The Ultimation (Play to Live: Book #7) Read online

  "They're going in for a second pass!" Dan yelled as the most versed in the tactics of the likely enemy, pulling a crossbow and some dangerously glittering arrows out of his inventory. "Get down where you are, don't clump together, and stay away from the walls! Like hell we're going to give them a group target."

  What walls was he talking about in the open field? However, I abstained from teasing him. Through the cotton in my ears I heard the sucking sound of the helicopter blades, eagerly slicing through the air compressed by their speed.

  I pulled out the Staff of True Flame and maxed out the beam, sacrificing the power and size of the light spot. A tight laser is better than a long-range floodlight.

  The copter stayed in the ravine to the last, skillfully hiding in the folds of the terrain. About six hundred and fifty feet from its target, the pilot abruptly threw the aircraft upwards and to the side, tracing an arc around us, quickly discharging unguided missiles and kicking up a dust cloud from the aircraft’s minigun. It was an attack helicopter in all its glory. Retribution from the skies!

  Our kamikaze-drone bellowed mournfully with its motors and threw itself into a suicide attack, futilely scraping its delicate electronic insides against the outer armor of the tank destroyer.

  I caught the cruel machine in my light beam, taking screenshots and calculating the necessary lead for the moving target as I went. It wasn’t for nothing I’d served in the Air Defense! You never forgot the training. The length of the striker was seventy feet and it had an angular velocity of two hundred and sixty feet per second. My Staff worked at the speed of light: 186,282 miles per second. So why would I even need to calculate the lead? Take that, you bastard!

  The plasma beam nailed the engine. The Apache immediately began to smoke and sank through the air, causing Fuckyall to curse as he overshot from his bow. The aircraft swayed and turned its tail to us, minimizing its target profile, then took off towards the horizon on one engine. The nervous pilot shot off flares, treating us to some farewell fireworks.

  Dan, who’s miraculously survived, snarled. "He’s not gonna make it! I put three poisonous bolts into him. He bled a lot: six percent per tick."

  No idea how Earth's reality calculated enchanted DOT from arrows landing on the steel belly of a helicopter. Oil gushing out of pipes, loss of pressure in the pneumatics, or maybe a poisonous mist in the cockpit? No idea. The main thing was that it worked. In general, the Apache’s armor could take a fifty-caliber round from a DShK.

  It's a matter of which is tougher: a heavy company machine gun or an artifact crossbow from the Lunar Forge.

  The sky blazed with a distant flash. We heard a thunderous crash.

  "Gotcha," Dan smiled. With one hand he pulled an expensive Full Healing scroll from his tome. His other hand had been smashed by a thirty-millimeter round and hung limply, revealing frightening white shards of bone and quivering, torn muscles.

  Fuckyall began to look like a pin cushion. Each unguided missile had two thousand submunitions. Each package had nineteen rockets. And they had fired four racks at us. That's more than a hundred and fifty thousand tiny arrows! So the paladin was now busy cleaning his gilded armor by pulling out the sharp spikes. I wouldn't recommend our girls visit Earth in the once-fashionable armored bras...

  Catching my gaze, Fuckyall winked at me. "What is it you love saying? If we can’t fly ourselves, no one will! But the pilots surely ejected. Maybe we should go and find them? Beat the snot out of them? Just imagine: a SEAL rescue crew comes to pick them up and they’re all sporting nice big shiners under their puffy eyes! "Oh,” they’d say, “we hit them with rockets and machine guns, and those bastards punched us on the nose...”

  I chuckled. The guy was in shock.

  I assessed our losses. Our tanks had anywhere from a third to half of their hits left: their armor had been beaten pretty badly. It wouldn't be a bad idea to deploy the camp forge and patch up the durability of our equipment. Ordinary soldiers would have been done for a long time ago. But we were an elite cluster. Sad.

  I used to think that a good mage stood much higher in the rankings than a combat helicopter. One good thing: we were as immortal and stubborn as cockroaches. The abandoned copter was worth seventy million dollars. Add to this the ammunition and expert pilots who couldn’t be appraised at all considering their ten years of training and service experience.

  How many combat helicopters did the U.S. have in all? About a thousand. And I didn't need to go to a fortune teller to find that out: I remembered the number from my army classes. So now we had cut the American helicopter forces of either the Army or Navy—I’d have to check the screenshots as I hadn’t had time to notice any affiliation markings—by a fraction of a percent.

  Next. They'd smoked all of our mounts: the beasties had less hits and armor and made for much larger targets. Again I’d have to pick through the logs, trying to understand how many hits were removed by a direct hit of the high-explosive shells from the aircraft machine guns and how much was shaved off by an explosion of the seventy-five millimeter rockets.

  Well, the final loser of the day was Zena. Despite her full plate armor, the stats of a cleric weren't the same as a fighter's. The former had weaker hits and lower armor. Add to it her exceptional bad luck: even though our goblin was a tiny target, she had still managed to find herself under the minigun's fire. It's no bullet to the heart, but rather four hundred, followed up by a high-explosive round. That one must have really hurt.

  Her rickety tombstone was barely seen among the countless potholes and craters. Well, who was going to resurrect her? Fuckyall? A paladin's relationship with death was nothing to sniff at, even if the said paladin was a Dark one. I’d say they were on back-slapping terms with each other. That was the nature of a paladin: he laid people into the grave with one hand while blessing and resurrecting them with the other.

  Indeed, Fuckyall didn’t waste time. After a minute of muffled curses and false chords of a disrupted cast, a tired Zena smiled wryly, accepting her third set of congratulations in a day.

  The girl cast an apprehensive glance into a bronze mirror. Okay, so she had a gray strand in her hair, big deal. People paid good money for those kinds of highlights!

  Wrapped in the cloak of invisibility, we resumed our leisurely run to the rendezvous point. Gone were our mounts and the copter: we were moving on our own two feet now. With a five-hour journey, we'd be running until morning. I still had no desire to sleep. It wasn't in vain that I had rested before we left. In general, the ideal healthy body grew tired slowly and recovered significantly more quickly. We didn't need any of those combat chemicals like pilot's salt in order to stay awake for three days on the trot behind the enemy lines.

  As we ran we exchanged our impressions about a “warm” greeting we’d received. Fuckyall lovingly stroked his bow with its massive limbs and tension of three hundred and thirty pounds. How else could one interpret the items restrictions of "Minimum strength: 330"?

  "Did you see that? I got it with my last arrow at thirteen-hundred feet! How the hell is that possible?! In AlterWorld, you can make a hit at fifty steps, no more. But here!"

  "I suppose it's easier for Earth's reality to add range to the item,” I said, “than to mess with the physics and aerodynamics of the world, trying to stop the arrow after a hundred feet. What's easier, erasing one number from the bow or rewriting the entire system? But I'm more interested in where the hell that helicopter was going!”

  Dan shrugged. "Probably to verify the results of the tactical nuclear strike, gathering further intelligence, and finishing off survivors, if there were any. The Longbow has a flight range of a thousand miles and could even take off faster than a bomber. They brought the heat and hit us with everything they had. They aren't moving under invisibility, so it's no matter."

  I nodded thoughtfully as I tripped over a piece of ice for the umpteenth time. I swore under my breath. Simultaneously running and studying screenshots was not easy. Snowie habitually held me by the a
rm. Thanking him, I continued,

  "It's entirely possible. By the way, I noticed the crystal quality of the military equipment and the level indices according to its arms. On the first screen, the copter was recognized as ‘90 (440)’. Meaning its hull was level ninety, but with its current arms system it was equal to level four hundred and forty. After it shot off all its unguided missiles, that coefficient fell to three hundred. This is still a lot, but its durability is minimal and it would crumble after a dozen hits. Thus, we have its level of survivability: ninety. The strength of a crystal vase...”

  Dan grinned. "Good theory. It explains a lot. You shouldn’t confuse an average level-ten gunner armed with a spade and one equipped with a DOT machine gun. See my point?"

  The horizon was already brightening as we ran up to the next hill and were finally able to see the rendezvous point. We weren't at all sure there would be anyone there waiting for us. Instead of the twenty miles per hour we’d been doing with the drone, we were now going three times slower. However, they were waiting for us. They were holding out by the skin of their teeth!

  On the ground, the hull of the transport helicopter was smoking. Overhead, a couple of very familiar K-52M helicopters were having a run-in with a bone dragon.

  "They're fighting our own!" Fuckyall cast me an expectant look.

  "Let’s go!" I snapped, unhesitantly taking the side of the red-starred machines.

  Chapter Twelve

  Our K-52s didn’t need help. They were steadily circling the dragon, making the whole fight look like a dance with them in the lead. The two 440-level copters had an advantage over the 170-level monster when it came to speed, maneuverability, and firepower. The creature was still alive only thanks to its physical damage resistance and an outrageously high HP. Outrageously high for the current reality, that is.

  The dragon could have taken out the 52s with one direct hit if he could have reached them. Creatures of the game surely laugh at the frailty of all living and non-living beings created by nature and at the hands of earthmen. Even the lamest newbie from AlterWorld’s nursery could easily sustain ten blows of the sword from a human of the same level. But an earthman wouldn’t even survive a mere stab in the liver.

  The 52s sharply flew aside when needed, thus keeping the dragon at a safe distance – 1,500 feet at least. The creature spat acid, created veils of poison, tried to manipulate its enemies’ minds, and helplessly sliced the air with its spiked tail. All in vain. The copters adhered to the Pokryshkin technique: altitude, speed, maneuver. What idiot had sent a lone monster to battle without any magic cover? That’s how the Nazis burned our tanks back in the 1941: the tanks had no infantry cover. Field manuals are written in blood. Didn’t demons know that?

  Guns thundered ceaselessly. Free-flight missiles exploded everywhere, leaving clouds of flames in their wake. The large-caliber machine gun of the transport helicopter rattled away on the ground. The 52s had to use up all their gun and unguided missile ammo. By the end of the battle, they were twice lower in level, down to 230. They were probably very low on ammo—either that or their guns were jammed or overheated.

  Dan and I exchanged glances.

  He was watching his ex-comrades in arms, biting his lip. “It’s a one-way fight. How could they allow such a mess when there are thousand-strong demon armies freely roaming the continent, and when nuclear weapons are being used?”

  The next moment, we saw one possible explanation. Chimera’s ghostly form materialized out of thin air, familiar to many warriors who had been to the Ice Wastelands. Completely immune to physical damage, she flew through the whirring blades of one of the copters and seized the rotor.

  The helicopter started helplessly spinning in place, trying to throw off the creature. A barely visible glow appeared around the copter and began eating up the ghost’s HP point by point. Whatever it was, it was too slow.

  The bone dragon seized the chance. Slewing around on one wing, he slowly flew away, splinters of his ancient yellow bones raining on the snow. The high-explosive shells had heavily injured him.

  We kept running, trying to get closer to the level-200 Chimera so that it would be within our magic’s reach. This beast was hard to handle even for a well-organized unit; it was vulnerable only to magic or magic weapons, which clearly excluded most of the tanks and infantry.

  The other helicopter was helplessly circling the first, having no idea how to help. Finally, the pilot decided to attempt a risky stunt. Hovering 150 feet away from its struggling comrade, the helicopter started firing at will. Strange as it may be, it damaged Chimera’s ghostly flesh. Of course, the damage was negligible. Every 23mm shell took only a few hundred HP. But the amazing part was that it actually took away HP in the first place.

  Fuckyall stopped right behind us. Putting his faith in the power of his bow, he started shooting at the enemy from a distance that was inconceivable for AlterWorld. The damage was less than he expected. A bow really isn’t the right weapon for a paladin. Nevertheless, the arrows enchanted with fire magic each took off a solid three to four hundred HP. Plus, according to the offline Bestiary, Chimera had about 40,000 HP.

  We were almost there when the pilot of the helicopter under attack noticed us. Instead of trying to fly toward us to let us handle the mob that was an easy target for a well-coordinated group, he heroically flew away from us, dragging the monster along with him in order to save us precious guests.

  Fortunately, the Alligators didn’t get far. The 600 pounds of armor in the cockpit were still holding up, but the engines couldn’t handle the strain and failed.

  The pilot was a knowledgeable fellow; he managed to land the smoking 12-ton aircraft on autorotation. The landing was obviously rough. The chassis broke, the tail bent, and the helicopter fell on its side, smashing its ESSS.

  Chimera was thrown off upon impact. The deafened creature fell on the ground, shook itself off, then tossed its head, and seized the poor helicopter again, its claws easily cutting through the aircraft-grade aluminum and the high-tech polymer. The armor plating crumbled between the monster’s teeth. The helicopter’s life bar was wearing thin before our very eyes. The damaged computer malfunctioned; it catapulted the second pilot’s seat, launching him 90 feet into the air. He then fell to the ground. His parachute had been damaged by Chimera’s claws and didn’t fill with air. It merely covered the poor fellow like a burial shroud after he landed. It is possible to survive a nine-story fall while tied to a chair, but not without serious injuries.

  Almost there, fifty paces left! I halted and slapped a delayed DOT on the monster. The magic spell took the shape of a viscid, bubbling bog of poison that wrapped around the enemy’s sharp-clawed feet.

  The next spell was Fear. It was rendered as a cloud of laughing skulls. The panicking monster released the half-eaten helicopter and ran for dear life, trying to get away from the cursed wizard who’d lashed it with horrific spells.

  This scenario was every assassin’s dream. Dan was right behind the monster, slicing it up at lightning speed with his short blade. My snow leopard ran right next to Chimera, helplessly bouncing off the monster’s armor. Snowie ran in leaps toward the battlefield, making the warriors around us tremble with fear. I was sure that they had never seen anything like this before.

  The machine gun on the fuming transport helicopter ran out of ammo and fell silent. The guards bustling around it started firing their machine guns, not so much helping as getting in the way and causing friendly fire damage; the bullets flew right through Chimera, and some of them hit Dan.

  “Cease fire, ###%%%###!!!” he yelled furiously in a loud and clear commander’s voice. “We’ll do fine without you bastards!”

  I was quickly dosing the mob with long-lasting DOTs. Once I cast everything I had, I switched to life drainers. I didn’t want to chase the monster waving a giant sword. Snowie and Fuckyall were already doing that. And this monster was hardly a challenge for them.

  Out of the three of us, each man could have easil
y defeated the monster by himself. This whole mess was just us playing to the audience. It was a declaration of our intentions and a show of power; We’re on your side. we’re priceless allies!

  The guard soldiers and the pilots of the crashed helicopters were nervously clutching their useless guns. Feelings of doom gave way to a feeling of hope. But such a close brush with death had left its mark on them; some now bore deep wrinkles on their faces, others came out with new mental scars and guaranteed nightmares.

  I smiled. Shock and trembling, eh, boys? Hang in there, things are going to be different now. The rules of the game are changing. Magic has entered our world! Not without my help, true. And that is something I’ll have to learn to live with...

  Zena was already running over the deep snow toward the transport helicopter. The bodies of the wounded formed a bloody line next to it. Their life bars were slowly shrinking. The injury symbols formed entire clouds above them. Some of those boys were almost out of time.

  Moaning, Chimera reared, spun around like a top, then fell to the ground, dead. The loot was minimal; the least you could expect from a drop. We weren’t surprised; the monster was too weak for us, not a good source of freebies. And, frankly, freebies weren’t our primary concern at that moment.

  Two men ran to us from the transport helicopter. Their once white uniform was now so dirty that their badges were indiscernible. The first ran fast; his equipment didn’t jingle, and his bullet-proof vest didn’t hinder his movements. The second had less gear, like he had been dressed in a rough-and-ready fashion. His equipment dangled on him like a clown suit, but he had a confident look on his face. What’s he, a greeting committee, an attached secretary?