章 48: River Crossing
The hardest thing about sniping in most mechs is that you can't lay prone in most mechs, the sheer weight of the armor in a mech causes the internals to get crushed when the weight is not distributed down the skeleton of the mech. This is more pronounced on these average military mechs that have standard heavy uncompressed armor. The advantages of this armor type is that it's cheap, durable, and easy to form fit. The obvious disadvantages are the bulk and weight of it.
The easiest part about sniping with a mech though is that you never have to worry about optically centering your scope as the scope is actually a direct camera feed making the sniper scope look more like a long camera lens than a scope. Also the sheer mass of the sniper rounds means that wind is not as much of a problem at longer ranges.
The timer for match start finished and everyone was spawned inside their starting zones for both offense and defense. 49 of the 50 players on the offense had the same mech, the Phalanx Mk 01. The only one that didn't was Giacobbe, he had a Phalanx Mk 01 Custom, and the only difference was that it had a custom black paint job with silver accents to match his pilot suit. The only that was bad about using the silver accents was that they were slightly reflective making it a little eye-catching, but Gray assumed that was probably Giacobbe's intention.
Gray and his team set out for the location on the map where B8 and C9 intersected and didn't pay attention to what the others were doing until they reached their position. Giacobbe started to give orders once everyone was spawned in saying "The 8 of you feinting from the east will be team 3, the 8 of you feinting from the south will be team 2, and the rest of us will be team 1 which I will be leading. Every team ready up when you're in position to begin!"
Various acknowledgements and affirmations came all at once leaving it hard to distinguish any one player from the rest.
Gray opened up the communications tab on his HUD and saw that everyone was in the primary group channel. "This won't do with 50 people all at once." Gray thought to himself as he asked Giacobbe for permissions to modify the chat channels. Surprisingly Giacobbe granted it to him as Gray thought he might have to ask more aggressively due to Giacobbe's personality.
"Maybe there is hope for him yet." Gray thought as he added 5 sub channels to their voice chat. Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, Team Leaders, and Scouts. The players were able to figure out for the most part what Gray was doing by adding those channels so they each went to their designated team rooms and thus the massive amount of chatter was drastically reduced. Gray hopped into Team 2's room for a minute and asked which one of them was the team leader. After a few rounds of bickering, Team 2 designated a player to be the leader for offense finally and Gray gave that player access to the Team Leaders room as well as himself and Giacobbe. Gray switched back to Team 3's room and left a listener open in the Team Leaders room.
Everyone finally reached the designated point for team 3 and then asked Gray what the plan was.
Gray started to say "We are going to assume the other team isn't a group of idiots like a certain person is. I want us to climb that small mesa with the solar farm on top of it that provides power to the defenses of the base and_"
"Blow it up! Yeah!" Yurika interrupted excitedly.
"…actually no, I want to use it for sniper cover. The solar panels interfere with laser targeting and I imagine the heat will cause visual targeting to be off as well. That aside, it's like we're holding a hostage so they probably won't shoot with missiles in case they destroy the panels." Gray said.
"Sounds good, but how much support can we provide with just 4 snipers? And won't we waste a lot of time climbing the plateau?" questioned Paul
"It will take time so that's why we're going to have to stall for time before Giacobbe loses patience and launches his assault. Alice, I hope you can keep this from Giacobbe." Gray said to Alice.
"…Fine, consider it repayment for the merits earlier." Alice said.
"Good, now let's get moving! Head north to the edge of the river, if we're seen it's not a big deal, just stay out of firing range as much as possible and we can get cover from the enemy snipers once we cross the river and get into the hilly forest on the other side."
"Gray, we can't cross the river without a bridge…" said Alice.
"Don't need one, we can't swim, but we're in mechs about 15 meters tall. The water is only a few meters deep here at this spot so as long as we don't get so deep that we can't move we should be ok."
Gray took a step first with his mech into the water and felt his feet sink quite a bit, then he took another step allowing his other foot to sink in as well. The water was only 1 meter deep at this point, but sinking a bit into the river bed was the worst part as trying to lift your mech's foot again would be very difficult due to the mud. Gray changed to the Team Leader channel and left a text message saying the river will delay them since Gray figured Giacobbe would probably start to get antsy without any updates.
"Ok, single file line behind me, we'll take it one step at a time since the river is too wide to do this one person at a time without it taking even longer than I hoped." Gray said.
Everyone entered into the river one person at a time following the same path as Gray as Gray continued to trudge through the mud towards the opposite bank of the river. Gray hopped into the Team Leader channel again and left a text message again. "Team 3 requesting diversion from Team 2 near point M6, sitting ducks while crossing river."
A few seconds later a reply from the Team 2 leader said "Affirmative, creating diversion near bank of river."
Looking towards the bridge around 3 kilometers from their position, Gray could see muzzle flashes coming from the forest and even a few lasers streak towards the base. A few of the defenders looked over the battlements and returned fire at Team 2, but given the range only snipers would be able to do any damage as the lasers would lose focus over that distance in atmosphere and not do any damage. Still, it did the job of drawing attention towards the southern portion of the base.
Gray reached the middle of the river and the water was about 10 meters deep, his mech was barely able to move so he had to shorten his steps to keep from getting stuck whenever he lifted his mech's legs. As he made it past the halfway, the water started to get a little shallower and movement became easier once his mech wasn't half submerged in water.
"Okay, looks like we can make it through, follow my path and let's hurry across before the defense stops buying the diversion." Gray said.
Everyone started to move a little faster but seeing as they were all at least half-submerged it wasn't really possible at this point.
Gray was only about 100 meters from the opposite shore when he heard Stacia cry out "I'm stuck!"
Gray looked behind and saw that Stacia was the 2nd to last person in the line and appeared to be unable to lift her leg.
Paul was the last person in the line so he started to move closer to her and said "Hang on, I'll push you out!"
Gray immediately said "NO, leave her there!"
This surprised everyone as they had thought that Gray was a bit softer than this.
"Walk around her, approach from the front, take her mech's hand and pull her slowly out, all of us need to link up and pull her out slowly since if just one tried to do it that one will probably get stuck too." Gray commanded.
Everyone formed a chain of mechs linked hand-in-hand. "Everyone walk and pull at the same time, one step at a time, step on my command!"
Nobody moved but just held each other's hands then Gray finally commanded "Step!" and everyone took one step with their mechs, Stacia's stuck mech attempted to step as well but couldn't move was merely drug slightly.
"Step!"
As everyone stepped at the same time to drag Stacia again, she was finally able to lift one foot up out of the mud and could now drag her other foot out of the mud too.
"Are you free Stacia?" Gray asked.
"Yes! I can move again." Stacia said happily.
Everyone continued to wade through the river and finally Gray was the first to reach the other side. Stacia noticed Paul was still holding her mech's hand.
"Uhmm… you can let go now Paul" Stacia said with embarrassment.
"Oh, uhhh, sorry, I was enjoying holding your hand" Paul said slightly flirtatiously.
"Yeah? I guess Paul is in to robot love then, that feeling of metal on metal." Geoff said jokingly.
"Screw off! I didn't enjoy holding her mech's hand, that's not what I meant!" said Paul angrily.
"It is nothing to get mad about Paul, I understand the allure of artificial love as well." Caleb remarked.
"That's also not what I meant!" Paul started to get flustered.
After a little bit more teasing on Paul, everyone had finally made it across the river.
Gray sent Paul a private message. "Consider yourself initiated into the team!"
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