral hand out and spun through the list of locations available to him, most of them generic spawn points. Once he found Gadot’s spawn point, he sighed at the name and chose it.
His hearing loaded in first, softening the mental anguish of being momentarily without senses. The sound of wind rustling through trees calmed him almost as effectively as the rattling of his train car. When his sight loaded in, he pulled up his phone and casually swiped through the skill notifications. “Damn right Pain Suppression…” He muttered to himself before swiping off the notifications to deal with later. The warm glow of having gotten away with the buyout settled in, and he started thinking about how exactly he could give his cut to Jimmy without wounding the other man’s pride. Stepping out of the guest bedroom, he joined Jimmy in the hallway and the men headed downstairs. They found Gadot in the viewing room, where they had met following their hit on the Ursa.
“Really? ‘Gadot’s Chateau’?” Kurt raised an eyebrow at her from across the room.
She shrugged. “Just because YOU can’t think of any clever names… This structure is a chateau, it seemed to fall into place.”
Jimmy walked across the room and embraced her in a hug from the side, turning to look out the window. “Puns were once considered the highest form of humor.” Kurt could almost hear the wry smile in his voice.
Then all conversation was forgotten as he stepped further into the room and got a good look through the floor to ceiling windows. The Downtown Cluster burned, a wall of black smoke barely obscuring the bright reddish orange glow. As they watched, one of the skyscrapers succumbed to the flames, leaning into a crumbling fall and trailing sparks and ash until it coalesced on the road in a blazing fireball.
Gadot snuggled into Jimmy’s side a bit more and mumbled. “…I love this city.”
Epilogue
Illusion burned. The oil slick Kitty had unleashed covered almost all of the Downtown Cluster and the fires overwhelmed any NPC response, quickly spreading and covering most of the map in death and destruction. The overwhelming majority of all player-faction owned Hubs and Strongholds were destroyed, and most players simply logged out to await the weekly reset.
Minutes before midnight Sunday a massive rainstorm swept over the city, immediately putting out the smoldering ruins and paving the way for the server reset. The ruined buildings, husks of burnt vehicles, and shelled out roads all dissolved into a swirling storm of silver dust. When the storm cleared a moment later, the city was returned to its pristine form and populated with fresh NPCs ready for a new week. The event gained immediate notoriety in gaming culture, but Kitty took the brunt of the blame for it, having been the most notable player involved.
Players began logging back in to find their factions fractured and weakened. Kitty’s final act in Illusion caused exactly what she wanted it to; chaos. Crews began conflicts with each other even as they struggled with massive infighting and betrayals.
GoonStorm dissolved, the upper ranks of their leadership too demoralized and financially burdened to maintain order. While their stronghold had survived the fires, being stationed well outside the city limits, the lack of leadership caused widespread looting. Any weapons, armor, or vehicles not under lock and key were quickly ransacked. Over a dozen smaller factions sporting some variation of the Goons’ name arose, and a fresh (but much smaller scale) war began.
The Ursa lost surprisingly few members over the conflict, becoming the new powerhouse crew in Illusion by default. They carved out a small but strategically placed plot of turf and began the arduous process of rebuilding, while defending themselves from all comers.
The Pirates were utterly destroyed in the conflict. Almost none of their naval forces remained, and their members found themselves without stable leadership or a stronghold. Kitty transferred off the Illusion server and left RougeWorrier in command, but her leadership was contested from the officer core, and the crew fell to infighting. Being a natural draw for players without a crew, the various Pirate factions began building their strength again quite quickly and emerged as the Ursa’s primary rival.
The Lace actually grew, with a few new players making their way into the ranks, and a few others being invited. Jerome and Godless ended up joining their ranks by invitation, but Godless quickly learned to avoid Gadot, as she continued to shoot him on sight anytime their paths crossed. They carved out a healthy plot of turf in the heart of the Downtown Cluster and began the arduous process of slowly washing three billion dollars in dirty cash, while defending themselves from incursions and running new heists each week.
Three weeks later, Kurt stood in his parents’ kitchen, bending over to stare at the oven’s window with narrowed eyes. As his father chuckled from his position at the table, Kurt sighed in resignation and slid his hands into oven mitts. Pulling his latest attempt at a loaf of sourdough bread from the oven, he plopped the tin onto the counter and shook his head. The mass of dough was misshapen and pale, clearly not the work of a master baker.
Kurt’s father maintained his bemused expression, standing up and reaching for the bread knife. Cutting into the shape that was perhaps generous to call a ‘loaf,’ he shrugged slightly. “Smells nice at least.”
“Yeah, great.” Kurt was unimpressed. “I should give up on the oven
entirely, we just don’t get along.”
“Nonsense, progress is still progress. Nobody ever made a perfect loaf of bread their first few tries.” Poking the mass of mostly cooked dough, he turned to face his son, expression somewhat serious. “I think you’re just not letting it prove long enough. I’ll take a look at that recipe you’re working from and we can try again tomorrow if you want.”
Kurt forced a smile to his lips and nodded. “Sure thing.” He raised his wrist and swiped at the air in front of it for a moment. “I gotta run, I’m meeting Jimmy and Summer for dinner.”
“Playing your game all night again?” His father asked with an eyebrow raised.
“Almost certainly. Things are still a bit crazy, and my talents are needed.” Kurt hugged his father briefly before heading for the front door.
“I won’t complain. Bit of an odd way to make a living, but the stack of cash you left on the counter the other week can’t really be argued with. You know you don’t HAVE to pay rent, and even if you did, ten thousand is a bit excessive.” He turned and started cleaning the kitchen space. “See you tomorrow son.”
Once in his car, the trip to Hot Fusion was short and peaceful. Kurt hummed along to the radio, in a great mood for a change. Their haul from stealing the buyout had ended up making them all a small fortune, and while both he and Summer had opted to give the majority of it to Jimmy, he still walked away with thirty thousand in the real world. Kurt had given his parents ten thousand to make up for the lost tuition he felt he had wasted and was more than content to live on the remainder while trying to figure out what he wanted to do for a living.
Pulling into the parking lot, he saw Summer and Jimmy were already at their customary outdoor table in spite of a cloudy sky that threatened rain. Summer was sipping from what appeared to be a chocolate milkshake while laughing, and Jimmy was clearly telling an amusing story, based on his hand motions. Kurt approached with a happy wave.
The Life- Illusion Page 46