The group he was following finally entered a tower along the outer edge of the allotted zone. The grace period has just ended, and the amount of gunfire is deafening due to the area being in a closed environment.
This was also the reason for the three to enter the tower, they just hated the noise, apparently.
Alfred entered through a window and found a nearby staircase that the three didn't go up in order to follow them. He could now tell what floor they were on by the sound of their footsteps because the frequency of shots fired rapidly dropped after the first minute and a half.
He noticed they were less drunk than before from their voices. 'Possibly some drug' he thought. 'Now I have to act fast for a clean sweep.' And after 14 floors of climbing, they finally came to a stop.
Alfred had a sinister smile on his lips. After this much walking and climbing with all of their equipment, they were all definitely groggy and tired. The distance they traveled was not small, and there were no gunshots near the area. Each one of them was completely blinded by hubris.
Slowly and quietly, watching his step, Alfred crept over to the room the group had posted up in.
Despite the efforts Edgewalk took to light up the place, the inside of buildings were still dark. Even the ghostly figure of Alfred would have been mostly hidden even if he didn't have on the clothes he did now. This led to an easy job inspecting the room before he fired away.
The one with the sniper was sitting against a wall behind a small and thin desk for "cover". He failed to realize that 1, his feet were sticking out, and 2, his gun was sticking out. So the only person it gives cover to is Alfred. The next one was the sniper that Alfred was targeting. He was looking out of the window, likely for picks.
Most suspicious was the third. He was completely silent and in the corner with his revolver in hand. The revolver itself was quite nice. It was quite a bit longer (relative to the ones Alfred had), and was almost totally black apart from the end of the barrel which had a light engraving of a crow. Its owner was feigning polishing it, however, both the safety and the hammer were both off and back respectively.
Alfred cracked yet another sinister grin, 'You sly bastard… so he wasn't drunk at all.'
A secret dangerous person had just accidentally revealed himself to Alfred. If he had opted to rush in, something might have happened.
Once the one behind the table had settled in, and the sniper was focused on finding a target, the third raised his weapon.
*Bang!~~~*
*Crack!!!~~~*
'!!!! Another sniper!'
Alfred now had the full picture, 'It was set up! This is even better for me!'
Acting quickly, he shot three shots into the third to make it seem to the sniper like one survived initially, and the third and the survivor got caught up in a short shootout.
From the bullet wound the hidden sniper shot into the first man, he was probably slightly lower down in the building directly across from the window. That meant that Alfred was able to sneakily take what he needed and hide somewhere else.
He did, in fact, get what he wanted. What he didn't expect was people to start rushing up the stairs on the lower floors.
"!!! Damn!" he whispered to himself.
There's only enough time to hide himself around some dark pillars farther in, as they reach the floor below him faster than he could sprint to the staircase.
'Just. My. Luck. The one group I was going to avoid!'
The majority of their members (8) seemed to be small fry. They also were the first ones up. Only a few pistols between them. The last 7, however, were strapped. Two men with what looked like Tommy-guns, two with shotguns, three snipers, and an actual gatling gun. 'Is this even fair? How can you test someone's skill when they have almost full body armor and a goddamn gatling-gun?'
The small fries poured into the rooms adjacent to the shooting to look for rats. 'That's why I didn't hide there,' He thought. The first one in the room of the massacre was a taller guy with a shotgun, then a second shotgunner. They both cleared the bodies as actually dead. That's when the sniper walked in the room.
'Assuming they aren't stupid, they'll know soon that someone else did it. I have to act, and fast!' Alfred thought to himself. Using the sniper he stole, he took aim immediately at the two guys with Tommy-guns.
As fast as he could so not a second of surprise was lost, he dropped the two men. As the others were reacting slowly (to him, who had HSM up), so he risked a shot on a third shotgunner who had just revealed himself in the heart since he was watching the staircase and had his head hidden. If possible, he would have killed the gatling-guy, but there were no vitals safe enough to be a one-shot.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Without wait, Alfred shot downstairs, not wanting to test the strength of the beams against a gatling gun. A few shots hit his previous position, but stopped shortly after. Alfred caught the gatling-gun guy yapping at his teammates orders and directions.
'If only I had grenades!'
As the team above him gave chase, another issue arose.
*Ssssiip!~*
*Bang!~*
Almost before it registered in his head, Alfred tilted his head, twisted his shoulders, pushed off a wall, and leaned back to dodge a sniper shot. It passed right under his nose.
'He's still up there!' Alfred was referring to the sniper who started this all. They hadn't moved from their perch, and even got a close shot in. For a moment, he hid behind the entrance to the stairwell he just nearly had his head blown off running down.
There was no way he could risk returning fire, as the other sniper had peeker's advantage, and time.
Despite the risk of exposure now that he was apparently on the same or similar levels as the outside sniper, Alfred zig zagged across the way to guarantee more cover. This gave the lackeys enough time to catch up.
As he slid into the next stairwell, he took a hail mary shot at two that were almost perfectly lined up. One took it to the solar plexus, while the other to their left lung. Neither were in good shape. His sniper was out of ammunition, so he decided to lie it on the stairs in hopes that someone would slip on it.
Alfred scrambled over the dusty floors to the opposite stairwell knowing they would continue to give chase despite their fallen comrade. 'I only saw three more there… That means!'
He had made a mistake. Just ten steps above him was at least three more. From the quick burst of HSM he allowed himself in that moment, he guessed that at least one of the shotgunners was there as well. At that moment of realization, his "trap" worked. One man tumbled down the steps he had just made down. That gave Alfred enough time to spare one shot during his HSM, which he took his time setting up seeing as he had limited himself to the low end of the second tier (giving him ~10 minutes per second). He was not in the highest tier he could manage currently for energy conservation reasons.
While pulling the trigger, he knew it would hit and began to turn his body so he could properly take the impact and return to running. 'Each tenth of a second wasted could be my last!' he rolled and quickly recovered to his feet. To his dismay, a hail of bullets rained upon his exit into the next level.
'The Gatling Gun Guy is already down below me?!?' (now called GGG).
He activated HSM once more. At this point, all the computing he was doing placed great strain on his mind, but he didn't care. In desperation, he swung himself out of the opening in the staircases to the outside and slipped into the floor below the man with the gatling-gun. There, he saw a barrel staring back at him. Not up close, but on the other side of the building. The only sniper on their team had gone further down and was preparing to fire at Alfred, believing him helpless.
The sniper would have been right, had he not had HSM up. With the time he was given, he found the most likely path the projectile would move and got his vitals out of the way. In the same motion, he fired a shot through the barrel of the gun and at the sniper's head. Sadly, he was clipped in his side, just grazing by his liver by the only shot the sniper could get off before he too, toppled to the ground.
Even before the blood started to flow, Alfred heard something fall down the stairwell behind him.
Without looking, he knew. Diving out of the way, the back of his coat was singed off by the resulting explosion. 'So they get grenades, but not me? Bullshit!'
That put him in an awkward position, forcing him to make an even worse dive for safety. Removing his coat and placing his knife in his mouth, Alfred sprinted towards a window and smashed through it, only just barely grabbing on to the remaining parts of the glass using the rapidly ripping sleeve of his now shredded coat.
With the momentum he had, Alfred swung/crashed through the window directly below him. In this moment, the old sniper in the other building finally hit a shot. This time, it cut deep.
"Mufher-"
He held his tongue. Now he had a hole through his gut. 'Nothing serious, I can continue on!'
Despite the time he had spent making his miraculous recovery from actual starvation, his small body was still weak. He was exhausted and rapidly losing blood.
'Now, I'll take the fight to them!'
He chose to instead run towards the stairwell with the shotgun. Stupid? Yes. Unexpected? Also yes. He knew that if he went to the other stairwell, he would die. GGG was definitely on his way, and not to forget the other ones on that stairwell, he had no other choice.
Scrambling to get up, he felt the burn in his legs and a sharp pain in his head (even if he couldn't really feel the pain *currently, he knew it subconsciously). Still, he continued.
With the maximum of level two HSM activated (giving him ~59 minutes to a second), he rounded the stairwell to see three faces completely unexpecting of him to appear there. In fact, they hadn't even reacted yet.
First, he dispatched the shotgunner. Next were the two other lackeys around him. He had to fan-fire so fast that the gun jammed on the last shot. Finally, he saw it in the last lackey's eyes that he had reacted. Alfred let go of the gun and grabbed his knife faster than the eye can see, and made a decent throw towards the man's eye.
Lucky for Alfred, his reaction was not to fire back, but to scream in pain. 'IDIOTS!'
Alfred was on top of the shotgun now, literally. So, he heaved it up and blasted the guy out the window.
"Damn!" he blurted out. 'This thing is fucking crazy!'
Since he now had to use the thing, he noticed how weird it actually was. A steam powered shotgun powerful enough to blast someone up and out of a stairwell! It was the first steam powered gun he had seen in this world, and it was not normal.
The logistics didn't matter now. All he knew is that the other lackeys had to be crossing over to him.
When he stood up to fire at the others, the ever so annoying sniper hit his lower spine.
'SHIT!'
If he wasn't going to fall over from the blood loss or the muscle fatigue, this did it. All control was lost over his lower body. As the three lackeys from the other stairwell drew nearer, everything went dark. That last shotgunner filled him full of lead.
…
…
"I got him!" the last shotgunner yelled out.
From a new looking CRTV screen, a young kid and what looked like a butler watched the final moments of Alfred's life. There were other screens, but nothing else had their attention.
"Holy cow! Ler, did you see that scrawny fuck? Damn, would it be nice if we had an assassin like that!" the kid said. "Hahahaha!"
The butler shook his head. "We could have stepped in, you know… someone with that much potential dying here? A waste, really. Pity."
"Pity indeed!" the kid agreed. "I should've thought of that…"
A short silence broken up by the panting chatter of the team that almost got wiped out by a single, starved, eight-looking year old with a pistol and four sniper shots.
"Oh well! On to the next one!"
"Yes sir."
"Hey Ler, would'ya be a doll and get me more popcorn?"
"..."
"Ler?"
"... y-yes, sir."
The kid looked at his butler for a second after, shrugged, and looked for another interesting scene.