He heard eight distinct set of footprints. Pairs of two. The chamber of shotguns, automatics, and magnums as they switched off the safety. They covered center, left, and right. Slow, taking their time.
He walked out of the room, but not through the door. He asked for the surveillance room and Blair happily gave it up. The parlor was part of eight different rooms that made up the first floor. Kitchen. Chemistry Lab. Living Room. Study. Parlor. Computer lab. Conference room. Exercise room. Stairs in four of the rooms led up to the second floor. Bedroom, bathroom, surveillance room, and a locked room. The surveillance room took up two thirds of the entire floor. It was more than just a surveillance room. There was a snipers nest, a spy hole, rations to last for years, and a flat screen monitor. Clearly Blair hired some kind of in-house security. Was it the bodyguards or someone else? The room had dust everywhere. So much that he was knee deep in it.
On the wall were instructions on how to operate the camera feeds. Within ten seconds, he was looking at the new intruders. Six men, one woman, and a child. Closer to a young adult. Was that how young they were when they got recruited? Or maybe the child thought it would be cool to shoot a gun. There were four groups of two and each group faced a cardinal direction. North, West, East, South. Covered all their bases. They headed straight for the house and were a quarter of the way through the garden.
He typed in some commands and saw racks of automatics and rifles hidden and covering every angle. The instantaneous shot of a rifle, silent, as it bored a hole straight through one of the men's temple. Dropped instantly and alarmed his partner. The other six took notice and looked warily.
Henry 'Ruthless' Smith felt like it wasn't very easy to be impressed. Too many fights engaged. Too many shots fired. Too many wars in both the domestic and international theater. Such a clean and devastating hit and the enemy didn't know where it came from. He lacked combat experience but after watching 'Path of Ruthlessness' so much, felt like he knew all there was to know.
He cycled through every feed as every square inch was replicated in his head. The only thing he couldn't account for was their thought process. He wasn't a professional killer. They were. All he knew was that you pulled the trigger and people died. You punch and people get hurt. As for the specifics on how to do that more efficiently and optimally, watching scripted scenes wasn't the same thing as trying to apply it to a scenario where you were directly in the action.
Henry Smith could brawl, but to duel? He was not there yet. There was a sniper's nest but no rifle. There were gun nests but no weapon of any kind. The best thing he could do was create a video monitor that was portable and let him see every camera in real time and he made one out of the supplies that existed. There was a bluetooth receiver with a range of 100 meters linked up to a mini lcd screen. There were speakers that transmitted the audio directly into his ears. The feeds captured audio but the computers weren't set up to process it. Therefore, he improvised. He went downstairs, grabbed some books, and quickly read them before welding together a circuit board that took the audio output from the feeds and converted it into usable input to his ear piece. He set up feedback fields that would interfere with each other by placing them at sixty five degrees outward.
There was a shotgun, a magnum with a silencer, and nothing else that he needed. He could remotely control the rifles, snipe them at close range with a silencer, then when things got loud or they found his location, go all out with the shotgun. All the feedback would delay the inevitable as long as possible. The feed would give him an advantage for as long as he stayed out of sight.
It took about a half hour to reach the house from the entrance and so far, only eight minutes had passed. He only had twenty two minutes to familiarize himself with counter-plays. He repeated in his head possible strategies and maneuvers that would allow him to kill as many of the eight as possible before the rest caught on and hunted him.
Groups of two meant there was no element of surprise. If he took down one, he had to take down the other. But all eight of them stuck together meaning he had to take all eight down at once. That was impossible so what else could he do? Seven left because the first one died. Why couldn't he just do the same seven more times? Because they had already gotten wise and analyzed the surroundings and correctly guessed where the most likely shots would come from.
Their level of ability far exceeded what he was expecting. If it were just grunts like the ones who had come for him on Saturday, he would be done with everything by now. But they were on a whole different level. They didn't become frozen with shock. They acted like their lives were on the line, but also tactical because they hid. They didn't pull any fancy maneuvers to get to the front more quickly. Instead, they performed constant calculations as they crouched and took half a step at a time, just barely out of reach of the weapons.
He decided to get into the trenches and experience the battlefield to understand what he was up against. He had been out there twice, peacefully, but this time lives were on the line. It was a completely different type of mindset and attitude. War on the inside, from within. Stepping down to the first floor and then out into the open, he aimed his magnum while navigating unfamiliar lands using his video monitor.