CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

The situation was grim.

Jason could fire at the King of Thieves, but in the time it took for the bullet to travel through the air, he'd take a crossbow bolt to the head. Even if he won the battle, he'd lose the Red Minerva due to the Salvage Rule.

Jason made his decision instantly.

For once, he had no interest in calmly measuring the pros and cons on either side.

He had no choice but to surrender.

From a rational and purely monetary perspective, Jason was making the wrong decision.

His upgraded Red Minerva was powerful, but it wasn't worth the three thousand dollars he'd effectively earn from OverManiacs for completing the mission.

However, Jason wouldn't give up his current Red Minerva for anything.

Although his rational brain knew that his Mech was just a line of data in the Overdrive servers, she was so much more than that.

As Jason had noted earlier, Overdrive was what its players made of it. The Red Minerva was Jason's partner, and he wouldn't give her up just to complete a mission, no matter how important the mission was.

The Red Minerva had been his only companion while working as a One Star Boss. They'd won countless seemingly impossible battles together. He'd just awakened his partner's full strength, and he wasn't going to give it up now.

He stayed frozen in place, speaking through gritted teeth.

"I won't shoot him. How do I know you won't shoot my Mech?"

Despite Jason's fear of losing the Red Minerva, he was smart enough to know where he was.

This was the Tournament of Assassins, a gathering of traitors and scoundrels. The other player could easily kill the King of Thieves while simultaneously claiming the Red Minerva.

That would be the greatest disaster possible.

The other player was quick to respond.

"Look beneath you."

A second Mech stepped out of the brush.

While the first machine merely used a crossbow, the second Mech actually was a crossbow.

The bright blue machine was thick and burly. It was meant for high-powered strikes rather than swift movements.

If Jason had to guess, the smaller Mech with the arrow pointed at the Red Minerva's back served as the walking crossbow's escort.

The second machine's arms had joined together in a wide triangular shape.

A lengthy spike anchored the machine in the ground.

Springs emerged from its legs, and the Mech began yanking itself back, pulling the thick bow wire taut.

As its only weapons, the Mech carried four enormous arrows.

One was already loaded into its bizarre body. The other three were backups.

Each of the arrows was as large as the Titan's Macuahuitl, and the enormous amount of gathered force meant the massive arrow would fly much faster than the flames released from Jason's hands.

The weapon took a long time to charge, but the crossbow bolt would kill its target in the blink of an eye once loosed.

Jason cursed.

He'd made the fatal mistake of underestimating his opponents.

Now that he saw the crossbow Mech, he realized the truth.

He was facing off against serious opponents.

The two players had brought specialized Mechs designed specifically for the mission.

Normally, using a crossbow was pointless when Overdrive Mechs featured gunpowder and high-powered beam technology.

However, the silent weapons were perfect for quietly killing off foes.

On top of that...

His ally had been right.

The other players had all been working together. It made no sense to bring a machine as specialized as the strange crossbow Mech without an entire squad backing it up.

Initially, Jason had thought that the other players had made a foolish mistake and gotten caught.

In reality, they'd created a distraction.

The other players had died, but the decoy had given the two key assassins the time they needed to reach the camp.

The gruff pilot went on as he explained that there wouldn't be any deal.

"He'll shoot, and then the game will end. That will be that."

Jason cursed again.

He'd hoped that the other player would let him go, but he was too smart for that.

He'd keep the crossbow trained onto Jason's head until his ally fired.

The giant crossbow Mech continued drawing its string.

Jason sighed.

Now that he'd surrendered, his only forlorn hope was to trust his opponents. If he wanted to keep the Red Minerva, there was nothing he could do.

It was an incredibly difficult pill to swallow.

Shik.

All Jason heard was the faintest snick.

It sounded more like a key slipping into a lock than a blade stabbing through a metal Mech.

And yet, a blade had indeed stabbed through the enemy machine.

An enormous sword lurched out of the crossbow carrying Mech, stretching so far that it'd nearly sliced off the Red Minerva's head.

The sword was a whopping seventy feet long, yet it was only about two feet wide. The combination of absurd length and tiny width made the blade look ridiculous.

It seemed like it should snap on impact, yet it'd cut cleanly through the other machine.

The sword's owner stood on the tree's lower branches, pointing the ridiculous sword upwards in a way that reminded Jason of a school janitor sweeping garbage out of the swimming pool.

The machine that held the blade was the Lucky Duck, the strange unit commanded by Jason's ally.

The Mech had caught up to Jason in the nick of time.

As Jason turned around, he noticed how the crossbow-wielding machine had managed to fly up the tree and sneak behind him.

The Mech was wearing a strange set of metal wings resembling a hummingbird's. The delicate Dainty Pack cost 16,000 Credits, and it allowed Mechs to fly without making a noise. Like the crossbows, the fanciful wings were specialized equipment designed for silent assassinations.

The Lucky Duck fished the machine down from the tree, silently pulling it down and depositing it on the lower branch.

The Lucky Duck was one of the strangest machines Jason had ever seen.

As far as Jason could tell, the Mech's name was clearly meant to be comical.

While the machine's white and orange paint - as well as the bill on its head - evoked a duck, Jason had no idea what made the machine lucky.

The Mech had skinny stick-like legs with large triangular feet. The exceptionally wide feet allowed the machine to anchor itself despite its noodle-like legs.

The machine's body and right arm were a sharp contrast to its slender legs. The Lucky Duck almost looked like the stereotype of someone who'd skipped leg day.

The Mech had an extremely broad chest that flared outwards. The chest had four closed ports, which Jason presumed were for secret weapons. Their use hadn't been described in the machine's status report.

Meanwhile, its right arm, which carried the enormous scimitar, was utterly massive.

Over fifty percent of the Mech's mass alone was carried in the gigantic arm, which looked like a swiss army knife. In addition to the scimitar, countless other blades and devices were poking out of the expansive contraption.

On the other hand, the left arm was just as spindly as the legs.

During his time as a One Star Boss, Jason had often battled skilled swordsmen who were overly dependent on attacking from a single side.

There were very few left-handed players on the server and even fewer ambidextrous attackers who felt comfortable manipulating weapons with either control board thruster.

This Mech looked like it was extremely right-hand dominant.

Meanwhile, the Mech's head perfectly resembled a cartoon duck, except that the Mech used a mono-eye sensor like the Zakus from the Gundam series.

Jason was incredibly relieved to see the machine despite its strange and ugly appearance.

The other pilot's boisterous voice loudly echoed through Jason's cockpit.

"Whew! Barely made it in time! I had to wait for an awesome roll."

Jason was surprised to hear how positive the other pilot sounded.

There was absolutely no judgment in his tone. Moreover, he was elated that he'd managed to save Jason in his time.

Most other players wouldn't have bothered saving their allies. They'd simply attack the boss themselves.

After all, it was rather obvious that Jason had planned to shoot the final boss and leave the stage without the Lucky Duck.

The other player's positivity left Jason stunned, but only for the briefest of moments.

"By the way, my name is..."

Although it was rude, Jason ignored his teammate for now.

Now that the Lucky Duck had saved his life, Jason fully intended to help the other pilot beat the mission.

However, this was no time for niceties.

The crossbow Mech was still charging its shot.

Jason quickly processed his options.

The boss machine was still sitting in its chair, completely unaware of what was happening.

Despite the scuffle, there hadn't been any noise. The Lucky Duck's bizarre sword was totally silent. As a result, nobody had detected the Mechs in the forest.

There were only a few seconds before the Mech would loose its enormous arrow and kill the King of Thieves.

On the other hand, Jason could shoot right away.

However, his concentrated stomach acid bullet had a less than fifty percent chance of killing his opponent.

Meanwhile, the enormous arrow was guaranteed to kill the King of Thieves.

Both weapons fired their bullets at the same velocity, but one of the projectiles was far larger.

Jason's priority was obvious.

He needed to stop the crossbow from firing.

He jiggered his right-hand thruster, and his partner mirrored the motion.

The Ghostfire Dagger slipped from the Red Minerva's wristband weapons depot into its hands.

Once again, Jason used a perfectly accurate toss.

He knew he had no chance of destroying the heavily armored Mech's cockpit with a direct attack.

His scanner was still calculating the crossbow Mech's statistics, but Jason's experience told him the bulky artillery unit was a Kingbreaker with at least an A in Defense.

The stats were too good for a head-on attack.

The Pestilent Snipe might kill the enemy machine, but Jason wanted to keep the acidic sniper shot for the King of Thieves.

As a result, he didn't throw the Ghostfire Dagger at his opponent's chest.

Instead, he used it to destroy the bowstring.

The pale knife cut cleanly through the string, instantly rendering the enormous arrows completely and utterly useless.

The enormous bolt, which had been seconds away from obliterating the King of Thieves, anticlimactically slipped to the floor.

Jason laughed at the comical sight.

That was the weakness of such a specialized machine. Overdrive Mechs only had a 50,000 Credit Cap. Builds could only equip 50,000 worth of parts or frame modifications.

This machine had used up its entire cap to become a gigantic crossbow.

As a result, it was useless without allies to protect it. All of its striking power was dependent on the vulnerable string.

Jason's ally grinned.

"Ah! Shoot! Sorry about that! I should have noticed. Let's finish them off now!"

The mission was more or less won.

First, Jason would fire the Pestilent Snipe.

Then, both he and the Lucky Duck would attack together.

Unfortunately...

"Hey! Look here! Look here! Look! Look!"

The Mechs in the clearing turned, staring at Jason and the Lucky Duck. As one, the guards raised their beam bows. The dogs began to scream and howl as they surged towards Jason and his teammate.

Jason cursed.

The crossbow Mech was useless. It was disarmed and totally out of the mission. It had no chance of winning.

As a result, Jason had dismissed it as a threat.

However, he'd underestimated the power of sheer spite.

The crossbow Mech's thought process was simple - if its team couldn't win the battle, it wasn't going to let anybody else win either.