Six hundred feet. Get set. Taali took another deep breath and began squeezing the trigger softly and gently, millimeter by millimeter. Three hundred feet. The car was within sighting distance. Her optimal range. The one she'd performed best during training.

She aligned the crosshairs on the top button of the corrupt policewoman's uniform and softly squeezed the trigger. Clap. The recoil poked her in the shoulder. For a brief moment, the image in the sights jumped. A small white spot appeared on the car's windscreen, turning into a red blot and generously splashing over the car's insides. Lowering the sights just a tad, Taali fired three more bullets in rapid succession, almost without aiming, into the target's presumed outline. She breathed out.

The heavy car veered to the left, clinging to the central barrier and emitting long trails of sparks as it careered along it, grazing its side. Scaring the few road users with its unpredictability, it pulled over to the other side, crossed both lanes and dove into a ditch.

"One, two, three..." Taali counted the car's somersaults.

Finally, the BMW lost momentum. It stood on its nose, swayed in search of a new equilibrium, then tumbled backwards. Oh well, not a good scenario. According to their plan, the ideal situation would have been for the car to expose its gas tank. In this projection, all Taali could see was the car's reclining front and its creased roof.

Oh well, plan B, then. The last six armor-piercing rounds in the clip could go through an 8-mm steel sheet at three hundred feet. Bang, bang, bang. The heavy tungsten carbide bullets ripped through the engine's vulnerable aluminum casting, showering the area with red-hot shrapnel and fountains of sparks. A clap, followed by an almost-white flash and black smoke bellowing from the car as the fire slowly took hold. Passing vehicles were already pulling up by the roadside, commuters getting out, pointing their communication bracelets at the gory scene in search of five minutes of cheap YouTube fame.

Time to leg it. Dragging all her equipment along, Taali crawled backward a dozen feet. Rising to her knees, she stroked the gun farewell and took a good swing hurling it as deep into the forest as she could. They were going to find it, of course, but not straight away. As her anonymous well-wisher wrote in his message, it was humanly impossible to track the Vintorez to the hitman. The gun was already obsolete, replaced by the state-of-the-art VSS Boor, its production licensed out to at least twenty different countries. Considering all the army depots looted during the Second Georgian war, the Vintorez had long become the most popular and numerous (after the AK, of course) medium-range score-settling weapon—amid pros and amateurs alike. And Taali had every right to consider herself an amateur.

She folded the mat and attached it to her weekend backpack. Then she pulled her skis out of a pile of snow and clicked a switch in her glasses, lowering the mirror filters. Now she had to get to the train station and mix in with the hundreds of Saturday skiers to get home safely. Considering her current mundane appearance, CCTVs wouldn't be much help to the investigators. She'd lie low in the hotel room rented in her dead sister's name. Then in the evening she had to arrive at a second position, directly opposite the casino patronized on Saturdays by those boastful Caucasus-tribal types with their black cars and their young victims.

She had only run for a few hundred feet when a deafening explosion made her look back. A black cloud rose over the little forest. The gas tank had finally exploded. Excellent. Those German rides had big tanks, a good twenty gallons easy. Now they had to wait for the fire brigade and the results of an autopsy which was the only way for them to determine that the policewoman had indeed been shot. Taali hoped it would give her a good twenty-four hour leeway.

Time to go! One more stop, one more shootout, after which she was going to one of those little towns outside of Moscow to meet Max's mother and enter the FIVR capsule's warm womb. Bye, cruel reality; hello, AlterWorld.

* * *

"Attack!" the battle cry gusted across the square drowning out the thousand-strong throng.

About fifty rogues—a popular character choice with mercs—flickered, stealthing. Immediately they unstealthed, only now they stood behind their chosen enemies' backs commencing their tooth-shattering combos. The fun began!

The clap of hundreds of elixir vials popping open all at once signaled the start of the melee. In between hits, hand-to-hand fighters gulped their life potions while mages downed their mana drinks. Wizards didn't bother selecting targets as they bombarded the crowd with mass damage spells, showering the square with meteors and torrential hail. Liquid fire and venom streamed in every direction; arrows, throwing knives and crossbow bolts pelleted the panicking crowd. Sheer Armageddon.

Already after the first few seconds of the battle, hundreds of tombstones began to clatter down onto the cobblestones. The crowd recoiled, hurrying to free up the area around us. Low-level players died instantly. The event had attracted lots of newbs: for anyone between levels 10 and 40 a skirmish like that was a one-way ticket to their resurrection point. Indeed, ninety percent of the attendees presented no serious threat to the mercs—with exception to their numbers as grinding through nine thousand people is no easy task. But the remaining thousand were more than enough against our three hundred. Plus the hundred guards on duty who were already elbowing their way through the human sea. In addition, we expected the King's guards to arrive any moment. Time was running out.

"The dome!" I yelled. The team of wizards on duty opened the Minor Power Dome.

I pulled the scroll out of my pocket. Selecting the dragon's transparent confinement as target, I broke the seal. In a clap of fire, a ravenous twister rushed upward to the sky, the familiar bolts of black lightning swirling like mad dervishes. We were on the right track.

Until now the Patriarch had stood frozen, his incomprehensive stare searching the crowd. Now he'd discerned the source of all evil. He pointed his gnarly finger at us. "Kill them!" he squalled.

About fifty of his staff flapped their cloaks wing-like, raising their hands and pointing them at the mercs. The skin on the palms of their hands began to burst exposing, in the midst of the bloodied wounds, large colored eyes. Blinking the blood away, they glared at us. The next moment, red, blue and green blades of plasma began slashing at our dome, Star Wars-style, sparking and leaving lingering scars behind.

"What's with the Jedi shit?" I croaked into the staff chat. The High Spell cooldown was already weighing me to the ground.

"It's the bastards of Light with their God's Glare. Deals the same damage as a bolt of lightning from a level-180 wizard. I can tell you it hurts," Widowmaker commented as he watched the battle unfold.

I cast a quizzical look at the wizard team's leader. He shook his head, groaning without unclenching his teeth, "We won't hold it. Another twenty seconds max. Distract the servants!"

I nodded to Widowmaker who was listening in, "Proceed!"

He rushed through the staff chat in a whirlwind of orders,

"Group leaders Sissy, Absinthe and Duke! Change of priorities. Priority target: the servants of Light. Allocation of targets: scheme 3."

About a dozen of our rogues darted toward the cloak-wearers, stealthing as they ran. The epicenter of the magic cataclysm shifted, covering the area all around the Dragon's dome including the servants of Light and the first rows of the more unlucky spectators. A dozen archers continued to draw their bowstrings, sending heavy arrows deep into the flurry of flames.