Step into the dojo

  On the small window in Gradie’s HUD, Maverick exploded into a million little pieces and the hallway crumbled like a kid’s diorama caught in a pressure wash. The feed went solid grey with dust and the team was invisible until the drone switched to thermal. The steady beam of mae gun ser fire lit up a solid lihat strafed bad forth, blindly.

  “Shields!’ Nova shouted, and Luke and the others held up their barrier meshes. A stray burst from the MG caught the top er of Luke’s and ripped it out of his hands in ks.

  “Well that didn’t do shit,” he said ftly.

  A burst of sparks above Gradie’s head made him jump and almost squeeze off a round, but he realized it was ting through the shaft on queue.

  “On me!” Angel screamed. A burst of white light on the small s told Gradie Angel was activating his rad thrower in she disie mode. Luke snapped up and bolted to Angel’s side while Robin held Nova VIP style and rushed him to his brother. She had a shield mesh raised in front of her head, and when a burst of MG fire hit it, it fared better than Luke’s, abs half of the rounds in a series of small fshes before shattering and spraying off them like a bonfire caught in a strong wind.

  Another burst strugel dead on but was buffeted against a till then invisible force field that took on the color and gre of the ser fire and ed and ed around it in a e for a brief sed before vanishing again. The MG danced across the room in another pass, came bad rippled Angel’s barrier again, and was on its way toward Robin and Nova when Angel and Luke suddenly disappeared.

  “Jump Robin!” Nova said, and the two figures leapt forward just as the ser fire sparked off Robins armor. They disappeared into a darkened pit and a on Gradie’s feed told him Robin had taken critical damage, but was still alive.

  “Shit!” She yelled in the s, and in some strange defect of the telepathic el, her voice rang right in Gradie’s skull as if she was trapped inside his thoughts.

  “Jesus!” He threw his hands up to his head and Nuke’s cutter went dead above him.

  “Dammit Robin watch that shit!” Maverick said.

  “I swear that girl’s a Speaker,” Mack said.

  “I am not! I’m just fug pissed!” This time her voice was a normal volume on the s.

  The MG went quiet suddenly.

  “Shit!” Robin said. “They know we’re down here!”

  Gradie looked on the mini-map as arted cutting again. Nova, Angel, Luke and Robin were all clustered in a room on the far side of the dos, one floor above Gradie and Mad one floor below the floor Nuke was cutting into.

  “I’m w on cameras now!” Nova hissed. Small dots on the mini-map tracked his drones as they spread like flies throughout the penthouse. Gradie noticed there were quite a bit fewer than there had been just minutes ago.

  Nuke’s cutter went dead.

  “Wait, they see me cutting!”

  “No! My drones wiped everything they found oher side of that door.” Nova pihe two drones drilled into the top of the shaft on the HUD and a log of everything they had done in the past ten minutes, drilling, tapping fibers, crag wireless, and even disabling something beled “LNDRY RAD-T”, scrolled by in a small window on the s.

  “Get inside immediately and look for a fug opening on that MG!” Maverick said. “There ’t be more than five fuckers in there, and I bet they’re all huddled around it like little bitches!” A rge dot lit up on the mini map in the general area of the back west er.

  Nuke’s cutter lit up again and an explosion boomed through the walls. Robin shrieked.

  “Nades! Move! Move!”

  Gradie watched their is spread out and move to the north as more explosions shook the ceiling.

  “On me! On me!” Robin pinged her location on the mini map repeatedly. The other dots moved through the floorpn map and found their way to her.

  “Damn, how much space mooh you think it costs to get a kit like this?” Luke said in an easy tone.

  A loud sm echoed down the shaft as the metal regle Nuke had cut out of the door pte fell to the floor upstairs.

  “Emp ‘!” She tossed one in and it rattled across the floor upstairs, the off with a humming pop like a transformer blowing.

  After an unusually silent pause, she said, “Its clear! Get the fuck up here!”

  Mack shot up the shaft, propelled by his jumpsuit and made it to the doorway in a single bounce. Gradie followed but almost missed the doorway. The meics of the jump suit meant that every slight movement became a direal propulsion, and by kig his leg slightly to the right, he had thrown himself off course. He grabbed the dder with one hand and swung himself around, scrambled in the doorway and found Nuke and Mack standing in a small room at the end of a long, strange hallway, and it took him a moment to realize what was strange about it.

  All the doors had been covered by some kind of bulging material that looked like spray-foam frozen in pce, and at the far end, about fifty feet down the hall, a pile of something that might have been patio furniture was stacked clear to the ceiling.

  “Uh,” was all Gradie could get out before Nova, watg his feed, put 2 and 2 together.

  “Get the fuck out of there!”

  The pile coughed up a stream of ser bullets and the hallway acked with a wall of sound.

  “Get behind me!” Nuke yelled, already turtled. Gradie shot to the left behind her as maegun fire tore up the air, but Mack flew up to the 12-foot ceiling and grabbed on to a light fixture.

  “I fug k would be there!” Angel said. “It’s the only—”

  “Start cutting god dammit!” Mack yelled out loud, his voice eg ielepathic chat.

  “Fuck that!” Nuke yelled, then solely on the s she hissed, “Grab a charge off my belt and throw it over my head. I’ll sp it on the wall.”

  It took Gradie a sed to realize she was talking to him, even with the blinking “Request from MiniNuke” on his HUD, but with the help of some pop ups and AR arrows and instrus, he got a square packet about the size of a pop tart out of an armored box on Nuke’s belt by pulling it out like a napkin, then pressed a button in the ter that made it expand to the size of a spiral notebook and threw it over Nukes head, hoping like hell the MG fire didn’t hit it.

  Instead, suddenly, the fire stopped.

  After a few seds of dead silence, Mack asked, “What the fuck?”

  “They ’t see us,” Gradie said, just as he realized it. “They heard the bst and knew hrew that grenade, so they know we’re here, but they ’t see us.”

  “What do you mean they ’t—” Mack started.

  “Holy fuck he’s right!” Nuke hissed. “They’re little furniture trick relies on cameras Quasar and I took out.”

  “Aw shit, so let’s rush em!” Mack said.

  “No!” said Nuke. “If I try and break through all that shit,” she poi the furniture pile at the end of the hall, now spilling out in fragments but having lost none of its height, and which Gradie could tell was at least twenty feet deep. “They’ll hear it and shred us again. Also, they might just be reloading.” The fear broke out of her voice with her st words, as if she had just realized it as she spoke.

  “Maybe they ’t see you, but they sure as shit hear you,” Nova said. “I’m pig up a harmonisor on the frame. Don’t move a fug foot. It’s gonna take a while for my droo isote it.”

  “Great. So what’s the pn?” Mack said.

  “Bst our way out. Ok Corpse,” Nuke said, and it took Gradie another fused moment to remember his username was OrbitingCorpse. “Very carefully, reach between my legs,”

  “Hmmmmmm,” Mack said on the ceiling, like a chortle being forced out of a slightly open balloon.

  “Shut up. Corpse, reach between my legs, pick up the charge and press it against the wall, as high up as you get it.”

  “Uh,”

  “I’m not about to get out of Turtle mode with a live MG poi us, and I don’t want you ing around aing spttered all over me.” (Once again, Mack wrestled with a ugh and got it beat down into a grunt,) “Just hurry up!”

  Gradie very slowly and with as light movements as he could manage, got down on his hands and knees and reached betweewo solid pilrs and tried not to think about what was at the end of them, and grabbed the charge. He grabbed onto one of Nukes armored legs and leaned as far through the gap as he could, then reached up until his shoulder was rubbing against her tank-hulled crotch, and spped the charge on the wall.

  They were all silent for a sed. The sp had echoed down the hall louder than Gradie had expected, but the MG didn’t answer.

  “Ok good job,” Nuke said. “Mack. Get the fuck down here.”

  One of Nuke’s legs made a soft metallic tg sound as she moved it against the other o locked bato turtle mode with a k and she was a solid pilr of hopefully very bst resistant armor.

  Mack swung on the light and slow-fell dowo Gradie, but as he did the big tacky delier swung backward and squeaked, and then exploded.

  “Shit!” Nuke yelled. The MG roared again and poured fire into the ceiling above them, raining down fragments of space age drywall.

  “Charge out!”

  The bst rattled Gradie’s skull and a few other bones he tried to vince himself didn’t actually exist here. Nuke yelled ‘move!’ and disappeared through the still smoking hole in the wall and Gradie scrambled after her. The MG fire darted from ceiling to floor and chased him out. As his left leg followed the rest of him into the room, a round obliterated his calf a fire up his thigh.

  “Fuck!” he yelled out loud and fell over onto hard tile.

  It was a bright fsh of pain, and from its molteer deep in his calf, reality spread outwards. Like someone had flicked a light switch, the showers around him became every ym locker room he had ever seen in his life, the HUD just a cheap rendering dispyed by his phone slotted into a VR headset, even the armored figures rushing by him were nothing more than cospy. His body ached, his leg was screaming, his breathing was shortened, and his mind reached out for an answer in memory, an ao how he got here and what kind s had been involved.

  Then the pain vanished and with it that whole other slice of the real world, and he was ba Gug rounds punch through the walls of a space ym shower.

  “Holy shit,” he said out loud, but barely a whisper, as he looked down at his leg. His calf armor had been bsted off, exposing the shreds of a kind of bck rubber undersuit, and a strange beige gel expanding over his wound.

  “Your suit’s got an auto-doc bro, just let it work.”

  “I felt it.”

  “You’re about to feel something else!” Nuke yelled and grabbed him by the handle on the back of his armor. The showers exploded in tile and dust as of pipe-free water everywhere and he scrambled up to get behind her just as she squatted down and turtled.

  The MG wasn’t taking any ces this time. Sed after sed, the bursts tinued, and the room became clouded with por dust like the world was ending.

  “Ohese mother fuckers run out of ammo—” was the st thing Mack got out. He had been hanging on to a vent in the ceiling, but the MG gunner must have caught wise to his previous ceiling trick, and sprayed a burst right through him. His body misted and the remnants fell to a crumpled heap just feet away from Gradie and Nuke, while, oddly, his voice screamed on the chat.

  “God fug dammit!”

  “Every fug time bro!” Maverick ughed. “That’s why you’re Timmy twenty deaths.”

  “Bitch you’re dead too!”

  “Yeah, for oally it up bitch.”

  Suddenly, the guopped.

  “All right, I found the Harmonizer,” Nova said. “Shit its right uhem. Im gonna have to choke it off.”

  Gradie looked back down at his calf as the dust settled, and was reminded of his previous pain, just as Mack’s crumpled body caught his eye again.

  “Hey Mack, did you feel it when you died?”

  There was a chorus of ughter on the line and Gradie felt his face warm, drawing more attention to the flesh he was desperate to escape.

  “Aw shit, now new guys got fug jokes!”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “Fuck do you mean did I feel it?”

  “I got shot in the leg and it sucked.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Cause it’s a game?”

  The only oh anything to say to that was Angel.

  “The more realistic the sim, the less your Spirit is removed from its physical memory. You’ll feel what your mind expects unless you learn to expeot to.”

  That wasly f to Gradie, but his time for ption had run out.

  “Ok, got the Harmonizer isoted,” Nova said. “Now we move.”

  Wele back to Gunmaze. If the bullets hurt, would you still py shooters? ime, more mae guns, more paniow with the fear of real pai episode, Grazing Fire.