Renaissance (Alpha Rome Book 5): LitRPG Series Page 2

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass how many of you die! Every single one of you is the dregs of society, capable only of shitting where you sleep and then happily wallowing in it. So remember this for the rest of your brief lives: you’re already condemned! Common swill, useless hunks of meat that were allowed to bring some benefit to the remnants of our society by giving your lives doing something useful, for once. So for you, dead men walking, there are a few simple rules. Try to slip into any of those drain pipes behind you’ll be met with a shower of lead and plasma. Anyone who moves to the rear more than a kilometer from the line of battle will be branded a deserter and eliminated. The only way for you to go back upstairs is to completely reset your red levels. Every monster killed means minus a portion of your red levels. Each completed task means minus some of the red levels for the entire platoon. Each person who tries to escape from any platoon is considered an infraction for the whole platoon, further increasing your time spent in your local branch of hell. Now all of you will be given a week's ration, and I don't give a shit if you eat it right away or stretch it out for a week. But either way, you’ll receive your next ration in seven days. Equipment and weapons will be given to you immediately after your food rations, the weapon activation button will be displayed in the interface of your platoon commanders with the Heart. For those of you who are idiots, I’ll elaborate: platoon commanders are those who were given a pistol only fit to blow your own brains out in desperation. And again, I don’t give a shit how you determine who exactly your platoon leader is, that’s your own pain in the ass to handle! Oh yeah, I almost forgot — the task for the next two hours is to relieve my men on the front line, the task for the week is to advance fifteen kilometers deeper into the sewers. Yes, you understand correctly, I really absolutely don’t give a **** how you do it, you either do it or die. That’ll just be one less headache for me.”

  Turning around, he walked with a wide stride to the field command post, completely ignoring some people’s attempts to ask him questions or clarify. I, of course, sympathized with his position — they’d really thrown him to the wolves, or rather a crowd of unknown personalities, none of whom were particularly friendly with the law. But damn it all, this way wouldn’t work for anyone. Would it be so hard to give them a day or two to organize into platoons, or at least the opportunity to rein in the rowdier individuals, or train those who weren’t weapon savvy?

  There were two options: either he hated us all for some reason, or this was an order from above. Well, it didn’t jive with my idea of a reasonably well-organized base, with barriers, patrols, and all other necessary measures in place, and such a disregard for the soldiers, even if they are second rate. He had strut in, given out minimal information, and left, leaving us to figure out what to do next.

  Alright, so I’d have to go off of the info I already had. Filling half my field of vision with the personal files of the entire platoon and stacking them so that only the names and pictures were visible, I started hastily glancing around, calling out for the people (and mutants) who were on my list.

  “Kartos!” I got the attention of the gang leader I rode with on the transport vehicle. “You better decide now: either you continue working in your own interest, in which case I won’t give a spit about you or your circle, and you’re left on your own to survive. Or you can obey my orders and I’ll make you commander of the platoon and will do everything in my power to make sure you survive.”

  “What guarantee do I have that you won’t just use me and my guys as human shields if it works in your favor?”

  “What guarantees do you think I can offer you in this position? I can only give you my word. Will that be enough for you?”

  “The word of the Bloody Skurfaifer?”

  “Yes!” I suppressed the anger that surged inside me at the sound of that nickname that was already spreading like wildfire.

  “Good enough for me! I, Kartos, am ready to fight under the hand of the Bloody Skurf until he breaks the code or releases me from my obligations.”

  “I witness!”

  “I witness!”

  …

  …

  The same words were uttered by two dozen voices calling from different spots in the pandemonium the cleared area had become after the commander had left. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but apparently I had just been swept up into some kind of local bandit code of honor. And worst of all, as usual, I’d have to learn the rules as I played.

  “Big Daddy asked me to look after you,” Kartos said in a low voice, leaning in a hair’s breadth away from me. “He said that you’re a decent guy and did a lot for our brother. And it’s not really right, you know, leaving a decent guy without support.”

  “So what was that show you put on in the vehicle?”

  “Well, just because Big Daddy put in a good word for you doesn’t mean you weren’t worth poking a bit. What if he overestimated you and you cower at the first sign of trouble?”

  Glancing around at the faces gathered near me, I noticed that only a few of them had rushed to the open warehouses nearby to receive equipment. But the majority of them were watching my conversation with Kartos, and even spoke in a whisper so as not to disturb us.

  “Don’t get things twisted, boss,” noticing my look, Kartos said with amusement in his voice, patting me on the shoulder. “They held you in solitary confinement, but the rest of us have already had plenty of time to scratch out the pecking order, who breathes what air, who follows whose orders, and in general, lawful or lawless, it doesn’t matter anymore. Muties, well, I mean, those mutants there, the psions, practically worship you, and some old guy was asking for you…”

  “The Old One,” I corrected him automatically.

  “Yeah, him. The security forces also have your back, and some of the men from the bottom have joined them in the brigade, there’s some retired warrior over there talking you up. There are some other guys I don’t know, they keep to the sidelines, but we’ve scuffled with them before, they’re all ready to follow you through Hell and back. At first they almost stabbed us, they were keeping their word to some Falcon guy, but it turned out they were talking about you.”

  “Hmm…So I guess most of the people here will follow my orders without question?”

  “Well, there are, of course, outliers, like that dough boy traveling with us, but they themselves don’t know what they want. And all sorts of renegades and lawless people took up knives in the beginning, so there won’t be any problems from this side.”

  “Alright then…I thought I’d have to grow eyes in the back of my head to avoid getting stabbed in the back, but it looks like it all worked out.”

  “Well, what did you expect? Now every sewer rat from the bottom levels knows who you are and what you can do, and what you can lead others to do, and everyone wants to survive. Plus, you had a lot of influential friends, so many that even the local commanding officer is foaming at the mouth, because it was explained to him that if he doesn’t want problems, he’d better stand on the sidelines and not be giving you orders right and left.”

  Now the puzzle pieces were falling into place. Both the commander’s irritation and the bodies taken out of the transport, who had died, as it turns out, not as the result of a banal showdown between criminals, but after being purposefully eliminated for being an unreliable factor. So my friends and associates hadn’t abandoned me, but were helping as much as possible, first with a conditionally reliable human resource, then…well, I didn’t know what, but obviously they wouldn’t stop there. Eh, I'd have to dance the waltz of death once again — but luckily, now the orchestra was playing along with me.

  Chapter Two: The Front Line

  I SPENT ALMOST AN HOUR of the time allotted to us forming six large units corresponding to the number of tunnels leading out of the basin. A couple of the most nimble fighters rushed over there to do reconnaissance and trudged back with the disappointing news. As it turned out, there were five more barriers in the passages leading out
, and the three front ones would be under our control.

  Considering the fact that we were only issued semi-automatic pulse rifles and five battery packs, for a total of two hundred and fifty shots, I simply couldn’t imagine how we’d be able to survive. When I remembered our encounter with the Administrator's monsters near Level Zero, I became even more grim.

  Taking into account the width of the passage, we’d be able to place a platoon of fighters at each line, swapping out soldiers in shifts. Plus a backup platoon, working in six-hour shifts. In total, a little more than a thousand fighters pulled in six directions. And damn it, there was barely anyone left to go on the offensive — thirty-six platoons, that was all the men that had been drafted into the penal military branch.

  Okay, we’d have to allocate two platoons exclusively for breakthroughs, leaving one of the strong points closest to the basin. There was no way we could send all our fighters to the front line — if the attack attempt gets bogged down and the offensive platoon needs to retreat, there’s a chance that the monsters will burst through their lines, right into our line of defense, preventing the retreating group from gaining a foothold. Although…we could try something a little different.

  “Alright, listen up,” I turned to the platoon commanders gathered around me. “Check the composition of your platoons immediately. I need six groups with the highest possible percentage of fighters with real combat experience. I’ll warn you now, these platoons will need to be able to quickly swap out with the SVF’s first line of defense. We're pressed for time, so act quickly. We’ll occupy the second and third lines, since that’s what’s left. What’s most important now is that we hold our ground.”

  While I brought everyone up to speed, I pulled on the equipment that had been brought to me, which was as miserable as the weapon. A stacked breastplate with small armor plates and a dampening layer underneath, a similar set of shoulder pads, a light open helmet and elbow pads with knee pads — that’s basically all we were given. They tossed it to us as a kind of handout, so we wouldn’t die in the first few minutes.

  “Then how are we going to be able to push forward? You heard the commander: fifteen kilometers a week. That’s already practically impossible, and if we’re going to sit on the defensive, it’s even less likely we’ll complete the task.”

  “How did he phrase it…’I don’t give a rat’s ass’ about what the commander wants. If he wants to go deeper, he can send real soldiers, but we have neither the equipment, nor the trained personnel for that. So it’s better we accrue a bunch of fines than die like idiots within the first few days. Our main task now is to fortify our positions, clarify the situation, navigate the terrain and begin rotating between posts in one branch. So that the rookies are under the cover of those with more experience. As for equipment and weapons, we’ll decide along the way.”

  “Well, what if it’s a complete shitshow out there? What do they mean the battle is non-stop?”

  “That's why I'm going along with one of the groups, to see everything with my own eyes. Maybe we’ll have to scrap the whole plan and come up with something on the fly,” I cut him off, taking the pulse rifle handed to me and checking the charge level.

  On the side, just above the center and closer to the butt of the gun, a digital display read “237.” What assholes — they even skimped on the battery. A full charge should read at two-fifty. I moved the pouch with spare batteries under my left arm, threw the belt around my neck, placed the butt of the rifle in the crook of my right elbow with the barrel down and glanced inquiringly at the others.

  “Why are we standing around? What are we waiting for? Have we decided who’s first out of the frying pan and into the fire?”

  Ten minutes later and there was already a platoon standing in front of every outlet pipe, the soldiers nervously checking their ammunition. Adding to the sense of trepidation were the muffled sounds of gunfire that reached our ears, sometimes pausing for a couple of seconds, then starting up again with renewed vigor. It was strange — although the distance to the front line was small, we had the feeling that the battle was raging a few kilometers away. I thought that the pipes would amplify noise, but on the contrary, they seemed to dampen it.

  Of the two central passages, I, like a real man, chose the left, but if I wasn’t lying to myself, I knew that the platoon here was the weakest in terms of the number of fighters with combat experience. The only passage between the defensive structures was blocked by an armored personnel carrier, which, at our request, drove off to one side, letting us pass into the depths of the tunnels.

  “Everyone turn on your radios! Platoon leaders, don’t forget to activate your soldiers’ weapons! Let’s move quietly and report back every hundred meters.”

  We passed the first two lines of defense almost at a walking pace and the SFV soldiers paid practically no attention to us as they went about their business, but at the same time they kept constantly near the machine-gun emplacements and equipment, and with each barrier we passed, the situation became more and more grim. For one, the constant sound of gunfire weighed on our minds more and more, and the deeper we went, the more exhausted the soldiers in the area looked.

  When the remains of monsters and SVF soldiers started falling over the top of the third barrier, which was, in fact, the furthest post back from the front line where we were stationed, I even had to reassure one of our soldiers with a time-tested technique: a square punch to the jaw. The further we moved forward, the more we began to see the traces of active battle.

  “Guys, wait!” the sergeant at the penultimate post called out to us. “I know the captain doesn’t care about you, but as a fellow human being I advise you to keep a close eye on the walls and ceiling.”

  “Thank you!” What else could I say?

  After receiving this warning, I commanded the soldiers to turn on the underbarrel lights built into the handle of their guns and to halve their speed, carefully studying the area around them. We had about a hundred meters to go, which seemed like nothing, but the last post was located immediately around a sharp corner in the pipe and all we could see now was the flashes of gunfire. But the lighting in the area in front of us was terrible, leaving a lot of dark spots.

  Either the combat engineers forgot to hang lights in this part of the tunnel, or when the front line had to retreat and abandon their positions, the monsters had destroyed them and our crew simply hadn’t been able to reinstall them. I really wanted it to be the former, but I knew very well that most likely, it was the latter — especially considering the thick layer of remains carpeting the floor.

  “LOOK UP!” shouted one of the soldiers.

  Almost everyone reacted on nervous reflex, firing chaotically at the ceiling, where something resembling a cross between a praying mantis and a spider darted between the beams of the rifle lights. It was a kind of mutant centaur with a head remotely resembling a human’s and the torso and forelimbs of a praying mantis attached to an arachnid bottom with six arthropod paws, which it used to cling to the ceiling.

  They downed the saboteur practically within the first few shots, but some of the soldiers continued pummeling the ceiling for another twenty seconds until they were pacified by jabs and pokes to the ribs. We only had eight or so inexperienced fighters, but the general panic had swept up more than a dozen.

  Fine, screw it, as long as they weren’t killing each other. I’d need to assign each novice an experienced fighter so that they would work in pairs, covering each other and simultaneously gaining experience without rushing headlong into places they shouldn’t. As soon as I made this decision, I gave the task to the platoon commander so that it could be carried out. At the same time, I wrote myself a note in the notepad built into the interface: do the same with the other groups.

  We were met with a mix of joy and a complete “damn-it-all” attitude. Joy, because they were being sent to the rear to rest, but on the other hand, the SVF fighters seemed completely detached from this reality, continuing to reflexive
ly glance every few seconds towards the territory controlled by the enemy and occasionally shoot back into the darkness. This despite the beams of the rifle searchlights, scanning the outer defenses.

  “Who’s in charge here?” I asked one of the SVFers.

  “Damask. There he is, sticking out from behind the third machine gun.”

  Following the direction in which the fighter had nodded his head, I saw the field commander on top of a stockade that blocked off the entire tunnel, standing on a special platform behind one of four heavy machine guns, each of which dealt a different type of damage. In this case, it was a good old heavy-caliber fire machine gun with a long belt going down to a huge box below.