When Chase returned from the range feeling like he’d shot so many bullets that the smell of bullet smoke might never leave his skin, he found the Ballistic office in a state of uproar. He entered the office around ten o’clock in the morning — about the time when most of the staff were around and some of the Hunters were lounging in the lobby, waiting for Jenny to direct them to a Raid — and before he knew it, he’d been sucked into a raucous celebration. Party poppers blasted around him like tiny gunshots, Hunters ran through the gaps between cubicles, chasing each other and using their less-destructive techniques, and even Marg could be seen bopping her head to the loud music someone had set playing.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked no one in particular. Walking through the office space toward the stairs that led to his office was like striding down a hall during a king’s coronation.
And when he saw Jamie coming down the stairs with a paper crown on his head and a fluffy white cloak thrown over his shoulders, he thought that might just be what was happening.
Jenny walked behind him, and when Jamie got to the bottom of the stairs, she stayed halfway up the flight, cupping her hands around her mouth and crying out.
“With the power vested in me by me, myself and I, I give you Jamie McAllister, Ballistic’s very first S-Rank Hunter!”
The cheers redoubled as Jamie bowed to the room. His face was red with embarrassment, but he still seemed to be enjoying himself.
Chase couldn’t believe it. He could see how much Jamie was improving, and the pace at which he was doing so was difficult to keep up with. But still, the younger man had confided in him after the Two City Disaster that he felt like he was still far behind the capabilities of even the other A-Ranks. And to think that now he was being put on the same pedestal as Nebula…
Then again, she was undoubtedly at the upper echelon of S-Rank, teetering towards Ultra. Jamie couldn’t have taken out the massive beast that Chase had watched her destroy, unless there’d been some drastic changes while he was gone.
He strode up to the newly crowned king and slapped him on the shoulder. On top of the guild’s recent growth, this would propel them once again to the front of everyone’s minds, and perhaps the front pages, too.
“Unbelievable, mate,” was all Chase could say.
“Thanks,” Jamie said. “Now get me out of this room before I dissolve into a puddle of embarrassment.”
With only a bit more celebration, Chase managed to extricate Jamie from the mob of hyped-up guild members. They escaped down the street to a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served pork gyoza and nothing else. It was a bit early for the lunch rush, but they whipped up a couple serves for the two customers sitting in the corner.
“So I guess you’ll be looking for a pay raise, now,” Chase said. Getting the business matters out of the way first seemed right, rather than dancing around the topic while they ate.
Surprisingly, Jamie brushed him off. “Nah. That’s the least of my concern. You’ve been generous to us, or I suppose Jenny has. I hear she has her grip on the purse strings around here.” He gave Chase a sly grin.
“She sure does, and that’s just the way I like it,” Chase answered. “Majesty was wasting her talents, that’s for sure.”
“That’s how you met her? I never knew that.”
Chase nodded, trying to pick up a dumpling with his chopsticks. It slid around his plate, evading him, so in the end he just stabbed it. “Yep. She was pretty much my boss’s delegate, but I was more scared of her than him. When I started Ballistic, I figured that’s the kind of person I wanted working with me. But don’t distract us from the main topic: Why is a pay raise such a bad thing?”
Jamie laughed and grabbed a menu, hiding half his face. “Well, I talked to a couple of my mates who work at some other guilds. They’re B and C-Ranks, so it’s a bit different, but they told me they have to buy all their armour and gear themselves, and even their salaries are lower than what you offered us. So I feel like we’ve got it pretty good already, you know? I don’t want to rob you blind.”
“Gah,” Chase replied. “It just makes sense as far as I’m concerned. You lot do twice as many Raids as the other guilds do, something three times more.”
Jamie still looked uneasy, but he accepted it.
“So S-Rank, huh? How’s it feel?”
“Odd. I feel like reaching S-Rank was supposed to be a goal to last me a lifetime, and now I don’t know what to aim for next.”
Chase nodded along. He’d been waiting for him to say something like that.
“What if I gave you a new goal? One that can really last you a lifetime?”
The S-Rank looked up, curiosity clear on his face. “Depends, what is it?”
Chase put down his chopsticks and sat straight. He ideally would’ve made this offer in a location with more meaning than their local lunch-spot, but Jamie had moved forward the timeframe by advancing so fast.
“How do you feel about leading a whole new arm of the guild?”
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*******
In the days that followed, Chase sent his eight Talentless recruits off to the range to train under Darryl’s tutelage. He wanted them to get proper training from the start, and they also needed to pick out weapons for themselves. Some of them had already expressed plans during the recruitment process, but most of them had no idea what kind of weapon would suit them best. Chase had prioritised hiring recruits with good characters and ambition rather than a particular fascination with guns.
They knew what they were getting in to.
Of course, allowing them to select weapons that suited them would naturally create variation in the power of his new Hunters. Those able to handle more powerful weapons would be able to handle more dangerous Gates, and would therefore need higher grade armour than the others. He was fine with some variation, though. There was always smaller Gates to be conquered, and he didn’t want to waste his own more tailored weapons and bullets, or the other resource that constantly strained him. His time.
After hitting the one-kilometre shot, he had succumbed to buying the Blaser sniper rifle as well as a significant hoard of the 7.62x51mm bullets that it shot. Herb had gone to work immediately, imbuing them with a concoction of Nebula’s crystal shards (conveniently harvested from Two City) blended with a generous helping of a sticky turquoise gel that they purchased from a B-Rank nicknamed Hestia. Her speciality was immobilising magic — apparently, a dose of her magic on a weak monster would freeze it in place for upwards of ten seconds, and it could make more powerful monsters lethargic. Herb had also finished his prototype for the Dolothin grenades, where razor-sharp pieces of Dolothin shell replaced the usual shrapnel.
They were to be handled very carefully.
Already, they had offers flowing in for their patented techniques. Some of the numbers were astronomical — enough to outfit the entire guild with some seriously advanced armour — but Jenny remained hard-headed in all negotiations. She would not sell. Not for anything.
Instead, Chase turned toward some of the other offers extended to him. Word had gotten around about his extended stay at the shooting range, and soon there were inquiries from other top guilds as to hiring his long-range services. Most Hunters with ‘long-range’ Talents could cast their magic a couple hundred metres at their absolute limits, and the potency and accuracy of those skills depleted as they became harder to control.
That was how Chase found himself suddenly thrust into the world of subcontracting.
It was kind of like being a third arm of Ballistic. The core of the guild was his newest Hunters, supervised by Marcus and Mia while they found their feet. He kept them separate because he wanted to prove to the world that being Talentless was not the curse he once thought it was. Then Jamie’s newly formed group came next. At present, it was the S-Rank and the twelve recruits with Talents. Chase basically kept his eyes shut and stayed on his side of the fence — Jamie could do as he pleased with them.
And now Chase himself. The nature of this new work — its specificity, the risk profile, his skillset and equipment — made it a very lucrative catch. Although he didn’t get to keep the parts of the monsters he killed, the pure-Credits compensation rivalled that of the other arms of the guild.
His current assignment placed him on a hilltop just inside a massive Gate that had spawned in the rubble of Two City. The ground was muddy, as though it had rained recently. The landscape was mostly devoid of decoration, aside from some gnarled trees that looked about as spooky as the monsters themselves, and some brown puddles that probably went metres underground.
Through his scope, he lined up his targets.
It was quite a bit different to the range, considering the elevation change, the different conditions, and the fact that he needed eyes in the back of his head just in case something snuck up behind him. As it was, he never allowed himself more than ten seconds to prepare each shot and fire. Straight after each shot, when the monsters ran around like headless chickens some six-hundred metres in the distance, he left his gun where it was and patrolled his hilltop, peering through binoculars as he scanned for threats.
After a few minutes, the monsters would calm down and return to their slow lumbering walks. Then he would strike again.
His MP7 was strapped his back, though he hadn’t had to use it yet. The guild that hired him, an ancient organisation called Estapanza, had sent in a small group of Hunters to clear the space around the Gate prior to Chase’s entry. Now it was on him to do the rest, including the boss if it reared its ugly head.
And for his services, they would pay him nine thousand Credits. Plus a bonus if he killed the boss.
“Hey Enro, you think Nebula could do this?” It felt odd to speak to his Relay as though it were human, but he had no one else to talk to. Solo-Raids could be lonely.
{Do I think Nebula, whose specialty is close to mid-range blasts of power, could complete this ultra-long-range task that you have specially trained and prepared for? I suppose I don’t.}
“Wow. No need to be a dick about it.”
{You asked, bro-man.}
Chase shook his head and relieved another monster of its own. It disappeared in a brown-black spray of sludge and cartilage, no doubt a fun task for some Hauler to piece together later. Hopefully they weren’t planning on harvesting these creature’s teeth.
He was tempted to go down there, but even with his fancy armour he didn’t feel confident standing up to these monsters. The Gate he’d come through was an absolute mammoth — definitely up there with the largest he’d encountered. There was a reason the executives at Estapanza had hired a lackey to do their dirty work.
Shoulda asked for more money. Oh well.
It took nearly five hours and almost a hundred spent bullets for the boss to finally appear. It was so large it could’ve picked up Chase’s bedroom in one hand, and its roar made the hilltop rumble, giving him a headache even from a good kilometre away. Swathes of dark green cloth covered its head in a tight wrapping, and its entire body was covered in swirling yellow tattoos, or something similar. When it reached down and heaved a giant boulder from the ground, the tattoos on its arms and shoulders glowed gold.
Some kind of empowerment technique?
He studied it for a moment longer, then wriggled into position. He zoomed out his scope until he could see the whole beast in his frame, steadily tracking it.
Then it stepped into one of the ‘puddles’ he’d seen before, and it disappeared. The puddle engulfed its entire body in one go, the surface rippling slightly as if it had barely been an appetizer.
Chase took his eyes from the scope, scanning the horizon. Suddenly, a deafening bellow echoed across the valleys, and he watched as the same boss spouted from a different puddle like a fish leaping out of a lake to catch a dragonfly.
But the puddle it exited from was two-hundred-metres closer to Chase than the one it entered. It had covered that distance almost instantly, as if there were some kind of portal beneath the puddle’s murky surface.
As he watched, the beast caught sight of him and sank into another puddle.
Coming ever closer.