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Time Heals Most Wounds · Original Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
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Some Food Court Take Out
She winds her pitch and throws it. It lands on the floor well and truly in front of them, doing nothing.

The grenade was a dud and that was all she had.

They swarm through the broken marketplace, using caved-in portions of the minimall for cover. Treating a delapidated escalator as a shooting gallery. They don't stop shooting, and when one reloads the other other lays down suppression.

Helvetica was getting desperate. She'd seen them coming, sure, but not until the sharpeye had taken the shot. She'd seen the muzzle flash and moved, but the pain ripped through her side as the sound finally hit her eardrums.

If he'd been closer, she'd have been dead.

The troops came in after, to put her and Nicky Dime down. Were coming in now, to mop her up.

Assault rifles, ceramic plates, four of them, one with an underslung something. If it was a grenade, she was fucked. If it was a shotgun she should be about as fucked as her current state. If it was a flamethrower the fucking she was suffering would be far more excruciating, but no more or less likely.

Nicky was going through their stock. Last time Hel took a mercenary job from a kid, but she'd talked her into it, hadn't she? That counted for something.

Speaking of counting, four of them, and something else to keep in mind.

"Spray and pray!" She orders the kid. Nicky, fourteen and wise beyond her years, balks at the much older merc.

"That's not going to do anything."

"It'll keep their head down."

"That's just stalling tactics." She's panicking now, "Just keep their heads down."

"Yeah well you can't shoot for shit, and I'm bleeding bad."

It'd heal in time. It always did. Mostly a flesh wound, just happened to take a damn lot of flesh with it.

"Uzi ammo isn't cheap! If I'm going down, I'm not dying on a deficit."

"Holy shit, kid, you can't take it with you. Just empty the goddamn clip. You're the one who pissed them off."

They'd been cornered into the area designated for the food court, and the fryers and freezers had enough metal bulk to them that they weren't just disintegrating. If they'd been raiders, they'd have swept them by now. She counted on their discipline though.

Hel just needed to delay them a few seconds longer.

The kid pulls out three uzis from her bottomless rucksack. Whatever you need, she reaches in and just has it. If Helvetica didn't know better, she'd have called her a precog.

But Hel did know better. Speaking of.

The uzi fire sprays them. The gun goes hot and silent, it's tossed back into the sack, the next one's pulled up, safety flicked, and emptied in kind.

It doesn't catch any of them, because the kid really can't shoot for shit, but it's bought them about ten seconds.

Nicky reaches for the third when Hel grabs her wrist and gives her a wait handsign. The ambush moves up on her, right over the dud grenade she threw a moment ago moving to flank through some columns, just as Hel saw it.

She's reaching for the morphine. It's coming out of Hel's wages, she's sure of it, but with a chunk of her side gone, and coming out of an argument with a kid, it's money well spent.

"You want to know something kid?"

"Sure. Dying isn't an excuse to stop learning."

Smart. Smart ass. Either, both. "Time heals all wounds, kid."

The dud grenade bursts bright, and the tac squad's mincemeat to the shrapnel. Not even a time bomb, she just knew it had a delayed timer, knew it'd take about that exact amount of time, knew that they'd swarm through there. Knew they'd let their guard down if she took the sniper's shot. Didn't expect that, mind...

"Time bombs, on the other hand, cause a shitton of dead."

Never fuck with a precog.
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#1 ·
· · >>TitaniumDragon
This starts and ends on a great note. The middle is choppy and jumpy, but works fairly well like that? The characters seem to have enough illusion of depth to them, and the world hints at it too - although it's never really clear what's going on, that's alright for the most part, since it's not very important to the story.

Anyways, my one suggestion would be to bring that hint about the precog in a bit sooner, so it doesn't twist quite so sharply at the end.

Other than that, good stuff, and I enjoyed reading it!
#2 ·
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[This story was read during our fic-reading event in the Discord chat (a recording of which will probably be available soon). This review will be a combination of my own thoughts on the story and what other people in the chat were saying about it.]

Not_A_Hat already left his comments from the chat on here, so I'll probably mostly focus on what I thought of this one.

Both Not_A_Hat and I got the impression that this might be taking place in a video game. The firefight, the bottomless rucksack, and the somewhat detached nature of the story all being apparent hints towards this. I thought that this story was hurt a bit by the fact that we're just kind of thrown in with no clues as to the setting or anything, to the point where I was wondering if this might actually be a fanfic for, or at least set in the world of, a video game that I've never played. It's still a strong story overall though.

I also liked that you didn't end this story with the twist on the prompt. The line you did use at the end makes a much better ending.
#3 ·
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Some Food Court Take Out - A- — A little confusing to read through, but a second pass made it make more sense. The scene is still a little ambiguous, but the action and the results are the focus, so that’s ok. This is a much better way to handle combat scenes than some others I’ve seen in this writeoff, but the added complexity of precognition and the mini-mall somewhat damp the action. Nice spike at the end.
#4 ·
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Heh. For some reason I keep wanting to start reading the title as an oriental dish 'Sum fud' or the like. Ah well.

Good action, it wasn't too hard to follow. The narrative voice had some interesting character to it, as well. Speaking of characters, both managed to have some definition in rather few words. We don't get much of a sense of the larger picture, but the story doesn't really suffer for it.

I don't know why there were three uzis, though; I'm not sure what that gained over just having three clips. In hindsight, I wonder why her clairvoyance didn't show her what the 'underslung something' was. I guess there might be limits, but we never learn them.

I concur on the strong ending. An engaging vignette overall, it got the job done for me.
#5 ·
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Well, it wasn't badly written, action packed, though I freely admit that pure war scenes aren't my cup of tea. By pure war scene, I mean just the fight relation.

As usual there are a lot of characters named, and it's somewhat confusing, because we don't really know who they are nor what their links with the narrator.

The writing was good, chopped and disjointed, in keeping with the tradition for such scenes. No technical flaws. Just mid-range for me, due to my lack of interest in such vignettes.
#6 · 1
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Hmmmm...

Interesting setup and setting... We don't get any explanation, but you still manage to paint a picture of some sort of post apocalyptic or at least post-disaster future. But the language, sentence structure, and word choices are just a bit.. off in places. For instance...

"It'll keep their head down."

"That's just stalling tactics." She's panicking now, "Just keep their heads down."

"Yeah well you can't shoot for shit, and I'm bleeding bad."


I'm not sure who's supposed to be saying "Just keep their heads down" there... As a matter of fact, to me it reads a bit like a sentence fragment that got missed in an editing pass. And quite a few of the sentences and descriptions feel... truncated. I know it's a minific contest, and you're trying to cram as much meaning into as few words as possible, But in spots if feels like you cute a little too deep.

The final (almost) prompt drop and line also feel a bit superfluous... The whole "Time bombs, lots of dead" thing doesn't really work for me. Maybe if she said "properly used time bombs" or some such... But saying "time bombs kill shittons of people" like it's a truism like that... Okay, that's just me being super nitpicky. ;>

So, final verdict... Not bad, but might need an editing pass or two (believe me, I am NOT one to talk on that point o.o) and perhaps a few words dropped from the end to beef up the earlier portions.

Oh, and a bonus point because I loved the title. ;>
#7 ·
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This is another great fic in a row. I don't have any advice. I'm not sure how to write tension like this because my stories rarely have battle scenes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqfSqUuo7Ms
#8 · 1
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I think calling it a dud at the start is cheating; I think having it just do nothing, and implying to the reader that it was a dud, would have worked better. Or better still, having the other character in the scene getting angry over the grenade being a dud, and then the protagonist never correcting them until the end.

I agree with >>Not_A_Hat about bringing in the precog thing earlier. You could even bring it in with the original grenade throw, and the other person being angry at them, like “I thought you said you were psychic” and them blowing them off, then the thing going off at the end and revealing that, yeah, they were and the person wasn’t just shooting off their mouth or something.