Revolt; Pt. 2

The plan began two nights after Cirice discreetly visited the headquarters. Angus and several other men grabbed SCOP R-3000s, and prepared to kill their generals as they slept. While Angus would have ordinarily struggled with the morality of these sorts of actions, the act of murder came shockingly easy after everything they had put him through.

First went the guards. Shots were fired and their heads popped like balloons. The bullets were loud enough to wake some of the officers. One of them grabbed an R-4000 rifle he slept with and peered outside. It was difficult to see in the darkness, so he put on some night vision goggles. When he turned to look in their direction, Cirice shined a bright flashlight in his goggles, basically flashbanging him. Suddenly, the entire tent was lit up with hundreds of shockwaves fired from the R-3000s. All of the officers had been killed, many in a heavy sleep. Some of them took the better rifles, but most decided to stick with what they had.

As the group approached the perpetually moving chain, the portal became quite intimidating.

“Alright, here’s the plan. Grab a sack of flour like this, open the top, and connect it to the chain. Once that’s done, quickly climb in and hold on tight. It’s going to be a rough ride through the portal, but this is our best option to get back up.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Angus was climbing into an exoskeleton suit.

“Do you know how to drive one of those?”

“No, but I found an instruction manual. I’ll practice down here for a bit, and then catch up.”

“Uh, okay. Good luck with that. Those machines are pretty complicated-”

Before Cirice could finish saying those words, Angus was already running around in it.

“Uh… alright, well the rest of us will use the sacks.”

“I want a metal body too!”

James and Bertrand appeared. Although they were originally wary of the plan, they decided to join at the last minute. Seeing the chance to steal these powerful machines made them much more willing to help.

“We’ll jump through the portal and blow their asses up!”

“Wait, Cirice, you went up using the ‘sack method’ before, how did that go?”

“It worked, but I felt like throwing up when I got there. Serious motion sickness.”

“Like on a boat?”

“... Yeah, kinda.”

“Well that’s no good, I have a better plan.”

“We don’t have time for another plan. We need to get up there now!”

A single shot from an R-4000 made everyone fall silent. It cut the chain, causing thousands of pounds of thin steel links to crash to the earth. It was a PlunderCorp soldier in the executioner outfit.

“Ha ha! Now you’ll never stop PlunderCorp!”

“How are you going to get back, then?”

“Uh- doesn’t matter! You’re next, mech suit guy!”

Instantly, the executioner was obliterated by hundreds of shots from R-3000s.

“Okay, fine, what’s your plan?”

“Everybody get into small groups! Huddle together, we can bring some of you up.”

“No way, you don’t mean…”

“Of course I do.”

The groups formed and gathered closely together. Angus wrapped the mech suit’s arms around them and activated the jump. Instantly, he shot hundreds of feet into the air, flying through the portal and landing in the headquarters. This landing wasn’t exactly graceful, to avoid crushing the people he was holding, Angus had to turn over and land on his back. Bertrand and James followed holding their own groups of people.

“Oscar, hide in the bathroom!”

“No can do.”

“What?”

He pulled out an R-4000 rifle.

“I’m joining you guys. Let’s take this thing down.”

Their first targets were everyone in the Portal Room. Angus threw a grenade in the air, caught it in the staff, and then blasted the machinery holding open the portal on the opposite side that they were dumping trash into. It shrunk and faded until the chain was cleanly severed. Engineers grabbed R-2000 pistols from their belts and shot, but alas, the usurpers were too far away for the pistols to be reliable. Many were quickly dispatched and the rest surrendered.

Although the security team didn’t have working cameras in the portal room, they could clearly hear the commotion taking place there. Everyone on the security force except for Vanessa flooded through the doors on the upper level of the portal room, aiming R-4000s at the mechs. Unfortunately for them, their hesitation in shock was their downfall. Cirice shot their guns with an R-3000, which threw them out of their hands and fifty feet down onto the floor of the portal room. One guard began to run to get help, and he was the only casualty in that event. The R-3000 reduced his head into a fine mist. Cirice instructed James and Bertrand to lead a group of people to keep this area under control, and the rest of them headed up the elevator.

“Follow me! When we enter the room, don’t damage anything. We will need it later!”

Obeying to the best of their ability, the math lab was taken over without a single shot being fired. As it turns out, a group of unarmed nerds don’t make for difficult targets. They were detained and held in the surface level security room. Parts of the group broke off as they ascended the tower, gathering the office workers and escorting them downstairs to different rooms for holding. In the end, it was only Cirice and Angus in the regional manager’s penthouse suite of an office. The thing took up an entire floor, and was given to him as his reward for decades of serving this company.

“Ah yes, come in.”

The older man didn’t even know anything was wrong. When she saw him, Cirice immediately knew who he was. Her grandfather. Although she had seen him in pictures, she never got to meet him in person. Now she knew why her father knew so much about the company, why she had never been taken to visit him. It was a lot to handle, but she wasn’t very close with this man. Cirice decided to be blunt.

“Hello, grandfather. I’ve come to kill you.”

“Grandfather? You’re related to the boss?”

“I’m just learning this, myself.”

The old man just laughed.

“You’re wearing some outrageous clothes, young man.”

“These clothes are normal, and they’re from the 1300’s.”

The man’s eyes suddenly widened.

“Wait, this is real?”

“Huh? Of course it is, why wouldn’t it be real?”

“President X thinks he’s a comedian and pulls jokes like this all the time.”

“I’m still going to kill you, but seriously, what the hell?”

“I know, it’s kind of messed up. That’s just how things are around here.”

“Huh?”

“Anyways, I’m going to die soon no matter what. I’ve lived a full life, go ahead and shoot me!”

“You don’t seem like you’re taking this very seriously.”

“Oh, I am. I’m just ready to go. I’ve accepted that I was going to die like this years ago. What was that passage from a holy book? ‘If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword?’ I think I’ve heard that somewhere.”

“No matter how strange and humanizing this interaction with you is, we’re still going to kill you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, just go ahead and do it already before the anticipation kills me instead!”

Angus cut off the interaction with a single shot that plastered the window behind him in blood.

“What the hell, Angus?”

“You were hesitating. We need to lock this place down immediately.”

PlunderCorp’s regional headquarters had officially been captured. After a memo was sent and the place was locked down, they destroyed all the equipment for making portals, except for what kept the portal to Warwick open. Cirice wanted to give everyone a chance to go home.

“Alright, great work everyone, now you have a decision to make. You can either go home or stay with us and keep fighting. After those who want to go home leave, we’re going to close this portal. The crack in the sky you’ve seen for so long will disappear.”

While Angus and Cirice worked together to lead a forceful takeover of the PlunderCorp regional headquarters, their work was far from over. There were still hundreds of other regional headquarters that needed to be stopped. As soon as the news got out that one was taken over, they would be surrounded by many. Cirice and Vanessa activated the lockdown for the headquarters, and planned to leave it behind and take over the closest one next.

As for Angus? He had a choice to make. Either go back through the portal and live his life as he knew it should have been, or join the revolution and help them attack the next headquarters and the next one until the whole system falls apart.

He thought about it.

It was clear that the whole plan was a huge longshot. In a crazy new world that he had no real working knowledge of, taking over a giant corporation and overthrowing a global government seemed like an impossible task. The other option was a guaranteed full life of happiness. He could return as his world’s hero and be celebrated until he died; how could anyone pass that up?! However, he was still conflicted. The level of suffering that PlunderCorp was causing was so large it couldn’t fully be comprehended by the human mind. To turn back now would mean the company had a chance of stopping Cirice and her crew.

He thought about Sturgeon. The king. Those given the bubonic plague as a punishment. The way it spread and festered. He decided to continue with Cirice. In the end, while he was shocked at the atrocities this company single handedly committed, that made him all the more excited to stop them. His journey wouldn’t end here; not yet.