“What’s that?” Hind pinged the minimap, marking where he wanted them to look.

“Can’t see anything,” commed Jock, voice tense, sounding more surly than usual. Whilst they’d managed to get away from the main ganger force, they were still deep in enemy territory and nerves were frayed.

“I’m sure I saw something, but my sight’s not locking,” commed Hind defensively.

Mai called a halt, trying to get her mind settled by not having to concentrate on moving through enemy territory at the same time. It was daft, that not moving would help her collect her thoughts, but she knew that if her people felt as frazzled as she did, they would probably appreciate the momentary pause.

“Keep your and your wingman’s attention on it. Confirm bio-boost levels,” she followed her own order, frowning as she saw how low it was. Just having the suit running was still eating in her bottle, and they still had at least another thousand paces before they were into their own faction’s control points.

At point five per cent per pace, that meant she had to have five hundred millimetres just to keep moving. With each bottle only being one litre, and the weapon costs all costing anywhere from point two-five per cent per round for her assault weapons, through to one point per burst from her lasers, she was facing a tight situation.,

“I’m pretty much still full,” reported Dakota, Ma and Wu saying the same thing since they’d been given bottles by Mai at the point of rescue. However, she and her people had run through one bottle each just getting their suits and running into the battle, and now all of her knights were reporting the same thing. They had less than half a bottle each.

“Got that damned movement again!” Hind cursed.

“Where do you think it is?” Jock asked, his mecha cutting over towards where Hind and his wingman were.

“One hundred paces to our ten o’clock. It’s like my sights are glitching,” Mai could hear the anger in Hind’s voice.

“All knights, be aware, we have STEALTHED units one hundred paces to our ten o’clock,” Mai warned her people. She wasn’t going to distrust her friend’s feelings and put the movement down to glitching. They were being tracked by people or peoples unknown and they were in hostile territory.

“Movement to our three o’clock,” warned Dakota. “Same sort of slipperiness to it.”

“Weapons free, if you think you can paint them with a shot, do so,” she slewed her own weapons over to their three o’clock, squinting as she tried to spot what the others thought they had seen.

A shimmer, as if hot air was rising from the ground. Not waiting, she sent a quick burst from her machine guns, spraying horizontally in an attempt to put as many bullets down onto the rough area as possible.

HIT! 5% DAMAGE

“Enemy confirmed! They’re STEALTH, confirm they’re STEALTHED!” her words were backed up by a hail of return gunfire. It was all light, hand-held weapons, but still her heart sank. “They’re mecha killers. Watch out, they’re going to want to close before using their weapon systems.”

Curses filled her comm channel as her knights tried to get a fix on the enemy as they closed in.

“We need to move. If they’re at our three and ten o’clock, we can lose the ones on our left flank by moving to our five. We’ll then sprint for three hundred paces and cut back to our twelve. Confirm,” Mai ordered.

Her knights confirmed her orders and she set off at a run, her mecha’s great strides easily outpacing the fastest sprinter.

Unless they’ve got some sort of running boost that we haven’t come across yet, the thought was unsettling. She hadn’t known that any of the factions had stealth suits this effective. Were they mercs from the upper city or had one of the factions managed to get hold of the suits previously and then kept them secret for just this sort of opportunity.

A bright flare of light, a wave of sound, and then debris slamming into her mecha. Knocked sideways by the force of the explosion, Mai tucked her mecha into a roll, ignoring the SOAK warnings that filled her retinal monitor as she came up onto her knees.

“Report!”

“IED, one of the buildings just blew up! You okay?” commed Dakota

“I’m fine!” Mai pushed herself back to her feet, breathing hard. Checking her suit, she saw that she’d lost five per cent SOAK in the blast. If the enemy had waited for just another three paces she doubted she’d still be alive.

“Bastard’s have blocked the road,” Ma reported, she’d closed to the debris. “I wouldn’t recommend trying to climb over it. I reckon the other buildings have been mined as well.”

Mai agreed, ordering her people to turn around. As the other buildings loomed over them, sweat trickled down her forehead and she greedily sucked on the water straw as her mouth turned drier than a desert.

Dust had filled the street, coating everything it landed on with a fine, grey dust. It made her people look like ghosts.

“Back to the main street, we’re going to have to fight through them,” Mai gritted her teeth in frustration, they’d wasted fifty millimetres getting to this point, and were going to lose another fifty returning to where they’d come from. “We’re going to have to keep going no matter what, we can’t afford to waste any more bio-boost. Dakota, Ma, Wu, you’re on point since you have the most bio-boost left. Your task is to engage and pin the enemy whilst we keep moving.”

“Roger that, boss lady,” Dakota’s reply was overly chipper, she clearly knew that they were in a bad situation that was only going to get worse. “Can we get more reinforcements?”

“Not with this damned jammer still blocking us,” Mai made a mental note to find and destroy the jammer once they’d had time to refit. They should be able to work out its location by sending a ring of drones into the X faction area and working out where it was when each drone lost contact. It would be expensive in terms of control points needed to build them, but worth it in the long run. She couldn’t afford to have players able to jam her people. Not if she wanted to have full control of Nether City. Not if she wanted to punish each and every one for what they were doing to her people. “Enough talk. Let’s move!”

Kicking her mecha into action, she pumped her arms and legs, running as quickly as she could. Fortunately, movement cost the same no matter how slowly or quickly a mecha was moving. It was distance, not time or speed that ate into their bio-boost.

Reaching the end of the street, she dropped into a slide, her mecha sending sparks showering into the air as she skidded back out into the street they’d first encountered the mecha-hunters in.

“Got you!” There was a cluster of three vehicles, each mounting a heavy weapon on their rear flatbed, the crews hunched over. Enemy fire sizzled over her mecha, the crews aiming for where she should have been, not where she was.

She keyed her tri-barrels, raking the first vehicle. The laser punched into, and through, the windscreen on the first truck, the driver dying from explosive vaporisation instantly.

KILL!

That burst had taken her bio-boost down by another two millimetres. But it had been worth it, the crew on the first vehicle being more concerned with taking cover than returning fire. She racked the vehicle again, one tri-barrel firing at the engine, the other targeting the gun crew as they crouched down behind the vehicle’s cab. Two bursts from each weapon, another four millimetres gone.

MULTIKILL!

Her shots hit something explosive. She didn’t much care what as an explosion rocked the truck, lifting it from the ground before it slammed back down, flame and smoke roiling from it. A burning body tumbled into the street.

DAMAGE! 10% SOAK!

Mai swore. She’d stayed in one position for too long, allowing the other vehicles to get a fix on her. She was at eighty-five per cent SOAK. Each one per cent would cost her five bio-boost. It wasn’t worth it. Not yet at least.

“Little help here!”

“Oh ye of little faith, although next time, don’t sprint off without the rest of us!” Dakota and the rest of her knights charged past her, weapons blasting the enemy vehicles, bits of enemy players raining down amongst the wreckage of their vehicles.

“Clear! Pushing on!” Dakota led Ma and Wu through the smoke and wreckage of the enemy ambush. Mai and her knights followed at a slower pace, checking their rear and flanks.

“Any sign of those STEALTH troopers?” Mai licked her lips, shaking her hands to try and work some feeling back into them, knuckles aching from how she’d been forming fists.

A chorus of negatives came over the comm. Either the enemy were trying to catch up with them following their change of direction, or they were shadowing them on their flanks.

“Can we just run for it?” asked Jock. “Just sprint for home?”

Mai considered that for a second. It was tempting. Just put their heads down and run for their lives, but she knew that they were up against players, not just locals. Against locals, this might have been a valid idea, as she was starting to get an understanding as to how they reacted.

For instance, once they were outside of the gang’s headquarters’ ring of influence, the locals there had stopped chasing them. So using that logic, if they were quick enough, they could run through the various checkpoints and gamble on the locals manning them to not come after them once they were through.

But the players, and possibly locals assigned to work with the players wouldn’t give up. The STEALTHED troops were definitely players. She couldn’t see any other faction giving locals such weaponry. Not only would it make them more of a threat to the players themselves should anything go wrong, but it also probably wouldn’t even occur to them to do such a thing in the first place. The only other player who even seemed to consider the idea was the leader of the Ghosts.

“Got a glitch again, building, one hundred paces. Marking it,” although their minimaps were still down, Ma could still paint a building with a way marker which would appear on their retinal monitors.

“Light it up!” Mai was done with worrying about collateral damage. Her priority was looking after her people. As much as it pained her, they had to come first.

“Incoming!” A missile raced down the street trailing a white plume of smoke. At the last moment it shot up into the sky, Mai straining her neck as she tried to track its progress.

“Scatter! Now!” her warning came too late. There was a small explosion and then a black cloud appeared. “Bot-bomb!”

She’d seen records of bot-bombs in the command centre’s weapon catalogue but had been too busy with expanding the base at the time to put any further thought into using them. Each one cost the user ten per cent bio-mass. But as the tiny bots fell through the air towards them, she realised that it was probably worth it.

Spinning, the bots fell through the air slowly, small fins impeding gravity’s effect. And then, with eye-watering brilliance, each of the bots fired a single laser pulse at the targets they’d locked onto.

DAMAGE! 10% SOAK

There was a scream, cut short, followed by an explosion as one of her knights bore the brunt of the bot attack, suit vaporising under the force of the deadly beams. Other knights cried out as the blast signalling their comrade’s death damaged their suits even further.

“Kill that fucking rocket launcher!” screamed Mai, opening fire with everything she had in the direction of the rocket’s origination. The building she thought the enemy launcher was in erupted as her people added their own weapons systems to the fire raking it.

“I’ve got a kill!” called one of her knights, another confirming the same. There was an explosion, then part of the building’s façade tumbled into the street, exposing the rooms behind. Mai powered down her tri-barrels, using her cheaper machine guns to sweep the rooms.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” they’re gone. She hadn’t even got a PINNED marker. “Move people!” checking her bio-boost, she saw she’d used another twenty millimetres in that exchange alone.

Moving through the now shattered street, she scanned for signs of enemies, the STEALTHED forces still had to make their presence known properly. Thus far she had the feeling that they were using less well equipped troops to size them up.

I hope to the gods that they don’t realise just how much bio-boost these damned suits require to keep going, if they do … she didn’t dare finish the thought.

“Movement, to our nine, just saw something moving across that street. They’re matching us on the flank,” Hind warned as they cleared an intersection. The jammer was still blocking their minimaps, so all they could do was make a way marker on everyone’s retinal monitors.

It also meant that they couldn’t mark a target and then have them tracked on the minimap. Any battle would have to be fought old school, like they did in the old days before proper tech.

She considered throwing up a drone, but even then she couldn’t guarantee that she could get it high enough to be out of the hammer’s range. And she couldn’t really afford the bio-boost cost either.

“Cut down the next intersection, we’ll go for them, I’m fed up with working to their agenda,” there was a chorus of growls at this, her people just as keen to end the hunt as she was.

The next intersection was only fifty or so paces away, so she sped up, hoping to catch the enemy in the open. Taking a couple of paces more than she needed to, as if she wasn’t actually going to turn into the street, she suddenly spun and opened up with everything she had as soon as she could lay her sights onto the end of the street.

Her sights danced, unable to lock onto the group of hazy shapes at the end of the street, but she didn’t need to lock on to them, she just needed to fire through them at the building at the end of the street.

She pulsed her tri-barrels, the hot beams blinking in and out of existence so quickly as to make her doubt she’d even fired them. Explosive vaporisation threw blood and bodily fluids into the air as at least one of her beams struck home.

Even as the first KILL notification popped up, she was firing her grenade launcher, using incendiaries. Each one of those cost one per cent bio-mass, and she sent five winding their way through the air.

KILL!

KILL!

HIT! 50%

BLEED @5% PER SECOND

BURNING @1% PER SECOND

HIT! 65%

BLEED @3% PER SECOND

BURNING @4% PER SECOND

HIT! 20%

BLEED @2% PER SECOND

BURNING @7% PER SECOND

Figures wreathed in flames staggered about at the end of the street, cut down by her people as she added their own firepower to hers, making short work of the enemy.

KILL ASSIST!

KILL ASSIST!

KILL ASSIST!

“And now we run!” Mai charged through the smoke, ignoring the feel of bodies beneath her mecha’s heavy feet, turning back towards home once again, cursing the fact that they’d lost another two hundred paces. As she watched her bio-boost ticking down, she prayed to all of the gods she could think of that she’d get her people home.