Everything other than the target, the immediate environment, and his fellow combatants fell out of Nathan’s perception.
This was not because he was hyper-focused or lacked, in that moment, situational awareness. He had always been quite good at maintaining an overall strategic grasp of the situation, where that was managing a variety of bases simultaneously in a grand strategy game or judging the flows of a party so that he could smoothly move from anodyne conversation to tiresome conversation without talking with self-important and brilliant genocidal monsters or, worse, tedious ones.
No, it was not any fault of Nathan’s that he could no longer see the billboard or the seven suns in the sky. It was the gray delimiter in the air, that spherical bubble outside of which nothing could be seen. It sprang up between one breath and the next, surrounding the three people on foot on one side and the eight-legged Flatlander war machine on the other.
And in that designated space, the barrels of a rather large number of guns tracked slowly towards the human and his two new friends. Though, conveniently for the three’s desire to live at least a little bit longer, the figures staffing those guns stiffened as Tiffany’s gun spoke with a murmured pfftang twice, three times, and then a fourth. The gunners began dancing, booted feet striking the metal of their positions and bringing up sparks, and a moment later they were all tumbling off in paroxysms of joy as they lost their footing.
“High,” called out Bob calmly as he started to stride steadily forwards, pulling a pair of long-barreled pistols through the fabric of his bodysuit. “Three, three, close.”
“Low, three, three!” Tiffany ejected her cartridge and slung her rifle around in one smooth motion as she bounded forwards, muscles coiling under her. “That means move, Nathan! You’re our closer! Get your munchies on!”
“Munchies,” Nathan muttered. “Really?”
Still, he broke into a run as a not-quite-deafening crack erupted from one of Bob’s pistols. There was a streak in the air and then an explosion as the not-exactly-projectile, labeled briefly on Nathan’s HUD as self-propelled subsonic miniaturized conversion round, made riotous contact with its target. It erupted in a pillar of flame, held off from the skin of the vehicle by the sudden appearance of a blue mesh; and then the second shot hit, and the blue mesh shattered into shards that ripped apart a half-dozen of the fractal triangle weaponeers.
They bled black and the explosion of blue sent the mech rocking unsteadily from side to side—seven guns of various calibers fired, missing them all by a wide margin—as Nathan closed his right eye against a sudden migraine, brought on by the uneven magnification of that eye and his visor’d left one. At the same moment, a thumping, grinding sound started up, and the metal from his arm and wrist rushed to take its place back up.
“Is this… fight music?” He asked himself the question rhetorically as he picked up his run, feet slamming first against the impossibly hard ground and then suddenly finding easier footing on deep grass. “Bagpipes? Electric bass and cool muted drums?”
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“Oh, you have audio pickups! Smart. Diegetic music can help you figure out when you’re in danger.” Tiffany smirked as Nathan glanced over. Shaking her head as he slowed down, she stopped suddenly to drop to one knee and bring up her rifle. “Go! We’re your cover, you’re our closer!”
“It’s just that I know this song!” Despite his protestation, he obediently picked his pace back up, yelling into the headwind of his run. “Why is a cyberpunk dystopia alternative universe full of weird shit playing a song that I know?”
“That’s because The Sidh exists in every world,” Bob said to his left.
Nathan startled, to Bob’s clear amusement, and a loud whine started up to their right as they kept running. A series of loud, high-pitched splatting sounds were followed by the cracking of supersonic munitions as hand-sized holes appeared across the body of the mech. A dozen rounds in, Tiffany’s rifle had tracked its way across the main body of the tank and found the point where one of the legs joined the body—and the sound of her rifle shifted into a low scream that built up over the course of two seconds and then loosed its charge in one go.
Overcapacity penetrating railgun round, Nathan’s visor informed him, and the joint of the leg blew apart in a mess of metal, black blood, and rainbow oilshine a second before every gun that was facing them fired in turn.
Even through the metal buffers of his adhoc earbuds, the mass eruption of fire from an entire broadside of assorted weapons rattled his brain and left him disoriented. The fusillade, however, missed almost entirely as the eight-legged mech pitched diagonally, not having expected the rifle round to effectively dismember an appendage.
Almost entirely.
“Well, fuck!” Bob’s snarl came loud and clear from where his head and upper torso had just been turned into a red mist by a high-caliber anti-tank round. It had simply gone through him, neither exploding nor deviating in its path, and his pistols floated in the air as the rest of his body belly-planted on the grass. “Okay, Last Breath, and if you win this duel I’m still making a profit,” he allowed, apparently mollified by something unknown to the other two. “Last shots!”
“Go!” Tiffany yelled as she sprinted past Nathan, 80 miles per hour popping onto his visor as she passed him.
Nathan went, but he also glanced over his shoulder to see Bob’s pistols turn slightly in mid-air before starting to glow red. His eyes went back to where he was running as he almost tripped over his own two feet, and then the roar of the pistols blotted out the bagpipes.
For a moment, but only for a moment; and then it was pipes again and a soft high-pitched whine.
There was no shield to interdict the pistol shots this time. They punched into two of the legs just under the body, blowing holes in them large enough to fit a small antimatter explosion in—which was a span substantially wider than the legs themselves. This had predictable results, salutary ones from Nathan’s perspective, as the now-five-legged mech began to waver and wobble. A seeming swarm of metatriangular sophonts streamed out and away, scattering as if by a prearranged system. They danced and cavorted as they leapt, slid, climbed, or rappelled down the ten- to thirty-foot drop to the ground, depending on where they were to begin with.
Tiffany fired once more, and in the moments that followed, the Flatlander war machine toppled fully over and slammed to the ground in a roaring crash.