“I’m hungry.” I shrugged and lifted one of the lids off the serving plate. It was fish and chips with a neatly cut lemon, tartar sauce, and coleslaw. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten fish and chips, but my stomach was telling me that I didn’t need to worry about being the world champ anymore, so I should scarf this down.
“Okay. Good news,” Chip said a few minutes after I started eating. “There were four men in the APC. Three have been shot, and the other has been apprehended. Our security is still sweeping the property, so we have to wait here for another hour or two, but these guys seem like amateurs, not military.”
“That’s a relief,” Daisy said as she hugged her arms to her chest. “This probably was the best place to be, though, at a time like this.” She flashed me a cute smile and then glanced down at the food. She shrugged and started lifting up the lids on the plates. She went through three before she found one filled with potstickers and moved the dish to the spot in front of her.
“Beer?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for her reply before I popped open one and handed it to her.
“Uh, yeah. You know, if someone would have told me that getting a job at Arnacript would have meant that I got to have dinner and a beer with Leo Lennox; I would have told them they were crazy, but then I would have also taken the job for a quarter of the pay.” The short-haired woman let out a laugh, and we tapped our beers together from across the table.
Zarra sat down next to me without saying anything and then began to sort through the plates. One of them was a hamburger with fries, and she picked it from the selection. I opened a beer for her, and she tapped our bottles together without speaking.
I had finished my fish and chips before the women got started so I sorted through the remaining plates for another meal. Playing Ohlavar Quest was truly messing with my appetite, and I was eating as if I was doing heavy workouts every day. I found a plate that had cups of the miso soup I liked and took one before I asked the women if they wanted one.
“No thank you,” Zarra said after she finished chewing on a bite of hamburger. “I doubt I will be able to finish this. I am a bit of a stress eater under most circumstances, but if something happens to the AI…” The beautiful woman sat back in her chair, and her purple eyes seemed to lose focus for a bit.
“You don’t have it backed up?” I asked.
“Yes, but it will lose everything you did today. Maybe. I am not sure.”
“Shit,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it back up every minute?” I asked.
“We were doing an update today,” Zarra said, and her jaw hardened. “We were doing an update today.” The woman shot to her feet and turned to Chip. “They have to be going after the AI servers. This is an inside job. Someone at the company has betrayed us.”
“But we already have a team there,” Chip said.
“Frankly, I don’t trust anyone right now besides you two,” Zarra said as she looked at Chip and me.
“Uh, Ms. Zerne, I had nothing to do with--” Daisy began, but Zarra cut her off with a motion of her hand.
“But you knew we had an update today, wait here. Leo, Chip, and I are going to the server room.”
“Ms. Zerne, that is a bad idea. Your staff is securing the area and--”
“I have to go. You are either coming with me, or you are waiting here, Don’t try to stop me.” Zarra turned away from us and stomped to the four heavily armored guards at the door.
“Wait!” I walked after her, but she made it to the guards before I could grab her arm.
“You.” She pointed at the nearest guard. “Give me your rifle.”
“Ms. Zer--”
“Now,” she growled, and the sound from the beautiful woman’s throat was filled with enough malice to turn the man’s face white.
He handed her his rifle.
“Give your sidearm to Leo,” she commanded another guard, and the man pulled his pistol out of his holster.
“We seriously going to do this?” I asked her as I took the pistol. My heart was hammering in my chest.
“Yes. You coming?” she said to Chip.
“Yeah, but so are they,” my friend issued orders to the four men, and they moved to the exit door.
“What about--” Daisy began, but Chip interrupted her.
“Stay here. Lock the door behind us,” he said.
“Got it,” the short-haired woman replied, and her face turned another shade of white.
Then the seven of us ran out of the rec room door.
“The server room is on the other side of the complex,” Zarra said as we ran. The woman had taken off her heels when we exited the rec room, and she was running barefoot across the gray carpet. It looked like the beautiful dark haired woman knew how to carry the rifle, and I wondered if she had any military training.
We passed through the hospital checkpoint, but there were no guards at the stations. The airlock doors did have to be operated by someone on one side, so I realized that this was kind of security measure in itself. It would slow down any attacking group because they would have to split at least one person off to set the controls while everyone else went through.
Chip seemed to know how to operate the thing, so he stayed behind at first, and then Zarra flipped the switch so he could run through. The whole process cost us an extra thirty seconds, and I could see Zarra’s frustration as she waited for my friend to exit the chamber.
Then we were running again, and the four armored men were having a hard time keeping up with Zarra, Chip, and me. I didn’t know exactly what time it was, but I guessed it was close to 6:00 PM, and I figured that most of the employees had gone home for the night.
“Where is this AI room?” I yelled after we jogged through the hallways for a minute.
“It’s right up here! Maybe another two hundred yar--” Zarra started to say, but then the sound of gunshots interrupted her. The popping noises seemed farther away, but Chip, Zarra, and I increased our running speed and started to leave the armored guards behind.
I could have run at four times the speed we were moving and made it to where the gunfire was in a few seconds, but that was probably a bad idea. I was one of the world’s most deadly martial artists, but I had only a few hundred hours of training with a gun. Granted, I’d gone to one of those expensive “tactical schools” that Chip and Dale recommended, and they had given me some firearms instruction, but I didn’t think I’d be able to do much more than getting shot once I arrived at the server room. I’d never, in fact, had to shoot anyone with a gun.
“Let me take the lead,” Chip must have read my mind. He made a brief sprint to take the lead over Zarra and me. We were coming up to a “T” shaped corner where our path could either go right or straight, and my friend made a stopping motion with his hand. Zarra and I skidded to a halt behind him. I turned to see that the other guards were still forty feet behind us down the hallway.
There were more gunshots around the corner, and Chip poked his head forward and then quickly moved it back. He held up five fingers to us, then closed it, and then opened with two more fingers. Then my friend pointed to one of the rifle-carrying guards that had caught up to us. The guard nodded, and Chip gestured for the man to replace himself at the corner. My friend then pointed at another rifle carrying guard and motioned for him to cross the hallway junction so he could take a position that could give us cover on the other side.
The second guard sprinted across the hallway while the first one covered. Whoever was down the hallway let out a shout of alarm, and there was a spray of bullets that slammed into the far wall. The bullets missed the guard who ran across, and the armored man was able to take his position on the other side without injury.
Zarra stepped up to the corner, but Chip motioned for her to stand back a few feet. The beautiful woman shook her head, but then my friend gave her a dead stare, and she nodded before she followed his instruction. Chip held three fingers up, then two, then one, and then he swung his pistol out from behind the corner while t
he other two guards poked their rifles out.
There was a flurry of gunfire from the three men, and there was a retort of more gunshots from the other side. Chip pulled back around the corner and then held up five fingers to us. I could hear screams of agony around the corner and figured that my friend had been able to hit two of the fuckers with his pistol.
More bullets slammed against the corners of the walls and Chip motioned for the guards stationed there to pull back. Then he pointed at the other two guards to move up to stand next to him. They followed his order, and he motioned for the guy who gave his rifle to Zarra to sprint across the hallway and join the man on the other corner while they provided cover fire. The pistol wielding guard nodded, and the team popped out from behind their cover of the corner a bit so that they could fire again. The man sprinted and dove across the hallway before the unseen group could shoot him.
Chip raised his hand up with four fingers.
The unseen enemies around the hallway stopped firing, and Chip made a motion for everyone to wait. Then he sprinted across the hall to join the other two men. This drew the enemy fire again, and Chip pointed at our guards to pop out and shoot. They did so, and I heard screams from down the right-hand hallway.
Then I saw a group of three armed men turn the corner about sixty feet from us. The men were wearing gray military fatigues, had armor on their chest, and each carried rifles. For half a second I wondered if they were Arnacript guards, but they raised their guns toward us, and I screamed out a warning.
All hell broke loose.
I threw myself on the ground and pointed my pistol in the direction of the trio of men. They were probably too far away to hit with my weapon, but I still did my best to “Put the ball in the bucket” as Dale once told me when trying to figure out how to sight down the barrel of the Glock pistol. I pulled the trigger when I had thought my sight was set, but the new enemies were already firing.
One of the men’s faces exploded in blood when someone on my team shot him, then my bullet actually hit the second guy in the chest. I doubted that I killed him, but it made the man fall on the ground. The third got off a burst of shots at us, but then his body blossomed into red as a dozen rifle bullets tore through him.
“Everyone okay?” Chip called out when the third man fell.
“Fine!” Zarra said.
“I’m good!” I yelled.
“I’m hit!” one of the guards shouted. It was the man who gave Zarra his rifle, and I saw that one of the enemy rounds had ripped through his stomach armor.
The other three guards all said they were fine while Chip crouched at the side of the injured man.
“You took a hit in the gut. Put pressure here.” My friend moved the man’s hands to cover his own wound, and then he turned to the other guard standing next to him. “Check that hallway. Make sure they are either dead or unarmed and then cover the far corner. We’ll push on to the AI room.”
“Got it,” the guard said, and then he ran toward the three men we had shot.
“Leo, go grab a rifle and come back,” Chip ordered me. There was more gunfire from the four men down the hall where the AI room was, and even though they couldn’t hit us around the corner, I flinched.
I turned to run toward the three men we just shot. I made it there before the guard that had left a second before me, and I saw the man I shot was trying to pull his pistol. I kicked his hand away from his holster and slammed the heel of my shoe into his face. I hadn’t intended to do more than knock him unconscious with a broken nose, but the man’s skull caved in like it was a rotten tomato. Blood, brains, and skull fragments splattered across the hallway and my pant leg, and I gasped with surprise. I knew that the man had intended to kill me, but I didn’t realize my kick would do so much damage to him.
More gunshots echoed in the hallway behind me, and I bent down to grab the man’s rifle. The other guard had reached me, and he glanced down at the three obviously dead bodies before he took position at the corner.
“Clear!” he shouted as he looked around.
“I’m running back!” I told him before I returned to Chip and Zarra’s side.
They were both leaning around the corner of the hallway and shooting toward the server room.
“There is a lobby room before the servers. They are taking cover in that alcove. If we don’t stop them, they will be able to break through the door and get into the AI room,” Zarra hissed as she spun back around the corner.
“They are dug in. We need to try to--” Chip began to say, but Zarra cut him off.
“You cover me. I’m going to sprint there.” The beautiful woman pressed a button on her rifle and the magazine fell away. Then she crouched beside the injured man and yanked a full one from his ammo belt.
“No. I can go first if you cover--” Chip started to say.
“You are the better shot. I’ll keep on the right side of the hallway,” she said slamming the full magazine into her rifle. It was obvious that Zarra knew her way around the weapon.
“I can run the fastest. Give me cover,” I said.
“Leo and I will go. Now!” Zarra yelled as she jumped around the corner.
I wasn’t prepared for her to go quite yet. We were charging head first into a group of gunmen without any cover. I had wanted to convince her not to run, or to wait, or not to be stupid, but it was evident that Zarra would rather risk her life before she let these assholes into the AI room.
“No!” I shouted as I chased after her.
The bullets of Chip and the guards behind us whizzed by our heads like angry wasps. The corner of what I guessed was the server room was only forty yards ahead, but there was absolutely no cover. Just an open gray hallway and the business ends of four rifles pointing in our direction.
Zarra aimed her rifle at the men as she ran. I tried to catch up to her, but she had a bit of a head start on me, and she’d sprinted surprisingly fast. The world seemed to slow down as she fired at the same time as the other men’s guns shot flame.
I thought about using Guardian of Fortune, but this was real life and not Ohlavar Quest. My heart leapt into my chest as I realized I was about to see the beautiful woman get filled full of bullets. Why had she run ahead of me? Why did she charge down the hallway? Who the fuck cared if we lost a day’s worth of data? It wasn’t worth her life.
One of the enemy attackers fell back against the corner when a bullet tore through his skull. Another took a hit to his right shoulder, and he spun as his rifle punched bullets into the far wall of the hallway.
The remaining two gunmen had pulled back around the wall edge, and Zarra dove to the ground so that she could slide around the corner. Her rifle barked automatic fire as soon as she began to slide and I heard the last two men scream when her shots found homes.
I spun around the corner and aimed my gun. I confirmed that the last two men were down, but there was an opened glass door some twenty feet past them. Past the door was a dark marble lobby with chairs, sofas and green plants arranged in a tasteful manner. On the other side of the room was some sort of giant metal bank vault looking door. Three black garbed men worked on opening it. One of the men carried an assault rifle, and he was pointing it in our direction.
His shot went wide, and I heard the bullet bounce off the wall of the hallway to my left. My shot went true and hit him in the chest. The man fell with a spray of blood and a scream of surprise. The other two men turned and reached for pistols at their hips, but both Zarra’s and my guns rang out in unison, and the men’s bodies spasmed as a dozen bullets filled them.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted at Zarra as she sprang to her feet.
“Protecting the fucking AI!” she growled at me as she darted past the glass door. She swung her weapon around to check the corners we couldn’t see, and I guessed it to be clear since she didn’t fire.
“You could have been killed!” I followed her into the room as I looked over my shoulder. Chip ran around the edge of the corner, and he nodded
at me before he posted there.
“I wasn’t though. Watch the door,” she ordered as she reached into her coat for her phone.
“Why did you do that?” I demanded, but the woman had her phone up to her ear, and she motioned for me to wait a second.
“I am here with Leo, Chip, and four of our guards. One man is wounded. You better fucking tell me that this is the last of them.” Her words were filled with venom, and I guessed she was talking to her CSO.
I walked over to the three dead men by the vault door. These men weren’t as heavily armored as the other assholes, but their clothes were a dark gray and black military style. I turned to look at Zarra, but she was still on the phone and wasn’t looking in my direction.
I crouched down beside one of the dead men and reached a trembling hand out to check and see if he had a tattoo behind his ear. Part of me didn’t want to see the strange mark, but the earlier conversation with Chip had me thinking that Zarra was connected with Sal’s death and the group that was trying to kill me.
There wasn’t a tattoo on this side of the man’s skull, and I shifted my weight over so that I could look at his other side. There wasn’t one here either, and I breathed a sigh of relief. There were two more bodies to check though, and I scooted over to the next corpse.
“Leo, can you watch the hallway with Chip?” Zarra’s voice called out to me. “Our guards are still sweeping the area.”
“Yeah,” I said as I stood from the bodies, but as I took a step away from the vault door, a group of Arnacript guards rounded the corner going past Chip. Then another group came, and there were soon twenty heavily armored and armed guards taking up a defensive position.
“You ten, escort Ms. Zerne and Mr. Lennox to their rooms,” Chip said a few seconds after the guards took up position.
“No, I will remain--”
“Ms. Zerne, the server room is secure. I don’t understand why you thought it was worth risking your life for, but I’m going to recommend a group of your men take you to your room and guard you there.” As Chip spoke another unit of guards turned the corner. A quick count gave me forty guards that I could see from my spot by the AI vault door.
Lion's Quest: Trinity: A LitRPG Saga Page 26