CHAPTER 4
Battle in the Woods
—The Second Ordeal—
“Now I will guide you to the next ordeal,” said Suuzaburou.
At that moment, a number of things happened in succession.
First, the infinite ammo indicator returned to the number of bullets they’d actually brought with them. The guns flashed as their resistance to overheating wore off, too.
Next, the racing Gladiator engines suddenly sputtered to a stop, so that only their tires kept moving on momentum, until that slowed down, too. They could no longer be used for travel.
Clarence’s hit points recovered slightly. She was now at 97.5 percent, so she’d recovered half of the damage she’d suffered in the previous engagement.
Then a bright light surrounded everyone, its blinding power forcing them to shut their eyes. “Eep!” Llenn yelped.
“Mwuh?”
When she opened her eyes next, she saw a different map.
The first ordeal had taken place in a downtown area, but now…
“It’s a forest.”
Surrounding them was a massive, wooded area, packed with conifer trees that stood rigidly straight.
The earth beneath their feet was damp and covered with ferns that grew to about Llenn’s knees. Overhead, tree branches lined with copious needles blocked out much of the sky. It was just like the location where Llenn had first spawned in SJ1.
In fact, this place seemed to have been recycled from that exact map environment. There were a few variations on the patterns of markings on the tree bark and branch placements, but otherwise they were all the same trees.
Llenn struggled to read the wind in the woods. She didn’t hear rustling, so if there was any zephyr, it wasn’t strong at all.
Across the fern-covered ground lay gentle dips and hollows about thirty to a hundred feet apart. The dips were deep enough that you could lie down to avoid detection. But that also limited your line of sight, so it was better to hide in the undergrowth.
Due to the network of overlapping tree trunks, visibility was fairly short, which hindered snipers. But it was a good map for Llenn, who could move quickly and nimbly. The trees were thick enough that they would stop any bullet if she hid behind them.
Llenn turned back and saw the rest of her team there. Nobody had been left behind.
The players who’d been sitting in the Gladiators were still there after teleportation, so the group made for a comical sight in the midst of the forest. They slowly got to their feet.
Of course, the little black guide dog remained there as well.
“This is the second ordeal,” Suuzaburou announced.
“Awww, you stayed with us!” Fukaziroh cooed, rubbing his cheeks with her hands.
“Mrg, guh, hng, bebegh, mlam, yarl.”
“Just let the dog talk,” Llenn scolded, pulling on Fukaziroh’s backpack.
Freed from her torment, the canine was able to give his explanation.
“First of all, I will be setting all of your hit points to infinite.”
Whut?
Llenn’s tiny body glowed as she reacted to this news. The hit point gauge in her upper-left corner, along with the eleven smaller ones below it for her squadmates, turned from green to gold. They were invincible now.
“You and your weapons may take as much damage as you’d like. In this ordeal, you cannot die, and your armaments and items cannot break,” Suuzaburou said. The group gasped at the announcement, and Llenn’s eyes bulged.
“What does this mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like, Llenn,” noted Fukaziroh. “It won’t matter how much the enemy attack us. No sweat.”
Llenn turned toward her friend. “Yeah, I know. But that’s such an advantage! What I’m asking is: Won’t that make the game way too easy?”
“Of course. That just means there’s going to be some kind of time limit, ya know? Also…”
“Also?”
“It’s probably not going to change the fact that you’ll get a nasty sting from taking a bullet, right? I mean, if you can’t die, doesn’t that mean you can get endlessly hurt?” Fukaziroh added, her tone heavy.
That made sense to Llenn. From what she’d heard, GGO’s pain system that activated when you got hit was harsher than the feedback systems in other games. Their absorber function was much lower.
If your limb got blasted, it would go numb, so you wouldn’t be able to hold objects. Take a cap to the torso, and a nasty shock would pulse your body. A round to the head would hurt more than getting slapped in real life.
If you couldn’t die but were susceptible to a constant stream of that pain…well, that was torture, in a way.
“What the hell…? That’s so messed up…”
“That’s what I said, didn’t I?”
“Huh? When?”
Boss snorted and repeated what she’d said in the first ordeal. “The game designer’s a real creep.”
“I concur. I’m very ashamed,” apologized Suuzaburou, for some reason.
“Stop it!” Fukaziroh interjected. “Don’t pick on Suuzaburou!” Not that anyone was doing that.
The dog resumed his speech.
“This area is a circular forest map with a diameter of two kilometers. Within its boundaries, thirty foes lie in wait. Please eliminate all of them. Your time limit is twenty minutes, plus a time bonus of five minutes for the previous ordeal. An early finish will have no effect on the next ordeal. When you complete the task, all the ammunition you used will be restored. And now, I wish you good luck.”
I see.
That cleared up the premise to Llenn and the others. The number 30 appeared in the upper-right corner of their vision, along with a timer that started at twenty-five minutes, which promptly turned to 24:59.
Before the timer ran out, they would have to reduce those thirty foes to zero.
They’d finished the first ordeal in fifteen minutes, which gave them a bonus of five minutes. If they had taken over twenty minutes back then, it probably would have subtracted from the time limit here. Good thing they’d found those cars.
The fact that their ammunition was being replenished at the end suggested that they would need it in the following ordeals. That was going to help out quite a bit.
“Aw, that doesn’t sound too hard, does it? We’ll just split up and take ’em out. We won’t suffer any damage, and we’ll get our ammo back, so…let’s give ’em a gun gale!” Clarence cheered, patting her AR-57 and smiling in her trademark lackadaisical manner.
“Better than a gun fail…”
“Shut up, Fuka,” urged Llenn, with the kind of love only a best friend could have.
On the other hand, Shirley looked peeved. That’s because she was peeved. If the players couldn’t suffer any damage, that meant she couldn’t assassinate Pitohui in this battle. She was quite annoyed, indeed.
“Heya, M?” Pitohui stated, giving him the floor. He put his tactical ideas into words for the rest of the group to hear.
“A circle with a two-kilometer diameter is actually quite large. That’s over a mile. If we have to find and eliminate thirty foes, I could certainly see us at risk of running out of time.”
That made sense to Llenn. Within the forest, the farthest you could hope to see ahead was a hundred meters, one-tenth of a kilometer. Without a map or a satellite scan, you’d have to find those enemies the old-fashioned way. Twenty-five minutes could pass in a blink.
“How about this?” Boss suggested, keeping her back to the group so she could watch for hostiles in the vicinity. “Llenn and Tanya will run in predetermined directions. If any enemies attack them, we’ll know where they are, and all members will move toward that spot. The two of them will just have to sit there and take a beating, though.”
I see; that’s not a bad plan, thought Llenn, although she certainly wanted to avoid as much conflict as possible.
But Pitohui cut down that idea at once. “Our opponents aren’t guaranteed to attack us once we’re in their sights. And we won’t necessarily be able to chase them down, either.”
“Oh…yeah… Good point… And we still don’t know what kind of foes they are,” Boss realized, withdrawing her support.
Some monsters in GGO were programmed to always run away if a player spotted them. If a player failed to ambush them, they would have to give chase at top speed or flush them toward a friend who could finish the job.
But I’m good at that sort of hunt, thought Shirley, who practiced hunting fleeing monsters with her squadron, Kita no Kuni Hunter’s Club. However, she kept that to herself.
M responded, “I can’t imagine they’re all enemies who will run away, because then the nullification of damage doesn’t make sense. I assume they’ll attack. But it might be more or less the same thing if they only strike when we find them hiding and fire at them first.”
Everyone aside from Shirley nodded.
“Ooh! Ooh! What about this?” Clarence blurted out, raising her hand. “We’ll put the slower people in the middle and the faster people on the outside, dividing one kilometer by twelve people, so that we’re in a line about eighty meters apart each! And then we’ll rotate around like a compass!”
Hmmm…maybe that will work, Llenn thought, until Shirley opened her mouth.
“Not a chance. If the game—er, the monsters are adept at sensing us coming, they’ll just run the other way, behind our line. They could end up following us on the opposite side of the circle perpetually, no matter how many times we rotate around.”
Shirley had experience tracking game on the vast plains of Hokkaido, so she realized the flaw at once.
She had never once caught a Yezo sika deer without a solid plan to track them. You had to think about the terrain and set up a scenario where you could assume they would want to flee in your direction. Even then, you might guess wrong.
When she saw that virtually the entire group was taking in this advice with wonder, she felt just a little bit proud. But when she saw Pitohui wearing a shit-eating grin on her face while chuckling “I knew you’d realize that,” Shirley wanted to shoot her in the face.
But Clarence was persistent. “Then what if we split into two groups of six and made two lines…?”
“And trap them from both sides? I get what you’re saying, but with a hundred and sixty meters between each person, it would still be easy for them to slip through.”
“Grr… Stop picking on me, Shirley!”
“I’m just telling the truth.”
Then what should we do? Llenn wondered, at a loss. Time was ticking every second they stood here. It was down to twenty-three minutes now.
When in need, ask a friend.
“Hey, Suuzaburou! Give us a hint!”
Without an ounce of shame, Fukaziroh turned right to the spitz for help. Everyone else rolled their eyes. If there was anyone in the group who would do that, it was her.
Suuzaburou’s doggy expression did not change. “All I can say is: Kick back and relax.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?! Hey guys, you wanna sit down and have some tea?” Fukaziroh asked.
“Let’s do that,” announced Pitohui, drawing everyone’s eyes on her.
Is this really a good idea…?
Llenn sat on the root of a six-foot-wide tree, leaning back against its trunk. The timer in the upper-right corner ticked from fifteen minutes to 14:59. Then 14:58. Then 14:57. The other number was still at thirty.
Pitohui always found ways to surprise her; this instance was no different.
About seven minutes ago, Pitohui had offered a rather shocking suggestion.
“Let’s all just sit down. Though, I don’t have any tea.”
“Umm…what? Are you serious, Pito?”
“Serious as a heart attack. Let’s just sit down and wait. And then the enemies will wake up and come to us…I hope.”
“You hope…?”
“Llenn, do you know a song called ‘Waiting in Vain’?”
Without waiting for her response, Pitohui began to sing.
“Waiting in vain / waiting in vain
I went to the field / to work one day
Out came a rabbit / from the brush
It tripped and fell / on the tree root”
It was the first verse of the famous nursery rhyme by Hakushū Kitahara, delivered in perfect a cappella.
“Oooooooh!”
Boss and the rest of SHINC applauded furiously, on the verge of tears.
It’s Elza Kanzaki!
In her avatar!
Singing a nursery rhyme!
In a cappella!
They were so overwhelmed that their AmuSpheres could have shut themselves down.
“What’s up with them?” asked Shirley.
“Dunno… She’s good at singing, but did it warrant that reaction?” wondered Clarence. She couldn’t be blamed for her lack of enthusiasm; after all, she didn’t know the truth.
Llenn applauded politely and said, “Of course I know it. But that’s a song about a person who keeps waiting so long for the next rabbit to come that they end up becoming worthless.”
“Oh…wait, really? I only know the first verse.”
“Well, yeah, then it sounds like a really lucky song!” Llenn snapped.
“In that case, we’ll sing the other verses!” Boss shouted.
All right, Boss, cool your jets. All of you, chill. Fukaziroh held up a hand to stop the rest of SHINC from launching into song. Her other hand was ceaselessly petting Suuzaburou, who was resting on the ground next to her.
“Anyway, my point is: Let’s not waste our energy scrambling around to find the monsters. Instead, let’s sit here and wait for them. No use rushing. Take a break,” said Pitohui lackadaisically, plopping down on the soft earth. M followed her lead, as did the younger girls, who would do anything their hero commanded.
“Sigh…”
Llenn didn’t feel up to arguing, so she walked over to the large tree and plopped herself down on top of its roots.
A very relaxing period of time followed—until the countdown hit ten minutes and then 09:59 a second later.
“Are we done yet…?” murmured Llenn, who couldn’t help but express the smallest bit of frustration.
Three feet away, Shirley hissed “Don’t speak” and lifted the muzzle of the R93 Tactical 2.
She was resting against the same tree with her legs pointed straight outward. Her elbows fell close to her knees, where she had her long rifle steadied.
There was a blast.
The R93 Tactical 2 had a piece on its tip called a muzzle brake, or a compensator. It was a little bulge with some holes that allowed the gas from the gun firing to escape to the sides, keeping recoil to a minimum.
“Gah!”
The gas shot sideways, which was rather unpleasant for Llenn, who was sitting very close to Shirley. It felt like she was getting slapped in the face with air.
The bullet that burst from the gun zipped through the trees at Mach speed—and though Llenn couldn’t see around the thick trees, she could tell that the shot had landed true, because the number in the corner went down from 30 to 29.
“Nice one!” Pitohui bolted upright from her position resting faceup on the grass.
“Hrmf.” M got heavily to his feet.
“Here they come!” SHINC also jumped up; they had been sitting in a circle facing outward. Their backs were to a tree so that they were protected on one side and watching their perimeter.
“What was that? Shirley did it? Wild!” shouted Clarence from a seated position.
“More fighting. What must humankind do to move past the cycle of violence…?” murmured Fukaziroh with love in her eyes. She was using both hands to rub Suuzaburou all over, off in her own world.
KTR-09 against her shoulder, Pitohui warily asked Shirley, “What was it like?”
The enemy had taken a single shot and had gone down without any attack in response. There was no movement. The forest was as silent as could be.
Shirley finished cycling the bolt to load her next bullet, fighting the urge to shoot the person who asked her the question. She peered through the scope, looking for the next foe, and murmured, “It definitely had a humanoid shape. A robot soldier.”
It was a humanoid robot standing at about five feet seven, with a thin, dull-silver body, joints that shone with a bluish light, and a single red lens in the center of its face.
There weren’t any human-shaped enemies in GGO aside from this kind. You often saw them in abandoned factories and subterranean dungeons.
“Then it’s not that tough of an enemy.”
While not as weak as the tiny creatures from the first ordeal, the machine soldiers were not very hardy on their own. Blasting their limbs off with a rifle was easy, and a head shot was a sure kill.
But you had to be careful around them. Since they had two arms, they could use a variety of weapons, just like humans. They mainly wielded cheap optical guns, but sometimes they carried rare live-ammo guns or threw grenades from a great distance. Their attack power could not be overlooked.
Of course, in this battle, the only threat they posed was a little pain.
“What weapon did it have?”
“Dunno. I only caught a glimpse. It was definitely an automatic rifle, but I can’t tell what kind.”
“Come on, that’s important! How many years have you been playing GGO?!” pouted Clarence. Shirley ignored her. She wasn’t a gun fanatic and didn’t know much about the types of assault rifles, so she wouldn’t be able to identify one at a glance.
M stood up, pressed the left side of the M14 EBR against the tree trunk, and looked through its scope. He gazed carefully in the direction Shirley fired.
“I don’t see it,” he reported. “How far away was it?”
“About two hundred meters. I just saw a bit between the trees and fired,” Shirley replied nonchalantly. But in a situation where everyone else was losing focus, she had stayed vigilant, noticed it first among the group, took aim, and fired immediately to strike the target through the trees. That took a tremendous amount of skill.
“You’re so good at that!”
“……”
It was simply in Shirley’s nature to be pissed off when Pitohui complimented her.
“Very skillful,” M added. It was also in Shirley’s nature to begrudgingly accept the compliment from him instead.
In real-life hunting, catching a tiny glimpse of your quarry between the trees was a frequent event. In those circumstances, a hunter absolutely would not fire unless they were certain that it was not a human being they had seen.
There had once been a tragic shooting accident in which someone mistook a towel tied around the neck of a person in the woods for the white rump of a Yezo sika deer. Mistakes were intolerable in Japan if you were being given the right to use an actual rifle.
That spoke to how much experience Shirley had with taking care to identify what she was shooting. Hence why she took out her target with great skill in one attempt here.
So how would their opponents react…?
Llenn and the others waited, their senses prickling, as the moments passed in silence.
The enemies were out there, and one had come to them in time. But after felling the first, the others weren’t attacking. Why not? Would they have to venture forth after all?
The squad kept their eyes and ears open in all directions, waiting with equal parts nerves and skepticism.
That was when the sound started.
It was a pouring rustle, like a downpour of rain. The sky was still clear, of course.
The sound came not from any one direction, but from all around them.
And it was getting closer.
“Above!” Pitohui barked, swinging the KTR-09 toward the sky and firing.
From outside the world they had all been watching, hopping around high in the conifer trees like monkeys—a robot fell, shooting sparks where Pitohui had shot it.
It smashed to the ground about fifty yards away, breaking to pieces. The green gun it had been holding bounced and vanished into the ferns.
Pitohui’s “Waiting in Vain” plan was a resounding success.
“Everyone, shoot! Don’t let them get closer!” Boss ordered, and SHINC burst into simultaneous gunfire.
“Haaah!” Llenn yelped, pointing her P90 at the sky, too.
However, she could see nothing but branches and needles. With all the din of gunfire around, there was no way to hear the robots jumping from tree to tree.
“Wh-where are they?”
“Doesn’t matter! Just shoot around!” Clarence shouted. She was blasting her AR-57, a gun that used the same ammo and magazines as the P90. The high-pitched cracks rattled like a high-speed snare as empty cartridges simply poured out of the bottom.
Either Clarence’s shooting was impressive or her luck stat was great. Maybe even both. Whatever the case, a robot fell from the trees about 120 feet away, its arm shattered from a bullet.
Hail after hail of rounds issued forth from the group. The forest that had been so quiet was now a cacophony, with multiple firearms blaring at any instant.
“Raaaaah!”
Blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam.
Rosa clutched the PKM tight to her side as she fired, blasting branches and needles loose, littering the forest floor with greenery—and the occasional robot.
“Yah!”
Llenn emptied an entire fifty-round magazine at random like spraying a hose, but it seemed that luck wasn’t on her side today. If she wasn’t going to hit anything, she decided, better not to shoot at all. After popping in a new magazine, she watched and waited for enemies on the ground, but nothing was coming.
As for Fukaziroh, she asked, “Hey, what kind of dog food do you prefer, lamb or chicken?”
“……”
Suuzaburou did not say anything that he didn’t need to say.
“I’d probably go with lamb. I tried a little bite of that stuff once, and it’s got a pretty good fragrance…”
She was off in her own world. Her grenade launchers didn’t do very much good shooting upward, so sitting around chatting was actually the correct course of action in this case.
“This is weird…” Twenty seconds into the racket, M was the first to notice that something was wrong. “Everyone! Something’s wrong!”
The gunshots started to die down.
“Oh, you’re right. Hey, what do you all see for your remaining enemies?” Pitohui asked. Llenn had been watching along the ground, so she glanced up and to the right.
The countdown read 08:05. The number of remaining enemies: 29.
“They haven’t gone down! It’s still twenty-nine!” Llenn shouted.
“Samesies for me,” Clarence added lackadaisically.
“Me too!” Boss chimed in. “This doesn’t make sense!”
“We’re not beating them…?” muttered Shirley, her brow furrowed.
She had seen at least four of the robots fall from the sky. They’d smashed against the ground and burst into polygonal shards. It didn’t make sense that the enemy counter wasn’t decreasing.
Then a hand grenade came hurtling over in her direction.
“Urgh!”
“Eek!”
Shirley was practically in the center of the blast, and Llenn was nearby. They were flung to the left and right.
The shock wave–type grenade threw them both about fifteen feet. Despite being farther away from the blast, Llenn flew the same distance because of her light weight.
“Owwwwwww!” howled Shirley, writhing on the dirt.
“That hurt!” Llenn yelled. She was writhing, too, but twice as fast.
As Fukaziroh had said, her body was numbed in an intensely painful way. The fact that her hit points weren’t affected made it even more unpleasant. The visual damage effect was still active, however. Llenn’s body was glowing red all over.
If getting struck at a distance from the explosion was that painful, then how bad was it for Shirley, who was nearly hit dead-on?
From what Llenn could gather, her right side looked like it had taken a shower with red paint. Under normal circumstances, she would have died instantly, before all that pain could have registered.
“God-frickin’-dammit!” Shirley swore, the only thing she could do to withstand the agony. You couldn’t blame her.
“Found one!”
Pitohui had rushed over after hearing Llenn’s scream and immediately spotted the enemy. A robot was lying on the ground just thirty feet away, its red lens visible through the ferns. She fired once with the KTR-09, splitting its silver head. The shards burst everywhere.
“They’re down below, too!” she called out.
“Why…?”
“How come?”
Shirley was still reeling from pain, while Llenn had shaken off the numbness. If they were that close to the ground, it didn’t make sense that they weren’t visible through the trees. And even while crawling, they were large enough to be conspicuous. Were the robots springing up out of the earth?
“Gahk!”
“Eek!”
Those screams belonged to Tanya and Tohma.
Llenn spun around and saw the two members of SHINC, who had been guarding their rear from thirty feet away, squirming on the ground in a glowing mess as well.
“Dammit! They’re over here, too! Down below!”
A grenade had incapacitated Boss’s teammates; she valiantly led the charge for vengeance. Switching her silent sniper rifle to automatic mode, she rushed forward, shooting at the silver head.
“Die!”
From a distance of barely ten feet, she put ten bullets into the head of the metallic soldier, which was trying to lift its gun. It was overkill. Against another player, that would have been very bad form. Not the sort of behavior to emulate in Squad Jam.
The machine’s head blew apart, and its body fractured into pieces and vanished. Certain of her victory, Boss checked the number in the corner.
“What the hell?!”
It was still 29.
“This doesn’t make sense! I just watched it die!”
The next moment, several bullet lines appeared on a diagonal above, followed by submachine-gun rounds that pelted Boss’s large body, riddling her with damage effects.
“Aiee! Owww, that hurts!”
“This is so strange…”
Pitohui watched and waited under a large tree, keeping an eye out for enemies.
The automatons were certainly advancing upon them, and the group was returning fire and destroying them. But the remaining enemy counter wasn’t dropping at all. Although they were knocking down the foes from above, others were coming up from the ground, too.
“Oh, that’s it,” she remarked, right at the moment that a rifle bullet burst through her head from right cheek to left. Her smile turned bright red from the damage.
“Hey, Clarence,” she called out casually, as though she wasn’t feeling anything at all.
“What?” asked Clarence, flat on her stomach behind a big tree out of fear of being shot.
“Go and check out the one I just blasted.”
“No! I’ll die.”
“You won’t die. Just go—you’ll be happy you did.”
“How come?”
“Because then I won’t shoot that cute little ass of yours.”
Clarence looked up and found the red bullet line from Pitohui’s KTR-09 traveling right to her own rear end.
“Okay, fine…but back me up, okay?”
“You got it. Now go!”
Pitohui began to shoot around the area as Clarence got to her feet and crossed the thirty-foot distance in a half crouch. Eventually, she reached the spot where Pitohui had fired at the robot moments earlier.
“Huh?”
She was staring directly into the eye of the fallen robot soldier. Two guns pointed at each other, mere feet apart.
“Aaaagh!”
Clarence’s brutal scream resounded in everyone’s ears.
“Ouch, ouch, holy shit, dammit! My ass would have hurt less! But I got you, you son of a bitch!”
Llenn and Pitohui saw Clarence rolling on the ground in agony, her chest and back glowing bright red. Apparently, the shot had ripped right through her body.
She was wearing a combat vest with pouches for those long AR-57 magazines—and bulletproof armor over her chest and back. And still, the bullet had torn through all of it.
The robot must have been equipped with a very powerful rifle, at least an 8 mm caliber. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be an insta-kill shot, of course.
But that wasn’t the problem.
“Huh? Why? Who got you?”
In mystery novel terms, Llenn was less interested in the “howdunit” than the whodunit.
“It was the one-eyed robot! Dammit, Pitohui! He wasn’t dead at all! He just pointed his gun right at me! So I shot him through the head and finished him off! It was a mutual kill! Ahhh, this hurts!”
Pitohui nodded in understanding.
“Ah, I had a feeling!”
“You had a feeling?” asked Clarence and Llenn together. Pitohui ignored their suspicion.
“M! Plasma grenade where Clarence is now!”
“Okay.”
“Huh? H-hold on, stop!”
M did not stop. Instead, he did as he was told, chucking a plasma grenade toward her with great accuracy.
“Hyaaaaa!” Clarence shrieked, fighting through the pain to get up and run right as a blue orb appeared, obliterating the ground and ferns within its diameter. The explosion buffeted her back.
“Blegh!” She fell face-first into the earth, getting a good taste of virtual grass and soil. “Gross!”
The number in the upper right of their displays went down to 28.
“Oooh? What’s this?” wondered Fukaziroh, who was kicking back and relaxing in the middle of the group.
“Everyone, listen up,” announced Pitohui, answering the mystery. “It’s not the robots we’re supposed to destroy.”
What? Llenn’s mouth fell open, as did everyone else’s.
“It’s the guns they’re carrying. Those are the enemies to beat. The robots will keep respawning, over and over, unless we destroy their firearms,” Pitohui informed.
“That is correct,” announced Suuzaburou.
“Ohhh! I get it now!”
Boss wore an angry smile, like a child who was about to burst into tears. Pigtails swaying, she charged toward a machine soldier who was staggering to its feet a few yards away.
The automaton held a large green assault rifle in a model she’d never seen before. It pointed it at her and fired several shots. More red damage effects bloomed on her chest.
“Screw this!” she roared, ignoring the pain and smashing its neck with a brilliant move that used a lariat. It toppled onto its back, leaving its face exposed.
“Eat it!”
She pulled the Strizh pistol from her right hip and fired quickly. After five shots, the machine fell apart and disappeared. Only its weapon was left behind.
“Stupid gun… I’ll blow you up!”
Boss pressed the activation switch on the plasma grenade and affixed it to the top of the gun.
“Actually, bring it here,” Pitohui instructed.
“You got it!” Boss replied, incapable of refusing her request. It would be annoying to undo the counter on the plasma grenade, which was going to explode in ten seconds anyway, so she just chucked it out of the way.
Rushing back toward Pitohui, her body framed by the blue explosion in the background, she set down the mysterious firearm on the ground.
Pitohui, M, and Llenn stared down at it.
“What is this?” asked M.
“If you don’t know what it is, there’s no way I would,” replied Llenn.
Although she didn’t know all the guns in GGO, of course, Llenn had heard Pitohui brag about her gun collection plenty of times. She felt like she’d absorbed a whole lot of information about guns that way, but this weapon was new to her.
The gun featured a very blocky design. Its stock rested on your shoulder and pressed against your cheek while you held the pistol grip. In other words, it was an assault rifle of some kind but with an angular body that could have belonged to a tin-plate robot. A bipod was folded in across its front end.
The trigger wasn’t just in front of the pistol grip, however. There was another one in front, too.
But the strangest thing of all was that resting on the top of the firearm was a classic hand grenade, pineapple shape and all.
There were weapons that launched grenades from the muzzle, or from below your body, but Llenn had never seen one on top of a gun. How were you supposed to use the sights with it there? Well, there was the bullet circle, so maybe you didn’t need them.
Between the amateurish design, the blocky frame, the inexplicable extra trigger, and the unfathomable grenade placement, Llenn got the feeling that she was looking at some kind of child’s toy.
“Oh my godddd! No way! I’ve never seen this one here! I can’t believe it’s in GGO!” Pitohui exclaimed with delight.
“You recognize it, Pito?” Llenn asked, dumfounded. Pitohui really seemed to know everything. Even M’s eyes were wide.
“Yes, I know what it is,” Pitohui replied. But before she could continue, an explosion drowned her out, and everyone stumbled from the force of the blast as the ground shook. That was from a grand grenade.
“What was that?” Llenn wondered, tearing her eyes from Pitohui. In the distance, the grand grenade explosion was toppling several trees.
“It’s Boss! She’s blowin’ herself up!” Tanya replied.
Since she couldn’t take any damage, Boss had rushed close to the enemy and detonated the biggest bomb in her arsenal to take them out. It was a suicide attack.
“Ugh. That’s gotta hurt…”
If she couldn’t die, then the surge of her explosive was just going to chew her up and spit her out. That seemed like it would hurt terribly. Llenn did not want to try it out for herself.
“Wah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! This is nothing compared to messing up on the floor and hitting the ground! No snickering spectators here!” Boss chuckled. Falling on a high-speed gymnastics floor routine sounded pretty painful.
“She’s so hardy,” Llenn muttered to herself. Meanwhile, the number of enemies had decreased to twenty-two. The other five players in the group were busy firing away, so for the time being, SHINC seemed to have a handle on things.
Llenn got back to the topic at hand, pointing at the robot’s bizarre gun. “What is it, Pito?”
Pitohui smiled, her facial tattoos stretching. She held up the mystery gun and explained, “This is a Johnny Seven OMA. That stands for One Man Army.”
“That’s a pretty fancy name for something that looks like a kid’s toy.”
“That’s because it is. A kid’s toy, I mean.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a child’s toy gun from early 1960s America. The little turds back in the day would run around their immaculate lawns with these things. It’s got a rifle, submachine gun, antitank rocket, even a physical grenade launcher. Seven different features, as the name implies. If you remove the pistol grip part, it becomes its own handgun.”
Slapping all those things together into a single weapon certainly sounded like a toy concept. But for some reason, M mused, “Sounds just like an XM29.”
In the 1990s, the American military had developed a gun with a similar idea in mind.
That was the XM29. It was a firearm that combined the features of a 5.56 mm assault rifle and a 20 mm semiautomatic grenade launcher. The problem was that it was too large and, more importantly, too heavy.
Ultimately, they decided that it would be easier to just keep the functions separate and ended development. The South Korean military tested a similar design in actual combat, but it simply wasn’t up to snuff. Constant breakdowns eventually caused them to scrap the weapon.
The examples above illustrated why trying to give a single tool many functions could be a bad idea.
“Ah, I see… So it actually is a toy… But why do you know that, Pito?”
“I learned about it during PE in elementary school.”
“That has to be a lie.”
“Regardless, what a rare gun! What a bizarre shooter! What a freak piece! I’m taking this one! Into my inventory, then my collection! It’s not for you, Llenn!”
“I…never said I wanted it. Besides, isn’t that the enemy? The number won’t go down unless we blow it up, right? So…”
Llenn’s fears promptly materialized.
An automaton soldier began to form, clinging to the Johnny Seven right in Pitohui’s hands like a ghost coming back from the grave.
“I knew it!” Llenn shouted, swinging her P90.
But before she could do anything, Pitohui screamed “Hah!” and tossed the toy gun, then severed it in two with her pale blade. The slice was instantaneous. She clutched the optical sword Muramasa F9 in her right hand, the first time it had seen action today.
The robot soldier burst into tiny pieces, and a moment later, the vertically split Johnny Seven vanished along with it.
“Arrgh! I really wanted that one!” Pitohui wailed as the readout of remaining enemies went from 15 down to 14.
“When you run up on them, they’re actually pretty easy,” remarked Boss, who’d been fighting like a demon possessed as she destroyed yet another robot—er, Johnny Seven.
She’d figured out that the machine soldiers in this battle weren’t really that powerful once you got up close. Not only was their agility no better than an ordinary human’s, but their rate of fire was also low.
Boss had ceased using her plasma grenades. Instead, she was walking boldly up within a few yards of her foes and using the Vintorez’s automatic mode to dispatch them.
After ten Russian-made 9 × 39 mm bullets sprayed from her silenced sniper rifle, the Johnny Seven sparked and burst into pieces. The robot soldier holding it looked briefly mournful, then vanished just like its weapon.
Thirteen left.
Rosa’s machine gun knocked a robot to the ground, where Tohma’s rapid fire caught it. The Dragunov’s automatic mode was at its best here. Five bullets to the robot’s Johnny Seven sent it packing.
Twelve left.
“Raaah!”
With a cute little pomp, Sophie shot the GM-94 horizontally. The grenade attack at just fifty feet blew up both the robot and the Johnny Seven in its hands.
Eleven left.
“That hurt earlier!”
Shirley sprinted through the forest as fast as she could, spotted an enemy about a hundred feet away, and shot one of her insta-kill exploding rounds at it.
It was her specialty, the running snapshot. As with her very first blast, it hit the Johnny Seven smack in the middle, rending it in two.
Ten left.
“We can do this!” Llenn cheered, and the time remaining hit 03:58. Then a voice entered her head.
“Be careful, everyone. When the number of enemies goes under ten, their attacks will get fiercer.”
It was Suuzaburou’s voice.
“Hey, everyone, Suuzaburou just said, like, we have to watch out and stuff. Did you catch that?” asked Fukaziroh, who had been doing nothing this whole time. Llenn was too preoccupied to reply.
A red projectile rocketed toward her and exploded.
“Aaaaaahh!”
Llenn flew into the air, the Doppler effect kicking in and making her voice shift in pitch.
A grenade flew and exploded against her, hurling her tiny frame three times farther, until her back slammed into a thick tree trunk.
“Bwoogh!”
She fell ten feet down from that spot.
“Bwagh!”
Her face and torso embedded a few inches into the dirt.
“Ouch…”
Once again, she tasted pain that she wouldn’t have felt if she could actually die.
Llenn slowly sat upright, pulled the P90 sling closer, and ran her hand around P-chan’s grip.
“Gahk!”
Something beamed her in the head. It was a powerful sniper rifle shot, the same kind that went through Clarence. Must have been one of the magical effects of the mythical Johnny Seven. A huge red spot glowed on her forehead.
“Aaaah…”
She tried to lurch upward, feeling as groggy as if she were drunk, then fell flat on her butt.
This…has to be bad for my mental health…literally…
She couldn’t move the way she wanted to. It was like she had a concussion, although her thoughts were sharp.
Just as she’d anticipated, getting continually shot without dying in GGO was a trying experience. If the game had been this brutal when she’d first started, Karen would never have kept up with it.
The difficulty increasing once they were down to ten enemies was understandable, but this shift was extreme.
“Waaaah! Owwww! Don’t shoot me there! Perv! Freak!” Clarence yelped. In all likelihood, another one of the Johnny Seven’s weapons, its submachine gun, had nailed her in the butt or similarly sensitive area.
“Dammit! They’re moving faster!” Rosa shouted. While she’d disappeared from Llenn’s view, she got the impression that Rosa was struggling with a machine that had suddenly gotten quite limber.
She looked up and saw both Shirley and another automaton weaving rapidly through the trees before her. The robot was faster than before, but Shirley had the skills to match. She spun and darted from tree to tree in a white-knuckle game of tag.
Shirley had placed the R93 Tactical 2 on her back. Simultaneously, she held Pitohui’s M870 Breacher, chasing after the machine as she rushed left and right around the trees.
“Raaah!”
The moment her foe hid behind a trunk, she fired not in the other direction, where it was most likely to emerge, but toward the very spot where it had disappeared.
Her prediction was dead-on. The metal soldier merely feinted and spun back toward its original position, where it collided with a shotgun shell. It had been planning to point the Johnny Seven back at Shirley, but that just made it an easy target for the shotgun, splitting apart.
Got it! Llenn exulted, but the automaton simply pulled the pistol grip out of the Frankenstein firearm. Although most of its body was destroyed, the pistol part was fine, so it aimed and shot at Shirley.
“Guagh!”
They were fifty feet apart, but a simple one-handed shot with the pistol caught Shirley right in the forehead, and she faltered. Since she’d been rushing forward, she ultimately toppled to the ground face-first.
The machine that scored the head shot on Shirley with its pistol-only Johnny Seven turned and vanished into the woods.
There were still ten enemies left. Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds to go.
“This is pretty bad,” observed Pitohui. Though her tone was as flippant as ever, her statement was unvarnished fact.
She and M came up beside Llenn, who had finally shaken off her numbness and gotten to her feet. M had his trademark shields up in both hands, protecting Pitohui.
Time remaining: 02:45.
“Say, Llenn. You mind doing something painful?”
“I do! I’ve had enough! And…what is it?”
“Attagirl! Can you go running around looking for where the remaining robots are? If you find them, chase after them as fast as you can. You stick out, so I’m sure we’ll be able to spot you even with all the cover around.”
“Uh-huh…”
That would help Pitohui and the others identify where the machines were. It seemed that they had been biding their time in the area and simply circling around the players at a bit of a distance.
“But I don’t think P-chan and I can finish them off,” Llenn admitted. She doubted the P90 could pierce the backs of the robots and destroy the Johnny Sevens they wielded.
“Yes, which is why—,” Pitohui started to say.
“Gaaah!” Tanya’s high-pitched shriek cut her off. One of the mechanical soldiers was doing something mean to her, clearly. Take care, Tanya.
“Which is why Fuka’s going to shoot at you. With her plasma grenades, which are guaranteed to destroy the target.”
“Whuh? Meaning…?” Llenn asked, although she already knew the answer.
“Kaboom! Both you and the bad guy,” Pitohui replied.
A plasma grenade, with its sixty-foot blast diameter, would certainly obliterate the robots and their weapons. But at a terrible price.
“I’ll be engulfed in agony!”
“Yeah, but you won’t die.”
“But it’ll hurt!”
“Yes. So I can’t force you to do this…but we have no other effective options…and less than three minutes until our shot at this quest ends miserably in the second stage… I know everyone would have really loved to keep playing longer… What a shame it would be to let them down.”
“Urrrrgh…”
“Hey, gang. I know it’s sad, but maybe we should wave the white flag. I’m sure there’s a FORFEIT QUEST button in here somewhere—”
“Arrgh! I’ll do it!”
“There’s the Llenn I know and love! C’mon, gang! Round of applause!”
All the members of SHINC stood ramrod straight and clapped their hands for her.
Oh, Llenn, you have so much to learn, thought Fukaziroh as she stroked Suuzaburou’s fur.
In the two minutes that followed, Llenn felt something she’d never experienced before in GGO.
If those sensations had a real-life parallel, she thought they would be a combination of an incredibly hot sauna and the minus-twenty degrees she’d felt in the Hokkaido winter.
Pitohui’s wildly unorthodox plan actually worked quite well. Llenn would use her legs to evade the robot soldiers’ gunfire and chase them around. Then Pitohui would give an order.
“Fuka, right over there.”
“You got it.”
Right at the moment Llenn was about to overtake the robot, Fukaziroh’s bombardment would arrive. Plasma grenades, naturally. Even if her aim was off a bit, the blast radius made up for it.
“Now the other way. I saw a pink rabbit.”
“Sure thing, Boss.”
Amid the strange explosions around her, Llenn confirmed via the decreasing enemy counter that the machine soldiers’ Johnny Sevens were being evaporated. At the exact same moment, however, she succumbed to an intense sensation.
She couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold. After a while, she couldn’t even distinguish if it was painful. It enveloped her entire body from head to toe. The effect lasted for three seconds. After the first detonation, she never wanted to feel it again.
But Boss withstood this!
That fact alone kept Llenn rooted in place. If she couldn’t put up with this, she’d be admitting she was inferior to Boss. Right in front of her. She didn’t want to lose. Not to her.
Clearly, Pitohui had put her up to this, knowing she’d feel that way. Crafty bitch.
Tanya offered to do the same after a while, but she was overruled because that would be too many targets for Fukaziroh to focus on at once. Besides, she only had twelve plasma grenades at a time.
Battling the pain, Llenn chased after yet another robot and fell prey to the explosion that ensued.
“There you go! You got this!” cheered the woman who came up with the plan, though there wasn’t much heart in it.
“You can do it, Llenn!”
“Be strong!”
“Hang in there!” roared the SHINC members, who were putting their heart into it. That alone helped Llenn persevere.
“There you aaaaare!” she roared, chasing after the last automaton with a demonic countenance. The finishing eruption happened just thirty seconds before the end of the battle.
“Phew, that was some good work I just put in.” Fukaziroh, who was the only player who had avoided getting shot even once and who’d escaped perfectly unscathed, sighed.
“Llenn!” cried Boss, rushing over to the collapsed girl, her big hands outstretched. “You did great!”
She felt close to fainting, but she grasped the hand firmly. “Heh-heh-heh. I wasn’t going to let you beat me, Boss.”
The second ordeal was over.
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