Over ten thousand Beta Players were dicking around in their starting zones at the current moment, all of them confined to their starting colony and the area around it. Most of them had already amassed a sizable following, either by diplomacy or by conquest, but not a single one of them had been able to put so much as a single finger on their starting zones ‘safe area’. Sure, the world beyond the colonies was fair game, but nobody would be able to get away with harming anyone or anything inside the boundary of the colonies themselves. This was not to say that nobody had tried to make a hostile takeover, but it was more along the lines that they were all blessed/ cursed to have been deposited on more stable and therefore well-defended colonies.

Nobody thought that it was possible to cause a starting zone to destabilize, let alone become as valid a hunting ground as if it were the area beyond the confines of the colonies. This is why the announcement that appeared before all of them sent them running to the internet to try and find out the manner in which something had been done to change things.

『 Attention! Starting Zone #94732, Chikamasawit Colony, has been critically destabilized! All Safe Zones within Chikamasawit Colony have been temporarily removed and the Area has temporarily become an active Combat Zone! All Players in Starting Zone #94732 must pick a side and actively contribute to the conflict. The Player with the highest contribution on the winning side will receive a great reward. Due to this being the first occurrence of the Revolution Event type, rewards have been increased drastically. Please participate to the best of your ability! 』

Of course, they could not find hide nor hair of any information on how things got this way, as a certain someone had neglected to even bother posting the information on the internet. This left many quite cross, but as they were all mainly very wealthy people or the children of said people, they could afford to purchase the info straight from the devs themselves.

…

“Damn these little bastards!” yelled a member of the forces under Stebbs’ control as he fired off a few more rounds in the general direction of where some incoming fire had originated from. He was starting to run low on ammo, and these fucking insufferable brats were still alive. They knew this yard better than he and the rest of his family did and were making use of every twisting tunnel of scrap and debris they could to strike from seemingly nowhere without ever coming out into the open.

While they were only firing pistols at most, the fact that they could essentially strike from any direction without warning was the real danger. Armor was useful in stopping their shots, but the armor he and his cousin-brother-uncle-nephew-fathers and mother-sister-aunt-cousin-nieces (and all other possible variations of those, plus or minus a few things) could not cover every part of their bodies. Plus, the family did suffer from a few… deformities… which made some armor fit oddly or not at all.

He winced in pain as another small bullet nicked his right arm. The little shits were not very accurate, but hot damn did they seem to have a lot of ammo. The din of battle was growing louder as time wore on, and he half expected the rebel scum to try and blow everything up. They were on the back foot, and so they had put everything into a single push which had managed to force the loyalists back. But now the Mayor was getting another batch of people from the family, and this was beginning to turn the tide back into their favor.

They just had to hold on for a bit longer and then-!

Suddenly, over the shouting of people and the firing of blasters and slugthrowers, the sound of metal screeching across metal echoed out from the interior of the crashed ship that he and the rest of his nearest allies were using to keep their rea protected. The sound shifted from that scraping noise to other and then to silence. He figured that something in that dumb ship had come loose and was done banging around, or perhaps there was some varmint that was causing those noises.

He was partially right on both accounts, as soon after the ‘impassable wall’ behind him was smashed open and a fucking War Suit came barreling out while letting out a massive yell over the Suit’s loudspeakers.

“Oh Yeah! Care for some Kuul-Aid?!”

He didn’t have time to process what was going on as the machine landed amongst the group of loyalists and swung a massive slab of metal that was in the rough shape of a sword around like a whirling dervish. The unpainted mechanical monster cut through multiple members of his family with each swing, and he knew that he and his family did not have the weapons needed to stop it.

While he would most assuredly be kicked out of the family for what he was about to do, it was the only way to warn the rest of what was now on the field of battle before it was too late.

“Jim-Bob-Bubba-Sam! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!” one of his sister-aunts yelled at his backside as he ran. He didn’t care anymore: he just needed to get word to someone with the proper connections and he would gladly pay the price for leaving family to die.

He didn’t get very far, however, as the paths to the other areas in the massive scrap yard where fighting was raging were a guerrilla fighter’s wet dream. It did not take long for the small children to whittle him down with shots from small blasters and low caliber slugthrowers, and just before he could turn the corner and rush to the next combat zone a particularly brave kid leapt from the pile of scrap he had been standing on and hit him straight in the head with a piece of steel piping.

…

“Come on! Hurry it up, you damn wetbacks! I want that Suit ready now! When I get this baby up and running, heheh… then those ungrateful bastards will get what’s coming to them! Ah, I can’t get enough of this thing! The sheer amount of pure, unadulterated 24-carat gold that covers every part! It would be a shame to part with something so valuable, so ancient, so… beautiful! I’ll just tell Mr. Blythe that it was destroyed completely, and he’ll surely thank me for crushing this rebellion! Oh, the feeling of this glistening, shining metal!”

“Uh…. Should we tell him that he’s in the way and that we can’t work on it while he’s groping it?”

“Nah. We’re paid by the hour and we’re still technically on the clock; let him molest the damn machine.”