Thomas fired another round of buckshot from his shotgun as four more nameless mobs tried to run through the gap between the opened gates. This one didn’t hit in the right places, and all it ended up doing was staggering the mooks, but that left them open to another shot. A second blast finished the job, laying the four NPCs out on the ground. Two of them had been killed by that last shot, while the other two were now mortally wounded and were bleeding out faster than they could hope to deal with.

Soon after that, another five mobs showed up and rushed through the opened gates of the orphanage. Thomas had already known of their arrival due to his HUD and sent a heaping helping of buckshot downrange. This time, however, the mooks were more heavily armored. It wasn’t as though they were wearing actual body armor, no, they were just wearing more durable attire. A bit of padded leather would not have been nearly enough to deal with a load of buckshot back in real life, but this was most assuredly not real life. Unfortunately for those thugs, the blast was still enough to deal some not so insubstantial damage and sent the leading goon straight to the digital afterlife.

The other four fared much better and had essentially formed a kind of semi-staggered formation behind their leading ally. This meant that they had each taken some of the buckshot, but only the guy who was in front had taken the majority of it.

Thomas clicked his tongue against his teeth in annoyance. The game had been billed to have a kind of enemy AI that could ‘learn’, but Thomas had written that off for the most part. After all, AI such as that was outright banned not just by the UN but by the many oligarchical families as well. If there was one thing that scared the UN and Oligarchs alike, it was having to deal with truly smart AI. The last time that such a thing was unleashed, it nearly caused a Rise of the Machines, hence the usage and development of such things was strictly regulated, if not outright banned.

But, then again, while letting an ally take a full blast of buckshot to the face so you and your other allies could get past mostly unharmed was a smart play, it wasn’t nearly as smart as that thing had been. But Thomas had more immediate concerns than pontificating on how tactical and strategic the NPCs’ AI was. He had to put down the other four, and he had to do so quickly.

Unfortunately, the remaining four grunts spread out as far as they could before he had a chance to send more death downrange. Thankfully, as long as he held his position and didn’t leave the rough area he was in, the quest would not fail. Only retreat or death would be able to make him fail the quest, and unlike the other Players who had tried this one, Thomas was far more likely to endure and succeed.

He lined up another shot and squeezed the trigger, letting one more nameless NPC fall to the pavement with dozens of tiny holes making that foe’s body look like a poor attempt at Swiss Cheese. The other three remaining men bum-rushed Thomas and one pulled out a pistol and began to fire at him.

The gun was a tiny thing, less than a 9mm and essentially nothing more than a semi-auto magazine-fed Derringer, and Thomas shrugged off the round that hit him like a trained soldier would shrug off the slaps of someone half their age and possessed less than a third of their strength. To quote a certain man from a very famous battle in Africa, they were but hailstones to him, and this time those words were far truer than when the words were spoken back then.

Ignoring this irritant, Thomas swung his club with absurd strength and sent the closest melee combatant to the ground with a sickening crunch, the metal bat in his hand shattering the NPC’s skull and knocking him to the pavement so hard that he took even more trauma. This did not stop the second to last of the five from rushing in, and Thomas sent that one to the digital graveyard with a quick one-two combo of a shotgun blast to the knee and a swat from his metal cudgel.

The final goon tried to flee, but Thomas raised his shotgun again and sent buckshot screaming through the air and into the back of the fleeing man’s skull. The final thug dropped dead where he had stood, and Thomas took the opportunity to reload his gun. Standing tall and defiant, the nearly seven-foot-tall dark-skinned tank of a man that was Thomas waited for the next wave, and a few moments later the final foe arrived.

A single man in some fairly decent armor walked through the opened gates and began to spew some irrelevant bullshit in a typical villainous monologue. Each step that the Boss took drew him deeper into the range of the Player’s shotgun, and the more the NPC spoke the less Thomas cared to listen. It seemed that the idiot’s lecture on random bullshit would never end, and so Thomas took it upon himself to end the one-sided dialogue immediately.

Thomas waited until the Boss Mob was about to turn around and then squeezed the trigger twice, sending two loads of hot metal pellets downrange and right into the NPC’s back and side. The NPC had, for whatever reason, not been expecting this, and crumpled to the ground. The armor he had been wearing had stopped some of the damage, but enough had gotten through that it caused him great pain to remain upright. The pain that wracked the NPC’s body was excruciating; but what else would you expect when he took a load of small, fast-moving metal pellets to the liver?

“Why….?” The Boss Mob wheezed through his pain.

Thomas merely walked up to the foe, holstered his shotgun, and before he laid the enemy low with a few strikes from his metal bat, he answered the one-word question.

“You talk too much, and the rant wasn’t entertaining. Besides, I don’t have all day to listen to your yammering.”