Chapter 5 – How to Derail a Plan in One Easy Step
Waking up after a violent collision with something was never fun, Jet had long since discovered after his first driving lesson in GGO, where he managed to careen off a bridge, and come to rest only a metre from a one thousand metre drop that would've killed them with absolute certainty.
It had taken fifteen minutes before he had stopped screaming inside his head.
Still, this was nothing like that though – for one thing, the numbers were much bigger this time round. The train had derailed violently after the bomb had gone off, and any carriages forward of the one he was in were completely gone, either having split off during the derailment, or plunged into the Mediterranean three thousand feet below them, whilst the carriages behind had derailed and mostly come to rest on their sides and roofs, whilst the ninth car in the rear set, a buffet car, and been obliterated; first by slamming into a pair of stanchions holding up the catenary, then by the power car slamming through it as it decelerated…
Getting his bearings again, he drew up a map of where everyone had been – he was in the tenth car in the set, near the front of the carriage at the separation point of the consist. Koharu was in the eleventh car, he knew that much.
Masai and Sinon were in the front set, probably not far from the blast, meaning he really did have no idea where they might be now.
Which left their mystery woman, unconscious and lying amidst the luggage that had dropped out the racks as the carriage cartwheeled. Like him, she was mostly uninjured by the looks of her health bar, but that wouldn't last long considering the view he now had.
From his view, the Atlantropa Dam was beginning to crumble, the combined effects of a large bomb and the complete destruction that the train had caused as it derailed having significantly weakened the upper most section of the nearly thousand-year-old dam. He could see cracks spreading throughout the concrete, which meant they didn't have long left before the dam gave way, and they went for a very fast and very impromptu swimming lesson…
Deciding against that outcome for both, he tapped her on the shoulder. "Wakey wakey Catwoman." In doing so, he took a chance to see who his mystery assailant really was.
During the brawl and even when he'd faced her down afterwards, something had obscured her face, or that she had positioned herself in such a way as to make sure he was looking away somewhat, uncomfortable with looking directly at her, and in doing so, had made sure he had never caught a decent glimpse at her face…
And when he did, the first reaction was complete shock, because he recognised exactly who she was.
Eydis.
The woman who would have seen the world, had circumstances been better, because she was bored of life in a small village in a strange place…
That was impossible though! She had died; hell, she had died in his arms, murdered by Albion. That thought was interrupted though, as a memory popped back into his head – one that he had previously thought was just a dream of things that had never happened.
The memory of tending to a wounded and unconscious Eydis, wearing a similar armour to that they had seen on Mito back then, and with an eye missing, inside a hut not too dissimilar to the one they had stopped in with Eydis back then.
Now though, he wasn't so sure that was a dream anymore. He knew that hadn't happened though, because he'd have remembered it, surely?
Wouldn't he?
His mild panic at discovering that maybe all of this was more connected than he'd have ever reckoned aside, not-Eydis had started to rouse from her suitcase induced slumber. "Ugh, what happened?" She groaned as she rubbed her head.
"That bomb went off, and we need to get off this train before we get swept into the Mediterranean." He told her matter-of-factly.
"There goes this being an easy job then." Not-Eydis said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Wait, we?"
"Something tells me we aren't done with the questions you raise. Thus, you're coming with me… any questions?" He told her, trying not to show concern. After all, it wasn't as if he could tell her that he had seen her die once, and in no way was he going to let that happen again!
Not-Eydis though seemed happier than he'd expected at the idea, smiling at him. "Nope." She walked over to the deformed vestibule and looked out at the carnage and the debris scattered around them. "Ok, I do have one now. We were halfway down the train, so where's the rest of it?"
He pointed out to the mangled remains of what he reckoned had been cars seven through nine, horribly twisted in ways he'd never have imagined possible. If car eight was still there, it was now entangled so viciously that he imagined most of it was just obliterated outright…
"Either out there, or in the sea." He told her.
"The bomb did all that?" She asked, a sense of horror in her voice.
"Nah. Just had to derail the train. And that it did." He explained. "All that out there, that's pure kinetic energy at 300 kilometres an hour. You can't destroy energy, so it had to go somewhere… and unfortunately, that somewhere was the front unit."
"Yeah, I'm not setting foot on a train for a while, I think."
"Probably fair." He shrugged and turned away from the field of carnage. As he did, he felt a hand brush against his thigh, near his pocket, and this time, he knew exactly what was going on… "Whatever you've just swiped, give it back." He told her bluntly.
Not that Not-Eydis was listening, a look of glee on her face as she held up a ring, a ring that was more important to him than his principles right now. "Ooh, fancy." She looked it over in her hand. "Who's it for?"
"Give it back." He hoped she would take the hint that he wasn't playing about now, and this game she was playing was over now.
She did not. "Tell you what, I'll let you have it back if you answer my questions, how about that?"
"Or I can just shoot you and take it back." He countered.
"Sure, but we both know that's out of character for you, don't we?" She shrugged, and for the briefest moment, a silence fell as both of them realised what had just been said. How did she know what was out of character for him? Had she been following him? "I mean, you wouldn't, would you? Nice guy, like you?" She backpedalled fast enough to win the Tour de France in reverse… and fast enough that he knew she knew a lot more than she let on.
"Just who are you anyway?" He asked, a darkness in his voice.
"I'm no one, not really."
"No, 'cause meeting once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times… well, that's a pattern." He told her, his tone betraying the suspicion in his voice. "So just who the bloody hell are you?"
Not-Eydis looked away in sadness with each word, as if they were a repeated punch to the soul; almost in the same way as being told how awful you were by someone you idolised… "You can have the ring back, I just… I wanted to find you, to thank you. Uhh, for saving us back in Aincrad."
She was an SAO survivor? Then how the heck had she ended up in the Underworld, unless… ohh…
Time moved faster in the Underworld, and he found himself reminded of what Seven had told them about the Underworld Project; that player data had been used from Aincrad to initially populate this new world. Initially, she had been led to believe it was just the players who had died being placed in this world, a way of ensuring they lived even after death, and hence the name "Underworld", but when she had looked deeper, it was all ten-thousand people who had ever logged in who had been copied and placed into the Underworld.
That meant that it had included himself and Koharu, naturally, but so did it include everyone else they had ever met in there, and quite a few they'd never met either. Thus, the Eydis he was currently stood in front of must have been the original, whilst her fluctlight had been placed into the Underworld, meaning that the Eydis they had met in the Underworld was her descendant.
Except that raised one more question – that some of the fluctlights of those in the Underworld weren't dead…
"Hang on, that means… I've met you before!" He exclaimed. "Edith, weren't it?"
"I swear I wasn't stalking you!" She quickly added. "I genuinely didn't know you were there!"
He realised something else – Edith wasn't a spy then, and he had been a complete arse in standing her up... "Umm, sorry I stood you up then." He responded awkwardly after few seconds.
"Yeah, I was wondering what I'd done wrong there…"
"Family stuff. You wouldn't believe me if I told you." He told her. "I don't believe it, and I'm living it."
"Jet! Can you hear me?" called Koharu, and he quietly thanked her for the distraction from the previous conversation.
"I can hear you, Ko. You holding up?"
"Yeah, I'm fine… just about. Where are you?"
"Front of the train now. The first nine cars are gone essentially, and the dam is cracking under us. We need to get out of here now."
"Ok, I'm in the twelfth car, I'm just trying to get people out now. I'll meet you here." Trust Koharu to put herself in danger to help people… though he was one to talk on that! It was practically his M.O at this point…
"See you in a few." He told her and turned to Edith. "Come on. I still owe you that drink, and I intend not to die before then."
"You… don't hate me then?"
"Why would I?"
"I dunno, the way you snapped at me then…" She shrunk slightly. One thing he had already worked out was that Edith and Eydis might have had very similar personalities, but the girl in front of him was not Eydis. She was her own person, and she deserved to be treated as such… even if he hadn't been doing so, so far.
"Sorry, I've been under a lot of stress, and that ring is kind of important to me."
"Engagement ring, right?" She asked. "I'm guessing it's for Koharu, given… you know." He nodded, as he prized open the door into car ten, and almost immediately wished he hadn't as gunfire tore into the door... "You have got to be joking!"
"Nah, if I were joking, I'd have said they were the Egyptian goons who already did car two as well. They're the two-ten-car-men!"
"Booo!" Edith gave him a visible thumbs down as they hid amongst the luggage. "How are we getting through them though?"
"You've got a sword, and I have an umbrella. They don't stand a chance!" He said confidently, standing up and switching the umbrella to Mode 1; a laser cutter, in order to cut off a piece of one of the luggage shelves to use as a shield…
"That might be the coolest umbrella in history."
"Wait till you see what else it can do." He grinned, grabbing the shelf, and placing it in front of them as a shield. "You ready?"
"Are you?"
"Nope, but there's never a good time really." He shrugged. "Avanti!"
/-/
Koharu hated being right sometimes.
In her head, she had known, even if it was on an instinctive level, that them being on a train would end up going badly.
She had just known something would go wrong, and whilst she hadn't predicted a bomb would go off and derail the train at 300 kilometres an hour, it certainly hadn't been the least sensible idea in her mind whilst they were onboard the Trans-Europa Express.
Still, she could be smug about it later, she reminded herself – people were hurt in the carriage, and she was in a position to help them. The first person she came to was the young woman who had served them about thirty minutes ago, coming around after being knocked out in the derailment. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm just…" She told her wearily. "Where's Ronye?"
"I really don't know, sorry." She admitted, though with a pause. Ronye? That sounded awfully like…
It couldn't be, could it? She'd died – Albion had murdered her to spite Jet, and for no other reason than that. Perhaps she was an NPC, but she'd deserved at least a shot at living and making things better…
"Sorry, I didn't get your name?"
"Umm, Tiese… ma'am!" She panicked, as if she thought she'd committed a social faux pas.
"It's just Koharu, no ma'am, please." She told her, tapping her earpiece again. "Jet, can you hear me?"
"Bit busy Ko!"
"Is that gunfire?! Are you under attack?"
"Nothing we can't hand-oh shiiii-" Before he'd finished his sentence, she felt the train shift noticeably under foot; no doubt a carriage had plunged into the water below the dam.
Or that was until the ground beneath them pulled away with the other carriages…
If she had thought the derailment had been unpleasant, it was nothing compared to the feeling of plummeting thousands of feet inside a metal tube, being lifted off her feet by the force of gravity as the carriage fell, hitting the roof quickly and finding herself pinned there until the sudden deceleration that was hitting the water below, where she found herself plummeting into the floor again…
Despite expecting that she was about to have to start swimming very soon after, very little water was entering the carriages at all, a surprise given they'd just hit the Mediterranean Sea. Her confusion at that was soon answered when she looked at the windows – all of which now had a solid metal shroud around them, almost like blackout curtains… or a pressure seal of some kind.
"Tiese, are you okay?"
"What just happened?"
"I think we fell off the dam, and we're now in a sinking train with a limited amount of oxygen." She wondered what it said about her life experiences that she was able to say that calmly, despite the dire nature of the situation…
Unsurprisingly, Tiese was not as calm as she was, and became frantic. "We're gonna die, we're gonna drown, we're gonna-"
Taking a leaf out of her boyfriend's book, she placed a hand on Tiese's shoulder to try and calm her down a little bit. After all, the last thing they needed now was her panicking, and using up the already limited supply of oxygen... "Tiese, listen to me – I've been in much worse situations than this, and we've always pulled through. I'm still here, aren't I?"
"Ye-yeah…"
Koharu smiled, putting on her best impression of Jet as she came up with a plan in her head. "Good, now we need to find that teleport pad." She explained, walking over to a terminal at the end of the carriage and opening it. "So, that pad is in the seventeenth carriage, almost right at the back of the train." She explained, before changing the channel "Jet, can you hear me? We're heading to the seventeenth carriage, there's a teleport pad there. We'll meet you there!"
"Koharu, we're-" A faint call came through, but she was unable to understand most of it. "Don't shoot the-!" He told her, a tone of anxiety in his voice before it garbled again.
Don't shoot the what? She wasn't sure what Jet had discovered, but she imagined it couldn't possibly be good news if he was that worried about it!
Either way, she'd decided that any kind of gunfire in what was practically a pressurised vessel now wasn't a good idea for their continued survival, and that they needed to get out of here sooner rather than later, before the laws of nature crushed the train like a wad of paper as it sank further into the depths of the Mediterranean Sea…
She could only hope Jet was having more luck further back.
/-/
Jet was not having more luck further back; in fact, his luck was somehow even more abysmal than it normally was!
Having cleared car 10, they had found themselves ambushed in car 11 by what he could only assume were special forces given the gear they carried was something that only made sense in this situation…
"These bastards knew what was about to happen!" Edith shouted to him, as he pulled a table in front of them for cover.
"I hate enemies who are prepared!" He grumbled as a pulse of energy singed a hair as it passed next to him.
She wasn't wrong though, these goons were a step up from the ones they'd fought so far – they had pressure gear to help them in case the train flooded, and weapons that wouldn't destroy the pressure shields, a thermal burst rifle that he'd only ever rarely seen before called the TPR3 that was capable of leaving serious burns on a target, but offered very little by way of penetrative power.
Luckily for them, he had such a weapon too; the optical shotgun that Seven had built into the "Battle Brolley" as he had christened it. The problem with his weapon was quite simple though, its range was pitiful in comparison to almost any weapon in the game – even his PPK had a greater range, and that was positively rubbish by almost every metric!
"Don't suppose that umbrella has a pulse rifle in it, does it?" Edith asked, jokingly.
"Only a pulse shotgun." He answered immediately, much to her surprise.
"Swiss Army umbrella." She nodded with a grin.
"I prefer Battle Brolley." He shrugged. "Don't suppose you have any flashbangs on you? You kind of nicked mine!"
"Nope, no pockets!" Edith patted herself down, and he really didn't need her to do that to figure that part out. Her dress was… well, it was certainly unconventional, if nothing else, being formed of what he assumed were three separate pieces, none of which containing any kind of pockets, though her belt did contain ammunition and medical supplies apparently.
Quickly, he skimmed his inventory for something that they could use to break through the heavily armed goons, and he spotted something – a flare gun.
Given he was sure they were using thermal sights and goggles, the heat of a flare being fired off in their general direction ought to have the same effect!
"On my go, we take them out with melee attacks. Can't risk the shielding."
"Agreed! Wait, what's go?"
"You won't miss it!" He pulled the bright red breech loading handgun out, and guessed roughly where he expected them to be, in order to line up a shot before he popped his head out from cover… "Now!"
A bright light shone throughout the carriage, and the attackers stopped firing, trying to clear their goggles of the many, many visual artifacts that would now be in them from the bright flash of a flare passing nearby.
Spotting the opportunity in front of them, both himself and Edith broke cover, using their blades to deal with the armed goons, mostly trying to disarm them. In Edith's case, that was quite literal, her katana slicing through the armour with very little effort, whilst he did his best to knock the attackers out in the darkened carriage, as the room lit up with plasma bursts from the rifles, and the shattering of the electronic goggles…
"Well, that was easier than I thought it'd be." Edith said, picking up one of the TPR3s and putting it on her back, something he also chose to do. "Next time, try to show a girl a good time, would you? Rather than, you know, disappoint her."
"They're unconscious, you do realise that they don't hear you?" He pointed out.
"Eh, you can't tell me you don't do one liners either." She smirked, and he looked away in embarrassment. This girl was going to be the death of him… "Knew it." She told him in a sing-song voice, grinning in vindication as they walked into the luggage store at the end of the car. Armed with a flashlight to see in the almost total darkness they had been plunged into, they found themselves looking for something that might come in handy…
Night vision equipment mainly.
Scanning the room for anything useful, he had the shock of his life when he came face to face with a veritable arsenal of equipment – pulse rifles, flashbangs… "Ya know I said that bomb was what'd alter the balance of the game?" Edith gave him an expression he knew as "whoops". "Yeah, I think that was more likely it, come to think of it…"
"No kidding." He looked on in awe…
"Reckon anyone would mind if we took it for a spin?" Edith asked.
"Whoever wants it probably would… so I think that's an excellent idea." He grinned. "I call dibs."
"Boys and their toys…" Edith laughed.
"Oh please, you're telling me you don't have any toys of your own?" He snarked back at her, betting she was the type to keep a collection of stuffed animals in her room…
"Well, I do-" Hah! He knew it, she was absolutely the kind of girl to have stuffed- "But they definitely aren't the kind you'd give to kids." She blushed, and he tried to get the now quite different meaning of his earlier thought out of his head…
Damn it, life or death here! Think unsexy thoughts!
/-/
Further up the train, Koharu had found herself leading a small crowd towards the rear power car; mostly guests who'd survived the crash and fall, but a few of the staff as well, and much to her surprise, a girl who looked awfully like Ronie had.
As in, identical to her, though perhaps with a few years over the teenaged queen, meaning she was around her age, give or take a year.
It didn't make any sense though – Ronie had been an NPC… she shouldn't have been here, because even with the fluctlight copying that had gone on, she shouldn't have had one!
"Erm, Miss Koharu?" She snapped back to reality, to being beckoned by the mystery girl. "You said you've been in worse messes than this?"
"Yup, we got through Aincrad alive, so a sinking train is kind of nothing." She smiled, doing her best to hide her confusion from the younger woman.
"You're a survivor too?" She asked. "Wait… Koharu! No way! You're the Queen of the Concord!" She beamed, as if she was meeting a celebrity… rather than herself.
She could understand why Jet had wanted to strangle Lueur sometimes, if he was going around giving them nicknames like that! "Heh, yeah, that was me." She looked away, embarrassed by the nickname. "It's just Koharu now though, Ronye." She told her, before fiddling with her earpiece. "Anyone, can you hear me? We've made it through to the sixteenth car, but we can't get through any further."
"Ko, we're-fifteenth car-there in-" Another garbled message from Jet, no doubt disrupted by the atmosphere nearly two-thousand feet below the surface. Still, it was good news that he was nearby… but that debris blocking the door was probably the thing that stopped them dead in their tracks.
The amount of it meant that the only feasible way to clear it was with explosives, and well… explosives down here was an unbelievably bad idea by anyone's standards! They'd be flooded before they could say "oh no", if they went down that route…
"We're… we're trapped then?" Ronye asked, clearly resigning herself to an unpleasant death before they respawned. That was something she was still getting used to herself – death here wasn't permanent, but that didn't mean there wasn't an incentive not to die.
Depending on the circumstances of your demise, it could be as simple as losing your equipment to whoever killed you – a pain, but none of them really carried specialised equipment that was unique to them (other than Jet's umbrella, anyway), so it could be replaced without too much hassle – or it could be as infuriating as losing your entire character, should you die in a rather unusual way…
Like being drowned at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
"No. We'll find a way, we always do." She told her, doing her best impression of Jet and trying to reassure not only the group that had gathered around her, but also herself.
"Yup, don't write us off just yet." Said a familiar voice, stood at the other end of the carriage…
Jet! And… Eydis?!
Oh, today was just full of surprises, wasn't it? First Ronie, now Eydis, she thought… what the hell was going on here!?
Regardless of what was going on, she found herself rushing to attack hug him before she realised something… what the heck was he wearing?!
A giant metal suit, armoured at every position, making him stand nearly eight foot tall… "Err, Jet, where did you find that?"
"Cargo hold. I think this was the game changer, not the bomb."
"I… can imagine." She answered blankly, before pulling him into a hug. It was cold and metallic, almost as if she was hugging the Iron Giant, but there was still some warmth from her boyfriend inside it… "We are still kind of trapped though."
"This is kind of what this was designed for… I think." He added hesitantly.
"What even is it?" She asked, wondering not only that… but where he'd found it!
"Engineering suit, futuristic equivalent of a combat tractor I imagine." Jet explained, though she knew he was making it up a little – he had just as much of an idea about it as the rest of them did. "Either way, let's get that rubble out of the way, and-"
As he pulled a section of the rubble loose, it became apparent that they had a rather major problem in the form of gravity, with the train coming loose from the sediment it had settled in and was now falling further into the depths of the Mediterranean. "Jet…" She told him, as he if couldn't feel the lack of ground below them anymore…
"Working on it!" He replied sharply, bending the bar in front of them as if it were a paperclip and pushing it aside. "Clear! Run for the front!" He turned and looked at her. "That means you too, go!"
"What about you?!"
"This thing ain't quick you know!" He responded in kind. "I'll be behind you, don't worry!"
Realising that standing around arguing was simply going to be wasting time they didn't have, she ran after the rest of the group whilst Jet clattered along behind her at a considerably slower pace, before something else exploded…
Had the bulkheads shattered, or… "Shit! Suit's wrecked. Koharu, there's a release on the back of it, I can't reach it now…"
"Got it!" She yanked the handle out, and watched as Jet was ejected out the back rather unceremoniously, landing on his butt and picking up the pulse rifle on his back to return fire. "What about the suit?"
"You still got your grenade?"
"Why, haven't you?"
"Long story, but no!"
"What are you thinking?"
"They want it so badly, let 'em have it!" He told her, putting the primed grenade into the cockpit and pushing the remains of the suit over, in order for it to fall back towards their attackers… "Hey, you want it? You can have it!" He shouted as the suit fell back down the carriage towards their positions. "No takebacks though!"
She watched briefly as two of them picked up the suit hesitantly, only to realise the self-destruct had been primed, alongside the grenade, and thinking better of watching any more, they ran as fast as was possible up the train before the inevitable explosion tore open the sealed windows and flooded the train…
Reaching the bottom of the eighteenth car, she could hear the distant blast, reduced to a dull thud to her, before the violent rush of water began to rush in, drowning out any noise… and any of their attackers too.
Without thinking, she tried to rush up the carriage, finding no grip whatsoever as she started to slip backwards with the descent of the train…
"The gloves!" She heard Jet shout from behind and remembered the grip gloves Seven had given them. Leaning against the most solid thing she could find – in this case a table – she equipped the gloves, and hoped Seven hadn't given them an instruction manual to read before they used them…
Thankfully, it was as simple as equipping them to turn them on, and she was able to, with some effort, pull herself up to the final carriage, with Jet following not too far behind.
"Everyone okay?"
"Had better days, but we'll live." Eydis answered. "Just trying to get the damned teleporter to work, it's almost like it needs a complete rewiring or something…"
"We haven't come this far just to die, have we?" Tiese asked.
Jet was bent over, looking at the maze of electrical wiring and plumbing that went into the teleporter as he talked, running his hands across what would otherwise be live wires… making her wince slightly as he did. "Nope, just needs a bit of… ah hah!" Jet exclaimed. "Looks like a capacitor came out in the crash, just need to knock it back into place, and we'll be out of here!"
"How long will that take?"
"A minute or so." He answered, now hearing the creaking behind them. "On second thoughts, thirty seconds…" He revised his estimate and pulled out a small mallet to start banging the capacitor back into place.
"Umm, are you sure hitting the thing that scatters us into atoms is a good idea?" Eydis asked, amongst the banging of the mallet.
"You can swim if you want, Edith." He replied almost instantly, and a bright blue light came on. "We're going out this way though!"
With only the words needed to activate the teleport spoken, the group teleported out of the wrecked train, and found themselves on dry land once again.
A beach near the Atlantropa Dam, once probably a pleasant holiday destination, but now littered with parts of machines and concrete from the decaying cities built on the arable land created from the damming of the Mediterranean…
And a group of players armed to the teeth.
"Well, isn't this a pleasant surprise?" The leader, a blonde man slightly shorter than Jet, spoke with a distinctly American accent. "I finally get to meet my competition."
"Competition?" Jet asked, genuinely confused for a moment. "Ohh, so you're Gabriel Miller…"
"Isn't it rather taboo to name others in virtual reality, Michael Edmondson?" The man – Gabriel – snarled, and she got a better look at him. He was conventionally attractive, with blonde hair and blue eyes, but she could tell those eyes masked just how far gone he was…
She'd come face to face with murderers in SAO, and even they hadn't that look in their eyes; that was the look of someone with no value of human life, no value of anything that didn't have yen signs in front of it…
"I must admit, I had heard impressive things about you. A man who could turn the tide of battle and inspire those around him…" The condescension in his voice was enough that even Albion would have told him dial it back a bit… "I wasn't expecting Scooby-Doo and his gang."
"What does that make you then?" Jet retorted. "A caretaker in a dodgy mask?"
"You already know about why I'm doing this, if you know who I am, but just so your friends are aware… I am not someone to be trifled with."
"Yeah, you're a right flan…ker." Jet gave an unapologetic smile.
"Perhaps I should show your head to my employer, I imagine he would be impressed…"
"If it's who I think it is, I imagine you would find an RX-9 Hellfire cutting you into little ribbons if you did that." Jet shrugged, as if he wasn't being threatened with certain death. "Blood's thicker than water, after all…"
"Then it should've been my company! Not some pompous, waste of space from an inconsequential backwater shithole!" Koharu had done her best to keep up with what was going on, but now she was really lost, and by the looks of it, so was everyone else but those two.
"Oh, this is priceless, daddy dearest didn't trust you with that kind of big stick, and now you're acting out like a giant manchild…" Jet laughed, and Gabriel looked as if he was about to pop a blood vessel…
Maybe taunting him wasn't a good idea, she was beginning to think... "I see why Albion was obsessed with killing you."
"Birds of a feather, huh?" Jet asked. "Or is he bankrolling your little takeover scheme?"
"Oh, you'll find out soon enough. Alice, Nijika, Alexandra and Kotone send their regards, by the way…"
If it wasn't personal before, now it was. She saw Jet's defiant expression of annoying their captor switch to one of anger, one she'd only seen once or twice before, and even then, those had been in the direst of circumstances in Aincrad… "If you've hurt them, I swear they'll be searching for your body with a microscope…"
"That hard act really doesn't work on me." Gabriel mocked, before a familiar loud crack threw the mercenary to the ground, sans an arm.
"What was that?!" One of the goons shouted as they looked around the craggy cliffs for any signs of a scope or launcher.
"Just fire on that cliff!" Another yelled, opening fire with an M249 light machine gun…
With a nod between them, the five of them began to attack any of the distracted mercenaries with whatever they could find – be that with rocks, their fists, or in Jet's case, pulling the pin on their grenade belt and kicking him away.
That one hadn't stood a chance, and half of his upper body was completely gone when the DEAD popup showed up to confirm that.
Whilst the mercenaries fought the fire from the cliffs, and from them, she had managed to pull out her MP7 and deal with another of them, a moustachioed man who had been caught completely unaware when a burst of 4.6mm rounds slammed into his head, and another had been dealt with by Eydis' sword, joining Gabriel in the amputee club…
"Fall back." Gabriel ordered calmly, as his men retreated with teleport crystals…
"What was that?" Asked Ronye, clearly rattled by the whole ordeal.
"Friends in high places, I think…" Jet gave a salute to the cliff face. "I dunno about you guys, but I could do with a breather after that…" He laughed a little, as he sat back into the sand.
Still though, what was it that Gabriel had said about the girls? She knew they'd lost contact with them, and so, something had to have happened… and if both were right about Albion's presence, it couldn't have been good news.
With another flash of light, Masai and Sinon materialised in front of them, looking worse for wear, but crucially for any plan going forward, not dead. "Does every job you two do end in disaster?" Sinon asked, whilst Masai laughed a little.
"Only the good ones." Jet joked back. "All the others just go mildly wrong."
"That was the guy I saw at the party – Subtilizer." Masai explained, and suddenly a few things made sense, whilst a lot of others didn't. "No idea why he's interested in you though?"
"He's got a grudge against me. Long story, personal stuff." He waved away. "Suffice to say, he's gunning for me now."
"Next question… Eydis?!"
"Edith." Edith clarified. "Umm, why are you looking at me like I died, and you've seen a ghost?"
Before she could explain anything, Jet cut her off to get them back on course… "We'll explain later. Still, we've got one big problem left to handle. Subtilizer has the girls, and I've not got a clue where he's keeping them."
She imagined a trip to Argo would be in order after this…
{Author's Comments}
So this chapter has actually been finished for about two weeks now, but I've not had chance to upload it, as something else has distracted me every time I thought about doing it...
Oops.
