The Games We Play

Chapter 5

The Games We Play

Escort Mission

The thing about doors is that they're for people who aren't running for their lives.

Me? I drove straight through the truck entrance.

"Get in!" I shouted out the window as I saw Adam and Blake fighting. I ended up driving right between them and one of the Spider Droids by pure chance and the machine thankfully halted its attack for a second, apparently uncertain whether it should be shooting at me. Or maybe it was the logo on the side of the truck that stalled it, I don't know. Either way, I didn't slow as I passed them—couldn't afford to, honestly—but the two Faunus thankfully recovered quickly and I saw them hop on top of the truck through my mirrors.

I also saw the trail of smoke left in the wake of a rocket fly out of the back of the truck, presumably the work of Ram Man. A second later, I had to look away as it exploded right in the face of one of the machines—and wow, I felt that explosion even as far away from ground zero as I was. And it was loud, too; the movies don't do explosions justice. I had no idea where the White Fang got their rocket launchers, but whoever made them obviously didn't mess around.

I thought I would have been deafened by the sound—which would have been bad, damn it, why hadn't I thought about that when I saw him with a rocket launcher—but after the last sounds of the explosions died away, my hearing was left untouched. I wasn't sure if that was a Gamer thing or an Aura thing, but either way I wasn't going to complain right now.

"Damn it, Billy!" I heard a female voice snarl, sounding more than a little irate.

"Blake!" Ram Man, or maybe Billy, shouted, though I couldn't see why; the downside of driving a semi.

"Map," I said, nearly sighing with relief as the grid of streets appeared before me. Almost as useful, there were a trio of red dots moving on the map, close behind the blue marker of the truck. My eyes danced across the map for a moment before I swung the truck wide onto Afzan Avenue, passing through a holographic streetlight in the process. I heard shots hitting the pavement as I did, flashes of light too fast to see clearly in my mirrors, but I was driving faster than the machines could move, at least for the moment. Butut given that one of them was clinging to the side of a building as I flew past...well, I was depressingly sure they weren't limited by roads for mobility.

I had to prioritize. Blake and Adam may have been able to combat those things directly, but I had a truck full of people who couldn't have even if they weren't wounded. If those things started firing on us, I couldn't trust the truck to standup under their fire. It wasn't enough to just stay ahead, I had to keep them from having a direct line of fire—and oh boy was that gonna be a fun trick to manage against people who could climb a building and bath me in fire at range. And given the size of this truck...

I had to stay on roads wide enough to maneuver on and connected to other roads I could switch onto before the machines caught up and keep track of the machines locations in three-dimensions and the size of the buildings around me so I could try to keep out of sight. But where was I even going? The bridges? No, I couldn't be certain they wouldn't be willing to follow us into the Commercial or Residential Districts, at which point who knows how many people could get hurt, even assuming we survived crossing it, which was unlikely if they caught us on the bridges. Unfortunately, there weren't all that many roads I could safely drive on, excluding those.

And there was the police to worry about, I was sure. The idea of just going to them and placing this mess in their laps was tempting but...no. I didn't know what the robots would do and if they were violent, a lot of good men and women could die. If they were Hunters, maybe...but they weren't. And even if the robots refused to fire on them, the police would almost certainly want to arrest the White Fang and I couldn't imagine them coming quietly. Given Adam and Blake's levels...no. I had to avoid the police, too. Which probably just meant avoiding the bridges, for now—it had been, what, five minutes since the Spider Droids had gotten loose? Ten? The police wouldn't move in until they could mobilize a response capable of addressing the problem.