District 42-Chapter 182: Terrorist attack part 1
The soldier was locked into a white room. He didn’t know why the hell they decided to fool him at that point. Those three, indeed, were a bunch of idiots.
"That Leonel seems to be an annoying guy with his giggles and other bad characteristics, but the triplets... I just can’t get how people as dumb as them could get into a serious organization... that is, if this Sgail thing isn’t nothing but a joke."
He walked inside there slowly, giving up on trying to open that door. He knew that it wouldn’t matter how many times he yelled or knocked hard on it, they wouldn’t open, anyway. Casper even doubted if they were still in front of the door and didn’t go to have dinner.
"Just, what’s this place? They said that it would be the room where my training would happen, but... It’s just an empty, white room. I am getting a bit of nausea just to be looking around... Ugh..." It was difficult to maintain the focus and balance being in a completely white room, and even his vision seemed to be a bit blurry; even more with all those lights reflecting on the walls and floor.
"I am walking for a while by now... Why does this room is so big? It seemed to be not that much before..."
He lasted some minutes walking there at a high pace until he found something different. Probably he didn’t notice before he could approach it because of the confusion that all that white gave on him, but he was sure that it was real.
Casper stopped to walk just when he was on the edge of a hole, a huge one, opened in the floor of that room. The soldier was dumbfounded as to why there was something like that in the middle of an empty room, but he knew that there was no way that he was seeing things.
"Should I jump into it? But I don’t know how much deep it goes..." He looked backward and saw the entrance door. It was way closer than he expected it would be. Calculating carefully, he judged that the distance between him and that door wasn’t enough for even a minute of walk.
"That’s strange... Maybe I should just give up on it and return there to make those three air-headed triplets open the door for me..." When he was thinking about it, he noticed that he wasn’t feeling the floor behind his foot properly, and jumped backward.
When he realized, the edges of that hole opened even more, as if it was falling, like pieces of a puzzle.
"What the..." That process started to become faster and faster, and the White warrior retrieved even more until it got to the point where he needed to run.
He tried to escape from that trap going towards the entrance, he wasn’t sure if that thing would continue or not until there, but if he called for them in such a desperate tone, maybe the triplets opened to him again.
Casper rushed forward with all his might, not even having the time to look behind and see if the floor was still falling.
He was nearly touching the door, and his voice was already going out his throat to scream at them and make them open, but before he could arrive there in time, the floor fell under his feet, and Casper found himself in free fall, this time not in a white and shiny place, but just a darkened one.
His fall lasted for some seconds before he hit his head hard on the ground. As incredible as it sounds, he didn’t feel any pain, nor felt like fainting or something. The only thing showing that he indeed slammed his head was the thud that echoed and the impact itself.
He stood up from the ground just some seconds after he fell, his vision, strangely, was a bit blurry, and he could not take a good grasp of what was going on around him. He blinked several times until he could see everything clearly.
Casper was in a city. It wasn’t something like the cities of District 42. It wasn’t futuristic at all. The buildings around, the streets, the vehicles, everything, just remembered him from his world.
"What... What the heck..." He noticed, then, that he was in the city he lived before suddenly appear in the world he was in now.
Nevertheless, there was something wrong there. The city wasn’t peaceful at all, and what Casper was seeing in front of his eyes was just chaos.
The buildings were covered in flames and destroyed, some even fell from their foundations. Vehicles were abandoned on the streets, Casper could witness some of them exploding in front of him. The streets were covered in dust, gunpowder, debris, and ashes.
The soldier could hear that a bunch of people was screaming in the distance. Some shots could be heard as well.
"What the... Get up! Get the hell up now, Casper!" He prompted himself, forcing his trembling legs to move on, standing on his feet and looking to what was happening.
"What’s going on here? How the hell I ended up here and... What was I doing before? Why am I on the street?" His mind was a bit dizzy, and blank, he couldn’t remember anything he made from the past five minutes.
He tried several times to search his mind, but nothing came. He finally gave up when he heard shots coming from a street near there, forcing him to run to a secure place.
"One thing I am sure. That’s my city. And it is under a terrorist attack, probably. There is no other explanation for something of this amplitude, except a terrorist attack... Or then a war... But I prefer to not think too much on the last option."
He looked to the street where a burst of shots came some seconds ago and just saw that a gang of masked people was going out of there, wielding rifles and machine guns. At first glance, Casper knew that they were exactly what he guessed.
The White warrior was going to run away but saw something that made his heart stop, freezing his body at the same place.
Among all those terrorists, Casper saw a group of people being dragged along. They were pointing their guns towards them, forcing the citizens to walk as they wanted.
The criminals ended up guiding them to a wall that separated an aleatory enterprise from the streets.
They lined the people in front of that wall, making them face the terrorist group.
Casper, before, wasn’t sure of how many there were among them, but now he could see clearly. It was four men, a single woman, and two children that seemed to belong to her.
"No... No. No!" Casper screamed in his mind, clenching his fists. He gave a step forward, nearly getting his body out of the street he was hidden by impulse. However, his subconscious prevented him to do so.
"You can’t just... Damn, you can’t just go there so lightly and hope that you will save all of them, you idiot! You just counted 8 terrorists armed and alerted there! What do you think you can do...?"
Casper was putting his hand in his mouth, breathing in and out with his nose, long and slow breathes. His heart didn’t stop pounding crazily in his chest no matter what he did, but, at least, his mind calmed down.
Casper was facing a difficult situation there, he needed to make a tough choice.
"Look, soldier... You have two options..." He thought to himself. "Go and save 7 citizens and die in the process... Or find a way to go to your apartment, get your radio, and contact the army to get your group to save hundreds of thousands of people, with as few casualties as possible... You know what to do, Casper..." 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮
After some time of reasoning, the soldier lost strength in his arms. The fist he was making with one of his hands loosened, and he opened it slowly. The soldier needed to kneel on the ground. He wanted to look down, close his eyes, cover his ears... But he couldn’t, he needed to see and hear attentively. He was on a Battlefield now.
Casper heard a burst of shots coming from the other street. No screams, nothing, just the sound of the bullet casings falling on the ground.
The kids and the woman, who were crying out loud before, stopped to cry. Some of the men couldn’t be heard anymore as well.
After some while, Casper put half of his face outside the street, seeing that the group no longer was there.
He passed carefully through that place, but he didn’t look to that wall. He didn’t dare to.
"Your mission here is to be a real soldier and do what you need to do: call reinforcements. You are not a hero. You are not..."
