They pushed forward, keeping right up against the buildings on the right-hand side, ducking into doorways and such as they advanced another hundred meters or so without anything happening. Then, a fusillade of shots erupted from diagonally across the road to their front, indicating that some of the Japanese troops had gotten into a position to fire on them. None of the shots had any effect, as he was holding a really hard shield to defend against the shells from the AGC’s cannon. He opened a small hole for Simpson over his right shoulder and put a sound shield over his ear to protect against the sound.

“Can you see that?”

Her response came in the form of the shot she fired, which he assumed hit one of the Japanese. Her accuracy was such that she would hit with four out of five shots she fired in the huge rifle she wielded meant that whatever she fired at stayed down permanently, generally speaking. He stood still and let her take several shots, which resulted in the Japanese fire diminishing rapidly until it stopped altogether, and they proceeded to move further down the road again. He must’ve lent a bit too far out when provided the target because the AGC fired, the shell hitting his shield, which he had angled, fortunately.

Because he had been protecting them from the shots from diagonally across the road, the shield was at about a sixty-degree angle to where the AGC was firing from, and instead of exploding in his face as the shell earlier had, this one deflected off his shield at a shallower angle and impacted a building a good distance back up the road and again, on the other side of the street. He jumped out from the cover they were using, concentrated, and lobbed a tight fireball into the fighting compartment of the AGC, using a bit of telekinesis to pull it down into the open top. He ducked back just as the thing exploded in a massive ball of fire.

He grinned at Simpson, and they began walking down the road, not bothering to hide anymore. The occasional Japanese burst of small arms fire in their direction was invariably met by Simpson sticking her gun passed his shoulder into the hole he created in the shield and her blowing the person firing away. Between attacks by the enemy, he could hear firing both left and right as the Nuzeeland troops moved down the parallel streets, clearing the enemy from them as well. They passed the smoldering wreckage of the AGC and continued their advance in the face of the occasional Japanese fire.

So far that day, they had found no Japanese willing to surrender, although they hadn’t really come across any civilians yet. The troops advancing behind them ducked into buildings as they passed to clear them, but most of them were empty, just the occasional holdout who all seemed to be soldiers that were too wounded to retreat. Strangely, the further they advanced, the less the resistance proved to be. He wasn’t sure whether it was because the Japanese were running out of troops or enthusiasm. Most of the houses they passed seemed to have been ransacked at some point since the invasion started, but they didn’t look like they had been subjected to long-term occupation by civilians, or at least that was how it looked to Andrew. Which he thought odd given the civilians they had found earlier, but he supposed they might have been families of some of the troops and were further forward for that reason.