Hour after hour, the flashing white lights are enough to torch any sane mans mind.
After a while it seems possible to smell the disorientation as the constant beat of three lights marching forward and backward at different times, each displaying the contents of the unorganized chaos: Chairs thrown to their side. Couches shoved over. The remaining soldiers mounted behind any possible line of defense they could find to hide themselves from their foes holding tight to the most menacing Nerf guns any child or parent alike has seen; painted a sleek black, with a barrels extending to the length of the entire gun. The childish toys look like hand cannons, standing bare, stripped raw of all the useless decorations and colors, enhanced to better achieve its one goal: to hit its target. At the feet of the soldiers home constructed foam bullets and clothe wrapped heavy foam bombs littered the flooring as bullets whipped and flung side to side.
There is a jump between the dead silence that is so quiet you can hear any and all movement—so quite you can hear the heavy breathing of your exhausted allies from that quiet to the screams and roars and thumps and taps of bullets piercing into its any unfortunate victims and slamming into anything in between you and invader which is enough to decimate consciousness of thought and the idea of righteous or tactical judgment. All of this sound, this quiet, and loud, thrown together with the soft movement of you opposition moving from side to side mistakenly bumping a blanket or chair.
Meanwhile, the lights still dance from left to right and up and down exposing any and all movement piece by piece, like a photographer’s slide show, showing cold terror and a heaping load of nothing-- the kind of nothing that stands and waits and lingers over its victims, taunting them with excitement, and the only cure is patience or action. This realization of nothing is the same nothing that can finally push an unsatisfied worker to quit his job, to give a poor man a reason to rob a store, and in this case it’s a nothing that will make a warrior jump from his defense of darkness and run deep into the realm of danger, and become the hero and shoot the last remaining targets before they shoot you, or become the fool who is drilled down the back with cold hard foam and forfeits the only chance of victory.