Volper

by Ros Per

  - Got it! I’ll cover you! -

  Turning back, I quickly replaced the spent case with a new one, only with armor-piercing incendiary cartridges, since even if they hit and pierced through the bodies of the monsters, then the damage would also be dealt to the second row of monsters. Meanwhile, Elephant moved his aim toward the street, where I had been firing before, and aimed a couple of bursts in the monsters’ direction, after which I once more started shooting. After just 5 short bursts, he froze for a second, and when he started shooting again, he shouted at the same time, turning to me so I could hear him better:

  - We’re leaving, now! To the second entrance, the sixth floor! Sini and Buffoon are waiting for us there. -

  - “Roger that. Let’s act together, on your left side. We move on one-two-three,” I commanded, without even thinking about it.

  - What? -

  - “F***!!!” I scolded myself, realizing that I was giving commands the way I was used to, without even thinking if my partner was aware of the meaning. I whispered and explained everything in more detail. “We charge in turn, three meters each, covering each other, you constantly move along the left side, so as not to get clipped by my fire.”

  - Got it! Cover up. -

  - “Ok, I’m covering you up! Go!”

  The mobs are 150 meters away, there’s no sense in saving ammo anymore. Therefore, I moved the fire flag to automatic mode with my index finger and started shooting the enemy in small bursts. Elephant rushed to my left and was three meters behind me. We just need to move like that a couple of times - and we’ll be near the entrance. My adrenaline begins to flow hard, my consciousness gains increased sharpness, I feel braver. For each person, in a battle, the brain reacts in its own way. My mind, for example, becomes purer, and all doubts fly out of my head. Through the rushing adrenaline, I can hear the voice of Elephant.

  - Ready, cover up!

  I turn around over my right shoulder and run to a new position, changing the magazine case again on the go, even though there are still about half of the cartridges left inside. If you can, it’s better to change it since an extra cartridge can help a lot. Reaching my position, no sooner had I started firing, when I heard the voice of the machine gunner again.

  - I have to reload! -

  - “Shit happens, let’s move to the entrance, now; you can reload there.”

  Everything was going well, and then something unexpected happened: the machine gun box isn’t just a machine gun case for you; you can’t overcharge it, even for a second. The bulk of the mobs were already about 60 meters away from us, and I don’t know at all about the ones around the corner, they could’ve already been ten meters away. While Elephant is running to cover, I activate the mode Brand-axel, setting a three-hour Cooldown. But in this kind of situation, the skill performs at almost maximum efficiency. The neurointerface chooses the nearest targets by itself, completely emptying the case with a hundred and fifty cartridges, and I doubt that at least one of them could miss the monsters.

  As soon as he heard the dry click of the striker, which didn’t find the cartridge in the right place, I immediately began to swap out the case, simultaneously launching the “Position change” mode. I selected the porch with a look, choosing it as a preferred location. I managed to fasten the magazine case, but I didn’t have time to fire a bullet, because the activation of the skill had been triggered, not allowing me any more time, as I rushed to cover. The machine gunner showed up right behind the door and was already close to done with feeding a strip of ammo into his machine gun.

  - Go upstairs, where the others are, I will also join you. - Seeing my confusion, he added: -If all else fails, I will use my speed boost to get to you. - And when I started to go up, he called out to me again. - Volp, tell me if you have any grenades left? I’m running out. -

  - “Blinding, plasma, fragmentation, smoke.”

  - Fuck, yeah! You are well-prepared! Give me a couple of plasmas just in case. -

  “When I was getting into the building, the mobs had about fifty meters left before they’d reach us,” I said, passing along three plasma grenades, “they will appear at any moment.”

  - Ok, go and join the others. -

  I’d managed to go up only one flight of stairs before I heard the machine gun in action and the loud laughter of Elephant mingling with the sound of shooting. Well, it seems like he’s enjoying himself. I was met by Siniami when I reached the third floor, who looked like a parkour expert, jumping over the fences between flights of stairs.

  - Where is Elephant? -

  - “Down below.”

  - Damn, his alarm system’s been activated; we need to urgently pull him out! -

  Slipping past me, she performed amazing tricks. She was sliding down the steps almost without touching them. I had to turn around and descend again, because under the image of Elephant, the label of the buff, well, debuff, was blinking urgently. There was, however, another label to the right of the image, but the whole trio had it. Maybe it was just a group display, I don’t know, there’s no time to figure it out now. Practically sliding down the steps, I managed to notice how Siniami jumped on the back of the machine-gunner and injected some brown liquid into his head, and immediately after that, she jumped off his back again. A moment later, Elephant was lying on the steps. That didn’t seem right. Maybe something had gone wrong?

  - Volper, cover us, - Siniami shouted to me. Meanwhile, she moved to her partner and asked. - Well, baby mammoth, you’re not finished yet, right? -

  - “Yes, thank you, Sini. But I have forty more seconds left on the debuff to my coordination.”

  While they were chatting nicely, I kept the entrance in my sights, only there was no point in doing so just yet, because there was an obstacle in the doorway, in the form of the destroyed remains of the mobs. Although not quite, one corpse was moving, and the face of a new mob immediately appeared in the gap that had formed. After shooting a couple of rounds in there, I began to hurry the couple up.

  - “Go, damn it, go! The mobs will need less than a minute to gnaw their way through.”

  - Dude, don’t wait, shoot them for a couple of seconds, and then rush back upstairs.

  After that, he tried to get up, but he was still leaning to the side, and if Sini hadn’t supported him on his right side, he would’ve fallen again. I had a lot of questions. This group looked very strange, but I understood that now wasn’t the time to ask them anything. The only question that was bothering me was somewhat philosophical. Am I just incapable of using game slang? It would be a shame. I’d tried to get these terms, forcing myself to use the gaming words, and then I look at a player like one of these people and realize that I look like some kind of teenager who hasn’t learned to speak properly, but he has already picked up all sorts of words everywhere.

  Tearing myself away from such thoughts, I shot several more bullets into another monster, that was trying to get through the corpses and into the doorway. As soon as Elephant, with support from the girl, disappeared from view, going up to the second flight of stairs, I changed my position and took up a defensive one between the floors. In my opinion, now was the best time to move. Siniami helps the machine gunner climb a flight higher, after which I also go up a flight, defending them as I do so.

  I looked out of a small ventilation window, embedded in the wall between the floors. On the street, there were already other mobs gathering now, more sluggish, but at the same time, much better protected or much stronger than the previous ones. Very much like a spontaneous migration, or rather, the behavior of real animals during a heat wave and fires, when all animals run together in one direction, away from the threat. This is about the same: first, the fastest and most agile representatives of the fauna come in, followed by more massive creatures, which are slower, but also stronger than their fleet-footed brethren. If we continue with this analogy, then we are still waiting for a meeting with the largest representatives of the local animal kingdom, which are likely to be the most sluggish.


  We got bogged down on the fourth floor. Although Elephant, by that time, had been able to move on his own, he still couldn’t fight. Still, he was no longer leaning on the girl, which allowed Sini to cover me with pistol fire. Though I couldn’t call it actual firing: those places where her shots struck were covered with a crust of ice, and if she hit any limbs, they froze completely, a fact which I tried to use right away. Just one bullet was enough to destroy the frozen parts.

  - “Sini, hit the limbs!”

  - What for? The damage there is tiny, and you cannot kill them by shooting at a limb, only by aiming at vital organs-

  - “I will shoot at frozen: control, injury, debuff speed and mobility, bleeding,” I said, separating the phrases to save time.

  - Ok, that might work. -

  Since the start, by periodically looking through the logs, I’d discovered several patterns: the damage to the limbs is always minimal, gradually becoming more and more insignificant, and Siniami had rightfully pointed out that you can’t kill creatures by shooting their limbs. But she probably hadn’t paid attention to the fact that you can just shoot off the monster's paws and leave them to die of bleeding. We human beings can bandage and stop the bleeding, but they don’t use bandages and therefore, they can bleed to death. Well, except for those monsters who have increased regeneration abilities. Although, admittedly, if we don’t cause any bleeding and just break its paws, then the monster won’t die anyway, of course.

  I agree that if you just want to hunt the mobs, then you have to hit them where it counts on their bodies, or shoot them in the head, where critical hits can be had, and if you hit them successfully, you can kill the monster with one shot. This saves a lot of ammunition and speeds up the process of hunting. I suspect that the game developers had wanted to make everything closer to reality: if you broke your arms and legs, it wouldn’t mean that you were killed, you’d get a bunch of debuffs and keep rolling, almost with full hit points. And if you make a small hole in a particularly delicate place – you immediately get a corpse. There were other factors to consider, but the gist was that, normally, vital areas, or hitting as close to them as possible, was the way to go. Not for us, however, our situation required a new approach

  The new tactics proved to be quite good. Gradually retreating, we shot monsters in various limbs, after which they had a hard time reaching us. Siniami was now trying to hit only the limbs, freezing them, and I would be ready to break the frozen limb with one shot, limiting their mobility. At the moment when I needed to reload, she would immediately switch to automatic fire, doing more of an area freeze. Also, I was very surprised when I realized that she didn’t have a normal firearm in her hands, but a needle gun. After all, I’d initially thought her shots being so quiet was due to sound absorbers. But everything turned out to be much simpler: she was simply firing darts charged with a certain filling, in this case, cryo-capsules. And then, when we were close to Buffoon, she gave me some bad news.

  - That's it, no more freezing. I’ll charge the burst grenades! -

  - Get away!

  I threw a couple of grenades out of my pouch, practically one after the other, at the monsters rushing to our position atop the stairs. Then I turned around and picked up speed with a few steps, jumping over the steps. And from the middle of the span, I tried to dive with a pike onto the floor platform, and after a hard landing, using my whole body, I pressed myself to the cold cracked concrete, almost kissing the floor. Both explosions sounded, one after the other, raising a cloud of cement dust. For the fourth time in a row, I chose to use the rolling skill, and only then did I realize that it was on Cooldown. I’d used it after the laboratory, when I went down to the street. I had to act on my own, and, pressing my chin to my chest, I tried to get the foe in my sight.

  At that moment, there was no one, but at any time, another monster might appear. I crawled on my back, without taking my eyes off the stairs. Then, behind me, someone grabbed me by the collar and, in one movement, that knocked the breath out of me, threw me into one of the doorways. It turned out that I’d managed to crawl on my back all the way to the very feet of Elephant, and, without thinking twice, he’d decided to hurry me along like that. Now I was only watching the back of the machine gunner, who had already managed to leave his machine gun somewhere, and he had no backpack either.

  But that drop-shaped plate now rested on the forearm of his left hand and was sparking with yellow energy flashes. And the handle with all the incomprehensible devices now no longer looked awkward - the tips of the plates were connected by a laser beam, forming a semblance of an ax blade. While I was trying to realize what was happening, Elephant, already fully recovered, began to issue commands.

  - Sini, give us some buffs, and charge the under-hill! Buffoon, activate the bars, when I go defend, we will check if they can cut the mobs at the same time. Volp, thanks for covering me, you can rest for now. -

  Siniami, quickly changing the magazine case in one of her pistols to a bright red one, surprised me by throwing a line of needles into the back of Elephant, applying many buffs to him. It seems to me that she hasn’t only got needles for fighting, but all kinds of chemical substances as well.

  - “Bar test,” came Buffoon’s voice, from the depths of the room.

  - OK! - Elephant answered instantly and closed with his shield.

  Directly in front of him, for a split second, two layers of energy barriers appeared, unfolding from wall to wall, with a space of fifteen centimeters between the layers, after which they immediately disappeared. Only now did I notice that the elements needed to form the barriers had been placed along the walls, and the wires from them stretched along the junction of the wall and floor, in the direction of the engineer.

  - “Well, now I’m starting to remember my paladin years, when I was younger” the machine gunner practically muttered ... or was it more correct to say a berserker? “Well, Centuria, let’s show this guy what our clan is all about!”

  He didn’t even have time to finish, as the first monster appeared in the corridor, and was immediately cut into two uneven halves. The edges of the cuts slightly smoked after contact with the laser ax.

  CHAPTER XXIII: BREAKTHROUGH. PART TWO

  Twenty minutes of bloody fighting passed. That’s how long we managed to withstand the onslaught of the monsters. We tried to hole up in a small corridor leading from the landing to the rooms, which likely used to be apartments. Elephant managed to fight for three or four minutes, and then he had to retreat, under the cover of a machine gun that Buffoon had mounted on a tripod in the corridor. He rested for two minutes, and then he rushed into battle again, cutting yet more monsters into pieces, sometimes using a knob located on the reverse side of the laser blade, which turned out to be a pulse hammer.

  During all of that, Siniami systematically played the role of support, deftly combining the needles in her pistols with various injections of combat chems, preventing Elephant from being left without buffs, and, if necessary, she added regeneration mixtures that spurred the body on very strongly, up to the point that small wounds healed in literally twenty seconds. That's how these miracle substances worked.

  Elephant had already gotten the overly medicated debuff, reducing the effects of all injections by forty percent, and even giving him ten percent disorientation. At that moment, I was practically superfluous to the team, and all my desire to help was reduced to just equipping machine gun belts with new cartridges. On the other hand, by listening to Buffoon, I was able to learn many interesting things.

  Their group has been taking part in other virtual projects for a while, and was previously a fairly large clan. But with the creation of the new city, the clan had decided to move on to this project, because the main team was bored with the previous one. To put it another way, they’d decided to try their luck in a new genre. But, things didn’t go very well for them, from the very beginning. Most of the people were scattered around various outposts, and they lost touch with some of them. As
a result, they’d decided to register the clan in the outpost where the greatest number of their people was. Because of all this, of course, they had been a little late with registration and hence hadn’t received the achievement of the first clan. Now they were trying to strengthen their clan, scouting potential hunting places.

  As it turns out, there are almost two dozen registered clans in this outpost at the moment, but only three clans have any real strength by current standards: The Centurions, The Wolves and The Tempest. However, it must be noted that these clans have divided the territory around the outpost using directions, focusing on the cardinal points, leaving the fourth direction to other, smaller clans. True, there are still two quite noticeable clans beside those three, but one is targeted at crafters, and the second is positioning themselves as mercenaries.

  Most of the cyborgs had gone to join them, and they provided almost a full range of services: from the ordinary transportation of the remains of mobs or other booty to providing a full group for combat support. But relationships among the players are very fragile and can change drastically at any time.

  Buffoon admitted to me that these herds of monsters have ruined their plans. He had been keeping in touch with the officers of the clan through letters via the neural interface. Their clan had already lost two buildings, in response to which the system took ownership of the property away from them immediately, as soon as these buildings had been flooded with mobs and no people had been left to defend them. We agreed that such a big population of mobs wouldn’t allow small clans to grab a bunch of locations for themselves, to add to their property. After all, as they say, if you can’t protect your property, then it won’t be yours anymore.