Royale Rumble

At last, Lola and her crew made it to the outskirts of Lucky Landing. There were already two other squads inside the small town, but they were busy fighting each other over an air drop, so she decided to let sleeping dogs lie. Instead, she led her own team up to one of the tall hills overlooking Lucky Landing, right on the edge of the circle. Perfect place to set up shop.

Lola and Tammy quickly built up adjacent one-by-ones made of wood and stone, respectively, while Stephen actually fortified a small temple that was already there. Bob the Builder constructed a steel fort using Stephen's temple as the foundation.

One of the enemy teams won the skirmish down below and started to collect the drop. Tammy equipped her hunting rifle and, aiming slightly above target to account for the bullet drop, held her breath and fired once. An unlucky dark voyager who just picked up a legendary RPG got thumped in the chest and flew back into a parked car.

"Oh! You see that?" Tammy shouted excitedly as she slammed the heavy bullet casing out of the rifle and loaded a fresh round in.

Lola was grinning wildly. Her friend's energy was contagious. She reached over and slapped Tammy a quick low-five for props.

"Yeah I did, that was nice," she admitted. "Watch this though."

Stephen had completely fortified the hut on the hill. Why waste materials when he could use what was already there? There was no way any enemies were getting in here without spending more time and ammunition or effort pickaxing than tactically worth.

He had the whole temple rigged from head to toe with spike traps in various 'rooms' he created within, using brick walls. Each room had pyramid pieces placed on top of flats to give them sturdy ceilings, and if they managed to get through all that, he'd be waiting with a rare suppressed submachine gun.

Lola sniped a rust lord in the head and felt a pang of relief. It was the same guy from earlier, the sharpshooter who shot Stephen back at Shifty Shafts. The guy was a pretty decent shot, and she was glad he was no longer a problem. In the stone fort beside her, Tammy switched to her RPG and sent a vicious barrage of rockets down into the town.

A moonwalker and a mission specialist quickly set up a launch pad right there in the middle of the street and took to the skies, abandoning their downed allies in the process. Their launch pad, the dark voyager, and the rust lord were all 'sploded out of existence by Tammy's rockets seconds later.

Everyone opened fire on the two survivors as they coasted out of sight to their left. There was already some sort of build there from an earlier battle, and it was here they momentarily took refuge. Tammy kept the rockets coming, while Lola had one eye to her scope and a still finger waiting patiently over the trigger. Bob swore his final win was in the bag, but panicked when he heard something tin bouncing off the inner walls of his fort. He looked down right as smoke started billowing up.

"Launch pad, launch pad!" Tammy shrieked, switching back to her purple tactical shotgun.

She saw Lola look over just as a grenade exploded at her feet. Her stairs and floor panels gave out beneath her and she fell about a story or so to the sod. Her shields completely depleted in the blast while her health dropped to a mere three percent upon impacting the ground. They had taken some damage again from the second storm on the way over here, which had been chunking damage in twos, so the fact that she was still alive was astonishing. But that was where her luck seemed to end.

Those medieval vultures hadn't dropped anything useful in the field of medicine and all Tammy had was whatever was left over from what Bob showed up with back at Tilted Towers. She used one of her last two bandages and edited her way out of the bottom floor of her one-by-one.

"Shit!" Lola cursed as she looked over and saw her friend get bombed to hell.

She turned around and saw Bob's fort above them completely immersed in a cloud of smoke. This wasn't good. Whoever these other astronauts were, they were moving like SEALs or some kind of two-person SWAT team. Their breaching technique was textbook: bang and clear. They waited until Lola's team was disoriented by throwable items before moving in to kill. Her adrenaline spiked when she saw them paragliding in.

The moonwalker flew over her and disappeared into the smoke, but it was the mission specialist, who landed right there in her one-by-one with a pump shotgun, that immediately concerned her. She jumped to the side as he let off a wild blast and blew the rearmost wooden wall to bits. Lola switched from her bolt-action over to her tactical shotgun as he racked the pump and let off a shot of her own.

Stephen was firing through a window at the mission specialist fighting his team leader, but it was tough to land any more than two shots because of the angle and how much they were jumping around. It was fine though. In the end, Lola had the faster weapon and reflexes and managed to get the upper hand. The mission specialist threw something on the floor between them just as she downed him.

Impulse grenade, Stephen realized with a groan.

It beeped faster and faster before going off and catapulting the knocked mission specialist out of the fort, off the hill, and back into the town. Lola had also gotten launched. She flew backward out of the blown open back wall, smacked her back against Stephen's fortified temple, and went down in the grass below. Stephen couldn't get to her, so he dutifully threw a smoke canister down to where she was to hide her. He thought he saw Tammy enter the smoke seconds later, but wasn't too sure.

Right about then, he noticed that the shotgun blasts above him had stopped. There were footsteps up there, along with the unmistakable sounds of someone looting.

"Bob?" he called out. "Yo Bob, is that you?"

No answer. The footsteps and looting stopped as well. Listening closer, he could hear the sliding metallic clicks of a gun being reloaded. Nervousness crept into Stephen like a thief in the night, silent and stealthy, yet intrusive all the same. He took a few deep breaths and tried his best to calm down, but it wasn't easy. Bob was gone and Lola and Tammy weren't in a position to help. It was up to Stephen to clutch it for the squad.

The moonwalker started pickaxing her way in through the ceiling. He slowly backed away with his submachine gun aimed at where she would drop down. Then the moment of truth came. A wide square in the ceiling came fluttering to the floor in splinters and the world seemed to go still. No one moved, until Stephen made the mistake of putting his weapon away and unclipping a grenade to toss into the square.

It was scary how instantly the moonwalker dropped down. Just as he was about to underhand it, she one-pumped him right in the face. He never stood a chance. Stephen went down for the count, but as he did, the grenade slipped out of his hand and bounced off the floor a few times. The moonwalker had no time to build back into Bob's base and hurried out the door further down into the temple. Right into one of Stephen's spike traps.

And just like that, Lola's team achieved their ninth Victory Royale.