Clip that shit
“Shit!” Nuke yelled and dove in front of Gradie, turtling as she fell. Her solid pillar body landed on the carpet like a steel beam dropped from a crane and Gradie pressed himself into the floor next to her.
“I thought you said they wouldn’t shoot the windows!” She yelled. Gradie wasn’t sure if she meant him or Nova, but luckily Nova answered.
“Yall are too close for that now! Sit tight!”
“Fuck that,” Nuke said on their private channel. “Hey, I like your plan, but looks like the sneaking is a no go. Wish me luck!”
She de-turtled and started to stand up.
“Wait!” Gradie pushed her down as the MG raked over them. She turtled again and the rounds bounced off her.
“Sorry! Guess we’re stuck here!”
Gradie’s mind had now completely shaken off the confines of its Hardworld and Philip centric thought process, and a plan emerged that would have offended both of them.
“I’m gonna draw their fire!”
“What?”
He decided that showing her would be faster than trying to explain, and now that the thought had entered his mind, he had to act on it, before the fear of spiritual pain caught up with him. Somewhere in his thoughts a memory jostled free, of summer mornings standing in front of the lap pool, trying to get the nerve to get in at the start of practice, and the eventual understanding that a straight dive was the best way to do it, the cold grazing his skin and falling away under the onslaught of his first sprint.
He activated the jump suit and bolted across the kitchen, back towards the living room.
Immediately, the MG erupted in the walls, but then, strangely, the noise faded behind him and went silent. For a few panicked strides, he feared they hadn’t taken the bait, but then the wall in the living room erupted and rounds danced around him, and he realized his plan had been smarter than he was.
The MG position had multiple gun slits cut in it to allow it to shoot anyone at any place in the building, but now that he was right in front of them, the MG had to transition from gunslit to gunslit to chase him as he ran perpendicular to their line of fire, and they couldn’t move fast enough. He made it clear across the living space unscathed and started laughing like an idiot at his own cleverness, until the flaw in his plan revealed itself.
The other MG, positioned exactly to cover such weaknesses in its twin, opened fire as he stepped into the other half of the penthouse, a kind of art gallery space with a skylight in the tall ceiling and a theater sized screen on one wall, which now exploded in a stream of rounds and glass.
He was, essentially, running headfirst into machinegun fire. Reflexively, he cut to the left, but the stream of laser rounds followed him, pressing him into the wall.
I am going to experience a brutal death in a stupid fucking video game world. All those fucking warnings from Michael about the Hardworlds and their real pain, and this is where I’m actually going to find out what it feels like to get shredded by machine gun fire.
But at the last second, just as he ran out of floor, he did something desperate; he ran up the wall sideways, Matrix style.
It worked so well he laughed out loud, a strange noise under the sci-fi gunfire. With the aid of the jump suit, his feet propelled him up the wall like the world had turned on it’s side, and he moved across it at nearly a full sprint as the floor and wall beneath him shattered into pieces.
The opposite wall came to meet him, forming a right angle with his current running platform, and in another flash of improvisation, he twisted at the last second and continued his run up the oncoming wall until he reached the corner of the ceiling and pressed himself in snugly with his arms and legs outstretched. The strange fiber optic lights of the jumpsuit pointed downward like mini rocket engines, illuminated in his night vision.
“Holy shit,” he said on the comms. That was—”
The explosion was massive and he felt it through the walls, so much that it almost shook him off his stable position. He had forgotten about Nuke.
“God damn Nuke!” Nova whooped. “You blew them out of the fucking tower!”
“I almost blew myself out!” she squealed. “Get over here!”
“Corpse! Go get her!” Maverick said. “The rest of you, rendezvous at the offices!” He pinged a set of square rooms to the south of the eastern penthouse. Gradie let go of the wall and slow fell to the ground, then took off at a sprint towards Luke. After about five seconds, he wondered out loud,
“What’s up with the other MG?”
“Probably trying to bait us into a false sense of security,” Maverick said. “Stay frosty.”
“Ay, my balls are like two little dip-n-dots, bro,” Luke said.
“Wonderful,” said Robin.
Running back the way he had come, the Penthouse now seemed like an empty shell, silent, still, as if it actually was just someone’s home left empty for a weekend away. Smoke wafted in through the mouseholes like dream mist and as he stepped out of the living area into the kitchen and dining section, wind pushed at his face.
Nuke was at the edge of the floor, the sprawling sci-fi city skyline behind her, wind howling and muffled sounds of space age war flowing in with smells of burnt chemicals. The walls, floor, and ceiling had been completely severed, ending in frayed and sparking tendrils of molten wires and smoldering everything.
She scrambled to get up to her feet and Gradie rushed over and pulled her up.
“Thank you!” Holy shit I gotta do that again!”
“I fucking told you girl,” Mack said. “Why you think those suits cost so much?”
“She just thought a turtle-suit sounded cute,” Robin said.
“Shut up! I was sick of getting fragged every time Mack blew my stealth!”
“I don’t know how you ever expected to do anything stealthy with that dump—”
“The MG team are melting their position,” Nova said suddenly. “Probably moving to the roof.”
“And I just got chewed out by fucking Goat-head,” Maverick said.
“It’s been fifteen fucking minutes!” Robin said.
“Yeah, well, they’re pushing the lane now and our cloning machines have been returned to us,”
“How nice of them.”
“He wants the tower cleared for drop-off in ten.”
“Let’s do it in five,” Mack said. “Then chill for another ten after to make his bitch ass sweat.”
“How the fuck are we getting up there?” Robin said.
“Uh, one sec,” Maverick said.
“Are you serious?” Mack laughed. “After all this we can’t even get—”
“You can! And so can Corpse. Put those jumpsuits to work and get up there and pin them down. The rest of y'all, meet me at the tree and we’ll throw up a grapple line.”
“Pin them down?” Mack scoffed.
“Yes, throw some fucking grenades and lay down some fire till we can move up there. Think you can handle that?” Maverick spat.
“Damn, bro, sorry Goatdick has your balls in a vice, but you don’t have to get all pissy. I’m goin.”
Gradie was already halfway up the smoldering cracking wall, trying to ride the wave of adrenaline. The explosion had ripped two stories of corner off the four-story tower, and the third floor drooped down in pieces. He got up onto it and steadied himself. A thin metallic wire ran from his hip back down to Nuke and it billowed in the wind. She had hooked it onto him before his climb, with instructions to attach it to the top, but now he was unsure of his path up.
“Aight bro, I’m in position up here,” Mack said on a private line. “Let me know when you’re ready and we’ll pop up at the same time.”
“Uh, one sec.”
Gradie stepped cautiously to the edge of the drooping floorboards and looked up. There was another balcony stretching out from the tower, its underside riddled with shrapnel marks. He went into a squat, took a breath, realized he wasn’t actually breathing, which meant he wasn’t actually jumping, shook off his thoughts, and shot up at the edge of the balcony.
The floor below him groaned and gave, and as he grabbed the edge of the balcony under the railing, he heard cracks and crashes below him.
“Damn don’t drop the building on me!” Nuke said.
He pulled himself up and over in a single movement like a wushu actor on a wire and landed on the balcony. Bare, unscathed wall stretched above the penthouse doorway, and the night sky outlined the harsh line of shadowed tower. Flashes and flurries of projectiles of all kinds streamed through the sky. Wind brought in the sounds of distant cannons and engines and something he couldn’t identify. In a reflex, he looked behind him at the sprawling sci fi city, and his false breath caught in his throat.
Before, as he had stood in the smoking gap left by Nuke’s explosion, the city had twinkled faintly in his nightvision, but he had barely glanced at it, too focused on his probably perilous ascent, but now, as the smoke had cleared and his view was a full 180-degree panorama, it hit him hard. A thousand towers, glittering with lights or gunfire. A million crafts weaving through the city blocks or rising and falling to larger, floating crafts that shaded the world below like storm clouds. Everywhere, activity, movement that indicated the presence of other people, real people, playing a game as close to a video game as a vivid lucid dream was to a half-formed thought. Again, a realization, too powerful to ever fully be realized, the way a gunshot was only ever heard in part, just before your ears went to ringing; Someone made this with their mind, and it’s solid enough to support a million others.
That same earlier childlike excitement rolled up his back and vibrated his skull, amplified by his post machine gun run adrenal state. Though his glance only took a second, he knew something had changed forever. He was beginning to understand the mind defying scope of this new reality.
“I’m up here hangin out,” Mack said. “So let me know when you’re ready to jump up and pin them down or whatever.”
Gradie ran up the wall and grabbed on to the edge with one hand and threw Nukes wire line over the top with the other. It hooked on something and made a whirring noise. The flat line of roof edge looked like a horizon right in front of his face, and he felt like he was about to throw himself over into some brand new day.
“I feel like we need one of those whistles they used in World War one,” Gradie said on the line. Mack cackled.
“Wow bro! That’s not the fucking comparison I want to make.”
A swarm of steel rods, like a disassembled windchime, slid up the wire next to him like something out of an old movie where they played footage backward to make it look like magic was happening on screen, and assemble itself into a ladder that immediately went taught under Nuke’s weight.
“They’re moving something across the roof!” Nova said. “Should be some cover here. Get over and throw some ‘nades!”
The minimap pinged some squares on the roof, just as Nuke’s icon regained her grenade launcher symbol. Gradie looked below him and saw one of Nova’s drones delivering her a fresh launcher.
“You got any AP drones in play Quasar?” Gradie asked.
“AP drones?” Mack said, and Gradie realized he had accidentally used a term from the clubhouse.
“Grenade drones, and no,” Nova said. “I can’t get them over the roof. They got a cone of EMP deployed, which is why you need to fucking go now!”
“Moving,” Gradie said on the line with Mack and Nuke.
He threw himself up and over the edge, his movements again feeling like he was suspended on a wire, and brought his rifle up before he hit the roof. He immediately moved up to what Nova had marked as cover, which turned out to be a giant AC unit or something, and scanned the rest of the roof.
It was completely empty and still. Besides the other ACs, there was only a wide landing pad next to the door to the staircase that ran between the two Penthouses, a handful of objects that looked like geodesic orbs on tripods the size of moving vans, and the edges of what were, according to his mini map, two skylights over the penthouse living areas and the large opening over the central tree.
“There’s no one up here!” Mack said.
“One sec,” Nova said frantically. “Shit, they’re at the main elevator! Fuck! They’re loading something! Get to the skylight and drop some frags on them now!”
Nova pinged the skylight on the mini map and Gradie moved up, feeling that all over his skin chill that came with walking out into an exposed area with his rifle in hand. Memories filtered in from the Clubhouse and fragments of the Hardworlds, and he heard a voice that may have been Philip’s say.
“There’s no better feeling than something solid and bullet resistant at your shoulder in the middle of a fire fight.”
Mack bounded towards him like a man on the moon and they both made for the skylight.
“How many frags you got?” Mack asked. Before Gradie could answer, something banged like a flash grenade out of sight.
Mack dropped to the ground and aimed at the edge of the skylight, where the noise had originated.
“What the fuck was that?”
Then another sound broke in through the muffled white noise of distant battle. A whistle, growing louder.
“Move! Move!” Gradie shouted, and bolted in a direction exactly perpendicular to his previous path.
Just as he set his foot down for the second time, the roof exploded.
