The Difference Between Stalling and Buying Time
“What were you dawdling around for?!”
I had nothing to say.
If I’d just slipped out without being spotted, things never would have gotten this frantic.
The second I wondered whether I was being greedy, someone came stomping up the stairs—who could have seen that coming?
“Just run. Hurry.”
“Where—”
“Straight ahead. I’ll cover you from behind!”
Watching Sara brace herself against the wall and settle into a firing stance filled me with dread.
If my call left anyone from the Omen family behind—if it left Sara behind…
“I’m not saying I’m staying—”
A noise forced its way through the gap, and fire spat from her muzzle.
“Guh—!”
And just like that, a corpse sealed the narrow passage shut.
“That’s why I told you to get moving already. Haa… Come on!”
In the game, escape had always been entirely my job.
I planned the route, chose which prisoners to take, decided who died along the way—all of it was my call.
Sometimes I even let myself get captured by a heavily guarded faction on purpose, just so I could kill their leader or their scientists and cripple their progress or tear them apart from the inside.
But being the one getting rescued? This was a first.
So it felt completely alien.
Having no idea what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to do it—just following someone else’s orders.
“Left here. Left!”
We ran until we reached a steep incline that looked like a sewer channel where the water had long since dried up.
Light suddenly spilled down from above.
“Sara?!”
“Yes, Grandpa!”
“Get up here!”
Dietrich went first.
I scrambled up right after her, then reached down and offered my hand to Sara, who came last.
Once I’d hauled her up and got a solid grip, Curtis started hurriedly pouring something down the slope.
…Oil. The kind they used for generators.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Back there. Go help him set the booby traps. And be careful with those fuses!”
Now that I looked, the escape route had been fortified for a long time.
A heavy machine gun was already trained down the incline, and James was planting improvised bombs along the path we would take.
Tight wires strung at ankle height made me swallow hard without thinking.
“And… looks like we’ve picked up a passenger.”
“Angela Dietrich. And you are…?”
“Curtis Omen, at your service, Lady Dietrich.”
“Nice to meet you. Um… so what do we do now?”
“We scare the hell out of them.”
“Scare them?”
“Beasts chasing retreating prey always get cocky. Their heads fill up with how they’re going to play with their catch, not how they’re going to take it down.”
— Clack-clack.
The sound of one slab of metal slamming into another was nothing like a rifle’s.
And the way he racked that slab of metal—pulling and releasing—had not a single wasted motion in it.
“But what happens when they watch the comrades ahead of them get turned into meat scraps?”
“…”
“And once we’ve abandoned this outpost and put some distance between us, when their superiors whip them into climbing up here anyway—well, the little presents we’ve stashed all over the place will give them one hell of a welcome. You think they’ll still feel like chasing us after they’re covered in blood?”
This was a combat veteran who’d been nursing a mild case of PTSD.
So why, of all the versions of Curtis I’d seen so far, did this one look the most alive?
“Ahem. So, Miss Dietrich—what’s your line of work…?”
“I’m a doctor. Up top I was a veterinarian.”
“So you were practicing medicine under the Nazis.”
“…That’s right.”
“Then without you, the Nazis have—”
“No doctors. Correct.”
“That’s a damn critical hit!”
Curtis clapped his hands and let out a booming laugh.
Dietrich looked thoroughly uncomfortable under that laugh, her expression darkening by the second.
“Maybe… for now, we should get Miss Dietrich somewhere safer. That would be better, right?”
The forced smile and the nod she gave were thick with unease.
Curtis must have noticed, because he cleared his throat a few times and waved James over.
“My boy will show you the way. Follow him.”
Compared to the three of them, who were suddenly very busy, my own role felt strangely weightless.
I was staring blankly at the mounted heavy machine gun when Curtis’s wrinkled hand clamped onto my shoulder and yanked me around.
“How’s the body? You in one piece?”
“Yes. Thanks to you.”
“Save the thanks for my granddaughter. We’re only here because of Sara.”
“Because of… Sara?”
Fingers still locked around the heavy machine gun, Curtis kept his eyes on the path we’d climbed.
“Stubbornness runs in the family, but my son’s girl never once complained growing up. I figured maybe that’s just how daughters are.”
Then he snorted.
“She grew up worthy of the Omen name.”
“…”
“I’m going to collect on whatever made that girl dig her heels in. You know that, right?”
“Of course. You said you’d take the price of a life plus interest.”
“That so?”
When I nodded, Curtis looked at me with a strangely satisfied expression.
…Probably just excited about how hard he was going to work me from now on.
“All right, enough chitchat. Grab that bag over there.”
I dragged over a bag that was a little on the heavy side and opened it. It was packed with nails and canisters of powder.
“We tried cobbling together some bombs for the traps, but next to the ones you make they looked like garbage. So you’re finishing the booby traps.”
“Then what about the ones being set right now—”
“Empty cans with nothing but detonators in them. Oh, and while we’re on the subject—mind planting a few over here before you go?”
His finger pointed straight down.
Plastic tubes wedged between the sandbags propping up the machine gun.
…No way.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’ve got no plans to pull a kamikaze here. If I’ve got a modest dream left, it’s living long enough to see my great-granddaughter.”
A great-granddaughter. Down here, underground.
“It’s just a precaution so this beauty doesn’t fall into enemy hands. Can’t let a fine piece like her end up in filthy Nazi paws.”
I sighed at his cackling and started packing nails and explosives into the cans already in place.
“Done.”
“Good. Now go finish those traps. Nazis still coming hard after you?”
“Sara killed a soldier climbing through the passage and blocked the way, so… we should’ve bought a fair amount of ti—”
“Shh.”
“Mph?!”
The wrinkled palm that clamped over my mouth tasted spicy and sour—
But what hit my brain far more clearly was the sound of combat boots.
The dark path we’d climbed was growing brighter under the beam of a flashlight.
“Go finish the booby traps. And send James over to me.”
“You’re trying to stall them? But—”
“Stall them?”
Curtis pressed his lips tight against a laugh that wanted to escape, then patted me on the back—thump, thump.
“You’ll see. What a fifty-cal can do.”
“Move! Move!”
At the SS’s urging, the Wehrmacht men scrambled into motion.
And then the incline rose up in front of them.
“Frank, take your squad down that side passage. Everyone else—up the slope. Execute!”
While another group of soldiers pushed into the dark tunnel with lights raised, the ones under orders set their first boots on the incline.
“Ugh?!”
The first thing they learned was that the surface was extremely slippery.
Not a single man could get a proper footing and climb.
“What’s going on?”
“Looks like oil was dumped on the floor. We can’t get up.”
“So the people we’re tracking never made it up this way either?”
“Seems that way—ugh?!”
An SS trooper cracked him across the head and jabbed a finger at the rope.
“Why do you think there’s a line running up from here, soldier? Is that head of yours just decoration? Your eyes? Your judgment?”
“No, sir. Climbing now.”
One soldier seized the rope in both hands and shoved with his feet as best he could, hauling himself upward.
The others fell in behind him—and that was exactly when it happened.
— Screee.
A bone-chilling metallic sound suddenly crawled into the soldiers’ ears.
“W-what was that.”
“What’s wrong, soldier?”
“Something up above. But it’s too dark—I can’t see a thing.”
At that, the SS trooper braced a hand on the slope, pulled out his own flashlight, and shone it upward—
And both the lead soldier clinging to the rope and the SS man saw it at once.
A barrel far too thick to belong to a rifle.
Sandbags stacked as if someone had been waiting for them to climb.
“H-huh—”
The soldier on the rope realized something was terribly wrong and tried to let go—
But before his brain could finish telling his hands to open, a gravelly old voice drove itself into every ear on the slope.
“Auf Wiedersehen, you Nazi bastards!”
And then the orange flower blooming right in front of their faces.
— KRRRRRRRRRRRRRAK —
The roar that threatened to rupture eardrums tore human bodies apart as it came.
The men on the rope were shredded into pieces that spilled down the old water channel; even the SS trooper in body armor was reduced to ground meat along with his flashlight.
“M-machine gun nest—machine gun ne—”
He tried to throw himself behind a wall, but even that wasn’t enough to save him from a bullet the size of a palm.
Concrete exploded into powder, and chunks of flesh peeled off the body behind it.
By the time the soldiers who’d taken the other path came running back, flesh and blood had already been flowing with the water for a while.
Of those who had tried to climb the incline, not a single man was left alive.
“…”
No one could bring themselves to move.
The holes punched through thick concrete were a clear enough warning.
They were not permitted to so much as stick their heads out, not permitted to so much as aim a muzzle up that slope.
The blood-soaked radio flickered for a moment, then shattered into fragments under another burst of fire.
A clean hole punched through the concrete floor.
“…”
The hand holding the radio shook like a leaf.
“Th-there’s a machine gun nest, Major. Advance is impossible.”
“A heavy machine gun nest, Major. It tore the wall apart and wiped out Max’s squad. Pursuit is impossib—”
— Clatter-roll.
Something came tumbling down.
Every soldier’s eyes snapped to the sudden flare of flame, bright as a firework.
A fuse, already burned almost to nothing, stuck into a long plastic stick and still burning down.
“Bomb—!”
The blast filled the tunnel.
Only after the choking dust settled did the full horror of the scene reveal itself.
“M-my arm, my arm!!! AAAAAAH!!!”
“S-somebody hold my stomach—my stomach’s open. This isn’t supposed to be out here—”
Those sounds drifted up the incline.
Above, the old man finally took his hands off the heavy machine gun and leisurely stuck a cigarette between his lips.
“You said I was stalling them?”
“…”
“Call it buying time. And a whole hell of a lot of it.”