The elevator doors opened, revealing a gray, soulless-looking world of abandoned warehouses, empty streets, spooky alleys, and open doorways leading into inky blackness. Most of the workplace was located hundreds of feet underground, the better for security, and the battle arena was hundreds of feet beneath that. They were probably a quarter of a mile underground right now, Rodney thought.
The four soldiers stepped out first, forming a semicircle, weapons pointed outward. Rodney and Walsh followed a moment later. The elevator doors shut and locked behind them and Rodney gulped.
Mr. Thomas' voice crackled over the radio. "She's in the back left corner, so you've got some distance."
"Copy," said Mr. Walsh. He walked over to a nearby panel on a wall and opened it. "Entering override code now."
"Tell us what she's doing," Parisa spoke into the radio. "Will she move to attack, or will she try to..."
"She's going for a nearby panel," reported Thomas. "She's trying to hack the codes!"
Parisa's dark brown eyes narrowed with decision. "Walsh, Rodney, stay here at the panel and keep adding extra layers of encryption. Player Seven, guard them. Brandon, Player Three, come with me. We're going to get her before she has any chance of overcoming our codes. Thomas, keep us informed."
"Copy. Take the third door on the left, then the second door on the right. She's still working on the panel."
"Encryption holding for now," reported Walsh. Parisa, Brandon, and Player Three made their way through the various doorways, finally entering a large room, empty except for several thick concrete pillars.
"She's on the move!" said Thomas. "Coming right at you, Parisa. She'll emerge from the door at the far end of the big room."
"Get ready!" said Parisa. "Everybody behind a pillar. Keep your guns trained on that far door and blast that bitch as soon as you see movement."
"Wait a minute, what's this?" Thomas sounded puzzled. "She's taking out some sort of...Hey, what the fuck? There's smoke all around her, I can't see her anymore! She must have had some sort of smoke bomb contraption..."
Smoke appeared in the doorway. Brandon and Player Three both began shooting. "Hold your fire!" shouted Parisa. As the gunfire stopped, she paused, listening with her trained ears. There came the faint click of high heels.
"NOW!" she cried. She opened up on the doorway, firing bursts of five or six rounds at a time. From behind their pillars, Brandon and Player Three did the same. The shooting continued for several more seconds. Parisa kept the last half dozen rounds in her magazine as the other two reloaded. When they were done, she emptied the remainder of her rounds into the smoke, then reloaded her own weapon.
"Is she down?" crackled Mr. Anderson's voice.
"Wait for the smoke to clear," said Parisa. "Keep behind the pillars."
The smoke finally cleared away, revealing the figure of Maitreya, still standing. And in her leather-gloved hands she held a huge, multi-barreled machine gun, the kind that was normally mounted on a helicopter, but here effortlessly hand-carried by Maitreya.
"Holy fuck," said Anderson and Thomas at exactly the same time as the image appeared on the screen. As for Brandon, he felt his trousers fill with something and knew that it wasn't shepherd's pie in his knickers. Overcome with terror, he threw his AK down and began running for his life.
Maitreya opened fire, the incredibly powerful weapon pumping out several dozen bullets per second. Her aim was still lethally accurate, however. Brandon took over 100 rounds into his body from behind as he tried to run away. His body was literally shredded into paste, the only remnants of him being bits of flesh and bone.
Parisa and Player Three fired back, but Maitreya turned her massive gun on the concrete pillars they were hiding behind. Despite the thickness of the pillars, her weapon was so powerful that the bullets rapidly chewed deeper and deeper into them, sending bits of concrete flying everywhere, threatening to destroy the columns in a matter of seconds. There seemed to be no end to her firing power and the heavy recoil was quite easily managed by the buxom, feminine muscle babe. A few seconds later, the pillar that Player Three was hiding behind crumbled into bits and his body, taking about 150 rounds in a couple of seconds, was shredded into even smaller bits than Brandon's.
Parisa, seeing that she had no chance, did a series of one-armed cartwheels and handsprings towards the door, firing her assault rifle with her free hand as she tumbled, her strong wrist absorbing the recoil. Maitreya had to move to dodge the bullets, throwing her aim off just enough for Parisa to escape.
Maitreya's huge machine gun finally stopped firing, a massive amount of smoke coming from the multiple barrels. She had fired thousands of rounds. She looked dispassionately at the scene, littered with shell casings, the remnants of the corpses of Brandon and Player Three, and the bits of concrete from the destroyed pillar. A second concrete column, the one that Parisa had been hiding behind, slowly toppled over from the damage that the bullets had done to it, shattering with a crash. Maitreya gave a small smirk, then turned and walked away, high heels clicking.
"Holy fuck..." moaned Thomas as he stared at the screen.
"God damn it, two more gone. When will it end?" Anderson put his face in his hands.
"What the fuck was that?" shouted Player Seven into his radio. "It sounded like World War Three out there."
"It pretty much was," Parisa replied. "Brandon and Player Three are gone. You, me, Rodney, and Walsh are the only ones left."
"What do we do now..."
"We finish the mission. Player Seven, attack from the center and turn left, I'll come from this direction. She can't have that many rounds left, we'll try to get her to waste them. Walsh and Rodney, stay at the panel."
"Much more likely to waste us," said Player Seven. Parisa was about to respond, but stopped herself. He was probably right.
Parisa, following Thomas' directions, screamed like a banshee as she approached Maitreya's position, thinking the best she could hope for was a glorious suicide attack against this superhuman goddess of death. But it was not to be. Not yet. She heard the familiar sound of the machine gun in the distance, male screams, then silence. "Report," she spoke into the radio.
"Well, the good news is that her cannon is out of ammunition," said Thomas.
"And the bad news? Let me guess. Player Seven, shredded into paste."
"Um...well, yes. Pretty much."
"Fuck." She punched the nearby concrete wall, leaving a fist-sized hole.
"Parisa, save that for Maitreya," said Mr. Anderson. She nodded, feeling her normal calm returning. She was a soldier, first and foremost, and she still had a mission to complete. She rejoined Walsh and Rodney, seeing the fear in their eyes.
"Okay, guys, get out of here," she said. "It's too dangerous. I'll handle Maitreya myself."
Despite his terror, Rodney found himself saying, "I'll stay. You'll need someone on the control panel in case she tries hacking in again."
"I'll stay too," said Walsh, although he sounded less than convinced.
She smiled. "Well, you guys have a lot more balls than Brandon. If he hadn't run away like a coward, we could have had three guns on Maitreya at the same time and we might have taken her down. Fuck, I can't believe I was ever attracted to that loser." She shook her head. "Well, back to business. Where is she now?"
"Making her way towards the central part of the game zone," came the voice of Mr. Thomas. "If she keeps at it she'll come out at the other end of the long alley you're standing at. That doesn't make sense. She'll be vulnerable to a clear line of fire for a couple hundred yards. And she appears to be unarmed. Yep, she's getting there...she should be appearing right about..."
Smoke appeared at the far end of the alley. Parisa readied her AK-47. "Get your guns ready," she instructed her male companions. "Don't start shooting until you see...actually, just start shooting when I do."
"Wait," said Rodney. "Maybe there's another way."
