Girl of Iron
Icarus Tech detected in the vicinity.
The area was pure chaos.
Weeks of soloing AP had taught me one hard truth: the gear boxes that unlocked skills always sat dead center in the busiest hubs, and those hubs were always the places where the line between life and death was thinner than paper. Even now, with barely three hundred meters left to cover, the gunfire pouring out of the zone was relentless — a constant, furious crackle like beans roasting in a pan.
I'd said it often enough already, but the shape of a tournament-rules session never really changed. The moment you cracked a box open, weapons spilled out, and whether you held the advantage in a firefight came down almost entirely to whether you had a skill. Naturally, the skill-unlock zones were where lives fell like autumn leaves. Even accounting for the fact that this was a tournament, the pattern held — and once a match burned past the early item-farming phase, the whole thing caught fire.
In short, I was heading into the hottest spot at the hottest possible moment.
The building was the largest structure in the area, packed with a control room, rest facilities, and a tangle of other zones. The second I stepped inside, the sound of a firefight came ricocheting off the walls from deeper in — hundreds, maybe thousands of impacts, shattered into fragments. Most of it was gunfire, but mixed in was something else: a sound like trying to stop a cloudburst with a single umbrella.
I knew that sound by heart.
───Thud-thud-thud-thud!
Rounds slamming into a ballistic shield and ricocheting in every direction. This wasn't some ordinary riot shield — it was Icarus Gear, and even if it looked like a regular plate, its performance left modern equipment in the dust. Back when I'd run my gear on a nanomachine-activation loadout, I could tank a minigun's continuous fire head-on for dozens of seconds. That hadn't changed here. Users who built dedicated tank setups always took the vanguard and soaked the enemy's fire.
But my thoughts were somewhere else entirely.
Mjolnir and a ballistic shield. A memory that felt terribly… familiar. And bitterly, painfully raw.
I drew a slow breath and checked my surroundings. Even on the same map, AP reshuffled the layout slightly — or drastically — every single time, but the skill-activation devices were always planted somewhere wide open. Meaning the odds of your head parting company with your body while you unlocked a skill hovered somewhere near one hundred percent. Plenty of players simply never came here. Late-game, EMP grenades and jammers that could nullify skills had been introduced specifically to stop people from leaning on them too hard.
—Piiing!
"Ugh."
The moment I stepped into the building — if you could even call it that — the people already inside, tucked into every corner, sensed the presence and opened fire with cheerful abandon. In situations like this, you never, ever gave them a fair fight. I was the one walking into their positions; nearly every advantage belonged to them. As I always said, you only took a fight at even numbers, or when you already held the edge. There was no reason to pick a fight when the odds were against you.
But things never went the way you wanted.
The instant I edged into the corridor, a stuttering roar erupted from the far end and a muzzle flash lit the dark. I threw myself clear and ran the situation back. One enemy was trailing carefully behind me. The route I'd planned was already blocked by another. The most certain thing: neither of them would want a straight gunfight with me. At best, they'd try to take the safe profit with grenades.
So… let's limit where the one behind me can throw.
First, I put carbine rounds through every light fixture in the ceiling nearby — including the corridor I'd been about to take. Darkness swallowed the space in an instant. From a pocket, I pulled a smoke grenade.
With that, I could manufacture any number of situations.
The one closing from behind will try to pin down my exact position.
Because that was the only way a grenade stood a real chance of killing me. Years of real combat experience let me cut to the answer fast. Feed the one behind me false information about where I was. Use the smoke to shove the one in front farther back, and create a relatively safe pocket to ride out the blast. The one hard rule was that the smoke's detonation had to stay hidden — but if I popped it under the cover of loud gunfire, that was easy enough to bury.
And just like that, I had the three conditions I needed to break free of the situation. The pieces of the puzzle clicked into place one by one, and the engagement geometry I wanted came into focus.
I took a breath, and started.
───Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!
I locked the carbine hard into my shoulder, leaned into the corridor, and poured automatic fire into the last place I'd marked the enemy. Muzzle flash tore open the dark, and the fight settled into a straight frontal exchange. Of course both of us were working cover, so almost nothing landed — but the noise was deliberate. It was meant to tell the one approaching from behind exactly where I was.
With my tail I pulled the smoke grenade free, yanked the pin, and rolled it. At the same time I switched to semi-auto and laid down measured suppressing fire at a steady cadence. The rattle of the rolling can and the crack of the fuse were completely drowned by the gunfire.
—Fsssshhhh…
White smoke billowed soundlessly from the middle of the corridor. The enemy in front of me fell back beyond it — and the one behind, reading the gunfire, roughly understood that I was fighting along the hallway.
I swapped in a fresh magazine. From behind came a sharp metallic click — someone priming a grenade. Without hesitation, and without a sound, I sprinted down the corridor, dropped flat to the floor, covered my ears, and opened my mouth.
There was no risk of catching a bullet from the enemy I'd just been trading with. The smoke was thick, and the grenade I'd thrown had already forced him to retreat.
Something hard bounced off a wall, then hit the floor.
An enormous roar and a shockwave tore through the corridor.
───KRA-BOOM!
"…Ugh…!"
Acrid powder smoke crawled along the walls. Hundreds of steel balls and concrete shards screamed in every direction. The force was enough to leave my ears ringing. The spot I'd just left was a bare junction of corridors with nowhere to hide — if I'd still been standing there, I would have been blown apart.
A dull thud sounded again. Another grenade. Qualifying-rank players never got careless.
Two explosions in succession shook the building. The moment the aftershock faded, I rose and ran silently toward ground zero.
No one ever threw three grenades into the same spot. Two was fine, but a third was wasted time — and if you failed to kill the target, the noise would draw aggro from every direction. Meaning the enemy behind me would stop throwing now and come looking for me.
Closing the distance with an enemy was always something I welcomed.
───Clack-chunk!
"…."
The sound of a ballistic shield deploying. If I'd been an ordinary player, I would have cursed this never-careless bastard until my throat gave out. In a tight space like this, a shield-and-pistol combo could weather almost anything. Frankly, a normal user would already be dead at this point.
But putting absolute faith in a shield was always a mistake — because tools are only ever as good as the person holding them.
The instant the edge of that shield punched into the darkened corridor where the lights had been shot out, I launched myself forward. Like a rhinoceros, I drove my full body weight into him. The shield had a broad surface area optimized for exactly this kind of impact.
"Hhk—!"
A shield could stop bullets, and Icarus Gear helped — but in the end, the force still had to be absorbed by human muscle. With a heavy crash, the combined mass of two people slammed into the wall. In that same instant I lifted my body, seized his right wrist with my left hand, and forced the pistol out of his grip. My right hand joined the left, both locked on his wrist — and I yanked hard, rolling him straight into a shoulder throw.
───WHAM!
He hit the floor on his back with the shield still clenched in his left hand, every last breath driven out of his lungs. I pinned the shield under my foot so he couldn't move, then brought the Mjolnir I'd kept strapped to my body to bear on his head.
The report cracked several times. The kill count ticked up.
I breathed in the rising powder smoke and let my lungs settle.
"…Hah."
Aside from the one who'd fled earlier, there were no more enemies nearby. From the multi-purpose pouch at my hip I pulled five rounds of Lapua Magnum, dropped the magazine, and loaded them in. The familiar metallic clicks circled my ears.
Every single moment of life was a hardship.
The session wasn't over yet.