God Game or Trash Game
An ally had gone down.
The silver lining was that they'd already dropped three of the enemy, so the numerical advantage still sat firmly on their side. Even so, she now had to start watching her rear. By this point her position had to be at least partly compromised, which meant a fast push was the better call.
She strode toward the room holding the objective. A glance through the crack in the door confirmed it — an Entry Denial Device was planted on the frame. She destroyed the charge with the sniper rifle and was just stepping through when a voice cracked over comms.
"Unknown! An enemy's heading your way right now! Central stairs in the hallway!"
At the same instant, a red cursor bloomed at the far end of the corridor, right on the central stairwell. So that was the enemy's position. They'd flanked faster than she'd expected. No wonder she'd kept hearing movement from below.
Even if they came at her in the open it wouldn't have mattered much — except an ally was planting the defuse kit right now. She couldn't let an enemy walk up on someone that exposed.
Guess she didn't have a choice.
"Where are you going?"
"Just a second..."
The hallway ran in a dead straight line to the emergency exit the ping had marked. The other side would know that too. She dropped prone, settled the sniper into her shoulder, and evened out her breathing. No footsteps. They were coming in as quiet as they could.
From here on, it was a fight of reaction speed.
Then something odd came sailing out of the stairwell mouth. It wasn't a frag — the shape was wrong for a smoke grenade too. It hit the floor, hissed like air bleeding from a tire, and belched a thick yellow cloud.
Through the smoke that swallowed the corridor in a heartbeat, a heavily geared enemy came charging in. Submachine gun in hand — an FMG-9, if she had it right. She put the crosshairs dead on the center of their silhouette.
There was no hesitation in what came next.
A vicious kick of recoil raked across her shoulder.
"Aagh!"
The enemy folded where they stood, skull punched clean through, and a score flashed at the edge of her vision.
It had been a while since she'd shot from the prone, and her body was complaining about it. A few quick stretches worked the stiffness out; the heavy recoil bled off through her joints and faded.
By the time she made it back to the objective room, the numbers in her vision had changed again.
Another ally was dead.
Figuring out who didn't take long. The teammate who'd been planting the defuse kit right in front of her was lying there, cold. Faint yellow haze still drifted through the room. So that thing the enemy had thrown wasn't a regular smoke after all.
Her own health had taken a noticeable chunk out of it too. The color had struck her as off from the start — some kind of toxic gas, then. She'd wondered why that enemy had been wearing a gas mask. They'd put up with the inconvenience for exactly this.
"I'll have to start watching for that kind of thing."
Reconstructing it was easy enough. They'd pre-planted the gas and cooked it off on the way in. The ally had tried to finish the plant inside the cloud and simply hadn't been able to tank the damage. Whether they'd thought they could ride it out or had some other reason, she couldn't say.
It was an extraordinarily stupid way to die.
She skimmed the chat as it rolled in and picked the defuse kit up off the floor. It was issued to only one player at the start of the match. Lose it, and the only path left to a win was wiping the other team completely.
Click. Click.
She cracked the case, punched in the disarm code, and a system prompt confirmed the plant as the timer lurched.
Time remaining: 20:00+ → 02:00
More than twenty minutes on the clock had collapsed to two in a single breath.
So all they had to do was hold for that long?
The enemy would have figured out by now that the kit was down. She gave her remaining ammo and gear a quick once-over. Nothing worth worrying about. Plenty of rounds left — she wasn't going to run dry.
She'd barely finished resetting for the next fight when another frantic call slammed into her ear.
"Enemy at the underground vault! They're heading up right now...!"
"Enemies everywhere."
If winning was all that mattered, holding this position was the correct play. But she had no interest in a victory squeezed out of stalling a clock. Guarding the kit was something someone else could do just as well, and in a situation like this, putting pressure on the enemy was the better tool anyway.
As for how she planned to do that — it wasn't anything grand.
"Somebody watch the defuse kit."
Hunt down wherever they were hiding and smash them to pieces. In its own way, that was helping the team too.
That was how she saw it, anyway, as she started sweeping the area.
"...Did everyone die?"
"It's just us left. The defuse kit's already planted, too."
"Shouldn't have gone roaming. If we'd just held site they wouldn't have broken through that easy."
Shotgun slung forward so they could snap to an aimed shot at any second, the two of them hugged the second-floor site — a nest of remote charges already wired through the room — and watched the outside with careful eyes.
They'd taken two, but four of their own were already gone, and the kit was down. Roaming had never been a safe play. You abandoned the objective and went hunting, turning the attack back on the attackers — high risk by design. When it worked, though, the payoff was decisive. High risk, high return. And looking at the opening, the advantage had clearly been theirs.
They'd stalled the two coming in through the cave mouth, then cleaned up the one sweeping the first floor. Even if only two defenders had been holding site, it shouldn't have fallen this cleanly.
The reason it had anyway was sitting entirely on one player on the other team. Unknown.
Watching her on Jump's stream hadn't prepared them. Meeting her in a match was something else. She was even more of a problem than they'd expected — the kind of problem that started as curiosity about what she even was, and ended in a flat, incredulous how does a person like that exist.
"...There's definitely someone on their team coming to hunt us. We should drop one, blow a wall, and try a rush."
"If we just destroy the defuse kit, we win."
"If we keep our heads we can take this. I made it to Gold, you know. Trust me on this one."
"Oh..."
Twenty seconds had already ticked off since the plant. Any moment now, one of the attackers sniffing around for a kill would show themselves. The whine of a drone drifted in, undercut by the rough tear of a barricade coming apart. Busy movement from every direction — they were being hunted.
Then a drone slid into the room they were hiding in.
BANG!
The shotgun's roar smashed the drone to pieces. The shot also handed the enemy their position on a platter.
Too late to relocate. The only option left was to meet whoever came through and hit them back.
The tension in the room went taut enough to snap.
BOOM!
"What the—!"
"What are you doing? Shoot!"
A grenade-launcher blast shredded the barricade, and a single enemy came pouring through from the far side. The speed was ridiculous. In the sliver of time it took to get a sight picture and pull a trigger, they were already behind cover.
It was Unknown.
Both of their sightlines locked onto her at once. The self-proclaimed Gold player felt the mistake in that and reset his grip on the shotgun.
"I've got that one!"
He didn't say anything more, but the other one heard the implication instantly — you go for the kit — and snapped their head the other way.
In the same breath, the shotgun and the sniper rifle opened up on each other.
BANG!
The M590A1 bellowed and spat a cloud of 12-gauge steel shot into the air. This wasn't one of those games where the pellets went anemic after a dozen meters. Even at several dozen, there was more than enough force in the pattern to take a body apart. The flimsy structure in front of them came apart under the blast, and thousands of fragments — steel shot included — went scything through the room.
Even so, facing down what was supposed to be the crown jewel of close-quarters fighting, Unknown slipped the incoming shot by a hair on nothing but overwhelming Physical and squeezed the trigger.
A sniper round, fired without a proper sight picture. For most people that was a prayer. For someone who had lived through tens of thousands of real firefights, the accuracy simply matched a General Player's careful aimed shot.
Steel shot and a lead slug crossed in midair, traveling opposite ways. The results did not.
"Ugh!"
A short, punched-out scream. The voice didn't belong to Unknown. It belonged to the defender with the shotgun.
"Fucking trash game..."
That was just how games worked.