Slow motion explosion
Mack’s icon immediately went red with an X over it.
“God fucking dammit! Every single mother fuckin time man!”
“Get off the roof!” Nuke yelled, and her icon moved back towards the edge.
“No! we need those fuckers suppressed till we get there!” Maverick yelled.
Another pop from the mortar tubes. Gradie looked around frantically, as if there would be some clue on the ground to where the mortars would land.
Then, another epiphany. He had no idea where they would land, but he had a pretty good fucking idea where they wouldn’t. He broke out into a jump suit propelled sprint, right at the penthouse skylight.
He barely had time to snatch the last two grenades off his pouch and activate them with the heads-up prompt, before the skylight’s jagged glass edge opened up below him, revealing a fully dug-in command center. But, of course, as he had learned the hard way from Philip, every plan is a compromise, every position a gamble of odds. They had never expected this shit.
It was action movie-esque. Just as his feet left the ground, mortars exploded on the roof behind him. He sailed over the skylight and slammed both grenades down past his feet, which felt like flapping mid-flight, and gunfire cracked and echoed below him. Something hit him in the side and turned his graceful flight path into a chaotic half-spin and he dropped toward the far side of the roof sideways, his feet swinging slowly out from under him.
“Shit.” He hit the ground sideways and half rolled half bounced across the roof as another mortar landed somewhere farther off.
“What happened?” Nova said, and Gradie fumbled for the words to explain. Luckily, Nuke helped him.
“His dumb ass ran and jumped over the skylight and dropped grenades—”
On cue, the aforementioned grenades went off in the pit, and their double-sixteenth-note sound was followed immediately by a larger explosion that Gradie noticed, as it echoed across the roof, sounded quite familiar.
“I set off their fucking mortars!” He laughed onto the line.
“How the fuck did they not have a trophy system—” Nuke squealed
“Time to push it!” Luke said, and a second later another explosion echoed out of the penthouse skylight.
“On me!” Luke said, and Gradie watched his icon dash into the penthouse below. All the other ones, however, were slow to follow.
“Bro wait, wait!” Nova said.
“Let the drones—” was all Maverick got out before Luke’s gun went off. It was like hearing a friend’s voice, unexpectedly, in a crowded unfamiliar place. The staccato doubles and triplets, fired while moving so swiftly and precisely that it sounded like multiple shooters in multiple positions. Gradie snapped up to his feet and aimed down into the skylight.
One guy was clawing at an entrenched machinegun that looked like a SAW and a Dyson Hammer vacuum had a baby, and Gradie put a burst through his face just as a flurry of other rounds struck him under the chin. In under a second, his head was clean off.
“Damn this gun fucks!” Luke said.
“My kill!” Gradie snapped.
“My dick!” Luke said and fired again at something Gradie couldn’t see, and stepped out into view in the penthouse, his feet gliding over the broken bodies and hardware of the mortarmen. It was uncanny. Now that he was taking the shooting serious, he moved in a gameworld with the same fluidity and precision he had in the Hardworlds.
"Shit! Ones in the elevator!”
“I got him,” Nova said, and a drone zipped by past Luke.
“Corpse, get down here. I’m gonna blow those trophy systems on the roof,” Nova said. Gradie hopped down into the penthouse, which looked like an art gallery with a space marine infestation, that same extruded plastic spreading weblike across walls and encasing strange hardware and fonts of wires. The drones went off on the roof with sounds like transformers exploding in a backyard.
“Nuke, you good?” Gradie asked, having noticed her icon hadn’t moved since he started his run.
“Yeah, God dammit. Fucking mortar asshole dropped me into a closet.”
There was a crash down the hall, and Nuke stomped out of what had once been the master bedroom covered in fragments of drywall and cement.
“Shit!” Get clear! Get Clear!” Nova jogged in the room waving them all back in no definitive direction while staring at his wrist.
“What is—”
“I gotta blow the fucking elevator!”
The group scuffled back behind pillars and any hardware stations that looked particularly armored, and Gradie, now guided by habit, stepped behind Nuke, just before Sulphyr got there.
“Give me some space bro.”
“Get behind me,” Gradie said, not about to cede an inch of space to anyone after jumping over a mortar team with hand grenades.
“Man come on just—”
“Boys stop fighting over me,” Nuke said.
“He just wants you for your armor,” Gradie said, and Nuke’s laugh was cut off by a series of explosions at the elevator.
“Shit. Shit!” Nova sprinted out from behind a pillar and started drilling something into the control panel. Angel followed close behind him, holding a larger, more sturdier looking version of the mesh shield Gradie had been assigned.
“What’s he doing?” Maverick barked.
“The counterbalance and weight sensor have been fucked with and it looks like he’s got over half a ton of something in there. I think he’s trying to blow the tower!”
“Shit!” Nuke turtled suddenly, and Gradie laughed.
“How does that suit do against fall damage?” He whispered at the side of her head and rapped a knuckle on her metal hip, while Sulphyr glared at him.
“Better than yours!” Nuke squeaked from her cocoon.
“Can you stop him?” Maverick said in a slow booming tone like he was talking to someone far away and possibly deaf or ESL.
“He’s already dead. Popped himself.”
“Well then can you disarm it?”
“Not with my drone! Shit!”
“What is it?” Maverick yelled.
“It’s gotta be a slurry bomb. I can hear it mixing right now.”
“What the fuck—”
“There’s no detonating device. Its purely analog. Liquids and gases and shit. Once the chamber neck bursts it goes off. Maybe thirty seconds.”
“So what—"
“Get the fuck out! I’m bringing it up!’
“Bro, I’m up here,” Luke said flatly.
“If it blows up here the tower will still be stable! Everyone get the fuck out!”
“To where?” Robin yelled, But Nova was already sprinting down the hall.
“Repel lines!” He yelled.
“Attached to what?” Robin groaned, but everyone else scrambled after Nova and Angel.
“Here!” Angel melted something to a metal portion of the gun emplacement sitting where the master bed used to be and tossed the line outside.
“Ladies first,” Luke said, and waved out the window at Robin.
“Fucking move!” Nuke yelled. She sprinted past Gradie and leaped through the window. While the glass was still hovering around her and gravity hadn’t yet noticed her presence, she turtled and dropped like a rock. Gradie and Luke almost fell over laughing while the rest of the squad scrambled after the Twins down the repel lines.
“Will this suit break my fall?” Gradie asked on the group chat.
There was no response. Robin descended the rope line in front of Luke and Gradie, and blew a strand of hair out of her visor-less face. Luke looked at Gradie and raised an eyebrow.
“Think I’m gonna catch that little birdie,” he said out loud.
That reminded him.
“Nuke, you ok?” Gradie said on the line.
“I fell through two floors! It was bad ass! But now Im stuck, ha ha.”
This time, Gradie raised an eyebrow at Luke who smiled and nodded like they were planning a heist.
“Ay, there’s no fucking in Gunmaze!” Angel said on their private comms. To Gradie, it sounded like a slogan.
“Is that like a saying?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Angel sneered, his calm humor contrasted with Nova’s whispered swears and pleads in the background which bled a subtle anxiety on the line.
“Arthel players used to use it as a dig. But even there you can only fuck in the home instances—”
Gradie had never thought about being able to restrict Spirits from fucking. He had taken that first declaration in the Allclub, “here we fuck all around”, as gospel. But if you could limit everything else, from walking to seeing, why not? And what exactly couldn’t a “Prince” stop you from doing?
Breaking his thoughts, like a storm blown wind chime on a still night, the elevator dinged down the hall.
“Shit!” Luke laughed and leapt out with the repel line. Gradie looked down and watched him drop the four stories in a few seconds, and bounce safely to the garden grounds below. Gradie grabbed the line and glanced out at the skyline. All around the tower, illuminated in his night vision, the war went off like a fireworks show finale, as if in the five minutes since he had climbed to the roof, the firepower engaged had tripled.
“The stem just—” was all Nova got out before the world around Gradie got very bright and very loud, and then very fast. The repel line went limp in his hands as the explosion sent him flying.
He flew with his back to the ground, looking straight up into the air, where stray lasers and fighter ships and great dark shadows of capital crafts mingled with smoke and flak explosions. After getting used to the man on a wire motions of the jump suit, being propelled like a bullet was a jolting experience, and in the midst of the adrenaline and noise, a part of him forgot the fall couldn’t kill him.
“Shit!!” He tumbled as he fell, his feet pointing toward the tower just often enough for him to see the rolling bright ball of fire turn mushroom shaped on a pillar of smoke rising up from where the penthouses had once been. The air around the explosion sparkled with glass and metal caught in the fire light. It was immensely beautiful, and once again, in the same way the pool had been, unexplainably nostalgic.
As if to complete the comparison, he landed squarely in the center of one of the overgrown, flame charred pools spread across the garden, and the world became murky water and broken bits of reed plants lit oddly in his NVGs.
“What is this shit, simple syrup?” Luke said on the line, and Gradie noticed his icon was redlined and hollow.
“Did you die?” Gradie asked.
“Yeah, big support beam flew at me like an old girlfriend and shit. Now I’m climbing out of this goo like some fucking Nickelodeon game show. Wait, you survived that shit? What, did you glide down on a piece of drywall?”
“Landed in water.”
“Well bud that don’t make sense. Waters like concrete at that height. Think the physics in this game need some tweaking.”
“Don’t be jealous. My jump suit kicked on at the last—”
“Status report, team Maverick,” a voice said on the comms.
“Goathead, this is Maverick. Enemy combatants have been removed from the—”
“Yeah, I can fucking see that! What the fuck happened to the tower! Did you forget the entire purpose of the op was to secure a fucking artillery position for the advance? Did I not tell you six fucking times to be prepared for rigged demolition? You said your guy was a pro at that shit!”
“He is! The bomb would have taken out the entire tower if he hadn’t—”
“You lost a fourth of it! Do you not understand how height applies to distance when throwing shells?”
“Well, the alternative was the entire tower going—”
“No, the alternative was killing the fucking frogmen and defusing any bombs they left behind because that’s what the fuck you told me you could do!”
“Hey Goathead,” Nova said. “This is QuasarCultist from MiMsquad. We got the tower secure so you can keep crying about losing fifty feet off of it or you can call in the artillery pieces before the other side makes a move.”
“Don’t fucking tell me—”
“Oh yeah bro, I’m telling you. I’m also telling you to have my fucking payout in my account by end of day or I’m charging interest on my fucking billed hours. Your CO is D.B., right?”
“Yeah, he fucking is--
“Ok cool cause I’m seeing him tonight at the Clanhouse so I’ll just have him do it. Peace.”
Goathead’s icon was removed from the chat.
“God dammit bro,” Maverick said. “He’s gonna—”
“Hey man fuck him,” Angel said. “If he gives you shit about this, just come talk to us and we’ll make sure you keep your rank. I’ve never even heard of this dude.”
“All right man, I appreciate it. You guys staying to escort the cannons?”
“Nah, we gotta go. It’s been fun though. Nice seeing all of you.”
“Bye Quasar!” Nuke said. “Bye Corpse!”
The goodbyes overlapped each other and Gradie wasn’t able to ask Nuke how he could get in touch with her again, and before he made it to the top of the pool, they were back on the floating platform.
“I’ll make sure yall get your tokens,” Nova said. “And I’ll have that mother fucker loading trucks on a moon tomorrow.”
“Is that bad?” Luke said.
“We got priority queue now at least,” Angel said. “Howd yall like Soulara?”
“Next time I wanna be in a fighter ship,” Luke said. “But shooting that machine gunner felt good. Thanks for helping me live the dream, bro.”
He slapped Gradie on the back and sent him floating across the platform.
“What about you, Gradie?” Angel asked.
“I liked the jump suit. I would also like to fly a ship next time. And do you know if Nuke has a boyfriend?”
“Bro even if she does, fuck that dude,” Luke said. “Bet he doesn’t fly with grenades like you do. Oh, shit I didn’t get my little birdies comm line!”
“What?” Nova laughed.
“He means Robin,” Angel sighed. Nova cackled and the floating screen chimed.
“Next segment selected. Loading… Killcity.”
