Nerf UAV plz

The stream of death sliced over their heads like a blind sprinkler and they landed into hard rolls on the carpet below, or in Lukes case, right through a table.

The gunfire cut off suddenly and the whine of the drone faded away as it vanished past the window’s edge.

“Yall good?” It was Nova on the comms.

“Up,” Gradie and Luke said in unison, and they both started instinctively checking themselves for wounds then stopped and shared a laugh.

“The fuck did yall two go?” Luke asked.

On queue, a piece of the wall below the upper level they had leapt from smoked and smoldered and collapsed outward. Angel stepped out with his rad throwers glowing and Nova skipped out behind him, staring at his forearm. Luke busted out laughing.

“Shit, that’s what you meant by get down? I didn’t think to go through the fucking floor!”

“Robin, you up!” Nova said.

“Fuck yes! Where is it?”

“It’s a quarter mile up, scanning. But my birds are jamming it, its gonna have to—”

The machine gun atop the stairs started up again, and everyone scattered. Luke and Gradie aimed up the stairs and stepped up to the wall until their lower halves were obscured by the next level, then started firing.

The rifle’s rate of fire was somewhere between an M416 and an FN mini-mini, and the recoil was similar to his X95. Some things shot out of the side like shell casings, but they were about a quarter of the size of any rifle casings he knew of and landed soundlessly on the carpet after floating down like leaves.

Gradie noticed a gauge in the lower part of his screen, indicating that while his gun had a ridiculous ammo count in the hundreds per mag, it would overheat in sustained fire.

“Talk with me!” he told Luke on the comms, and started firing in alternate one second bursts of fire and pause. Luke picked up the gaps and they lay into the general area of the machine gun with a steady stream of fire that was joined by one of Nukes Grenades.

“Reloading!” Sulphyr yelled somewhere.

“Drone coming around!” Nova yelled “Sword, cut them some cover! Robin, tune your—”

“I’m on it!!”

Gradie had paused his fire to take out his and Lukes cover packs, which unfolded with a snap, and noticed Bled Robin doing something with her massive weapon. The metal exterior rearranged like a jigsaw, briefly exposing a bright glowing core inside.

“Fuck this!” Luke said and grabbed his cover mesh and ran in the hole in the wall Angel had just finished cutting. Sulphyr and Nova booked it after him and Gradie scrambled in behind.

Inside, they fanned out across the concrete and stainless steel storage room, where extra tables and chairs and even what looked like an old popcorn machine lay sleeping in dust.

“Look out below!” Nuke said on the comms, and fell down through the ragged opening in the ceiling cut by the drone. She sat down hard on a kitchen island and rolled sideways onto the ground.

“Damn she thick!” Sulphyr said.

“Bro, really, again?” Angel said.

Nuke pointed at Sulphyr and jumped around.

“Pay up! Pay up!”

“Mavericks dead!” Sulphyr hissed.

“Fuck that!” Maverick said on the comms. “You know the rules. 50 tokens every time you make that stupid fucking joke!”

Robin landed gracefully in the room and aimed her cannon outside.

“Nuke! Come here! Emplacement!”

Nuke jogged over to Robin and got into a low crouch in front of her. Robin set her cannon on Nuke’s shoulder and they stepped toward the opening.

“Yall get to cover!” Nova waved his arm at the rest of them without taking his eyes off his forearm. He was crouched down behind his own cover mesh which Gradie couldn’t help but notice was a different color than his and seemed to have extra layers of some kind of clear glass.

The whine of the drone changed tone and got louder. Having nothing else to do, Gradie crouched down behind his cover mesh and aimed his rifle at the wall.

“Gradie! Come here!” Luke said in a whisper tone on the private comms. Gradie looked back and Luke waved him towards a corner of the room where some kind of chest high freezer was, and got on top of it and put his mesh cover in front of him. Gradie laughed out loud, as the death sound of the drone roared outside and Luke snuggled into place behind the mesh. It was the most video game-esque thing he had seen since they left Colors.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

But he followed him anyway. As he was climbing up, Nova hissed on the team comms.

“He’s dropping down! Charge it!”

Robin’s cannon made a sound like a dive bomber and started to glow in places.

“Tagging him!” Nova said, and the drone popped up on the mini map. There was a burst of gunfire outside, and the drone disappeared off the map.

“Shit!” Nova said. “Ok, he should be coming from the –”

“SHHHH!” Robin said out loud, and the only noise after was the drone, its engine rising and falling as it zipped around outside like a wasp looking for an opening. Robin tapped Nuke on the head and they both walked carefully toward the opening. There was a brief pause, as Gradie rearranged himself on the freezer, getting his cover flush with Luke’s, and the engine sound normalized and grew at a steady pace, then everything happened at once.

Robin’s cannon went off with a “tchoooo” sound, Nuke snapped into her compressed turtle form, the walls, ceiling and ground around them exploded, and the drone’s engine shifted in pitch and made a strange grinding sound.

“Got it!” Nova said. “Ok, hold on, hold on,” He was typing frantically on a keyboard Gradie couldn’t see. The engine noise faded to nothing so suddenly, he thought it might have exploded, but as it persisted in a muted far away tone, he realized the thing had just zipped off at an unimaginable speed.

Robin slapped Nuke’s back and she popped out of her turtle form and stepped backward at an angle while Robin kept her cannon aimed out the now much wider opening in the wall.

“Ok, I got in through one of the cameras. Trying to crack the timing software. Shit. One second.”

The drone’s jets screamed like a thing attacked, and Gradie didn’t even have to see it to know it was diving in.

“Call it!” Robin yelled, jerking her cannon back and forth, seeking for the drone outside, and finding nothing.

“Shit it’s too high,” Nova said. “Your gonna have to move—”

The ceiling exploded and the drone shrieked. The room dissolved into bursts of dust and concrete and the last Gradie saw of Sulphyr and the twins, they were running in three opposite directions. Somewhere in the dim haze, something flashed and spit gunfire and for a moment Gradie thought it was the drone’s rounds ricocheting off something, but then Sulphyr started yelling out loud.

“Mother fucking toy using piece of shit!” He lay into his LMG for a good three seconds as the drone’s fire ripped the room around him to dust, and then he exploded, and the drones cannon roar echoed half a second later.

“Shit!” Someone yelled and Gradie felt another body hop onto the freezer next to him.

In an instant, the world went silent, besides the lazy buzzing of the drone somewhere out the window.

“It’s hovering,” Nova said on the group comms. “Looking for signs of life. Fuck! It cleared my worms out of the fuel system!”

The dust started to clear, and three big blotches of evening sunlight poured in through the broken ceiling.

“I need someone to draw its attention. Just for a second!” Robin said.

“Shit, I’m not busy,” said Luke, and he hopped off the freezer and jogged away with his cover mesh in one hand and his rifle in the other.

“Just get it to turn and then run!” Robin hissed. Luke held his mesh cover up like an old hoplite shield and rested his rifle on it as he dissolved into the dust. A few seconds later, his silhouette appeared, outlined by the light coming through the hole in the far side of the room.

“There you are. Hey Buddy,” he said sofly, and fired. Immediately, the drones engine shifted up in pitch and half a second later the ceiling above Luke exploded down on him in a burst of gunfire.

At the same time, Robin had stepped out into the soft patch of evening light, and Nuke scrambled to get in front of her. The laser cannon went off and red neon lit up every piece of dust in the room and reflected off mirror metal surfaces that till then had been laying unseen in the murk. The beam shot out into the light and held steady like a spotlight. It was a surreal sight that took the experience suddenly beyond video game or movie, and for a moment the causal link between the Real, the Other, and even the rest of Gunmaze, with this uncanny moment, broke apart, and he felt that what he was seeing was really happening on some other world yet undiscovered.

“Got it!” Nova yelled. “You melted an engine!”

“I can see that!” Robin yelled, and began pulsing the laser. The drones engine whine became an oscillating kick drum like noise that could only mean it was spinning uncontrollably.

“Oh shit. It armed its payload,” Nova said.

“What payload?” Robin yelled.

“Get out!” Angel screamed, surprisingly close to Gradie, and his rad thrower’s green glow lit up the wall next to the freezer.

Then, suddenly, with a noise like the power surges in Gradie’s old apartment whenever someone hit a pole, the drone went silent.

“Was that it?” Luke asked, stepping out of the haze. “Where’s the boom?”

“Pilot killed its kamikaze mode,” Nova said. “Guess they thought better about setting a bomb off in a building they’re stuck on since I was knocking on the steering software anyway.” He typed frantically on his invisible keyboard, and the wind blew lazily out in the terrace room.

“Im in position,” Mack said on the comms. “When we hittin this pill box bitch?”

“One second!” Nova said, annoyed. “I gotta finish breaking into their systems.”

Watching Nova sit and type, while one of his drones flew out the door and another climbed over to a hole in the wall and clamped onto a piece of exposed cable, Gradie was suddenly reminded of EP, and by extension, the Hardworlds. Like someone had flicked on a light, this world grew dim again, and like a junkie trying to distract himself from his craving, he asked out loud,

“Is it like actual hacking, or like a mini game?”

“Somewhere in between,” Robin said on the comms, and the chat window on the HUD lit up in a way that told him she had muted herself to Nova. Gradie quickly did the same thing, as Nova typed away, frowining.

“Most of the actual programming is done by software in the game,” she continued. “Its mostly memorizing what programs trump what and knowing when to cobble something together from the pieces. Some comp sci knowledge can help at times, but I’ve seen a lot of people pick it up who couldn’t even open a command prompt in the Real.”

Who is this person, Gradie asked himself. Who is she in the Real? He studied her face, but got nothing. A frozen projection under a glass visor. Like an itch, he tried to guess what any of them were like in the Real, what they might say to him, how they might act, would Nuke smile at him, would the twins have anything to say to him at all?

“Fuck, ok.” Nova sighed. “I got two in. Gonna leave them dormant for now. Lets deal with the MG and maybe I can get another access point closer to the penthouses.”

He stood up and everyone started swinging weapons around and getting in stances. Robin slapped her cannon and half of it swung open on hinges then broke apart and reformed. An info pop-up in Gradie’s HUD told him she was now in “anti personnel” mode, and listed a circle graph of her strengths and weaknesses. He tabbed over to his own, and saw that he, like Luke, was squarely in the middle. Run of the mill grunts. An AR and two grenades.

So be it. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that whoever was waiting in the penthouse, he and Luke would outshoot them.

In the back of his mind, the Hardworlds called, and he prayed the space age MG on the stairs would drown them out soon.