Sword Art Online Alternative – Gun Gale Online - Volume 11 - Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Bounty, Thy Name Is Llenn

Twelve thirty PM, September 19th.

“Good day to everyone tuning in! We’re here with the fifth Squad Jam, but you can simply call it SJ5! That’s right, we love our guns, we love our mums, and this one goes out to all you bums!”

In the spacious main hall of a certain large bar in SBC Glocken, the starting point of Squad Jam, a man was screaming rhymes into a mic with extreme excitement.

“It’s me again, your commentating gunfighter, Thane! Lately I’ve been getting barked at a lot by the dogs in my neighborhood!”

It was him.

Thane’s avatar was of average height, average build, and average looks, but there wasn’t a single person in this pub who didn’t know who he was.

His videos were very highly regarded. They were far, far more entertaining than the official replays of the event, which picked up hardly any sound and consisted only of battle scenes. You didn’t get bored watching Thane.

“Yeah! This is more like it!”

“Congrats on getting through the prelims!”

“Make it another fun one this time!”

“Hey, buddy! Try to last longer, why don’t ya!”

“Yeah, you die too quickly all the time!”

“Show us more of the battle!”

“Team up with a much stronger squad for once!”

Excited and irresponsible cheers and jeers cascaded over him from the packed audience in the bar.

Thane’s team, Zangiri Atama no Tomo (Close-Cropped Friends), abbreviated to ZAT, fell to MMTM in SJ2, SHINC in SJ3, and Llenn’s team in SJ4 while they were distracted by monsters. In each case, it happened in the early stages. They got their asses kicked.

As a team, they had the talent to make it through the qualifying round each time, but not much further than that. There was a general, unspoken understanding among all that you shouldn’t bring up the possibility that Thane’s focus on live-commentating the event made him largely useless in battle.

“Thank you, everyone! Thank you, thank you! Yes, I suppose living longer is my goal for today! Maybe this gear-switch concept will make a difference this time. I hope it does. But I’ll be ready for the worst, in any case. Aaaanyway, we’ve got thirty minutes left until the start of SJ5, and twenty until the cutoff to participate. This is about the time that all the teams come strolling into the bar! If I spot a well-known squad, I am going full-on journalism mode and charging in for some hard-hitting raw interviews!” he declared.

Just as he said that, the swinging double doors gave way, and a group of players walked through.

“Uh-oh! And here we have just such a team!”

Six men came into the bar—and just like that, it was silent.

To a man, they all wore Swedish army fatigues, a pattern of simple, straight lines in various hues of green. It was MMTM.

When not in tag form, their official name was Memento Mori, a famous Latin phrase meaning “Remember you must die.” The patches on their shoulders bore the insignia of a skull with a knife in its mouth.

Their leader, David, and the rest of the members were extremely talented soldiers. Most of all, their skill was in their teamwork. They were never simply working alone.

In all honesty, you could say they were the top team in Squad Jam, in terms of overall team ability, but for some reason, their survival rate was poor. They had never won the event.

Maybe they were just unlucky because they kept having to face Llenn and Pitohui. Naturally, MMTM’s hatred of Llenn and Pitohui was deeper than the ocean, and beating them to win was the majority of their motivation.

“The first through the door are MMTM! The championship favorites who’ve never been champions! I’ll go and get a word from them!” Thane said, rushing toward the team as they made their way for the private rooms at the back of the bar.

“Hello!” he said as loud as he could.

Kshing! David fixed him with a malevolent stare.

“That’s all I wanted to say!” Thane claimed, and returned just as quickly.

“What the hell was that?!”

“What a wuss!”

“Go in there and get killed!”

“Where’s your pride as a journalist?!”

“Don’t chicken out!”

“Don’t be afraid!” the audience jeered.

But they didn’t know what it was like.

Just as MMTM left the main hall, another group of six slipped inside.

“Oh?”

Thane and all the others looked their way, but nobody recognized the men. They’d never even seen them on a video stream. Were these newcomers to the event? Probably.

So when another team entered the door behind them, all eyes slid over to them, and the bar promptly erupted into sound at the sight of the six women.

“Uh-oh, here they are! The Amazons! In SJ3…you were a big help!” Thane said, ignoring the first team and slipping past them.

As it happened, the first six were T-S, the champions of SJ2.

Without their full-body armor and helmets, nobody realized who they were. Fortunately for them, this meant they could simply sit at one of the tables in the hall, rather than needing a private room.

Thane sidled up to SHINC as they made their way through the bar. “Hello, ladies! You’re all looking lovely today, let’s say for the sake of argument!” he said obsequiously, preparing to get hit.

But the pigtailed gorilla in the lead simply grinned at him. “Hey there, combat cameraman. You haven’t learned your lesson yet, huh? I’ll have to kill you again—in SJ, of course.”

“Heh. I’d like to…see you try,” Thane said as bravely as he could manage. He did earn some laughs for that one. At least, the Amazons in SHINC laughed.

They were heading for a private room in the back, but Thane tagged along next to them. “How do you feel about your chances today?”

“Well, it should be interesting…but it’ll be the same as always. We’ll give it everything we’ve got,” Boss said tantalizingly.

“I’ve got high hopes! You are certainly a team with the potential to win it all! Even if you haven’t!” he said, which sounded like a taunt.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she replied, taking the high road. “I’m noticing you’re not sexually harassing us today.”

“Huh? Did you want me to?”

“So I can sue you?”

“I’m sorry! Just one final question, if you’ll allow me! It’s a real serious question, of course!”

They were almost to the private rooms now. Boss said, “What?”

“The special rules this time allow for a secondary gear loadout, right? I assume you’ve come prepared with your own?”

“Of course. We don’t believe our opponents will be easy enough to let us win without it.”

“And…what exactly is your secondary gear?”

“The point is to use it to surprise your opponents. Do you really think I’ll say it here?”

“Please, anything you can tell my viewers,” Thane persisted with a smile.

“Fine, I’ll tell you. I’ve brought along a sexy bikini that’ll blow your mind,” she said, gorilla features smiling at the obvious joke.

Thane suddenly looked somber and switched to a serious reporter’s tone. “And that was her answer, which leaves us with more questions than when we began. Back to you in the studio.”

“Hey, shut up!”

“All right, Boss, enough playing around. Let’s go,” said Sophie, prodding her on the back. Boss and the others vanished into the private room.

Once they were gone, Thane said, “Oh, shoot!” as he remembered something. “I forgot to ask them about their friend, the little pink demon, having a hundred-million-credit bounty on her head!”

Minutes later, after a number of nameless teams had passed through and found seats throughout the bar, Thane’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, here we go! At last! I had a feeling they’d show up! It’s the defending champions! Out of respect for their accomplishment, I will call them by their full, official name, not the tag sign! It’s the All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers!”

“Whoaaa!”

“They’re here!”

“I’m so excited!”

“Congrats on winning it all!”

“Open bolts!”

The audience in the bar, having swelled over time, was exuberant.

Thane’s commentary was equally excited. “They suffered hardly any damage and lost not a single member in SJ4! Aside from the team that took advantage of circumstances in SJ2, no one’s had a cleaner win than them! That’s ZEMAL! Remember that name, because I surely will! And by the way, I pronounce that tag Zee-mall, not Zem-mal. Is that okay? Sorry if I’ve been doing it wrong!”

As Thane said, in SJ1 they were pushovers who got easily taken out from behind while they were having fun shooting at Llenn, and now they were champions. If you wanted to call them the team that had grown the most in the history of Squad Jam, you weren’t wrong.

Last time, they’d entered the bar with their new member, the only girl in the group, hoisted on their shoulders. But having won, they received prize money and a modicum of good sense, because they were walking in like normal people this time.

There was no question that Vivi was their leader, and it was clear to everyone that her arrival to the team launched ZEMAL into the stratosphere. All of their strategies in SJ4 had come from her, surely.

Thane said, “Excuse me, goddess of machine guns!” as he barreled into view.

The men in ZEMAL did not protest at the mention of the word goddess. They were her believers. They agreed with him.

“You were tremendous in SJ4! I was amazed! I’m looking forward to another complete and total victory today!”

“Thank you. We’ll do our best to live up to expectations,” Vivi said with a dazzling smile, sending the room into a frenzy.

For one thing, GGO had very few female players. And the ones you found in Squad Jam were vicious pip-squeaks, or wicked face-tattooers, or gorilla Amazons, or murderous snipers, or boyish temptresses. In other words, all insane—er, unique and quirky types. But Vivi was different.

Between her attitude, her manners, and the fact that she would paint a very pretty picture in an office setting with a change of outfits, she was altogether a very fetching grown woman.

Thane simpered a bit and said cheerily, “There’s a special set of rules around gear-switching this time, but given how you make full use of the machine gun’s qualities, you might need it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Perhaps. But maybe we’ve got something up our sleeves.”

“Well, you’d hope to startle your opponents, wouldn’t you? And speaking of surprises, there’s that strange bounty going around,” remarked Thane, asking the question he failed to pose to SHINC. “Are you going to keep an eye out for that?”

Vivi considered this for a moment. “The pink demon is referring to Llenn, I presume. I’ve heard about it, but I don’t know how much to trust it,” she said without interest—or without letting on her interest, at least.

But Thane persisted. “You didn’t hear the rest? The hundred million credits are already on display on the SJ5 bulletin board as an item within an item box. Once you’ve fulfilled the bounty, the winner will get sent the code to unlock it and claim the prize!”

This display was set up right after the bounty message was sent out.

In order to prevent fraudulent dealings, it was impossible to falsify the contents of an item box. The amount of money contained inside it was as real as real could be in this game.

Whether or not the player who eliminated Llenn would actually receive the code in a DM was a different matter.

“Oh, I didn’t know that,” said Vivi, whose dazzling smile made it impossible to tell if she was telling the truth or not. She continued, “In Squad Jam, every other team is your enemy. If you see them, you beat them. That includes the pink demon, of course. If we happen to earn something for doing that, I suppose I’d gladly take it. So long.”

The interview was over. Peter slid in between the two, playing the role of bodyguard.

“I’m looking forward to seeing your results!” said Thane, withdrawing willingly.

In VR worlds like GGO, there were sixty seconds for each actual minute of time.

The second hand on the clock in the pub ticked slowly onward as various teams made their way inside. Thane commentated on each entrance, keeping the crowd engaged. The only major difference this time was the lack of the mysterious masked squads in a tag-team alliance.

One forty-five PM passed, then 1:46, then 1:47, and at two minutes to go, the crowd got restless.

“They’re not here yet.”

“Yeah…”

“We didn’t miss them, did we…?”

“I don’t think so…”

The two-time champion of SJ1 and SJ3 (and thus leader in that category) and pink-clad pip-squeak was nowhere to be found; neither was her team. If no part of their bodies entered the bar by 12:50, they would be disqualified from SJ5 for being late.

“Probably waiting until the last moment again.” They’d barely made it in SJ2 and SJ3.

“What if they’re already here? Like that other time.”

In SJ4, it seemed like they didn’t show up, but they’d actually been waiting in a private room since an hour beforehand, so some people guessed it was that trick again.

“Nah. I’ve been here for four hours, and I haven’t seen a single member of the pink devil’s team yet,” someone said, to the shock of those who heard it.

“No way…”

“When are you showing up, Llenn…?”

“C’mon, man…”

“Why were you here so early, actually?”

“Ever since I lost my job, my wife bugs me about being at home. I had to escape to a Net café.”

“Thanks for that brutally honest story.”

Then someone noticed a new team coming in. “Oh, who’s that…? Huh?”

Thane also muttered, “What the—?”

“Huh?”

“Whut?”

“Why?”

The entire audience inside the bar was quite shocked by what they saw.

It was the group they’d been waiting for: Team LPFM, with M towering in the lead.

But there were two things that shocked the onlookers.

“The pink devil isn’t here… Oh no! Why? Qué pasa?!” Thane jabbered. Indeed, there were only five of them.

Massive M, tattooed Pitohui, tiny grenadier Fukaziroh, explosive sniper Shirley, and handsome girl Clarence.

One, two, three, four, five. That was it, nothing more.

No Llenn.

Perhaps she was just in the back because she was so small, they wondered. But it was not so. She wasn’t there. Simply absent. Not following in the others’ footsteps.

“And what’s going on with them? They’re all carrying their guns in the open! A little early for that, isn’t it, guys? You gonna stick up this tavern? And, M…what is that thing, man?!” Thane jabbered. Indeed, all five were fully equipped, from guns to protective vests to helmets to holsters to backpacks. They were wearing what they’d have on in Squad Jam.

There wasn’t any reason you couldn’t do this—but it wasn’t typical.

Trotting along at the front was Fukaziroh, MGL-140s hanging off both shoulders, while Pitohui held a KTR-09 in her right hand. Shirley and Clarence had their primary weapons in slings on their backs, too.

But the big surprise was M.

He was holding his brand-new antimateriel rifle, the Alligator, right out in the open, just showing it off to everybody.

A giant at six feet tall, holding a rifle like a six-foot spear on his right shoulder, stomping through the room. On his back was the huge pack he always carried, with the unbeatable defensive shield folded inside it.

The team was fully armed in a way you’d see only during Squad Jam and with some brand-new gear, to boot. He was carrying around the powerful gun that should have been a surprise for their hapless opponents.

“What the hell is that…?”

“That’s…an Alligator antimateriel rifle! They put it in the game…?!”

“There’s a lot more antimateriels now. You just don’t see them in the stores yet.”

“Because they’d sell out the instant they appear.”

“They’re saying if you want one, you gotta beat some mega-hard quests.”

“I just started playing GGO, and I don’t know the first thing about guns…but is that a Ukrainian bolt-action rifle with a five-shot 14.5 × 114 mm magazine?”

“Sounds like you know plenty.”

“It’s huge. Though it looks a bit smaller when M’s carrying it.”

“Thing’s a lance. You could kill someone just by holding it at your side and charging with it.”

“If I held that thing upright at my house, it would jab straight through the ceiling. I’d never get my security deposit back.”

“Okay, enough real-world talk.”

While the patrons of the bar added their own unnecessary commentary, Thane did the same. “A mystery! What a mystery! This ordinary, unremarkable Gun Gale Online bar has suddenly been plunged into the world of mystery! And to solve this mystery, special agent Thane has stifled the terror rising from his gut to proceed into the heart of mystery itself!”

He crossed the floor to the armed group, who were proceeding as slowly as a daimyo’s procession, and for some bizarre reason, asked in English, “H-hello! Everybody! How you doing?”

“Why English?” Fukaziroh replied in kind, lifting her helmeted head to glance at Thane.

Without missing a beat, he said, “Because I can’t speak French!”

“That makes sense,” said Fukaziroh, satisfied with his answer. She continued walking, as if to say that Thane’s job was done for now. Her face was determined, and her steps were firm, regal, and teensy.

Left behind, Thane turned to Pitohui next. “Ma’am, ma’am! Please, just two questions! Two is all I need! There’s no time, so I’ll just ask them! Where’s the pink pip-squeak? And why are you all weapon exhibitionists?”

The tattooed woman said casually, “Llenn decided not to attend.”

It was as casual as if she’d said, For breakfast this morning, I had toast with strawberry jam, plus natto and foie gras.

“Wha—?! Whaaat?!” he screamed, and a shriek-like ripple ran through the audience in the room.

Just then, a woman’s voice began the announcement that participants would soon be teleported to the waiting room, but the murmuring was so loud that no one could hear it.

Pitohui spoke as she walked, as if this wasn’t really such a strange thing. “As you all know, poor Llenn has some weird bounty on her head. She started sulking and said, ‘This is stupid. Stop ruining my Squad Jam. I’m not going to play. Good luck, everyone.’ We just got her private messages a little while ago. We told her it was just a game, and asked her to come and have fun with us, but oh well. Sorry if you were looking forward to seeing her. The five of us will be fine, though. We’ve got a new weapon, too. I’m guessing we’ll probably win this time, yet again. So long.”

As she walked off, Thane stopped in his tracks and murmured, “Oh my God…”

In the silence that followed, the stately procession continued out of the hall and into a private room.

Back on his own, Thane returned to his senses and announced, “D-did you all hear that? Did you hear that? What a shocker! A huge surprise! The pink shrimp is not taking part! Holy crap! A bolt from the blue! A twist of fate! What about the bounty?! What about SJ5?!” he screamed theatrically before realizing something. “Oh, wait. She didn’t say why their weapons are out.”

And then it was 12:50.

Like all the other participating players, Thane vanished from the spot, sent to the ten-minute waiting area.

The waiting area was dark and cramped.

If you weren’t standing on it, you wouldn’t even be sure there was a floor underneath. There was just a floating display reading TIME REMAINING: 09:59, which proceeded to count down in silence.

This was time for the SJ participants to spend freely, perhaps checking and prepping their gear, or getting hyped or relaxed, or coming up with team strategies or not, or even just sitting around feeling bored.

It was also the place where players who died in Squad Jam were sent again to wait for ten minutes.

Fukaziroh muttered, “We totally fooled them,” looking up at the mountain of a man who was her teammate. On M’s back, the massive, camo-pattern backpack opened on its own.

“Bwah!”

A small pink-clad player popped her head out. It was Llenn, of course. She’d been huddled up the whole time, hiding in the backpack without so much as twitching a finger.

M explained, “The teams we fight will notice right away, but we can just take them out as quickly as possible. If the folks in the pub see on the screen, they have no way of telling the other players. At the very least, this should mean we won’t get singled out by any teams who are just trying to play long enough to snag the bounty and don’t care about winning. Veterans aside, any teams who were staking out the main room in hopes of getting intel are bound to be disappointed now.”

Meanwhile, Llenn worked her top half out of the pack and wriggled up onto M’s shoulders. She had removed all her gear for size reasons, so she was wearing only her pink fatigues. Once her legs were free of the bag, she hopped down and landed safely.

“Oh! You’re here, Llenn? Oh no… I think I just lied to a journalist!” Pitohui exclaimed facetiously.

“Well, you were the one who told me to do it.” Llenn glared at her. Yep, it was all her idea.

Pitohui smirked, warping her cheek tattoos. “The majority are going to think you’re not here now, and they’ll freak out when they see you. Like you’re a ghost! Wow, what a brilliant idea… Sometimes I’m afraid of my own genius…”

“Yeah, yeah… Besides, I’m not going to skip out on Squad Jam just because of a stupid bounty.” Llenn pouted, puckering her lips.

The tattoos warped even harder. “That’s my Llenn!”

“I’m not yours, Pito.”

Clarence was seated flat on the floor with her legs splayed out in front of her: total relaxation mode. “Hey, Llenn, are you sure you don’t know who it is?” she asked.

Clarence was dressed in black from head to toe and had black hair, as well, which made her look like nothing more than a floating face in the black space. It was kinda freaky.

“No! I said no, already!”

The image of Fire Nishiyamada briefly flitted through Llenn’s head, but she banished it. She had nothing more than intuition in this case, but it didn’t seem like something he would do.

And through messages after the bounty announcement, Miyu and Goushi and Elza all agreed: This wasn’t his work.

She asked Miyu why she’d come to that conclusion in a split second. Her friend replied, “Probably because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with you anymore.”

Well, that truth bomb shut her up.

Llenn’s answer to Clarence: “Well, if I had a hunch of who did it, it would be anyone I’ve killed in GGO and Squad Jam!”

“Ahhh, I see. But that’s kind of an abnormal amount of money to put up just like that. It’s weird. Like, obsessive-weird.”

Credits in GGO could be converted to electronic cash. In other words, a real money transaction, or RMT. The exchange rate was 100:1, so one hundred million credits would be one million yen. In terms of cash to be spending on in-game entertainment, it was a bit bonkers.

“Well…I bet they all chipped in, bit by bit, and saved up the dough! Slow and steady!”

“I’m not sure about that…”

Even then, you’d be talking about a whoooole bunch of people who hated her, but why couldn’t that be the case? Just ignore the rest of the logic that said it was unlikely.

“Now, now, Clare, we’re not going to find out the answer just by debating it among ourselves,” Pitohui cautioned her.

And when she noticed that Llenn was giving her the coldest, most wintry stare of suspicion possible, Pitohui added, “Let me be clear, once again, and say that it was not me!”

Seven days earlier, just after the bounty was put on Llenn’s head, she got a message from SHINC’s Boss, also known as Saki Nitobe.

It was an extremely long and impassioned message, but the point of it was rather simple.

In short: “This is messed up! Next Squad Jam, let’s fight together until only our two teams are left!”

Llenn shared the contents of the message with her teammates, none of whom objected to the idea. They’d cooperated in SJ4 and the more recent quest, and there was no rule that favorites couldn’t team up with each other.

Why not do it? Once they’d eliminated all other teams, they could split up and have another showdown.

But there was one big problem…

“In order to group up with SHINC, we’ll have to wait for the 1:10 scan to determine their location and then leave it up to fate,” M said when there were six minutes remaining in the countdown.

He had already put the Alligator back into item storage and given his gear-switching set, or alternate loadout, or second loadout, to Pitohui to carry.

Resting against his thick legs at the moment was his favorite 7.62 × 51 mm NATO-round-shooting battle rifle, the M14 EBR.

Inside the backpack where Llenn had been hiding was now the folded-up shield that had played such a huge role in past Squad Jams. Minutes earlier, only two pieces had been in the backpack to keep its structure. Llenn had been packed between them, like the filling of a shield sandwich.

Pitohui and the others had entered the bar decked out in their full starting gear already, so they had nothing to do.

Llenn, too, had her beloved P-chan in her hand and three ammo magazines on either hip, ready to go.

Between the seven in the pouches and the gun, plus everything packed into her inventory, Llenn had twenty-five magazines in total. That was 1,250 bullets. That was quite a lot—a feat made possible by small ammo and fifty-shot magazines.

Her combat knife, Kni-chan, was also in place behind her lower back.

She’d already received the Satellite Scan terminal, a crucial part of Squad Jam, and had it tucked into the shirt pocket of her combat outfit.

She also had the three thick pen-shaped “emergency med kit” items—the only healing item allowed in the event, for the sake of fairness—in a waist pouch in front, where they were easily reachable.

As always, the large jewellike anti-optical defensive field, which greatly decreased the amount of damage taken from optical guns, was fixed to her belt.

“Indeed, the rest is up to fate. It’s the only way,” said Fukaziroh, who was even more relaxed than Clarence, nearly to the point of falling asleep, her limbs fully splayed out, lying flat on her back.

Her pillow was a backpack stuffed with grenades. Her large green helmet was resting on top of her stomach.

Now that they were in agreement to fight alongside SHINC, the biggest problem was how they could find each other and meet up as soon as possible.

The previous standard had been to scatter the most powerful teams’ starting points to the four corners of the map, which would presumably hold true here, too.

Those four teams would be ZEMAL, SHINC, MMTM, and Llenn’s team. Each of them had started in a different corner in SJ4.

The game map would be a square exactly 10 kilometers to a side, a bit over 6 miles. In other words, the total size was 100 square kilometers. And by comparison, the Yamanote Line loop around Tokyo had an interior size of 63 square kilometers.

That was big. Very big. It was difficult for two teams to reach each other.

You couldn’t set up your comm to patch in to enemy teams at the start. You could only find them in person and connect them that way.

After the first Satellite Scan ten minutes into the game, the teams’ locations would be revealed, but until that point, you couldn’t take any reckless actions.

After that, you would have to cross the map, littered with enemies at the start, and find each other. Until then, they’d have to fight powerful opponents like MMTM and ZEMAL, and survive to meet up.

Whichever spot would be quickest to meet, whether that was the middle of the map (from opposite corners) or right along one of the sides of the map, was unknown for now. They couldn’t do anything until 1:10, and then it would be up to fate.

“Llenn,” said Shirley, who rarely spoke to others first. “I’m along on this trip now. I’ll stay with you until we meet up with SHINC.”

“Thanks! That’s a huge help!” Llenn said, heartened.

“So will I, then!” said Clarence.

“Thanks!” Llenn replied.

“Don’t be fooled, Llenn,” drawled Fukaziroh, her eyes closed in an imitation of sleep. “They’re just making up a convenient, self-serving reason for hanging with us because they know survival will be hard with just the two of them at the start.”

“I know that! I’ve been competing in Squad Jams for years, now! But even if that’s the case, I’m thankful because it increases the chances that I survive!”

“You’re too nice for your own good, girlie. And that’s one of your better qualities. But before we go on, folks, I just have one question I hope to get answers for…”

Without getting up, Fukaziroh continued, “Once our victory in SJ5 is all but confirmed—meaning when our cooperation with SHINC is over, and we’ve finished off all other teams—the only thing left will be to twist those girls’ heads off. And assuming that’s something we can easily do without you…”

“I know, Fuka! You don’t have to spell it all out,” said Pitohui gleefully.

“I know what you’re about to say, too. I’ve been thinking about it this whole time,” Clarence said, grinning.

Shirley probably knew as well but didn’t say anything. M, as usual, was quiet.

Fukaziroh considered her horrifying speech.

“In that case, if I or our other teammates happen to shoot and punch and stab and kill you from behind…do you think we’d be eligible to receive the hundred-million credit bounty?”

“What?!”

Llenn, the one person who didn’t know what Fukaziroh was going to say, did a spit take.

She came to the sudden, sweat-trickling realization that her teammates—Pitohui, Clarence, Shirley, and even Fukaziroh on the ground—were staring at her with a gleam in their eyes.

You could practically see the yen symbol in their pupils.

“H-h-h-hey! Y-you guys…you guys don’t want money that bad, do you?!” she cried, a question straight from the soul.

“I do.”

“I do.”

“I do.”

“I do.”

Four voices spoke in order.

A moment later, M’s deep voice added, “If they’ll give it to me, I do, too.”

Llenn shivered. It was a high-speed bodily vibration, made possible by her incredible agility stat.

“Grr, grrrrr…fine! If you’re gonna try that, you better attack me all at once! I’ll fight you all off! But only once our victory is all but guaranteed!”

“Okay,” said Fukaziroh.

“You got it!” said Clarence.

“Will do,” said Shirley.

“Roger that!” said Pitohui.

“Understood,” said M, all in order.

The real strength of Team LPFM’s bonds was that it was expected that the members would fight. Probably.

With this heartwarming thought in mind, the countdown proceeded until it hit one minute.

“All right, you goons, the bus to the battlefield is leaving! You got your tickets? Don’t be late!” taunted Pitohui, pulling the loading lever of her KTR-09 to send the first bullet into the firing chamber. It made a nice metallic sound, the kind of thing that got every player in GGO pumped.

“Here we go, Rightony and Leftania…”

Fukaziroh hopped up to her feet, put on her helmet, and picked up the two MGL-140s she’d left on the ground.

“Hmm, I wonder what fun ways I’ll get to kill someone this time. Viva murder!” Clarence beamed, loading her AR-57.

“Hope you’re ready for your doom, Pitohui,” Shirley said to her teammate, cycling the bolt on her R93 Tactical 2. The rifle featured a straight pull bolt, meaning you only had to go back and forth. It was nice and quick.

Then she flipped on the safety switch behind the bolt.

The only people in GGO who bothered to use the safety on their guns were people with actual firing experience in real life, because it was already an ingrained habit. That held true whether it was live ammo guns or airsoft.

But people who’d only ever shot guns in GGO never used the safety. They prioritized being able to shoot at any moment, and in a sense, this wasn’t the wrong thing to do.

“Let’s do our best. Switch to your second loadout as the situation demands. You don’t need to wait for my orders,” said M. He pulled and released the charging handle of the M14 EBR.

The piece of metal picked up the top bullet in the magazine and pushed it into the gun, producing a high-pitched click that was the most impressive of any of them.

Then M engaged the safety. He didn’t forget.

The clock read five seconds left.

“Do your worst! Come one and come all! Try to take me out!”

The instant Llenn let go of the P90’s loading lever, everyone around her turned into flashes of light, leaving no one behind in the darkened space.

Then, just as the countdown on the wall reached zero, large words appeared next to them.

They said, About the special rules of SJ5: Here’s more! It’s really important! Read carefully! And don’t give up, even if you die!

They were followed by quite a long text explanation.

But there was no one there to actually read the text…

…yet.