Renaissance (Alpha Rome Book 5): LitRPG Series Page 3
“Roger, copy, I’m on it!” replied the gunner on the leftmost machine gun.
Five short rounds aimed at the target with tight bundles of electrical discharges, and then the soldiers with hand weapons entered the battle, finishing off the enemy with short mean bursts. Absolutely all actions were carried out so perfectly that it immediately became clear that they had already destroyed more than a dozen such groups.
“Good day to you!” I said, calling attention to myself as I started climbing up, at the same time taking a look at the surrounding area.
“Ah, the dead men walking…You’re just in time, I only have half a platoon left.”
“Will you give me the lowdown?”
“Oof…” he sighed heavily. “Sanchez, cover for me!”
When the fighter had jumped up and taken the commander’s place behind the turret, scanning for a target with the attached searchlight, the sergeant, judging by the stripes, wearily sat down literally a meter away and, leaning his back on the low protection wall, removed his helmet. A tired young face was revealed, all smudged with dirt, with bags under the eyes and bruises showing through in some places. In his eyes shone only one emotion — fatigue. And it was not the fatigue that occurs after several hours of hard work, but that terrible fatigue that fills the entire psyche of a person who has his nose to the grindstone for a very long time and cannot stop, because he knows that all it takes is one moment of letting your guard down — and everything goes sideways.
“So look here. These pipes are located on the very edge of the border, so you won’t expect to see such serious attacks as you do on the main lines, where it’s a slaughterhouse right now. But about twenty kilometers down, if we can trust the old sketches, there’s an exit to the first underground level. It’s a small opening, you won’t be able to drag any serious equipment through, only infantry formations, but command decided that as we break through on all the main fronts, a flank attack by infantry could help us gain a foothold. That is why they’re keeping us here, but, as usual, because this is far from the most important position, resources are allocated to us accordingly — we get the scraps. While we have no problems with food and ammo, we’re simply starving for replication resources. Rumor has it that there are a hundred and a half service replications left for the brigade, and resources for the next will only be issued in a week. And we have five people dying in each direction per day, and if these creatures go on the attack, then we may lose hundreds of guys to the battle. The captain is furious about it, but he is trying to plug all the holes with you, hoping that you’ll last out the week.”
“Understood, the safety of their fighters is much more important than the lives of some criminals.”
“I see you’re not too upset about this.” He arched his eyebrows in surprise.
“What's the point? I would have done exactly the same in his place. We are nobody to him, but he has been sharing his last rations with you for a long time, and, I assume, you’ve fought shoulder-to-shoulder on multiple occasions. You’d better just explain the combat situation to me.”
“Well, there’s nothing much to tell. There are three types of monsters on the other side, in the total mass there are not very many of them — I don’t know why that is, maybe the population is small, or maybe they also think this position isn’t very important — but they barricaded themselves there. The last time we tried to break through this pipe with a full battalion, eighty percent of the squad was mowed down! They’ve made a real labyrinth there. And in hand-to-hand combat, I'll tell you right now, they are still monsters, they chop our guys down as if they were children. I think they would have broken through a long time ago, but we’re saved by the fact that they don’t have long-range attacks. So we got used to eliminating each of their groups in our own way. It’s trench warfare. They’re trying to break through to the rear in small groups and organize a sabotage there, slaughtering as many people as possible. We try to contain them on the edge of the approach, but sometimes the groups we can’t finish off breach deeper. In the other direction, the situation is the other way around: they let us enter the labyrinth of their fortifications and simply cut us down in close combat.”
“Ants along the left wall!” yelled a fighter a couple of meters from us, immediately turning that direction and emitting volleys from the machine gun, five rounds each.
“Hit them with plasma! PLASMA, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” yelled the sergeant, shouting over the firing of the machine gun, jumping up and immediately putting on his helmet. “Get to work, you! Damn your ass to hell!”
“The plasma power supply is dead! If I get to work, I’ll flood the place and send us all to hell.”
“**** your mother! All right, up and at ‘em, boys! Off your asses, there’s work to be done! Dead men walking, why are you standing there like stone? Join the fun, and maybe we won't eat it today.”
Grabbing the radio, I heard the short commands of the platoon commander whose soldiers I had traveled with mixed with the orders of other commanders moving along parallel sewer lines. Damn, the attack seemed to be coming from all directions at once. The sergeant was right — now, the only thing we could think about was survival.
The “ants” only distantly resembled real ants in terms of body structure. They had the same long thorax with four pairs of limbs, an elongated head with mandibles and…and…that’s it. I had the impression that whoever made these ants was trying to armor them as much as possible without adding a significant amount of bulk. They were almost three meters in height with three pairs of eyes running down the sides of the entire head. Spikes all over the body, which, moreover, were bent at incredible angles, as if they weren’t ants, but caterpillars, and they even had serrated paws like sawblades. All of these details detracted from its resemblance to an ant, but the real kicker was the three tentacle-tails, which opened at the tip into a three-lobed mouth full of sharp teeth arranged in several rows.
If I had seen these monsters when I still thought Alpha Rome was just a game, I would have suspected the programmers were on some seriously heavy drugs. Conventional kinetic weapons had practically no effect. I didn’t know what kind of armor they had, but it felt like we were shooting at tanks. Only two machine guns managed to pierce through, or rather, the laser beams burned small holes, but the electrical charges managed to briefly disable the ants, leaving them twitching and convulsing.
But the machine guns didn’t help much — these beasts simply maneuvered around the corpses of the previous attackers, using them as cover and moving in short dashes towards the places where our protective gunfire was growing weaker. A couple of times, I even saw an ant move into an open space, intentionally drawing the fire onto itself, so that in other places, groups of three to five individuals could inch a little closer to us.
Ceasing fire, I peered into the space in front of us and almost started to swear. There was your evidence of monster sentience. The recent continuous attacks in small groups were not attempts at sabotage, they were simply forming shelters for their real attack — almost all the corpses were scattered in the same places, forming a whole system of barriers, allowing these creatures to easily move twenty meters closer with almost no losses. Even a plasma machine gun would be of no help here, you’d have too much to burn through. Wait — plasma…
“Sargeant, how much plasma do we have left in the reserves?”
“What difference does it make, the machine gun still isn’t operational.”
“I have an idea, but we need to act fast! How much plasma in the reservoir?”
“About a third…”
“Excellent!” I didn’t wait to hear the rest. Spinning around, I leapt down from the fortification on the protected side.
Tucking my legs, going into a somersault to absorb the momentum and without even taking the time to stand up
fully, I rushed towards the plasma reservoir nearly on all fours. The standard container for plasma gun installations resembled a meter-high cylinder, sandwiched in a double casing. In fact, this casing was a force field generator inside the cylinder, which kept the plasma in a compressed state, and also provided energy for the power coating of the energy conduit supplying the plasma, in this case, to the machine gun.
Now, apparently, a problem had arisen in the force field generator on the power line. And without it, a certain hose would burn out in seconds, flooding the entire area with plasma as it unpressurized. This is exactly what I wanted to use against the several hundred "ants" breaking through to us. Jumping up to the technician, who, in light of the impending doom, was trying to restore the plasma supply, I yelled right into his ear.
“I have an order! Run to disconnect the power line, I need the tank itself.”
I love the military, I just love it! No stupid questions like, “why?”, or any sort of, “Who are you and what right do you have to give commands?” The battle was raging, the commanders were close by, and you were surrounded by your own men, which meant that you couldn’t dawdle and needed to complete tasks quickly. So without any questions, the technician disconnected the container from the extra part in five seconds. In the meantime, I looked around and found a coil of synthetic rope, plucked the wire cutters from the technician’s belt and cut off a couple of meters.
I connected the two ends to form a ring and twisted it into a figure eight, then wrapped it around the tank approximately in the middle. Putting my hands into the straps I’d formed and cursing, I pulled the knot forward — but had given it too much slack and the tank didn’t not fit snugly against my back. Now I could pull it tight, but one of my hands was occupied. Unable to come up with a better solution, I grabbed the rope in my teeth and, twisting my head in the opposite direction, pulled it as tight as I could. This position was uncomfortable, but I had no choice — I needed my hands free.
Crouching and supporting the tank from the bottom with my hands so it wouldn’t move off my back, I tried to stand up with a jerk. Apparently, even a third full, the tank weighed forty kilograms, maybe fifty, so lifting it on my own wouldn’t work. The technician apparently understood what I was trying to do, and, jumping up, helped me and the cylinder up, loading on his back and bending slightly forward.
Grunting something grateful, but unintelligible due to the knot clamped in my teeth, I quickly walked back to the fortifications, carefully searching out footholds with one eye, as my head was turned to one side, and with the other eye I could only look over my shoulder. Completely ignoring whatever the sergeant was shouting in my direction, without stopping, I jumped over the shelters and almost lost my balance upon landing.
“What are you thinking, you half-baked psychopath?” The words flew at my back.
But I was prevented from responding by the damned knot in my teeth, which consistently tried to either slip from my teeth or dislocate my jaw. And why “half-baked?” I was fully baked, fully qualified, fully trained and certified as a professional psycho…well, at least in the military sense.
Ugh, now I’d have to run another two hundred meters, drop the load, and then run back — and I was trudging along like a tortoise, pushing myself to go as fast as possible with such a cumbersome burden. It was twenty meters, maybe thirty, but it felt like five hundred, and the tank was constantly threatening to slip off to one side. Fifty meters and the lower edge of the tank was cutting into my hands so much that I could barely feel my fingers. And judging by the blood loss icon that appeared in the corner of my vision, my hands weren’t doing too well.
At eighty meters, I was nearly split in two by an ant that burst forward, but I managed to recoil with my load, and the next second, a laser burst passed through the entire torso of the attacker. And they called me a psycho?! If they had hit the tank, I would have been reduced to a pile of ashes. Well, actually, considering the temperature of the plasma, even the ashes would be scorched out of existence.
There was no point in dragging it on any further. Throwing the container off my back, I pushed as quickly as I could to the top of a small hill of corpses. I immediately had to rush back at breakneck speed, as this exposed a view of the approaching ants, the bulk of which were already a measly twenty meters away.
The gunfire passed mostly to either side of me, avoiding even the slightest chance of hitting the tank while I was still in the danger zone. With ten meters left to the fortification and me frantically trying to figure out a way to quickly scale it, the sergeant commanding the SVF forces jumped over the shelter, and grabbing onto the side and hanging off with one arm, extended the other in my direction. After speeding up a little and jumping, I was able to reach him, and he jerked me up, giving me the opportunity to grab the edge myself. We jumped back over and landed at the same time.
“You’re a flipping psychopath, you don’t have any replications! This is the only damn life you have left!”
“Well before this, I lived a hundred years with no replications and survived way worse trouble than that with no issues!”
“Suicidal maniac…” he shook his head. “EVERYONE TAKE COVER! Justin, laser the tank!”
A second later, an explosion bloomed behind me with a bright flash, which reached us in a dry heat wave, so hot that any attempt to inhale burned my lungs with indescribable pain.
Chapter Three: Reconnaissance
WINCING FROM THE PAIN in my hands, which were now being bandaged by an SVF medic, I carefully listened to the reports over the radio. The attack attempts had been suppressed in all directions. We only lost a little more than twenty penalized soldiers, but at the moment, these losses were irreplaceable. I needed to make a decision fast, otherwise, if we kept going like this, all we’d have left at the end of the week was a pile of corpses. And I could safely say all my previous plans would have to go on the backburner, as we had neither the time nor the opportunity to bring them to life.
“By the way, Sargent, I never got your name…”
“Call me what everyone else does — Green.”
“Huh…” I didn’t see fit to ask why green in particular, and not another color — some call signs have terribly interesting backstories. “Green, can you do me one favor?”
“Depends on what favor.”
“We have a message ban, but I have to send a message to someone.”
“Hmm…I’m not supposed to, but I think I can make an exception after what you did. But then again, it depends on who and what kind of message.”
“I just need to send my coordinates to my wife and tell her that equipment’s tight.”
“Wow, the great and glorious Volper is also married...somehow I never came across this information. Who’s the lucky…or maybe unlucky lady who tied down the most controversial legend in all of Alpha Rome?”
“Shit, does every Joe on the street know me now?”
“I suspect even the flesheaters know your name,” the sergeant chuckled. “So spit it out, who did you manage to knock up?”
“It’s you guys who force people to get married because of a screw up. We got married before replication…but that’s beside the point, here, take down her ID…” I dictated Alyona’s contact information to him.
“You really are suicidal!”
“I don’t understand…”
“Anyone I tell this to will just think I’m shell-shocked. Wow, wait until they get a load of this. The Bloody Skurfaifer is married to the Electric Witch. The first opportunity I get, I’m gonna have to drink ‘til I lose my pulse!”
“Uhh…what did I miss?”
“Of course, you’ve been under strict surveillance this whole time! Now I understand why the Witch has been acting so immature. Alright, listen up: about a week after your sentence was broadcast live on all video channels, the skurfs began sending units of contract soldiers to help us in especially difficult areas. And I'll tell you honestly, these fighters are complete animals. Fuck knows where they
were trained, considering that the skurf corps was revived only a year ago, but they work so smoothly, as if they all have more than a dozen years of joint military operations under their belts. There are, of course, some mediocre fighters, especially among the psions, but those who call themselves commandos and scouts really have the ability to turn the tides on seemingly futile situations. And among these groups, there is one under the command of Alyona Ignatenko, who, as it turns out, is your wife. And one thing’s for sure: they’re completely out of their minds. Not that it makes a difference when they single-handedly cut down a camp of reptilians with almost five hundred lizards with psionics. Considering that her locals everywhere call her the Witch…basically, there isn’t a single soul who’s been to the front line and hasn’t heard of her.”
The situation with the “commandos” and “scouts” made sense — it seemed our military personnel, finally freed from all restraints, were doing what they did best. Even before, the possibility of dying never really stopped them, and now that they had a couple of replications to spare, there was nothing that could hold them back. As for what the hell Alyona was doing on the front lines, I had no idea. I also suspected that her group included at least Sargos and Tilorn, if not the whole gang, with the exception of Castra.