Lieu didn’t try to argue with Phon over their starting order. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. Instead, he just grabbed the bazooka on his back and fired it straight into the fault. He continued this until he entirely ran out of ammo, producing a decent sized crater added to the already craterous fault.
Once the dust had settled, Lieu chucked the now worthless bazooka to the side and jumped into the pit. With Starbits on all sides, there was virtually no chance of missing any shots, so he didn’t need to worry about accuracy. The Guerilla pulled out four submachine guns but let two dangle. He pulled the trigger of the top two with his pointer fingers and the bottom two with his pinkies. Then, he waved his arms around like sprinklers of death, overwatering the Starbits to the afterlife.
Countless empty shells littered the ground around his feet. Each submachine gun had a belt of ammo feeding into it, so he wouldn’t run out anytime soon. One of the first major purchases he’d made once he started making decent money as a mercenary, besides his vast arsenal, was a cleaning robot that would follow him around and pick up all the casings. Too many prissy clients had complained about him leaving such a mess.
He wasn’t using it at the moment since it’d just get caught on some Starbits. Whether he’d use it at all when this was over, he hadn’t decided yet. Lieu didn’t really see the need to pick up trash at the bottom of a fault that no one would ever see, but he’d do whatever Creti told him.
In fact, he actually liked having someone else in charge of his life again. It had been a long time since he’d been a proper soldier, but it was a feeling he missed. He now had a sense of belonging and purpose again that had eluded him for the longest time. Even if his new commander was a bossy, scrawny, pathetic-looking girl that was much younger than him, he still admired her as a leader.
Once Lieu had run his rampage with the submachine guns for a while, he decided to switch to a pair of shotguns. It wasn’t due to running out of ammo or that it wasn’t efficient enough. He’d just gotten bored. That was what most of his arsenal was for. They were all good at killing things, but he liked to mix things up.
Over the next… however much time—felt like hours—Lieu worked his way through dozens of weapons, returning to his giant trunk of goodies at the top of the fault’s rim whenever he needed to swap out a few things at a time.
He killed Starbits with assault rifles, grenades, a minigun, and a flamethrower. At some point, he also briefly used a liquid nitrogen sprayer to freeze the Starbits which he’d proceed to smash with a comically large sledgehammer. There were plenty of other weapons that he didn’t bother with since they were too precise and unfit for a large horde like this, such as his sniper rifles.
When he’d moved onto his machine pistols, something that had been bugging him finally drove him over the edge. “Are you ever going to do anything?!” Lieu stopped firing and pointed his guns at Phon. “Or are you just conceding defeat without even trying?! At least move out of the way if you’re just going to sit around. Having to aim around you is pissing me off.”
Phon had been doing as he said to an extent. She’d followed him soon after he’d jumped into the fault, but she’d just been sitting on a random rock in the cleared zone ever since. “Pfft,” the woman laughed to herself. “You couldn’t hit me even if you tried.”
“Oh, yeah?!” Lieu swapped out one of his pistols to a non-lethal round. It was something he rarely used, avoiding it whenever possible, but still carried on him at all times in case of emergencies. Once it was loaded, he fired a shot at Phon without warning, but she vanished before he even finished pulling the trigger.
“Damn it! Sit still will you?!” A few dozen more quickshots fired off before Lieu finally gave up since Phon had managed to teleport out of the way of every single one.
“That’d defeat the point then, wouldn’t it?” Phon brazenly teleported right in front of him, only a few feet away, so he could even reach out and strike her if he wanted. But he didn’t try, accepting that she was untouchable.
“If you’d put that much effort into killing these things, maybe we’d be done by now,” Lieu actually chastised her. “Bet your brother won’t be happy once he sees you’ve been slacking off.”
“But I haven’t been slacking off?” she mocked his assessment. “I haven’t been keeping an accurate count—that’d be impossible—but if I had to guess, I’d say I’ve been responsible for roughly 60% of these Startbit’s deaths to your 40%.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“How in the frozen hell is that possible?” the Fiend winced as if he’d heard a wild delusion come out of her mouth. “You haven’t even lifted a damn finger.”
“No, but you have,” the Greater smirked at him. “Many, many fingers. You buy the good stuff, right? Ammo, I mean. It surely has more punch and piercing potential than the standard stuff, yeah?”
“Of course, so what are you getting at?” he was about to run out of patience.
“Collateral damage, my fine fellow,” Phon’s mocking raised an octave. “You must have noticed by now, right? There’s way more corpses than there ought to be. Until they vanish, at least. Maybe you thought they were reproducing that fast? Nope, just been me.”
Lieu merely scowled at her, not deigning her with a response, so she suggested. “Go on then, continue your work. And I’ll prove to you how I’m winning right now.”
He took the bait, err, suggestion and resumed his mass slaughter. “Right hand, 218°, -11° vertical. Firing, firing, firing, done. Left hand, 145°, 23° vertical. Firing firing, moved to the right 6°, firing, firing, firing, firing, continuous drift of one degree down, two to the left. Firing, firing, firing, done.”
“Right hand grabbing a molotov you think is hidden. Throwing at an arc… would take too long to say the numbers. Left hand switching back to shotgun strapped to your leg, aiming at…”
Lieu suddenly stopped all action and swung back at Phon. He didn’t try to aim at her, but just glared with confusion and anger. “My Curse lets me know exactly what you’re doing at every moment, even where you’re aiming. Don’t worry, it can’t read your mind. Whatever few and boring thoughts you have in there are safe. Here, I’ll make it more obvious for you exactly what I’m doing. Back to fighting.”
Just to get her to shut up more than anything else, Lieu returned to blasting. Except now when he fired, the Starbits weren’t hidden behind the others anymore. Phon plopped them right in front of his shot, to the point where the ones he’d aimed at barely even got scratched. A few more attempts later, and he’d only killed a small handful of the ones he’d intended while killing hundreds for Phon. He really was doing all the work for her.
Lieu was clearly frustrated, but he wasn’t going to give up. He planned to go retrieve his minigun, since at least that would punch through everything. Phon found his agony almost adorable, especially since she’d been bluffing to an extent. She had no real way of knowing how many he’d killed that she moved. In fact, everything around her was just a big blur.
All she could see was the pocket of empty space they were standing in and could vaguely see the other pockets off in the distance with the others. Since there were so many Starbits, her Curse couldn’t identify them individually.
Phontext had been telling Phonscience where Lieu had been aiming, and then she had just been guesstimating an armful to grab and shoved them in whatever gaps she could find. It was still effective, but not as effective as she’d made it out to be. Somehow, she needed to figure out how to manipulate him in a better way.
“Why haven’t you been using your Curse?” Phon inquired. “Well, you’ve tried a few times, but it’s never lasted more than a few seconds. I’ve heard that happens to a lot of guys, but still…” She didn’t really know what that meant specifically, just that it tended to piss men off with a high success rate.
“The damned things won’t attack me properly,” the Fiend was getting aggravated just thinking about it. “I hate hunting something that won’t fight back or even try to run, and my Curse only works when I’m in danger.”
Phon grabbed the closest Starbit and pelted it at Lieu. He didn’t even flinch and reflexively shot it out of the air even without using his Curse. “Did that count as me or the Starbit attacking you?”
“Hmm…” Lieu thought about it for a moment. “The Starbit, actually. What’s your point, though? Gonna start pelting them at me? I can’t see how that would make things any faster.”
“Something along those lines,” Phon pulled out her yo-yo for the first time that day. “Just get ready to fight and stand still. This will be unrelenting, so it’s time for you to prove how good you really are.”
She spun the yo-yo’s ring to its purple setting and flung it above Lieu’s head. The yo-yo thinned and flattened into a wide circular platform with the top disc spinning rapidly, keeping it hovering in mid-air. Given the terrain, there was nothing nearby that could accomplish her idea for her, but at least she had this as a solid substitute. She could only teleport living beings to another surface after all, even if that surface was upside down.
The first Starbit appeared on the bottom of the yo-yo. It then plopped unenthusiastically onto Lieu’s head before it bounced off and fell to the ground. Then more came, not just a few, but hundreds. They all poured down on his body like a torrential rain, burying him alive.
Phon paused for a moment since nothing was happening. All of a sudden, Starbit’s burst away from the pile in every direction, just leaving Lieu standing there with guns in both hands and a mad grin on his face.
“Yes! This will work. Keep them coming, Phon Drazah, and don’t stop even if you think I’m going to die. Fog. Of. War!” Fog started pouring out of Lieu’s eyes. When the next wave came and started barraging him, he dropped his gun and pulled out his two favorite machetes. Slice and dice, he brutally cut up every single Starbit before it could even touch the ground, as if he was cutting away the sky itself.