We didn’t waste any time. The datadeck and various items we figured looked reasonably valuable were piled up already, and we moved as one, grabbing them and stashing them away.
The ghoul at this end, the left-most one of the two as we entered the tunnel, had a pretty standard rifle, good scope and in good condition, admittedly, but that was it, nothing special. We split the ammo between the four of us, adding in all of what we’d found so far, which wasn’t much, unfortunately.
After we’d done that, I was left with a single full mag after the one I had in my rifle currently, a single goddamn shotgun cartridge—and that was the Devil’s Asshole, which was both awesome and frankly terrifying—plenty of ammo for the handgun, which was shit, and my knife.
Oh, as well as the two frags and the two flash-bangs. But that wasn’t the point. We were underground in tunnels that were a hair away from collapse; using a grenade when it wasn’t an absolute “us or them” situation was plain stupid.
Thankfully, I still had the two hundred rounds that I’d bought earlier—I’d not dumped them back at the guild—and I pulled a full box out of my bag, offering handfuls of bullets around.
The others stuffed their pockets quickly rather than reload now. We could load on the way, after all, and every step down the path was one away from whatever made that noise.
“Dammit, shame about the mods,” Reign snarled, shaking her head as she looked down at the ghoul. “I could have done with the creds.”
“Didn’t you do a load of missions already today?” I asked, and she nodded, clearly pissed.
“Mama has a way with cards,” she admitted after a brief pause that screamed that she was hiding something. Then she was checking her nearest body, clearly as unhappy as I was to leave without looting the area bare. “Or, more accurately, I fucking don’t.”
“Debt?” I asked.
“Maybe I’ll tell you one day, Kabutt.” She shook her head. “For now? We’ve got enough to worry about.”
“Okay, fuck it, move out,” I ordered, gesturing up the tunnel away from the scream as another echoed toward us, seemingly much closer.
We set off jogging, passing the bodies quickly, most of which we’d checked. But we’d not had time to do them all, and that became seriously obvious when we reached the second, or more accurately, the first ghoul.
The one that Reign had killed first was slumped against the wall, head down, chin resting on its chest, rifle laid by its side.
“Fuck!” Reign grunted, quickly slapping her rifle onto her back. The mag clamps held it in place as she crouched by the body.
“Leave it!” I ordered, gesturing to her to move.
“No chance! It’s a grazer!” she replied, reaching out and sweeping up the gun, checking it for damage.
“Fuck’s sake! How much charge?” I asked quickly, skidding to a halt and moving in. I ripped my knife free and made goddamn sure of the ghoul, then hesitated, and sawed the rest of the way through its neck and lifted the head.
It was almost all cybernetic, and I glanced over it, before cursing and dumping it. Was it worth something? Yeah, probably. Was it also fucked up?
Most definitely.
Reign’s shot had entered just above the painted-on eyebrow on the left-hand side of the face. It’d blown half the back of the skull out.
It wasn’t worth carrying something that size and heavy for a maybe, and I discarded it with a sigh. What was good, though, was when Reign searched the body and found three more batteries for the grazer.
“Got them. Fuck it, let’s go!” She grunted, climbing to her feet and clinging onto the grazer like it was her first-born.
“You okay carrying that?” I asked. The damn thing was much bigger than a standard rifle, twice the size of a laser and easily three times its weight. But the wild grin she gave me made it clear how she felt about it.
“I’ve been saving up for one of these,” she said breathlessly. “Or I was, you know, until…”
“Until the cards.”
“Yeah. Anyway, look, we get back? I’ll sign my share over to you fuckers if, you know…”
“That’s worth a fuckload more than your share,” Gessh said. “That’s what, thirty thou?”
“Fifty, new.” Reign sighed, shaking her head. “Okay, fine, but let me buy you guys out, all right? You wouldn’t use this, would you?” she asked the girls.
Luna smiled and shook her head, while Gessh hesitated, frowning.
“No, we wouldn’t,” I answered for all of us, seeing the glare from Gessh. “It’s a damn sniper’s dream, Gessh, you know it, and you’re a ground pounder all day long.”
“Fuck you!” she growled at me.
“Gessh!” Luna snapped at her sister.
“What? The evaluation is over, and—”
“We’ll let you buy us out,” Luna said. “And Gessh—he’s APS. He’s a damn ground pounder like us. The only difference is he’s in shinier armor.”
“I wasn’t dissing you,” I said. “I was in the army as a soldier first.”
“Yeah, well, it sounded like…” She paused, then shook her head. “Sorry, boss,” she whispered, almost too low to catch over the sound of our running feet.
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“Don’t worry.” I grinned, even though they couldn’t see it. “Besides, what am I gonna do? Court-martial you?”
“Point.” She grinned self-consciously. “Sorry, Reign,” she apologized, and Luna spoke up as well.
“We’re used to people trying to fuck us over.”
“You’re girls, you’re half-orcs, and you’re mercs.” Reign laughed. “Believe me, I get it.”
“Yeah, you’re an elf, though…humans love you fuckers,” Gessh said. “Spend all their time trying to get some elf ass. So do all the races.”
“Yeah, there’s a reason there’s so much elf porn.” Luna laughed over the sound of our feet, all four of us on the edge of hysteria from the adrenaline high, the fear, and the encroaching darkness.
I bit my tongue, not sure whether I wanted to agree, or stay the fuck outta this conversation, being the only male.
“What about you, Sarge?” Reign asked after a few seconds of silence. “You like elf ass?”
“Fuck’s sake,” I muttered under my breath, before shrugging. Might as well admit to it. It was too much to hope they’d have left me outta it. “Yup, what can I say? Elves have the best asses. Half-orcs have better tits, though.”
Considering that was a minor detail that was well commented on, I knew it’d come up next, and just threw it under the bus as well.
“Really?” Luna gasped, pretending to be shocked. “I can’t believe you’ve been looking! Shame on you, soldier!”
“Yeah, can we claim for workplace harassment?” Gessh joked.
“Maybe later,” Reign said. “I think we’re a bit too busy right now. And besides, who’d watch the tunnel if we all start harassing him? I mean, he’s the only guy here…”
“I could go for some group ‘her-ass-ment,’” I added in, grinning at the groans from the others.
“Oh damn, Sarge, that just killed the conversation!” Luna replied sadly after a few seconds.
“It was terrible,” Reign agreed, glancing back behind us, then stumbling and screaming, “DOWN!” as she dove for the floor.
I did it instantly, without thinking, hitting the rough fractured stone of the old passageway and rolling as something whooshed overhead, striking the wall a dozen meters ahead where the passage took a turn to the left.
The wall exploded. A great gout of red and yellow flames washed over us. The sonic and pressure shock waves made the tunnel shake as Reign twisted around and fired.
“What the fuck?” I groaned, shaking my head, stunned. “RI, isolate attack!” The RI, used to working with me in my APS armor, responded as it’d been programmed.
Breaker-217 anti-personnel rocket identified, likely launched from a Pinnacle Assault Systems single-shot launch device. Est. location, 37m to the rear of formation.
I rolled, blinking, my ears ringing as I locked in on the rough location my RI indicated.
“Ping!” I ordered, and it sent out a generalized identification ping. It was a seriously basic friend-or-foe identifier. But what the civilian world always forgot was that when you used military kit?
It came with military back doors.
The launcher responded instantly, pinging its location to the military request, and I zeroed in on it, sighting and opening fire with my rifle as I muttered under my breath to the RI.
“Share target location with local team!”
My vision telescoped for a second, then zoomed out, before zooming in and clearing up as the zoom settled. The glowing red eyes of a specter shifted from staring at us, to glance at the launcher on its shoulder, then focused in on me, presumably as it identified the source of the ping.
“Firing!” Reign shouted. The grazer rifle, a long and seriously heavy-duty bit of kit, hummed for a second, then fired again. Ports along its length opened to discharge the additional heat with a sudden wash of it into the tunnel.
“Switch!” I ordered Reign, staring at the specter that was right at the outer edge of my darkness-piercing vision. “It’s a fucking specter! Use the solid shots!”
“Still got flesh,” she disagreed, slapping the discharge ports closed and aiming again. The specter slowly drifted into clearer sight of us all. “Fuck! Switching!” Reign finally agreed as she took in the actual condition of the enemy before us.
Specters were rumored to come in different grades, like the ghoul did over the standard specter, growing more and more powerful as they evolved past the limitations of their humanity. But this?
It was horrifying, and utterly inhuman.
It floated along, lit by the ungentle light of repulsors, stuttering and flaring, barely keeping it aloft. It stared at us, the half skull and its glowing red eyes extended before it on a cantilever arm; its lower jaw was missing and the upper made even more terrible by the glowing eyes shining out from a skull that had an old national flag painted across it.
“Fuck me…” Reign gasped in horror. “We need to run!”
“Kill that fuck!” I countermanded, sighting down my rifle at it, and letting fly with a quick three-round burst.
As soon as I fired, though, the creature seemed to re-awaken, twisting and zeroing in on me. A second launcher cranked into position, rolling up from its back to lock into place over its shoulder, aligning on us.
“Move!” Reign bellowed, scrambling to her feet and turning tail, struggling with her massive rifle and her normal one as well.
“What the fuck!” I screamed at her, firing again. My bullets cracked the air between us and my target, before bouncing off. Bright flares of light from the ricochets added to the blue glow of the repulsors.
It reached out one hand; long arms that were never designed to be human, looking as though they’d been ripped from a robotic assembly plant, clacked and flexed.
“Trust me and run!” echoed back down the tunnel from Reign, and Luna’s voice rang out next.
“Boss?” she shouted. “I can’t even see the fucker!”
“Fuck!” I snarled. The red light of the targeting laser on the launcher blinked to life. “Run!” I roared, forcing myself up and turning. I ran as fast and as far as I could, but I’d barely made it a few meters before the rocket hit the floor behind me, and I screamed. The blast picked me up and hurled me through the air.
I crashed into the wall, then the floor, bouncing, rolling, and more than a little on-fucking-fire before a pair of hands, then another grabbed me and started dragging, as a high-powered shot rang out, then another from somewhere nearby.
“Fucking fuck!” I heard Reign screaming as she fired again and again. “Run, you idiots!”
“Wha…?” I mumbled, my bell well and truly rung. My helmet’s faceplate spiderwebbed with cracks and symbols; warnings and the wraparound vision that was projected onto it flashed and flared as the basic systems tried to compensate for the damage.
I stumbled and pushed myself upright, clambering over a mass of rubble, dragged this way and that by the sisters as they ran, half carrying me.
“Move, move, move!” Reign bellowed, as they—and I—made it around the corner. The screech from our pursuer made it clear it wasn’t happy. “Grenades!” she snapped, suddenly before me, and ripped them off my chest rig. “Gimme and fucking run!”
“Mine!” Gessh corrected her, snatching one of them and shoving at her shoulder. “I can run faster and throw harder than you, elf!”
“HALF-elf!” Reign grumbled, not that anyone was paying attention.
“What…the…” I tried, getting a foot under me to take my weight, before I was unceremoniously spun around and thrown over Luna’s shoulder, hoisted in a fireman’s carry as she started to run.
“Bundle them all up…” I heard from somewhere behind. A second later, as Luna was complaining in a determined voice about how “fucking heavy ass” I was, I heard the sound of running feet.
“Go, go, go!” Reign shouted as she passed us. Her longer legs made short work of the distance as I muzzily tried to make sense of the world.
The next thing I knew, I was dumped on the floor, rolling and shaking my head, trying to get back up as someone grabbed me and dragged me in close.
I blinked, confused to all hell, then winced as someone put a hand on the back of my head and tried to put my face down closer to my crotch than the gods ever intended I could go.
“Stay down!” Luna bellowed, before the world dissolved in light, fire, and sheer sensory overload.