It was a lot of explosions, but it was only a fraction of the ones we’d been expecting.
But now we had missiles bursting over our heads in a repeat of the previous evening. Our own missiles started shrieking out into the ether as the point defense guns and chaff missiles started their constant chatter.
“Jumpers!” someone cried just as dozens of reticles appeared on my HUD. Like a sudden wave, they came, emerging from the woods. At least a hundred, mostly Recon mechs, jumped and landed in the fields, all crashing so heavily, I felt the jolt in the ground. They came from every direction but south.
Some hit mines, shorted out, and froze in place or toppled over. But most did not.
Their weapons opened up just as the smoke pots all activated. Sam and I both started firing as pulse blasts whipped all around us. The barrier right in front of me was hit by some sort of detonation, and I staggered. I pulled myself back up and moved to a different section as the spot where I was standing was hit again, the material exploding inward in a shower.
“Now?” I asked out loud, not bothering to hit my bracelet.
“Not yet,” Roger said. “Wait until the Regulars physically breach the wall.”
I became aware of a growing heat to my right. Next to me, the Battering Ram gun we’d stolen was literally glowing red-hot. It had fired only once. The drone hanging off the back of it was also glowing red. A waft of smoke passed over us, revealing multiple beams of purple light focused on the gun. The honeybee, I realized, was rapidly removing the shells from the hopper attached to the end of the gun. It was literally throwing them over its shoulder and down off the wall. It tossed the last one just as there was apop!And the drone fell away. A moment later, steam started rising from the now ruined gun.
I prayed it wouldn’t explode, and I moved back to blindly firing into the smoke.
Behind me, someone was screaming, but I couldn’t tell who it was.
“The enemy Regulars have entered the fields,” Roger said. “Activating trapdoors.”
Across from us, several of the mechs stumbled as random sections of the ground just fell away under their legs. This was something that we’d spent the majority of the day working on. These were simple two-by-two-meter holes that were also two and a half meters deep; we had utilized the holes from the spent mines from the previous evening along with several newly dug holes in the soil. The “doors” were the splayed-open upper-leg coverings of fallen Attenuators from last night’s raid. They were expanded open and welded spread out with a bolt in the center and a charge upon the bolt. The altered doors were tossed atop the holes and covered with dirt. With the press of a button, the charge would blow, and the bifurcated metal plate would snap closed like a clam, causing anything standing upon it to sink into the deep hole. It was a simple, low-tech trap, and in seconds, it caused absolute chaos as the mass of players, all scrambling to get ahead of one another, stumbled and fell against oneanother, shooting each other point-blank, causing missiles and explosives to go up.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lulu roared. “Did your warranty just expire?”
“Hey!” Sam yelled from next to me. “Ollie, did you hear that? Your sister stole my joke!”
“Canisters!” someone shouted, and literally hundreds of explosive canisters arced in the air, shooting out into all three directions, like a volley of arrows in some medieval battle, and they fell upon my fields, turning the chaos into utter destruction in a matter of seconds.
Immediately, the amount of fire coming in our direction was cut down to almost nothing.
It had happened so fast.
“Warning!” Roger shouted in my ear. “Enemy is utilizing weaponry that is not available to the general public but from the ‘Coming Soon’ tab on their site. The mortar armament was not explosive, but Reaper Spiders. Reaper Spiders in the base. Beware! Beware! Activating the flamethrowers!”
The fact Roger was literally shouting filled me with more dread than I’d felt since this whole thing started.
“Roger, what the hell is a Reaper Spider?” Sam shouted as he continued to fire over the barrier, shooting at the downed mechs. “Yeah, bitch!”
As soon as Sam shouted that, I caught sight of movement through the smoke to my right. Past the now wrecked Battering Ram gun stood a guy I didn’t know. He was loading a missile into a manual launcher. A group of round fist-sized things covered in tiny legs just popped up over the wall, percolating up in a way that reminded me of foam. They moved over the barrier, and then they swarmed up the man.
“What the…?” the guy cried as one of the spider things skittered across his shoulder. It beeped twice and exploded, taking the man’s head off.
“Oh, fuck me,” Sam cried, having also seen what was happening. He looked over the edge of our section of the wall, screamed, andstarted firing his gun downward as I started shooting at the ones that were already atop the wall. Half started scurrying toward me, and the other half went the other direction.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I shouted as I fired, and I fired. Finally, one of them blew, taking out the others.
“Oliver!” Sam shouted.
I peered over the edge as more shrapnel pinged off my helmet. I moved to the edge and looked down, and my heart stopped.
There were dozens more of the spiders. Hundreds of them. Sam was picking them off one by one, but they’d fall away before they exploded, keeping the others from getting caught in the blast. I moved to help.
Each spider had eight legs, and they were basically walking grenades. They were trying to move up the wall, but they were having trouble affixing themselves to the metal-like polymer material. Still, some were finding purchase on the spots where pulse blasts had hit, as if the damage made the wall less slick.
Suddenly Roger was there moving between me and Sam.
“You may stop firing at them now,” Roger said.
