Author's Note: Well, my little idea of editing the various chapters on the way to this point, while not a terrible one, felt a little too annoying at this point since Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction net have different ways to handle things like italics..namely while Archive has me copy and paste things from Word it doesn't accept format differences and I get the feeling it'd have to do the whole HTML coding thing of i and /i while Fanfiction just takes what I write and just wants me to make the line breaks more clear. It's something to think about doing but not right now.
Anyway, on with the story.
RWBY LPs Modern Warfare Chapter 29
It was with a large amount of caution that Jackson went back into the room he'd just been driven out of. On one hand, if there was anyone else in there than they'd have joined their friend in chasing him out. On the other, that one enemy had caught him so off guard it was a miracle he was still alive.
Thankfully the only activity was back on street level, and Jackson felt he'd earned the right to use the high ground to cut down the enemy, making things easier for the rest of the squad. One enemy rushed out towards the squad, as if thinking he could take the marines supporting a tank on his own only to take three bullets from a direction he didn't even glance at. That was all it took for every other masked bastard to shift their fire from ground level to the building.
[Yang: Wow, they really didn't like that.
Weiss: Huh, kind of surprised you aren't grabbing the sniper rifle just sitting there on the ground.
Ruby: Yeah, this game doesn't really feel like a sniping sort of thing. As much as I'd 'love' to play around with that gun, these guys are just way too good to mess around with new stuff while fighting them.]
It was insane how accurate they were shooting so rapidly from a series of abandoned stores, not giving Jackson an opening to really line up his shots as he returned fire. Still, he was enough of a distraction that the rest of the squad could push forward. Three men made it to a bit of broken wall practically on top of the enemy, though one man took an RPG shot to the gut for his trouble.
[Blake: Now that is just 'scarily' accurate with a rocket launcher.]
Shifting his aim upwards, Jackson put a pair of bullets into the rocketeer's gut, then gave a short snort of amusement as the man flopped over the railing to land on top of one of his friends trying to clip through a window. That guy stumbled in shock, leaving him open to be shot from three different angles at once. Probably overkill for a single guy, but it's not like there was some way to magically tell when other members of the squad were aiming for the same man.
It was at that point that it felt like the enemy was downright swarming over the same small area in an effort to prevent the Americans from making any progress. Bullets flew, bodies fell, and Jackson couldn't help noticing his ammo was getting lower than he'd like. Reloading, he quickly checked how much he had left outside his current magazine. Little more than four full reloads, but considering how quickly he'd been spending bullets and the fact he didn't know just how much further they were going to have to go before they were done here..
His support fire from above might have been giving his squadmates more courage, but every man who tried to advance into the building as he cut the enemy down quickly was just as quickly killed. It was a stalemate, and the one thing they really couldn't afford was to get stalled out. Not when they didn't know just how cut off from any allied forces they were. So, against his better judgement..
[Yang: Well, sitting up there and shooting isn't getting us anywhere. I say you jump down into the thick of it and push from there.
Blake: Brilliant plan. Rush right to where people are dying with ease instead of staying where we have some sense of what's going on.
Yang: When the sense is that we're going nowhere and they just keep coming? Yeah, rush in and see if that makes them back off.
Ruby: Sooner or later they've got to run out of guys!
Weiss: It's a video game. They don't have to worry about running out of men.]
..he jumped from the window sill and rushed towards the broken wall. Sadly enough that helped him with his ammo problem, there were some dead marines on the way to his new bit of cover. Though it brought to his attention that there were plenty of enemies in a building his previous vantage point didn't even see.
"HOSTILES!"
[Weiss: Why do they even need to cry out something like that? We've been running into constant enemies for upwards of ten minutes now in this same mission!
Yang: Probably just to remind us we've still got some squadmates left. How many of them have gone down?
Blake: I haven't been keeping track. Not that it'd matter since I wasn't keeping track how many we started with in the first place. Is the game just constantly replacing them?
Ruby: I 'hope' so. The number of guys we've had to fight has seemed pretty endless so having plenty of help makes it feel a little less insane.]
Jackson was so consumed by the fight at hand he almost didn't hear the tanker make a nervous transmission. "Bravo Six, this is War Pig. We clear to uh..we clear to advance, over?"
A significant part of him felt it would be a bad idea if only because there were still so many enemies shooting from two different angles that if anyone had a rocket launcher, the squad would be too busy to do anything about it. But apparently Lieutenant Vasquez had different ideas. "Roger that! Move up and hold position at the bend, over!"
[Blake: Feels a little risky to move on..if anything it looks like there's even 'more' guns shooting at us now than before.
Ruby: Well if you only do things when it's easy than you never get anything done. You've got to take some risks somewhere.
Blake: Right, some risks. It can get a little tough in the heat of the moment to tell what risks are worth taking, though.
Weiss: Oh I'm sure Ms Ride-A-Nevermore has been learning that the hard way.
Ruby: Hey, you rode it with me!
Weiss: And I kept repeating that it was a terrible idea!
Blake: Which then raises the question who's the bigger idiot. The girl who decides to ride a massive, dangerous bird or the girl who doesn't want to but follows the first girl anyway?
Weiss refused to give that the dignity of a comment.]
"Roger, moving!"
It would probably sound more comforting to have a tank driving closer to support them if it wasn't for the fact that the radioman on the tank sounded a little too timid for his tastes and the fact that he'd spent several hours protecting this lone tank. It just didn't have that air of unstoppable juggernaut he'd imagined tanks were like before he joined up.
Alternating his fire from one building to another, one floor to another, not even bothering to make sure that the people he hit stayed down, a streak of white smoke zipped by his position. Of course, the enemy hadn't run out of rockets just yet. And the rocket came from a broken down bus at the end of the street. That would be annoying to reach, especially with the constantly flowing in infantry from two different angles.
It was hard to tell just how long it took for Jackson to feel comfortable enough to poke his head out enough to start shooting at the men in the bus. Time tends to lose meaning when you're in the odd combination of mind-numbing excitement of a fierce firefight with no end in sight. All he knew for sure was that after taking down a second man in that bus, he heard the telltale clink of a grenade bouncing 'very' close to his position and charged ahead.
[Weiss: I know you need to get away from the grenade but did you have to run 'towards' the guns shooting at you?]
Jackson didn't even need to aim to put several bullets into a rather shocked man standing at the window. As tempting as it was to just jump through the window and start using that as his new base of fire, however, he took a left until he reached a door, thankfully getting out of sight of the enemies across the street as he did so. Taking a moment to catch his breath and brace himself for however many enemies were in there, he rushed through the doorway and..
..the locker room was oddly empty. No enemies, just some bullet holes, some firmly shut lockers, and a fire extinguisher. To his left was a very small room with the boiler, not that the place needed one in a desert building with no doors to cover its doorways. And to his right was the room where he'd been shooting a constant influx of enemies for quite a while.
[Ruby: Yeah, going to have to call this game a little cheap. We walk by some invisible line and some enemies just stop popping up.
Yang: You've still got plenty more to deal with out there.
Ruby: Sorry but I'd kind of prefer to feel like we earned our way forward after a lot of effort, not that rushing ahead makes things easier.
Weiss had a comment on the tip of her tongue about rushing ahead but held it back. Her earlier jab about the nevermore was still pretty fresh and she didn't want to keep hammering that and the deathstalker rush too much. Ruby had only done that during initiation after all. Besides, it was understandable to be a little disappointed that the game used such a cheap trick to make things seem harder than it actually was.]
The rest of the squad started pushing forward as well, the last dredges of that particular group of enemies falling under the constant gunfire. All that remained were a few bastards in the bus, and without support they were easy to take down.
"Enemy in the open, to the northeast!"
[Ruby: He's not in the open, he's hiding behind some crates!]
It was just one guy, less than a few feet away from a yellow car. Jackson would have put him down as he started rushing to the nearby building but five enemies just rushed into the bus guns blazing, prompting him to take cover inside his own building. It didn't take long for the bullets aimed at his position to die down as they shifted targets to other members of his squad, making it easy for Jackson to cut down four of the five. Someone else took down the fifth before he could line up the shot, which let Jackson notice some enemies trying to get in through an alleyway. Advancing towards said alleyway, he started pouring fire at the rushing troops. Two went down near instantly, but a third decided to get out of that convenient line just in time to avoid getting killed. Jackson sent off one last bullet, the final round in his magazine, and it zipped just between the open air between his elbow and armpit.
Jackson didn't have time to pull out his pistol, his hand was on the holster just as he was riddled with rounds. He was in no condition to appreciate that his killer was cut down seconds later or even be able to recognize any of the marines that ran over his corpse into the alley.
{"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on." John F Kennedy}
[Yang: Is that supposed to be inspiring or depressing? Just what idea are we dying for, anyway? The bad guy's idea?
Weiss: I'm going to go with pretentious. It sounds nice but given the lack of context, not worth thinking about.
Blake: There probably is context in the absolutely insane amount of works done by Strangereal, but I'm just not inclined to go digging through countless books, movies, and other media trying to find the context to a single sentence.]
Closing note: Felt like a good enough stopping point for now. At this point I'm more concerned with getting back into the groove of a good influx of fresh chapters instead of being all that concerned with how long each chapter might be. We'll see how long it takes for the next chapter to pop up.
