Free Web NovelChapter 15: Full-On Bullshit Cheating
My back was still against the wall, while the DDM4 stayed braced against my shoulder and pointed at the staircase, every part of me hurting in a slightly different way.
The rifle round trapped behind the plate had left my chest feeling like somebody had swung a sledgehammer into it.
The wound through my side was still leaking warmly into the jacket beneath the carrier.
My neck complained every time I moved it more than a few degrees.
And then there was the migraine, still drilling straight through the middle of my forehead, and the awareness was still gone.
Tikki sat beside me with his tail puffed and his ears flat, while the sound of boots echoed through the building from every direction at once.
The first man came down the left staircase at a jog, shotgun out, expecting to find a body.
-Tish-!
The DDM4 round went through his chest before he cleared the third step, and he folded right then and there and didn’t get back up while the shotgun clattered down the remaining steps.
A few seconds of silence later, a second man came around the top of the staircase in a crouch, slower, more careful, and found out that slower and more careful still put him inside my line of sight.
-Tish-!
A third man appeared at the top of the stairs, saw the second man fold, and immediately disappeared back around the corner, while shouting erupted from somewhere above.
"He’s still alive!"
"Then kill that bastard!"
"You kill him!"
"Stop peeking and someone do something!"
[Morale’s looking great up there...] I thought as I pressed my back harder against the wall, keeping the DDM4 on the staircase.
And the very next second, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a blurry shape of a man at the turn for the main entrance’s corridor, and I put a round through it without fully looking.
-Tish-!
That’s when someone up the corridor figured it out.
And the next thing that peeked out was not a head but a pistol that started firing blind, but since I was sitting down, the rounds hammered the wall above me.
Concrete fragments rained down into my hair and across the back of my hands, while I lowered my chin and let it happen because there was nothing else to do about blind fire except not be standing up.
[Someone passed kindergarten,] I thought.
The magazine ran dry. The firing stopped. A click, then silence, and three seconds later the blurry shape of a head appeared around the corner at waist height to check the results before-
-Tish-!
And the round obliterated the head in a shower of blood and white goo.
Then from somewhere on the floor above, a man shouted four words that made my stomach drop entirely.
"Bring the dogs down!"
My hand tightened on the rifle.
Dogs don’t reason. Dogs don’t hesitate at a muzzle flash or flinch from the sound of a shot or decide if it might be safer to wait for backup.
They close the distance with a frenzy not much different than the infected.
And with the awareness gone, my vision blurred and the space between me and the staircase wide enough for two of them to reach me before I could stop them both, I was looking at the kind of problem that grenades could not cleanly solve in a closed corridor.
My teeth gritted hard enough to hurt as my mind raced to find a solution, only to find none.
And, and just as I resigned myself to raw dog it all, the migraine changed.
It didn’t stop or disappear. But the leading edge of it, the drilling pressure directly between my eyes, dulled, changed texture, became something less like pain and more like weight.
And following right after, the blur at the edge of my vision pulled back one increment, and then the hearing, which had been arriving at about seventy percent since the concussion, came the rest of the way in, and then -
Something pressed against the edge of my awareness.
Faint. Like the first pins-and-needles feeling of a limb coming back from numbness.
And then came the feeling of detecting a presence. Then two... Three, four, five.
[Awareness is back!]
And down the corridor leading to the main entrance on my right, I detected five men behind the corner, lined up behind each other.
I held very still.
Then I pushed the awareness further, because it felt like it would go further, and it went, and above me on the second floor nine men and two dogs were crowded near the top of the left staircase preparing to come down.
[That’s not the usual ten meters... System?] frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
-Ding!
{Telekinesis functions similarly to a muscle.
Repeated use improves efficiency, strength, and range.
Operating near current limitations provides accelerated growth, but provides diminishing returns as the ability gets stronger.}
I stared at the notification for three full seconds.
[No way.]
[No. Fucking. Way.]
I pulled a grenade from the inventory, removed the pin, held the spoon compressed, and focused.
And the grenade lifted off my palm immediately.
The hold this time was clean, the compression on the spoon was solid, and the migraine barely registered the load.
I let it drift forward, out through the corridor entrance, letting the pressure off the spoon, and then I steered it right, moving it around the corner toward the five men behind cover, slow enough to keep control, fast enough that they would not have time to respond sensibly.
They responded sensibly anyway, for about one second.
"What the-! Is that floating?"
"GRENADE!"
-BOOM-!
Through the expanded awareness, I felt the pressure wave, the bodies slamming into the floor, the shrapnel shredding through their bodies, and the single survivor rolling against the wall with most of his right side not working correctly.
And I couldn’t help but start laughing, the kind that comes when something is so deeply unreasonable that the body doesn’t know what else to do with it.
I pulled another grenade, threw it without any ceremony, caught it telekinetically and curved it around the corner like I was steering a thrown ball mid-flight, and bashed it into the survivor’s face before-
-BOOM-!
Complete silence from that direction.
[This is bullshit...This is full-on bullshit cheating!]
"You seeing this?" I looked at Tikki with a wide grin splitting my face.
"Mea," he nodded and turned back at the stairs.
Chuckling, I too turned to the stairs and pulled the next grenade.
The awareness showed me everything up there. Nine men in two clusters near the left staircase, both dogs pacing between them, all of them loud and tightly grouped and completely unaware that the man they thought they had bleeding out on the ground floor could feel exactly where every one of them was standing.
I bought eight new grenades from the inventory in one transaction and started working.
The first one went up the staircase curving left at the top to land in the near cluster, and I felt them scatter before it went off, heard the scrambling boots and someone shouting, and then-
-BOOM-!
The second one followed the same path while they were still reacting to the first, and I curved it further this time, into the space they had scattered to.
-BOOM-!
The third one I sent along the right wall of the staircase to cut off the retreat toward the far end of the second floor, and by the time the fourth one went up, the shouting had become full-blown high-pitched shrieking.
And the awareness was telling me that the nine men had become three men and one dog, along with a man who was not moving but was still technically alive.
-BOOM-!-BOOM-!
I sent two at once, both steered from the top of the staircase in opposite directions, and I was laughing again, properly this time, through the migraine and the chest pain and the blood soaking my jacket, because I could think of nothing appropriate to do with the situation except laugh.
And after those two, the second floor went quiet.
"Alright... let’s move..." I chuckled as the laugh died out, and stood up.
My legs held, which surprised me, and I picked up the 1301 from where it had ended up after the hammer blow, stored the DDM4, and let the expanded awareness map the ground floor around me in full as I walked the corridor, a hand on the bleeding wound.
Eleven apartments. Four contained men still alive, two of them armed, two of them just hiding.
Three contained people who were clearly civilians, irregular breathing, no weapons detectable, pressed against the far walls.
The rest were either empty or contained what had previously been people.
I walked to the nearest apartment with armed men inside, stood to the side of the door, blasted a hole in the door with the shotgun, and sent a grenade through the gap, guiding it to the men via Telekinesis before-
-BOOM-!
Did the same with the next one.
-BOOM-!
And just like that, I cleared two rooms without ever so much as peeking inside.
The two civilian rooms I walked past without stopping.
Then I bought the proximity charges, eight of them.
The charges were smaller than I expected, a matte-black disc roughly the size of my palm and barely thicker than two stacked phones.
The upper surface was featureless except for a faint circular groove running around the edge, while the underside had a pressure adhesive pad protected by a removable film. No blinking lights, exposed wiring, or antennas. Just a black puck that looked harmless enough to mistake for a hockey puck if you didn’t know better.
I set two charges flanking the left staircase of the building, one on each side of the entry, close to the wall where anyone coming down would step without seeing them.
Two more at the main corridor intersection where the cross-passage met the central run, positioned left and right to cover both directions of approach.
Two more mirroring those on the right side of the intersection.
And two flanking the right staircase at the far right of the building, one each side.
Eight charges. Anyone trying to reach the basement stairs would walk through at least one. And frankly, one detonation would be more than enough to send a lot of them packing back to the upper floors.
Tikki climbed back onto my shoulder as I placed the last charge, steeling into his pocket, front paws on my shoulder, face forward.
While I checked the 1301, counted shells, checked the 1911, reseated the last partial mag, and turned toward the stairs leading to the basement.
"Kara," I said.
The word sat in the empty corridor for a moment.
"You better make me some chocolate pudding later..."
