Chapter 26: The First Direct Confrontation!

The Aldecaldos had halted about a dozen meters away, using their vehicles as cover.

By now, the pickup truck, being the primary target, had been riddled with holes by the three-round burst armor-piercing shells from the Shingen pistols wielded by Anzu and Lucy. Aside from the Aldecaldo manning the machine gun in the truck bed, only the driver had been injured, scrambling to hide behind the vehicle. Everyone else remained unscathed.

Mercer’s grenade had been blown back significantly by the gale-force winds, detonating only four or five meters out, nearly blowing himself to pieces. Old Cassidy had fared slightly better; with his surprisingly impressive arm strength, he managed to toss his grenade in front of one of the cars, but it was blocked by the bulletproof chassis, leaving the fragmentation grenade unable to penetrate or inflict effective damage.

"Fire! Open fire!"

The Aldecaldos roared as they scrambled to organize a counterattack, spraying rounds from submachine guns, kinetic assault rifles, and even a few long-range blasts from shotguns.

Chaos reigned outside. Gunfire flashed through the dim, dust-choked air. Fortunately, Anzu had pre-highlighted the enemies in their cybernetic eyes. The optics locked onto the targets' signals, outlining their human forms and allowing even the novices in the firefight to pinpoint their locations amidst the storm.

Mercer didn't reach for his Masamune; he chose his Kenshin pistol instead. As it turned out, his choice was spot on. While the Kenshin lacked the power for true suppression fire, its tungsten-tipped rounds—fired with a sharp "zap" after a one-second charge—precisely pierced two layers of bulletproof glass and drove straight into an Aldecaldo’s skull.

"Damn it! I’m hit!"

"Hell, you mean a shot to the head won't even kill them?"

Mercer cursed. The interference from the dust wasn't just about visibility; the radioactive particles hanging in the air were wreaking havoc on the local network signals. He had been trying to hack them since the start, but had been disconnected repeatedly due to the network fluctuations.

"These psychos have likely replaced eighty percent of their bones with metal; skulls are the easiest things to reinforce. If you aren't sure of the shot, aim for the body! They’re too cheap to buy heavy-duty biological armor plating!" Cassidy shouted.

[Lucy: They have body armor... Watch out! Mercer, I see them flanking toward the house! Someone’s priming a grenade!]

[Anzu: I’m laying down suppression!]

[Lucy: Daichi! How much longer!?]

[Daichi Tetsuya: Coming!!]

"Look out! Their pickup is charging!"

An Aldecaldo shouted, and from behind the house, a pickup truck burst through the sandstorm with Daichi behind the wheel. Leon, in the truck bed, kept his eyes wide open, hugging a light machine gun and pouring out fire to suppress the flank—he had performed a vital service!

Since all the Aldecaldos were hugging the rear of their vehicles to avoid the line of fire from the front of the house, Daichi’s charge from the side left them with nowhere to hide. If they dodged to the side, they would expose themselves to Mercer and the others; if they stayed put, they would face the full brunt of the light machine gun.

"Damn it! Take out that pickup! Hurry!" An Aldecaldo roared, but it was to no avail.

In games, enemies are always kitted out with top-tier gear, constantly popping Sandevistans or Berserk implants. But in the real world, this scum, who made their living through robbery and kidnapping in the wastes, didn't have access to such high-end cyberware. However, they weren't without heavy firepower.

"Damn it, let me give them a blast!"

An Aldecaldo grumbled as he dove into a car and hauled out a man-portable rocket launcher from the back seat! Waiting for a gap in the machine gun fire, he scrambled out, shouldered the launcher, and aimed at Daichi’s truck.

However, before he could fire, two spinning tungsten-tipped rounds punched through his neck—Mercer’s Kenshin was still flickering with electromagnetic arcs. The rounds struck, and the electrical surge caused the man’s entire body to spasm. The rocket launcher misfired, sending a projectile screaming into the empty air, exploding somewhere in the distance.

"Nice shot, Mercer!" Leon yelled, though his reload of the light machine gun was still far from smooth.

"No good! We’re going to get ground down out here! Rush the house! Get inside!"

Some of the Aldecaldos shouted and made a break for the building. Mercer tried to intercept, but a few grenades came spinning toward the doorway, pinning him down behind cover. Lucy and Anzu on the second floor were still firing, but as the Aldecaldos moved, they could only take blind shots of faith, unable to guarantee any accuracy.

Leon finally finished reloading, and the machine gun roared again, but the Aldecaldos were already moving, their vehicles barreling straight toward the house.

"Old man, fall back!"

Mercer’s expression remained ice-cold, devoid of panic. He rolled back toward the stairs. Cassidy retreated into the kitchen, using the bar counter as cover. "You could prime a grenade."

"Good idea!"

Mercer complied. As the Aldecaldos kicked in the door and smashed through the windows, their attention drawn by Cassidy in the kitchen, a grenade rolled silently from the stairwell to the threshold.

"Grenade!"

The Aldecaldos screamed in terror, but Mercer had "cooked" the grenade for a second, and it detonated far faster than they expected!

"BOOM!"

Two of the Aldecaldos were shredded by the blast, wailing as they hit the floor. The remaining three, however, pushed through Cassidy’s gunfire and stormed in—only three were left.

"Damn you! I’m going to skin you alive!"

The leader roared, spraying the room with his shotgun, while the two behind him fired wildly into the kitchen with modified rifles of unrecognizable origin.

Mercer, however, allowed himself a cold smirk.

Inside the house?

Then you don't have that damn radioactive dust to scramble the network signals anymore, do you?

He squinted, and the moment he poked his head out, his cybernetic eyes flashed with golden light, rapidly locking onto their subnets and pushing his programs. As the quick-hack programs surged into their subnets, the code of death began to load.

The quick-hack programs didn't even require Mercer to manually breach their subnets first; as long as he could lock onto their signals, he could send the code. The programs contained their own "ice-breaking" routines to bypass enemy subnets and ICE. The moment they broke through, the virus was uploaded.

While slower than first breaching a subnet manually, the advantage of this quick-hack was that it required no further input from Mercer. Once the program was executed with a single thought, the rest was handled by his own brain’s processing power.

As he drove three programs simultaneously to hack their networks, he still had the bandwidth to observe them.

The three Aldecaldos were already shrieking.

"A netrunner!"

"Ah! Arghhh!"

"Cut the connection! Cut it—"

Six quick-hacks uploaded in rapid succession. First, cyberware malfunctions crippled their motor functions; then, synapse-melting viruses scorched their brains.

Mercer let out a long breath. After checking to ensure the Aldecaldos' brains were well and truly cooked, he stepped out and aimed his pistol at one of the men who had been blown to the floor by the grenade. This time, he didn't charge the shot, just tapped the trigger—the lower-power two-round burst was more than enough for a coup de grace at close range.

The tungsten rounds flew. The man let out one final cry before going limp.

With network signals that obvious, they really thought they could play dead? He didn't spend a fortune on these optics for them to be mere decorations.

[Mercer: Nice fight. Clear the battlefield.]

[Lucy: Is everyone okay!?]

[Daichi: Leon got hit!]

[Leon: I’m fine. Lucky break—the bullet went through my shoulder, didn't hit the bone.]

[Cassidy: I saw you bleeding earlier, Mercer. Check yourself.]

Mercer looked down, only then feeling the sting—his adrenaline had been so high he hadn't felt a thing.

[Mercer: Doesn't look like anything serious. Probably caught some shrapnel from the grenade.]

[Anzu: We have medical kits with suture gear and meds in our packs. I’m coming down to get them for you!]

[Daichi Tetsuya: Don't bother. I’ve got a kit in the pickup. I’ll bring it over in a second.]

Mercer kicked one of the charred corpses, then bent down with a look of distaste to grab its legs and drag it out. "If you aren't hurt, give me a hand... How did these Aldecaldos find this place, anyway?"

His question sounded casual, but his eyes were fixed intently on Cassidy, watching him with quiet, searching scrutiny.