CHAPTER 5
Blending In with the Snow
—The Third Ordeal—
It was 12:40.
Llenn and company had no time to rest and relax after the furious bout to the very end of the time limit.
“It’s so bright!”
Once again, they found themselves teleported through a blinding light.
“Whew… Where to this time…?”
Llenn opened her eyes.
“It’s so bright!”
It was a world of white—a snowy field.
The sky was blue with a hint of red, and the sun shone high overhead. Snow was packed across every inch of the land, reflecting light that stabbed at Llenn’s eyes.
You weren’t going to go blind from snow glare in a VR game, but it was dazzling enough that she wanted sunglasses. There was supposed to be automatic brightness adjustment in the game, but the developers had probably configured it not to work as well in this particular instance.
Llenn’s pink boots sank into snow up to the ankle. It felt like hard ice was resting just a few inches underneath. She spun around and, with the exception of her teammates, saw nothing but flat, snowy ground. That, and buildings.
They were placed at seemingly random intervals of a few dozen yards each. Their exteriors were falling apart, and the majority of their windows were broken. Each structure was tall and square, about 130 feet to a side, all perfectly vertical. Not a single one was leaning in any way.
The buildings varied between three and seven stories in height. They all lacked a visible foundation or entrance, which meant they were buried in deep, deep snow.
A field blanketed in snow, save for countless buildings popping their heads up above the mass of white. GGO had plenty of bizarre locales that made you want to do research into the life of the designer who came up with them, but this one was a real doozy, even by this game’s standards. It was surreal.
“Whoa! The buildings are growing out of the snow!” shouted Clarence, calling it like she saw it.
Fukaziroh petted Suuzaburou and commented, “The building seeds we planted in the fall have taken root. By next summer, those big structures will be bearing plump fruit.”
“Wow, cool!”
“Clarence…have you actually had your compulsory education?” asked Shirley.
Right on cue, as always, Clarence replied, “Not to my knowledge.”
The next moment, the ground shook.
Their ankles wobbled, slowly at first but more violently as time went on.
It was obviously an earthquake—and a fairly intense one at that. Clearly unable to withstand this, the buildings creaked and trembled, and the occasional window shattered.
Zaboom! Another building sprung up out of the snow.
About five hundred feet to the south of the group, there had been a building about thirty feet tall and wide peeking out of the snow. It was much smaller than the others in its vicinity.
But now it was shaking away the snow around it as it soared up much higher. Up and up and up it went, absolutely rigid.
“Whoaaaa…”
They admired the spectacle with jaws agape.
“That’s too much fertilizer, right? Nutrients are like allowance: You shouldn’t give them out too much,” Clarence commented.
“Oh, I know all about that. It’ll grow into bamboo. If you cut them when they’re freshly grown shoots, they taste good. We’re a little too late for this one, though,” lamented Fukaziroh.
“Bamboo can represent a countless multitude of something!” said Milana the Russian, who was playing Tohma. She must have just learned about The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in school. Either that, or Elza must have slipped her some bit of language trivia while they were at the karaoke place.
The structure’s growth was so dramatic that it caused the wind to howl, and it came to a halt right as the rumbling did. Now it was a good three hundred feet tall—or thirty stories. It loomed high over all the other edifices, jutting into the sky. With how thin it was, it resembled a stick rising from the ground.
“It looks like, um, a bar graph.” Sophie gulped.
“I would have preferred a circle graph,” opined Rosa. She must have been thinking of homework.
“I bet the view up at the top is really good,” Boss said.
“Yes, exactly,” added Suuzaburou, much to everyone’s surprise. “I will now explain the third ordeal.”
“Huh? You mean we have to climb it?” Llenn asked, getting to her feet.
“Yes,” the dog confirmed. “I would like you to listen carefully to what I say next. On the rooftop of the tallest building on this map is a door. If you pass through it, you will find yourself in the next ordeal.”
“It’s the Anywhere Door!” shouted Fukaziroh, mimicking the voice of the blue robot protagonist of undoubtedly the most famous children’s cartoon in Japan. Nobody laughed.
They didn’t chuckle because her impression was too good. It was so uncannily similar to the real thing that it just wasn’t that funny.
Suuzaburou also did not laugh. He continued, “As long as one person passes through the door, the ordeal will be over for the entire group. You have eighteen minutes to complete it, starting right now.”
Once again, in the upper-right corner, they saw eighteen minutes, which then ticked down to 17:59. Llenn checked her wristwatch and saw that it was 12:42 in real time. That meant they had until exactly one o’clock.
“This one’s really gonna work our legs,” said Clarence with a fierce grin. “Unless there are elevators in that building, Mr. Doggy?” she asked the spitz at her feet.
“There are no elevators,” answered the canine.
“So just one person has to go up to the roof there? Sounds easy, right…?” Anna sighed doubtfully. Llenn was skeptical, too.
If all it took was running up the stairs there, she could do it in a few minutes. This wasn’t real life; taking all those flights wouldn’t even tire her out.
“I haven’t finished explaining. Please pay attention,” the dog scolded the group, who was busy commenting from the peanut gallery.
“Hey, people! Don’t disrespect Suuzaburou!” Fukaziroh fumed, despite the fact that she was the one who had been mimicking the famous blue robot cat.
“In this ordeal, you cannot use your weapons or armor. I will be confiscating them.”
Whut? Llenn thought. Then her trusty gun, P-chan, vanished from her grasp in an instant. The pouches on both hips disappeared, too, along with their contents. She reached around her back; even the knife was gone.
No way! You’re going to give them back, right…? She couldn’t help but worry, even if it was unfounded.
Upon turning around, she saw that everyone was similarly empty-handed.
Those who had bulletproof plating in their vests had lost them. Pitohui’s headgear had disappeared, and Fukaziroh’s helmet and knife were gone. Without the shield inside it, M’s backpack was completely flat.
SHINC was only outfitted in combat fatigues, too. They all looked like they had at the bar, hanging out without any of their equipment on.
“Good grief,” muttered Fukaziroh, who used her knife as a hairpin. Now she had to collect her long, loose hair and tie it together in a bundle.
Suspecting she already knew what lay in store, Llenn waved her hand and brought up her inventory window. The two Vorpal Bunnies and the backpack with the magazines inside had big Xs over their icons. No pulling them out.
Nothing that was left had any real connection to combat. Thermoses for a bit of civilized tea out in the wasteland—three of them, in fact—cookies for a snack, headphones for listening to Elza Kanzaki songs.
She always had them in her inventory, so she’d forgotten she was even carrying them around. If she’d taken them out of storage, she might have been able to bring a bunch more ammo.
Better not tell anyone I have this stuff in here, Llenn decided.
And of course, as was only fair, she had much more carrying capacity after subtracting P-chan and Vor-chan from the total. In other words, the invisible “bag” she was carrying around with her was much lighter for the time being.
“Don’t need weapons to do some stairwell jogging, eh?” mused Boss.
“As long as there aren’t any enemies,” added Sophie.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha. There’s no way you could call that an ordeal!” Pitohui, who was excited for some reason, laughed. “Isn’t that right, you blackhearted—er, black-headed doggy?”
“That is correct. There are monsters on the other side of the building that just had a growth spurt. They will attack you as they attempt to get through the door first.”
“What? Are we supposed to beat them in a fistfight? I don’t wanna pummel monsters with my hands!” lamented Clarence.
“You may if you’d like, but there are weapons and ammunition that you are allowed to use scattered throughout this map. Find them if you are so inclined and use whatever you like. The conditions are the same for the enemy. You may also defeat the enemies and loot their weapons.”
Wow! The team was shocked.
This sort of scenario was common in other games, but there had never been a time in GGO where you could scrounge up weapons from the environment or steal them from enemies.
“Here, your hit points will decrease if you take damage, as usual. If you lose all your HP…”
You’ll die? You’ll get booted out of the quest? Llenn worried. But she was wrong.
“You will be put on standby in a state of temporary death. If someone completes the ordeal, you will be resurrected on the next map, with all of your hit points returned.”
That explained it. The arrangement here was that either everyone went on to the next stage, or no one did. That was the only way it could work.
“That concludes my guidance. Best of luck.”
“Okay, Llenn! Run! Don’t worry; I’ll walk Suuzaburou!” Fukaziroh shouted. Her hands were free without the MGL-140s, so she picked up the little black dog.
Her suggestion aside, Llenn did start running.
“I’ve got this!”
A competition of speed was her forte.
If she could zip across this field of snow before the enemy arrived and climb up that sticklike building, the ordeal would be over before they knew it. Easy-peasy.
After saving the team in the last trial, she was set to be the hero again. She needed to think of what to say for her triumphant postgame interview.
Newly invigorated, she left little footprints in the snow as she hurried, until—zhunk!—she sank up to her chest on the fourth step.
She was immediately immobilized.
“Wha—? Hey! What! What’s going on with the ground?”
“This is what’s going on…”
Llenn looked up at M, whose voice she had just heard. He was in the snow to his thighs, working his powerful legs back and forth, leaving a snowplow trail as he came closer.
Well, goodness. Everything just a few yards from their starting location had been soft, freshly fallen powder. Llenn struggled but was completely unable to move.
Shit! She cursed her own tininess. It was the first time she’d ever done that in GGO. Now there was no way for her to get into the building first. There was no way for her to be the hero.
“Ugh, it’s hard to walk,” grunted Boss as her team waded over laboriously. “We’ll head for the structure over there on the left! There should be weapons inside! After me!”
“Raahh!”
They headed for the closest building, a four-story structure about twenty yards ahead to the left—or perhaps southeast.
“Any enemies?” Llenn asked.
Fwoomp! M pulled her right out of the snow.
“It’s like harvesting carrots,” commented Clarence, still standing in the starting area.
“Of course there are. Behind the tall building, about three hundred yards off. Weird-shaped creatures, about a dozen. They’re approaching a building on our right as a group, squirming and bulging and being creepy,” spat Pitohui, peering through binoculars.
The strap of the binoculars ran around Shirley’s neck. Meaning that she had pulled them out of her inventory, but Pitohui had grabbed them to use. Shirley looked ready to bite her neck at a moment’s notice.
“At any rate, we’ll need some weapons!” shouted Boss, leading SHINC in a line toward the nearby structure. “I’ll be turning off the comm for the moment. Just call for me if anything happens.”
They were going to temporarily separate communications. That made it easier when you were acting in different groups, since you didn’t have to hear everyone’s interactions all at once.
Pitohui responded lackadaisically and brushed her ear. Then she called out to LPFM, “Shall we hurry, then?”
There was a bit more than sixteen minutes left. No time at all for sitting back and relaxing.
“Grab on!” M shouted, lifting Llenn up with his arm alone before moving her back behind his head. Her legs went around his neck, so that she was riding on his shoulders.
How many years had it been since she’d ridden piggyback…?
Then M said, “Get in the bag. You can cover your head if you want.”
“Huh? Ohhh…”
Llenn hesitated for a moment until she grasped his intentions. She slid her feet down into M’s big backpack, which was now empty without its armor inside. As she did this, she had to hold on to his large head so she could fit her legs inside one at a time.
If she crouched down inside the bag, it was a perfect fit: not too tight, not too loose. It was like the bag had been crafted specifically for carrying Llenns.
“Here we go.”
M started to slosh forward with her on his back. He resumed his snowplow path toward a different structure from SHINC’s, about forty yards away on the right.
Having a tall vantage point gives you a really nice view. Well, duh, she thought.
In the real world, Karen looked down on virtually everyone, but in GGO, she could only see things from very close to the ground. That was a considerable disadvantage when it came to spotting the enemy as soon as possible, she realized.
“Do you see those enemies, Llenn? On the left.”
M was correct. About a thousand feet leftward, half buried in the snow, monsters were on the move. They were eerie and unidentifiable, albeit hastily pushing through the terrain.
Like her own squad, the monsters were making for a building on the western side. Their tracks were practically parallel. It was frustrating to be able to see their foes without having any means of attacking them, but that was true for the other side, too.
Llenn looked behind her and saw Pitohui and the rest of the team following.
“Marchin’ thru the snow, steppin’ on the ice! Where is the river, we lost the road twice!” Clarence sang happily.
“How do you know that song?” Shirley asked behind her.
“The Snow March” was an eccentric military song without much glory to it; the lyrics depicted the grousing of soldiers being forced to march through freezing conditions. Shirley knew the song because she sang it often while trekking through the winter landscapes with her hunting companions. They would usually scold her for singing when it might scare away their game.
“The horses are down, and— Uh, I learned it from a manga. Or maybe it was an anime.”
“Uh-huh.”
Llenn looked behind them. There was a path in the snow they’d pushed aside, and in the back, after most of the work had been done, Fukaziroh tenderly cradled the little black dog.
“There, there. You don’t want to get your widdle toesies to get cold.”
Was that really necessary?
Once they were inside the office building, Llenn jumped out of M’s backpack. The interior was spacious, with sturdy three-foot pillars supporting the ceiling. There were large metal desks and simple steel-frame chairs abandoned here and there. Some of them were in normal positions, others were flipped over. The walls and floor were a wreck, but there was no snow on the inside.
The structure was devoid of lighting save for the sunlight bleeding through the windows, which was still bright enough to illuminate even the back of the room.
“No traps in here,” Llenn announced, checking carefully around knee and waist level.
“It would be really nasty if there was one,” commented Clarence.
The rest of the group clambered through the broken window to get inside. “Split up and scan the area for weapons quickly, then meet back up here,” M ordered, shifting a desk. It was about the size of a single bed and looked very heavy. It made a nasty scraping sound on the floor.
“Me too?” asked Fukaziroh.
“Of course!” snapped Llenn.
“Aw, darn,” she grumbled, gently setting the dog on the floor. Suuzaburou plopped down onto his furry bum at once. She rubbed his head and said, “There you go, good boy. Stay here and occhanko. Don’t go too far from this spot.”
Occhanko was a local Hokkaido word for sitting with one’s bottom on the floor. Only Llenn and Shirley would have understood her.
“Let’s go!”
No longer limited in her mobility, Llenn sped through the empty building. Near the center of the floor was a staircase, the kind that went back and forth with landings. The lower part was buried in snow, but she could still go upstairs.
Nearby, blocking the gloomy hallway, was a gun. It was a rail-thin, long bolt-action rifle with a wooden stock. That was all Llenn could tell, but she was obviously going to take it back with her.
Beside it rested a green shoulder pouch. It gave a metallic sound as she lifted it—the pouch was very heavy. That had to be ammunition.
Llenn tossed the bag over her shoulder, held the long rifle vertically with both hands, and rushed back to where they’d started.
She’d been the first to discover treasure. No one else was around. It was just Suuzaburou, sitting on the floor in an empty office building.
The snow outside was so dazzling that it formed a white background. For a moment, she got the impression that the black dog’s dark eyes were completely without expression, so she startled. But upon closer inspection, he was as cute and attentive as ever.
“There, there,” she consoled, resting the rifle on the floor to pet the dog’s head.
“Don’t touch Suuzaburou! Oh, it’s just Llenn… I thought you were a pink monster,” Fukaziroh shouted rudely as she returned. The other four were close behind. They all were carrying spoils.
The enemy side had still not launched an assault. With the depth of the powder outside, they couldn’t have reached the goal edifice this soon if they were heading straight there. Now the squad’s top priority was to arm themselves.
They laid out all the guns on the floor. Some were big, some were small, and—
“Oh my,” exclaimed Pitohui. “The Mosin-Nagant M1891/30…”
The rifle Llenn brought back had been constructed by the Soviets for WWII. It was about four feet long. Like Tohma’s Dragunov, it fired 7.62 mm rifle bullets.
“Two Uzis…”
Those were Israeli submachine guns. Despite being crafted back in 1952, they were considered masterpieces to this day. Their metal bodies were shaped like a capital T and attached to a wooden stock. The firearms fired 9 mm Parabellums, pistol bullets.
“A Beretta M12S…”
That was another 9 mm submachine gun, this one of Italian make. Built in 1959.
“A Thompson M1A1…”
An American submachine that took .45-caliber pistol rounds. This one had a wooden stock and grip and was fairly long. A WWII-era gun.
“And a PPSh-41, huh?”
That was a Soviet Tokarev 7.62 mm submachine gun. It had a long wooden rifle stock and a seventy-one-round drum magazine shaped like a cookie tin. Another gun from WWII.
In other words…
“What is this, an antiques show?!”
They were all very old guns. Historical pieces. Collectors might enjoy them for the nostalgia, but in an actual battle, you would obviously want something more contemporary.
“And they’re all SMGs,” grumbled M.
Aside from the Mosin-Nagant, they were all submachine guns that used pistol bullets. At the very best, their effective range wasn’t going to pass two hundred yards. If the enemy side found actual assault rifles, their own team wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Just gotta fight with what we have! Those are the rules!” Shirley said, accepting the reality and grabbing the Mosin-Nagant, lifting the bolt, and pulling it back so she could insert its long rifle rounds from the top. This category of rifle always worked more or less the same way, so she didn’t have to give it much thought.
Once Shirley had loaded five bullets and pushed the bolt forward again, M said, “Keep a lookout for us.” She nodded and left the office area.
Shirley was a reliable sniper, so she’d do well with that gun even if it wasn’t her usual, Llenn trusted. But as for herself?
“Um, which one should I…?”
She couldn’t choose. The rest were submachine guns, but she was clueless about the benefits and applications of each. Early on in GGO, when she’d chosen the Skorpion for PKing, she’d done a little research on gun capabilities, but what little knowledge she’d gained had been long forgotten.
“You take this one, Llenn. Fuka, here.”
M did the hard work for them. Fukaziroh and Clarence had no complaints, and Llenn certainly didn’t. They accepted their weapons like they were receiving holiday presents.
But what to do with it?
Llenn had a black submachine gun in her hands. How many years had it been since she’d used a black firearm?
In addition to the normal grip behind the trigger, there was a similar one in front of the long, narrow magazine. That made it easy to hold the gun with two hands.
It was sixteen inches long. The stock was like a metal rod, folded up on the right side. It would be even longer if extended, but Llenn figured it was fine the way it was now.
The good news was that it wasn’t so heavy that she couldn’t hold and fire it at the same time. The bad news was that she didn’t know how to use it.
“Llenn, there’s a manual in the game window,” said Fukaziroh.
“Really?” She waved her hand and opened a pop-up window with the firearm’s name on it. According to that, Llenn was holding a Beretta M12S. There was another pop-up with a simple guide to the weapon.
A SUBMACHINE GUN MADE BY BERETTA. FIRES 9 MM PARABELLUM BULLETS. FIRES FROM AN OPEN BOLT AND HAS A SELECTOR BETWEEN SEMIAUTO AND FULLY AUTOMATIC. HOLDS THIRTY BULLETS AT A TIME. KNOWN FOR ITS GRIP SAFETY, SO THAT THE GUN CANNOT FIRE UNLESS IT IS FIRMLY HELD.
“Uh-huh…”
Llenn touched the floating description, bringing up a graphic with operating instructions. She quickly and carefully checked out how to disengage the magazine, how to use the safety, how to switch the selector, and how to fold the stock.
Just as she finished and felt like she had the gist of it, a high-pitched gunshot echoed throughout the building interior.
“Looks like the other side’s ready to rumble!” called out Shirley through the comm. She had been watching the structure where the enemy had gone and was shooting at them as they emerged.
“They ducked back inside. Everyone, hurry!”
It was a great luxury to have a good sniper at a time like this.
As for Shirley, she’d rushed through the dark hallway and had made it to the office on the far side of the edifice about a minute earlier, where she could see the enemy. The office was practically identical on the other side. Only the view was different. On the left stood the tall, thin goal—so close, yet so far.
Shirley took position behind a thick pillar and pulled out her binoculars. Through the broken window, she examined the wide building the team of monsters had presumably entered.
Just seconds after putting the binoculars to her eyes, the enemies emerged from the structure. They were about a thousand feet away. With the magnification on the binoculars, she could clearly make out their shapes.
The monsters resembled eerie octopuses with rainbow stripes. She had never seen anything like them in the game before. They were freaky.
Based on the ratio of their bodies to the guns, she could tell that they were the size of humans. She didn’t know what they were wielding, though.
Switching the binoculars for the Mosin-Nagant, she pressed the side of the gun against the pillar to steady it, then took aim at the head of the octopus monster leading the group. The rifle didn’t have a scope, so she was relying on only the metal sights.
It was a primitive method of aiming, aligning the rear sight that was closer to her eye with the front sight at the end of the barrel. The rear sight could be adjusted up and down, but she didn’t have time to tinker with it first.
Adjusting the firearm carefully, she lifted it upward until her aim matched the target and then fired without hesitation. It was a pure snipe with no bullet line to speak of—no system assistance, but no warning to the target, either.
Since it wasn’t her gun, her aim was slightly off. The bullet passed just to the side of the cephalopod’s head, and he (?) pulled back.
Shit! Should have gone for the body.
Shirley had given in to old hunting habits, where the vital spots like the neck and head were sure kills but harder to hit. She cursed that tendency in the moment.
“Looks like the other side’s ready to fight! They ducked back inside. Get a move on, everyone!” she called out to her companions—for the time being, at least.
Instantly, a number of red bullet lines lit up the building—and the office interior.
“Tsk!” she ducked back and hid behind the pillar.
A hail of bullets followed, erasing the red lines and striking the surfaces of the room, causing a racket. It was a counterattack, of course, not just random suppressive fire. The sounds of damage around her were light, which told her that their guns were mostly SMGs, too.
If they were firing normal machine-gun rounds in the 6 to 8 mm size, the effect would have been more severe. They would be tearing chunks out of the pillar around her.
Once the pinging of bullets ceased, Shirley glanced back toward the enemy area and reported to her team, “They shot at me with SMGs. They haven’t left their shelter.”
“Wow, thanks; that’s great to know!” replied the one person who pissed her off the most. Pitohui came into the office carrying an Uzi, her center of gravity low. Llenn and the others followed her in.
Llenn had the M12S, M had the PPSh-41, Clarence had the Thompson, and Fukaziroh had the other Uzi. They all looked very strange without their usual weapons. Especially Llenn, with her black gun.
Each of them took position behind a pillar or toppled desk or the like, facing forward. They all knew that getting too close to the window would leave them completely vulnerable. The scary thing about GGO was that after you’d played long enough, you unconsciously identified real-life locations in game terms. “Oh, I’ll get shot here.” “This spot is safe.”
Karen had once sat at a café with a view of an intersection below and felt strangely sick. She realized she was anxiously thinking What if I get shot from the building across the street?
Llenn stared out the south end of the structure. Beyond the white plane of snow, the stick—er, edifice—that was their goal was clearly visible, but there was nothing in between. No obstacles, no cover. And the deep snow would stymie them from moving quickly across it.
“So if we just trot out there, we’re gonna get shot, huh?” Clarence mused.
“Yeah. I’ll shoot you,” barked Shirley.
“It’s a stalemate,” fumed Llenn. They had thirteen minutes left on the timer. There was no room for error.
“Hello, Evacchi? How’s it going?” asked Pitohui, switching her connection to the other team back on. Llenn waited for their response, hoping they’d managed to find some powerful weapons. But she was disappointed.
“I was just about to let you know! Nothing over here! We searched and searched, but the only things we found were grenades!”
“Goodness. What kinds?”
“About fifteen normal types and plasma grenades. And tons of grand grenades, more than I can count! Dammit! Nothing we can actually shoot!”
“Aw, darn. We got one rifle here, but everything else is submachine guns. Though, it seems like the enemies found about the same.”
“So we’re in a stalemate.”
Exactly, thought Llenn.
“Can you make it over here? I’d like some grenades,” Pitohui asked Boss.
“Probably, if we crawl on our hands and knees through the snow. More importantly, could we get to the building we’re heading for by keeping it between the enemy and you, so they can’t see us?”
“That would be risky since it’s so narrow… I’ll leave the decision to you. What do you think?”
“…Let’s meet up first.”
“Okay, make it quick.”
So SHINC was going to come and join them. If the monsters climbed to the top of their building, they might shoot down on a diagonal at the squad, but Boss did not argue in the slightest.
“You got it!”
Please be safe, Llenn prayed. Twelve minutes left.
“Got any ideas, M?” Shirley asked, hoping for a breakthrough. She was still clutching the Mosin-Nagant. Clarence was using the binoculars to watch the other building.
“Mmmm,” he grunted.
“Oh! What about a sled?” Llenn suggested, deep in thought. It was true Hokkaido inspiration. “A sled can run right over soft snow! We could use those whiteboards!”
They were in an office, after all—grimy whiteboards were scattered about here and there.
“I see. But they won’t move on their own, will they? What’s going to power the sleds?” Clarence asked.
“How about farts?” suggested Fukaziroh. The group went silent.
Llenn ignored her friend and mulled it over. She answered, “What if we pointed guns backward and shot? Would that provide enough recoil to move us?”
“Maybe in the vacuum of space,” quipped Shirley sardonically. It was asking a lot of an SMG’s recoil power to push someone five hundred feet.
“But if we can just get Llenn there, we could clear the ordeal in a snap,” Pitohui grumbled.
In the meantime, bullet lines appeared from the building across the way, followed by a number of shots. Everyone ducked down, so they remained unharmed, but they couldn’t leave at this rate. Time was passing without a lick of progress on their end.
“We’ll be there soon,” Boss reassured, but Llenn’s team was still no closer to finding a solution. The countdown continued its cruel march, descending from ten minutes to 09:59.
“The enemy’s moving!” exclaimed Clarence, who was acting as Shirley’s spotter with the binoculars. Llenn took out her own monocular and pressed it to her right eye, peering over the top of the sideways desk.
“Ugh!”
From the building a thousand feet away, she saw desks marching in their direction.
They were sturdy office desks, like the ones the players were hiding behind. The monsters held them in a formation, three desks across and two tall, slowly but surely sliding over the landscape. They were heading for the tallest building, of course.
“They’re using the desks as shields!” Clarence cried. Now and then, they caught a flicker of some strange color that looked like one of the octopuses between the tables. Behind the shield, nearly ten monsters were working together to support the six desks, propping them up and pushing them along.
“Screw this.”
Shirley aimed at the tables and fired her rifle.
The bullet zipped forward and deflected off the surface of a shield, shooting out into the sky somewhere. Although the desks wobbled from the impact, the bundle of six tables continued its forward progress undeterred.
“What?!” fumed the sniper.
As a test, Llenn rapped the desk in front of her with her knuckles. It made a dull, heavy sound.
“Didn’t know they were so tough…”
Tough enough to deflect a rifle round from this distance? That was a shock. It was comparable to M’s shield, which was constructed from spaceship plates. This future office wasn’t playing around.
“This is one of those ‘you win once, you figure it out’ games. Can you copy them, M?”
“I’ll try.”
On Pitohui’s orders, he picked up the desk to imitate the monsters. True to form, the monstrously strong man could lift it. That meant he could probably hold it up and proceed forward in safety—provided he could also deal with the deep snow.
“I’ll try it, too, then!”
Fukaziroh copied him and easily lifted the heavy desk, a sign of just how much time she’d spent buffing up her character.
“I can’t do iiit!” wailed Clarence. Though she could just barely lift it up, the weight penalty made it impossible for her to walk with it.
“Neither can I,” admitted Shirley, without bothering to try. Llenn knew she didn’t stand a chance, either.
“Pito, can you cut them smaller?”
“With the photon sword? Sure thing, I’ll cut them down to size as soon as you pull my sword out of your magic hat.”
“Huh? Oh… I forgot…”
Their weapons had been confiscated—all of them.
“Th-then should we wait for Boss to get here and copy the idea?” Llenn asked.
“Hell with that! I’d rather blast ’em to smithereens first!” Clarence growled, holding the Thompson at her waist. She proceeded to the window and began firing.
The pistol bullets couldn’t cover a thousand feet, but when combined with the effect of the bullet circle in her line of sight, she could create a rain of lead. The point was simply to cause the enemy to falter, however minutely.
Ping.
“Gyah!”
A bullet promptly returned their way, penetrating Clarence’s left arm and spinning her backward. Incidentally, of the ten or so pistol rounds she fired, maybe one of them had hit their target and given it a little knock.
“Sniper! One of them on the other side has a sniper rifle!” Shirley snapped, quickly firing the Mosin-Nagant at the spot where the bullet line had briefly shone, then moved just as quickly to avoid reprisal fire.
“Did you…did you get ’em?” Clarence asked, wincing and holding her shining left arm as she scrambled back. She’d lost about 30 percent of her hit points.
“No, I didn’t get any feedback,” Shirley said, expelling the empty.
It was strange to talk about “feedback” in a gunfight where you couldn’t feel your shots hitting, but veteran players of GGO tended to use terms like this. And the weird thing was: They were often correct.
While this was happening, the countdown timer ticked every second faithfully away, so that it now read 08:40. The shield of desks was also slowly approaching the center building. They probably had about four hundred feet to go.
“Once they get inside, they’ll reach the top in two or three minutes,” M stated, a hint of panic in his voice.
Wh-wh-wh-wh-what-what should I do, what should I do, what can I do, whaddle I whaddle I whaddle I do-do-do-do? On the other hand, Llenn’s mental commentary was nothing but panic.
“Now, now. Slow and something wins the idea, as the saying goes,” Fukaziroh offered lazily.
As for the tiny blond, she’d been absorbed with something on the floor for a little while. She was forcefully prying the boards from the seats and the backs of the metal pipe chairs. Llenn was certain that she was trying to build a doghouse.
“Sorry we’re late!”
Just then, the six members of SHINC stomped through the building. They were early.
“Once we saw what they were doing, we just started running normally.”
Well, that would explain it. They were plastered with snow from their earlier crawl, but it was evaporating and clearing away quickly.
Pitohui asked, “Still no guns?”
“No…unfortunately. If we’d gone into a different building, maybe…”
“Hey, no sweat. We’re coming up with plans since we can’t break through their wall.”
Boss looked through her binoculars at the wall of desks that was steadily pushing its way across the snow. They had 350 feet to go. “Grrr, now there’s an idea. Let’s do that, too!”
She picked up one of the desks in the room.
“It’s too late to catch up by doing the same thing. Take out all the grand grenades you picked up instead and put them behind us.”
“A-all right.”
Boss did as she was told and materialized all the extra-large plasma grenades she’d found, placing them on the floor. There were twenty in total.
Of course, they didn’t forget to use the overturned desks as shields. If any one of the grand grenades went off, the ensuing blast would kill everyone and probably demolish the building along with them.
Fukaziroh observed the scene as though inspecting a pumpkin crop. “Just so ya know, ya shouldn’t eat ’em right away. Pumpkins gotta ripen up. Got that?”
“You’re still talking about that?” Llenn snapped. Yes, it was true that a properly ripened pumpkin was delicious, but that had nothing to do with the crisis at hand. Llenn’s favorite pumpkin dish was pumpkin dango dumplings. Shortly followed by pumpkin stew.
“You have a plan for this?” Boss asked Pitohui. She was clearly hoping that the answer was yes. Behind her, the other members of SHINC gazed at their tattooed hero with admiration and expectation.
Those tattoos crinkled into a smirk.
“A plan? You could say that.”
“Ohhh!”
“But we’ll need to convince a certain someone to do it,” Pitohui sneered, sending a devious sidelong glance at the back of the player looking for the enemy sniper with her Mosin-Nagant at the ready: Shirley.
She must have felt the virtual glances of SHINC and Llenn, because she turned back with a scowl and asked, “Did you call me?”
“The enemy party is cooking away, folks! Whatever we do, it’s gonna be soon!” called out Clarence, who was keeping tabs.
“I’ll make it brief,” said Pitohui. “First of all, Tohma will take the rifle to the roof of the building.”
“Okay, so we aim from above!” Boss raved.
“I’m not done,” Pitohui scolded her.
“Oh! Sorry!”
Shirley snapped, “Just get on with it.”
“Right, right. Tohma, you focus on finding and eliminating the enemy sniper. Don’t worry about shooting the team on the move. You won’t be able to shoot through the desks if they angle them your way anyway. They can all go inside the building, for all we care.”
“Have you forgotten the rules? We’ll lose,” pointed out Shirley, who was correct. Llenn wondered if Pitohui had given up on winning the competition.
“Now, now. Anyway, they’re going to climb up the building. It’ll take at least two minutes at the very fastest to reach the top. So we’ve got at least that much time.”
Assuming the edifice was twenty-five floors, climbing one set of stairs would have to be under five seconds to hit a two-minute total. That was extremely fast, but Llenn could manage it.
“And?”
“In the meantime, Shirley’s going to zoom off on her skis.”
“Glllp!” Shirley made a sound like she had food caught in her throat. She did have skis. They were a cross-country variety that had material at the back to keep from sliding. She’d used them to zip up a snowy slope in SJ2, and they weren’t that heavy, so she always kept them in her inventory.
“I’ll ask you later how you knew I had them. For now, yes, I could probably rush to that building within a minute. But—”
“Just sixty yards to go!” reported Clarence on the monsters’ progress.
Shirley continued, “But what will happen if I get there? I can’t handle the enemy all on my own.”
“No. But you can handle the building on your own.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll take M’s backpack, filled with as many grand grenades as it will hold. When you reach the structure, you blow yourself up.”
“Huhhh?”
Oh! I see…
Llenn could picture it now. She’d seen Pitohui’s vision.
There was a high-pitched noise nearby. M was firing the PPSh-41 on automatic in an attempt to slow down the opposing side. His gun’s top ejection spat out golden cartridges like a fountain. They looked like they would hurt if they hit your face.
Now that the desks were much closer, quite a few of the bullets struck their target, but that was all that could be said of it.
After about ten shots, M quickly spun out of the way, and the sniper shot from the enemy monsters passed through the space where he’d just been standing. The countless rapid-fire bullet lines he sent up were like a lighthouse beam illuminating his location.
“Fifty-five yards to go!”
“And what is blowing myself up going to accomplish?” fumed Shirley.
“It’ll fall down!” Llenn explained. “A chain explosion of large plasma grenades will chew up most of that skinny building! It’ll collapse, the same way the ship in SJ3 broke in half!”
The rest of the group murmured in surprise, except for Clarence, who reported, “Fifty yards!”
“Okay, fine! Goddammit!”
Shirley swung her left hand, and soon a pair of skis with sealskin backing appeared, along with two poles.
“Go, M.”
“Got it.”
M lowered his empty backpack and began to shovel grand grenades into it. After five of them, there was still room, but he instead made sure he could shut the zipper before adjusting the straps to fit Shirley.
“Here,” Boss said, handing her an ordinary-size plasma grenade. The timer was set to zero seconds. That meant an instant explosion as soon as the switch was pressed. Perfect for booby traps…or self-immolation.
“Thanks. Got any cups for a last toast?”
She didn’t understand what Shirley was getting at, so Pitohui answered, “After the game, maybe.”
“Urk!” Shirley glared at her, then hauled the backpack up and moved to the pillar closest to the window so she could equip her skis. Only the toes of her boots were fixed in place.
“Go ahead, Tohma.”
“Yaaah!”
Tohma took the Mosin-Nagant and its ammo, rushing along with her spotter, Anna, through the office on Boss’s orders.
“Thirty yards to go!”
Shirley squeezed the ski poles and attached the detonation grenade behind her back. “But just so you know, there’s no guarantee all the monsters are going to climb up once they’re inside the edifice. If they stay on this side and wait at the window, they’ll just shoot me, and that’s it.”
“True, but I have a feeling they’re all going up.”
“I assume you have a reason for that?”
“Bet your ass. It feels safer that way. If only one goes up, all progress stops if they fall on the way or run into obstacles. Having the entire group go as far as they can is a much more reassuring tactic.”
“Ugh! Reassuring? What are you, an octopus psychologist?”
“Twenty yards to go!”
“Oh? What, you haven’t figured it out yet?”
“…Figured what out?”
“Fifteen yards! They’re going to pass behind the building!”
“We’ll talk later. Dammit, you better be right about this!” Shirley snarled, crouching in preparation to jump through the window.
Time left: five minutes.
“They went in!” Clarence shouted as soon as she could no longer see them through the binoculars.
“Goddammit!” Shirley swore, then launched.
Though the skis did sink into the snow, she forcefully worked her arms and legs back and forth, which kept her sliding forward.
“She’s so fast! I want those!” Llenn marveled, clutching the M12S.
“You shouldn’t envy other people’s toys,” noted Fukaziroh. The girl who’d been doing nothing but building a doghouse had just reproached her.
Shirley left two parallel tracks on the snow behind her as she went. After ten yards, she hadn’t been shot at. After twenty yards, she was still in the clear.
M started blasting the PPSh-41 again from the window in order to draw the sniper’s attention toward himself. He fired wildly at the building a thousand feet away.
Shirley covered thirty yards.
The enemy did not fall for M’s diversion. They avoided him and fired at Shirley. Llenn could see the bullet line heading for the other woman—but before she could shout out a warning, Shirley fell onto her side. Sudden turns were tough in skis, so that was the best way to dodge an attack.
The gunshot rang out across the field, but the snow absorbed most of the sound; the merest of echoes came from the building. Shirley’s hit points weren’t changing. She had dodged the shot.
“Yesss!” Llenn cheered, right as something roared overhead.
That had to be Tohma. It was an instant counterattack as soon as she’d spotted their location. Another shot. Then another. That was to keep the sniper from popping back up.
In one swift motion, Shirley shook loose the snow covering her and used the poles and her sheer arm strength to get back on her feet.
Amazing!
You really had to know your way around snow to exhibit that kind of body control. As a Hokkaido native, Llenn understood this. Where did Shirley live in real life?
The sniper pushed off again with cheers at her back.
“You got this, partner!” screamed Clarence.
“Goooo!” yelled Llenn.
Pitohui, thankfully, said nothing that might upset her.
After Tohma’s fourth shot, her spotter, Anna, announced to the group, “Hit! I saw a flash of red effects!”
“Yes!” Llenn cheered.
But Pitohui commented “Earlier, I said they’d all climb up the stairs, but now I think some of them might come back” with all the nonchalance of someone realizing it was nearly time for lunch.
“Goddammit!” Shirley screamed. She had about eighty yards to go. She was pushing along even harder, the spitting image of a cross-country skier in the last leg of the race before the goal.
You can do it, Shirley! You can do it, Shirley! You can do it, Shirley! You can do it, Shirley! You can do it, Shirley!
Llenn felt as though she were cheering on an athlete at the Olympics. And her devotion must have worked because Shirley safely cleared the remaining distance.
And when she reached her objective, the sticklike building that was their final destination, a blue explosion followed.
The blast diameter of a grand grenade was sixty-something feet at maximum. That was easily large enough to envelop an entire side of the narrow edifice, before even taking into account that Shirley had five of those explosives. They went off in a chain reaction, the blue orb bulging larger and larger as it tore away the exterior wall, reaching up to the third floor.
The force of the eruption shot flurries of snow outward, obscuring Llenn’s view of the structure. Several seconds later, while the detonation was still rumbling along, the snow suddenly cleared. She could make out a crater on the building.
It was still standing, but the bottom three stories looked like ice cream that had been scooped out by a spoon. At its thinnest, the building had maybe 20 percent of its width left—just six feet.
But…it’s still not falling? Llenn worried—and immediately received her answer as the remainder crumbled.
The tall, tall tower lost its perfect straightness, then tilted, slowly picking up momentum as it fell toward their group.
“Yeep?” She backed away, trying to run.
“Have no fear. It’s not tall enough,” said Fukaziroh.
“Oh, right.”
Llenn stopped and watched the tremendous collapse play out instead. They were 150 yards away from the edifice, which had only ninety yards left of its height. But even though they knew it wouldn’t reach them, they were terrified seeing it implode in their direction.
“Eeesh…”
“Wa-hyo-yooo!” gurgled Clarence cryptically.
“This is scary,” admitted Sophie.
The structure plummeted sideways toward everyone—except for Shirley. When it struck the ground, it blasted the deep snow clean in another brief storm. The flakes and particles even flew into the office building where the team waited.
“Bwaaah!”
It blanketed their front halves in white. Despite the cushion of the snow, the sound and vibration of the crash were intense. The heavy desks rattled and jumped around.
After ten seconds or so, it was calm again. “Pff!” Llenn spat snow out of her mouth and beheld a perfectly toppled building.
The graphical cost of calculating and displaying the complete destruction of such a tall building had to be overkill, so it was still totally intact, just lying on its side, embedded in the snow. That would be inconceivable in real life, but this was a game. About 80 percent of the thirty-foot-wide rooftop was visible above the powder, about two hundred feet away.
It was impossible to tell from here what might have happened to the monsters that had been rushing up the stairs—but they probably weren’t okay.
“Now we only have to rush over there!” Llenn exclaimed. There was still 3:50 left, so they could even take their time getting to the building.
But Pitohui crushed that hope of hers.
“No, the goal’s moved.”
“Huh?”
“That’s not the tallest building anymore.”
“What? Whaaaaat?” Llenn gasped, looking up at her. Is that even possible?
“Correct. I’m grateful that you listened carefully to my explanation,” spoke Suuzaburou for the first time in several minutes.
“So the next tallest building, which is now the tallest, is the goal. Meaning that one!” Pitohui boldly exclaimed, pointing at a building two hundred yards to the southwest. It looked ten floors high, or approximately 130 feet tall.
“We’re going there, then? But…”
Time remaining: three and a half minutes.
“We won’t…make it?”
Six hundred feet through the snow and over a hundred feet of stairs.
The climb would be doable with fifty seconds to spare. If she had solid ground to run on, Llenn could have sprinted six hundred feet in less than thirty seconds.
But with the snow going up to her chest, there was absolutely no way she could cover that much ground in two and a half minutes. Even if M carried her piggyback. It just wasn’t happening.
“Oh no, it’s all overrr…,” she wailed as SHINC let out heavy sighs of frustration.
“It’s only over when you give up,” noted Fukaziroh sagely, patting Llenn on the back.
She spun around, thinking about what kind of comeback to throw out, when Fukaziroh handed her something. “Here’s your toy.”
It was a collection of parts that she’d used her incredible strength to pry loose from the pipe-frame chairs. She’d bent the metal into elongated circles, stuck the seats in the middle, and then tied ropes over the top to hold things in place.
In other words, they were a pair of DIY snowshoes. Just the device she needed to walk over the snow.
Llenn had never used snowshoes—but Karen had. They’d gone walking over the snow in them on outdoor events several times back home.
“Fuka, I love you!”
“I know.”
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