CHAPTER 5
Converging
The attack came from behind.
The world beyond her back turned orange, and the ground beneath Llenn’s feet rumbled before she heard the sound. Then the shock wave lifted her tiny body into the air.
“Fwee?”
She flew.
It was as though she’d been launched by a catapult. Her brain experienced a virtual sensation of acceleration g’s like nothing she had ever felt before.
There had been a sound apparently, but it was so huge, and she was so preoccupied being tumbled like a piece of laundry in a washing machine, that Llenn couldn’t have said if she actually heard it or not.
As she spun and her mind focused, stretching the moment into slow motion, she could see a single mansion.
It was an impressive structure, built of red brick and sturdier than the others around it.
Unlike the others in the neighborhood, this one was two stories. The sloped wooden roof contained a truly majestic chimney that could have fit three Santas at once.
As it came back around into view with each rotation of her body, the building grew larger, like she was seeing it through stop-motion animation, and she could tell she was shooting toward it like a bullet.
She was going to hit it in a moment. It was like she was “falling” toward it, just at a ninety-degree angle.
Oh, I’m dead. Deader than dead, Llenn thought but did not say aloud. She couldn’t have, even if she wanted to. She couldn’t even tell if she was breathing, virtual world or not.
But even if I die, there’s something I can do while I have time left! Llenn thought, determined to make one final act of resistance.
She twisted her body in midair, flailing her arms and bending her knees, doing whatever she could to alter her balance and change her rotation so that her back was facing the house. She was like a satellite, using her arms to control her balance.
And if possible, she was trying to go through a big window, rather than hitting a brick wall.
Llenn’s desperate resistance, thanks to her incredible agility stat, or perhaps thanks to her natural reflexes—or both—paid off in the end.
Her tiny body managed to change its angle and posture just slightly. But even a small change could lead to big differences when you were speeding at an incredible rate. She changed course like a breaking ball thrown by a fireballing pitcher.
Just after her final rotation came to a gentle halt, Llenn slammed through the middle of a large window back-first.
The living room window shattered into pieces, allowing the small white-camo-poncho-covered form a most dynamic entrance to the room.
“Hyaaa!”
Llenn flew through the middle of the room until she hit the tattered, fancy couch there, butt-first, and bounced off.
“Whoa!”
The blast followed her inside the house, jarring everything loose and sending her into one last backflip, so she hit her back against the wall above the fireplace, then fell downward into a sitting position on the mantel.
“Whoa…”
Her vision was woozy as a result of the experience, but at least she had stopped moving.
Dreading what she would see, she checked her hit point bar. Sure enough, she had taken damage: about 30 percent.
But after being blasted dozens of yards away, she had to consider it a major victory that she hadn’t taken any more than that. She was still the lucky girl, it turned out.
And then she could see.
“Whoa…”
It was bright.
Beyond the room—which was dancing with dust, scraps of paper, and any other light thing that could float—outside the broken window, the sky was clear.
Like the usual GGO, it was a reddish-blue sky. Ahhh, what a clear day. It felt quite refreshing to see.
She could also see very far—three hundred yards, in fact—and very clearly through the neighborhood, which was now full of half-destroyed houses.
The world that had been totally shrouded in mist was instantly cleared up.
It’s sunny? Why? Llenn wondered, but the answer came to her almost immediately.
It was because there was a massive gray mushroom cloud rising toward the blue sky above the ruined residential block.
Oh, it blew away the mist…
The incredible pressure of the explosion, which was indeed significantly increased in size since SJ4, had temporarily cleared away the mist for several hundred yards around, making the world instantly more visible.
Awww…it’s so beautiful, Llenn thought before recalling that there was something else to check on first.
“Vivi? Are you all right?”
She had been far behind Llenn and must have taken much more of the violent blast. Although, with as big as it was, maybe the difference between their positions was minimal.
“I am…alive,” said her voice. She had not been knocked out of Squad Jam.
But she sounded fatigued. She was normally so reserved and graceful, but her voice sounded practically gloomy now.
Llenn hopped down from the mantel and said, “Where are you? I’m in a big redbrick house.”
“I can see it. The visibility is very clear now.”
“Can you make it over?”
“I can’t.”
Llenn figured it out. Vivi was in very bad condition at the moment.
Trapped under rubble? Stuck between things? Sprained ankle? Or even worse, missing a few limbs?
She didn’t know why Vivi couldn’t move, but she knew there was one thing she could do.
“I’ll go help you! Where are you?” Llenn said, jumping out the same window she flew through, right as a gust of wind and rumbling noise blew past.
“Pwah!”
Her poncho whipped and struggled wildly around her.
The stormy gust was dragging her forward from behind. Thanks to the massive building behind her, she was surely being spared from the worst of it.
It was the blast wind, sucking the air back into the low-pressure center.
White misty air surrounded Llenn, stealing her visibility again.
All of the charred buildings around the blast center, the empty foundations of structures totally demolished, and the blackened road were totally blocked by the fogginess once again.
Everyone who had been in there was certainly dead. It was just too far for her to see any of the DEAD tags in the air.
“Can you come right to me?”
“Okay!”
Llenn started running into the wind. The return of the mist was a good thing for them. It would hide Llenn in her white camo poncho and also hide Vivi, where she was currently immobile.
“You’ll have to give me directions, since I can’t see you. Am I getting closer?” she asked.
Vivi watched her infrared strobe light and said, “You’re fine. A bit farther to the left. Yes, now you’re in front of me.”
“Got it.”
Llenn proceeded over dirt littered with small pieces of wood. This was the yard of the huge mansion. It took her about fifteen seconds to cross the distance that she’d flown in just two or three.
During that time, the mist flowed back into the world, and the wind quickly died down.
She hurried along, avoiding or kicking the pieces of wood in her way, and eventually came to a fence.
It was a sturdy metal fence painted black, marking the property line between mansions. The bars on the fence were not rounded, but square, a bit more than an inch wide on each side. They were spaced about a foot apart, and each one was topped with a decorative point like the spade symbol from a deck of cards. The fence was easily over ten feet tall. It was like the fence around a prison.
Llenn was used to seeing fences like this in GGO. It was a commonly used bit of set design in the residential areas of the game.
They offered a clear view through and wouldn’t stop a bullet, and yet they were very hard to get past. On top of that, they often continued on and on, so players hated them, by and large.
If you had a plasma grenade, however, the spherical explosion would eat right through the bars, allowing you passage. It came in handy when there weren’t any enemies around.
Item damage was handled very carefully and specifically in GGO. In most cases, when something was broken, only the broken part would be affected.
In other games, when an item’s durability reached zero, the item would simply vanish in its entirety. In GGO, an item above a certain size would generally only break where it broke, and everything else would retain its proper shape.
This was why you could put a hole in a wall, and the wall itself wouldn’t simply vanish. Same thing for fences. It was said that this happened because GGO was fixated on re-creating the realistic sensations of doing battle in post-apocalyptic ruins—that it was a result of pursuing the beauty of destruction—but it wasn’t clear if this was true or not.
Llenn reached the fence and was just wondering where Vivi was, when she heard her voice say, “Oh dear.”
“Huh?” Llenn looked in the direction she heard the voice come from: upward.
And she was shocked into silence.
“…!”
She’d been so focused on the ground beneath her feet to keep from falling that she’d never noticed on her approach.
Vivi was on top of the fence…
…with the sharpened points digging into her stomach.
“Wha—?! Huh?! Are you…?”
Are you all right? she wanted to ask but realized that it was pointless. Instead, she tried to grasp the situation.
Three of the pointed spades at the top of the fence’s bars were stuck in Vivi’s body.
One was deep enough through her lower left flank that it burst out the back side. She was totally skewered.
One was high on the right side of her stomach, vanishing into her body just below the lung. It went through the thick fabric of her chest rig, too.
One was jabbed into her left thigh. This one was only the tip, but even still, it was an inch or two in there.
Spades were meant to symbolize the pike, and they were certainly displaying that quality here. Vivi was facedown and slightly bent, suspended ten feet off the ground, completely immobilized.
Even if she wanted to pry herself off the points with her limbs, the crossbar was too close to her body; she couldn’t apply enough force to leverage herself up. And below that, it was nothing but vertical bars, with nothing to push against.
But even beyond that, if she tried to move herself, it was likely to just shift her weight farther downward.
It was like the sort of thing that shrikes did to their smaller prey, impaling them on sharp branch points. All Llenn could think when she looked at Vivi was, The poor thing…
Just to be clear, GGO is a game about having fun killing other people with guns, as well as other means. Like many other players, Llenn had pressed her gun to people’s heads and blasted them through, had blown them to pieces with a well-aimed grenade, and had torn vertically through a man’s groin with a knife.
Okay, maybe only Llenn had done that last one.
But these were all things that you would never expect to see happen when you lived in peaceful Japan. They were so unreal, so beyond the scope of reality, that the shock of them didn’t really register.
So in comparison, seeing Vivi’s current state, something tragically horrific that could possibly happen, was much worse.
How did this happen?
Until the blast had hit them, she’d been with Llenn.
But Vivi had been knocked high into the air and, through some twist of fate, had landed right here on top of the fence stomach-first.
Her RPD fell over ten yards away on the other side of the fence. It looked lonely and forlorn in the misty distance. Hopefully it wasn’t broken.
“Of all the terrible luck… Ouch,” Vivi hissed weakly.
Of course, pain in GGO was nothing like pain in the real world, but there was no way that the sensation of having something virtually jammed through your torso was pleasant.
Llenn asked the most important question: “How are your hit points?”
She couldn’t be fine. Was it 20 percent down or 30? And if she was impaled, that meant she had to be continually losing more with every second.
“The moment I landed, I was down to half. Now I’m at twenty percent left.”
“Yikes!” Llenn blanched. Her guess had turned out to be extremely optimistic.
If left on her own, Vivi would run out of health in less than a minute. She was going to die, and her SJ5 would be over.
At that moment, Llenn’s wristwatch vibrated, and she glanced at the time. It was 1:29:30. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.
In just twenty seconds, the third Satellite Scan would start, and all ammo would be replenished, but there was no time to check the map now.
There was a more important task at hand. She had to save her suffering comrade.
“Emergency med kit!”
“I can’t reach it.”
“I’ll do it! Where?”
“Left thigh pocket.”
“Got it!”
Llenn quickly jumped onto the bars. Holding one bar in each hand and using the soles of her boots to launch herself upward, she quickly shimmied up. She was climbing as fast as a monkey. Even faster, in fact.
When she was little, in terms of age and size, Llenn had climbed lots of trees with her siblings. Who would have guessed that it would come in handy here? The skill came right back to her, like riding a bicycle.
“Oh my goodness,” remarked Vivi at the sight of Llenn zipping up the bars.
She reached for Vivi’s left pocket. The spade stabbing her thigh right in front of that spot was horrendous to look at. The red of the bullet hole—er, fence hole?—glowed intensely.
Llenn carefully pulled out the med kit, which looked like a fat pen, and stuck it into Vivi’s leg.
“Thank you.”
Vivi’s body glowed, and her hit points began to recover. The problem was that it would heal only 30 percent of her maximum health. And it would take three minutes to finish.
At this stage, it was doing nothing more than prolonging her death for a few moments.
“Well, I’d really like to pull you off of there…”
But Llenn knew it would be impossible with her strength. She simply couldn’t imagine using one hand to lift the skewered Vivi up off the spikes. She probably wouldn’t be strong enough even with both hands.
“Do you have a plasma grenade?”
That blue spherical surge would do the trick. But she had a feeling Vivi didn’t have one. If she did, she would have dropped it already.
“Unfortunately, no,” came the answer Llenn expected.
Arrrgh! If only Pito or Fuka were here! she thought.
“Arrrgh! If only Pito or Fuka were here!” she shouted out loud.
“Well…it’s not going to work. I suppose this is it for me. You go on ahead.”
“……”
That might be the logical conclusion.
The massive explosion probably scared everyone off, but there was no guarantee other enemies wouldn’t converge on this spot, and if that happened, the two were sitting ducks.
Perhaps Llenn should just go on and survive on her own. That’s what kind of game Squad Jam was anyway.
“In that case,” Llenn said, making up her mind with a smirk, “I’ll keep trying until it’s over.”
She let go of the bars and kicked off the fence. As she floated through the air, she waved her hand to bring up the menu, then hit the equipment switch button.
The backpack that had been protecting her vanished, as did the Vorpal Bunnies and their holsters. When she landed, the P90 was forming right before her eyes.
The familiar shape was a mixture of straight lines, curved lines, and some other kinds of lines she couldn’t describe. You might say it had functional beauty, or you might not, but in any case, it was a shape Llenn was very fond of. It was also pink, the color she chose to paint it.
Don’t even have twenty seconds left!
Llenn grabbed the P90 and sent the first bullet into the firing chamber by pulling and releasing the loading lever.
Vivi replied by asking weakly, “Trying what?”
The vertical bars were about a foot apart. There were three consecutive bars skewering Vivi.
Here goes, P-chan! Show off your blade! Or your fangs! Or whatever!
“You got it! Let me handle this!” said the P90 in its energetic, boyish voice.
Llenn pointed the gun at one of the bars. If she stuck it right against the metal, it might deflect the bullet back, so she gave it a few inches of space.
Bratta-ratta-ratta-ratta-ratta-ratta!
The P90 spat fire for the first time this game, and the collision of bullets and metal bars sent up sparks.
The bullets were very small and light, less than a tenth of an ounce, but when delivered at supersonic speed, even a metal bar would suffer. And this was fifteen bullets a second.
The gun fired so fast that the shots sounded like one continuous sound. Empty cartridges glittered as they flew out of the bottom of the gun, then glittered again when they vanished from the game.
With each hit, the bar bent and warped, until at last it snapped in two.
“That’s one!”
Llenn checked the ammo counter in the bottom right of her vision. The P90 had a magazine capacity of fifty, and there were still over thirty shots remaining. She set about to sever the next bar.
Another round of automatic fire.
P-chan growled. Sparks and empties flew.
She was getting the hang of it. The second one snapped quite easily.
“That’s two!”
Watching from ten feet off the ground, Vivi asked her, “Did they teach you how to do that in the manual?”
“Nope!”
Llenn continued, determined to use all the bullets in her magazine.
There was a third series of sparks and gunshots. Sorry for the distraction, everyone trying to work nearby. Almost done.
“Got it!”
The third bar snapped. Only the horizontal bar was left.
There was no time to pay any attention to the surroundings. Llenn performed a blindingly fast magazine change, bumping the P90’s ammo counter up to fifty-one. Fifty in the magazine—one in the chamber.
She propped the P90 against her shoulder and then monkey-climbed back up to Vivi. It was frustrating that even having snapped off the roots of the columns, the horizontal bar was still holding them firmly in place.
“How much left?”
“Ten percent, maybe?”
With that cleared up, Llenn used her empty left hand and her feet to hold herself steady, then used the P90 with her right hand to shoot.
She started with the right side of the bar. The gunshots and sparks sprayed, gouging away at the two-inch-thick bar, which eventually snapped.
“Whoa!”
“Urgh!”
The next moment, the top of the fence bent downward, along with Vivi.
Llenn was left hanging from nothing but her left hand, while Vivi and the piece of fencing hung at an angle, though not far enough to snap off the other end.
“Why, you…”
The fence was Llenn’s archenemy, her biggest foe in Squad Jam to date. She stretched with her right arm and managed to point the muzzle of the gun at the spot where the horizontal bar was bent.
“Take thiiiiis!”
She fired and fired and fired.
It took all her focus to keep the recoil under control so that the gun still pointed at the target. It was a very unbalanced posture, so several of the bullets simply vanished into the mist and beyond.
The world was full of sparks and gunshots and cartridges, until the horizontal bar suddenly and mercifully lost its purpose.
“Hya!”
Vivi was free from the bar—and trapped in gravity’s clutches.
She entered free fall from ten feet up, along with the fence stuck in her.
Oh no, she might die from the fall! Llenn thought, terrified, as she hung from the fence with one hand. But it was too late for that. There was no other way to do it anyway.
Don’t die, at least!
Vivi plunged toward the ground, turning horizontal, with the metal bars stuck in her abdomen and leg.
“Whoa, there!”
She landed in a pair of burly arms, which belonged to a burly voice.
Since she hadn’t been looking down or around, Llenn had never seen the player running toward them. She had no idea.
Then she saw who it was: someone she’d been hoping to see.
“Boss!”
“Yo! You’ve been through quite an ordeal!”
There was a pigtailed gorilla dressed in speckled green camo below, looking up at Llenn with a smile that would cause little children to burst into tears.
Her signature gun, the VSS Vintorez silenced sniper rifle, was slung over her back.
“There we go,” she said, and with a motion like lifting a baby, she held Vivi up with one hand and pulled out the spears impaling her with the other. It was like pulling the skewers out of a piece of grilled chicken.
Within moments, all three were out, and she set Vivi gently on the dirt.
Vivi looked up at the massive gorilla from the ground and said, “Oh, thank you. I’ve never seen my hit point bar so close to empty. Thank you both.”
The fact that she wasn’t dead meant her hit points had stopped decreasing. Thanks to the med kit, in fact, they were recovering. Unless she took on fresh damage—like, say, if Boss rolled over on top of her and crushed her, in which case she might die—Vivi would be fine.
“I’m so glaaaad!” Llenn wailed, hopping off the top of the fence and paying close attention to ensure she wouldn’t accidentally land on Vivi.
But before she landed, she spotted a man in the distance holding a Swiss SIG SG 550 assault rifle and screeching, “Lucky meeee!”
The man, whose clothes and face were familiar, stood out against the thick fog about twenty yards away, pointing his gun at them. He must have heard Llenn shooting, thought it was a battle, and crawled up to get a closer look.
Since the three of them were preoccupied and weren’t in any position to counterattack, he must have stood up for a more comfortable aim.
Knowing that one of his three targets was worth an incredible amount of money, it was no wonder he was feeling lucky.
I get it. I really, really get it.
But despite the pinpoint accuracy of her instantaneous guess, Llenn was unable to counterattack. He started firing before she could aim and fire the P90. He was going to riddle her and Boss and Vivi with bullets and knock all three of them out of SJ5.
Would you at least shoot me first? Llenn prayed.
Since she was the smallest target, maybe he would miss a few shots, so Boss would actually have enough time to do something—if not while Llenn was alive, then while she was dead.
She hit the ground, staring down the barrel of the gun the man was about to fire at her.
“Hagk!”
He suddenly lurched backward and toppled to the ground.
She could see the glowing red dot on his face, which made it obvious he’d been shot.
Bing.
The DEAD tag appeared instantly over the spot where he fell. It had been a fatal headshot.
Very well done.
It wasn’t much fun as a game if people just died immediately, so the range of insta-kill points was actually quite narrow in GGO.
It depended on the power of the bullet you used, of course—but for a normal assault rifle, you couldn’t deliver that kind of instantaneous death, not even allowing a pull of the trigger in response, unless your shot went right through the brain stem.
But where did it come from? Who did it? I didn’t hear any shots, Llenn thought as she lowered her P90.
“Oh. So it was you guys,” said a man’s familiar voice behind her.
Llenn spun around and matched the sound to the face she saw.
“Ohhh!”
Standing about twenty yards away, covered by a light layer of mist, was a man holding a Steyr STM-556 assault rifle, with a silencer attached, plus a grenade launcher.
He wore green camo in a blocky geometric pattern, featuring a shoulder patch of a skull holding a knife in its mouth: the leader of his team, David.
It was 1:32.
The four of them—Llenn, Vivi, Boss, and David—were on the second floor of the huge brick mansion Llenn had been blasted into earlier.
For their present needs, it was actually quite a lovely location to occupy.
The walls were all sturdy brick, which would make it difficult for any bullets to get through. Even bricks would chip away if shot consecutively, so it wasn’t perfectly safe. But a wall of multiple layers of brick wouldn’t let any initial shot through, or a second, or a third. Although an ultrapowerful antitank rifle or antimateriel rifle would probably do the trick.
If this were your typical two-by-four wood construction seen in America, the walls would be very thin. Rifle rounds would cut right through the structure on the first shot.
Thanks to GGO, Llenn had learned that being inside a house or vehicle did not make you safe from military rifles. It was the kind of knowledge she didn’t know how to make use of in the real world.
On top of that, it was a two-story structure, so they had a vantage point of several yards higher than anyone else.
The mist was still thick, and it was hard to tell what was more than thirty yards away. Still, having better visibility and verticality than being on the ground was an unquestionable advantage.
In combat, whoever had the high ground had an overwhelming edge. This was something Llenn had learned in GGO. Again, not something she knew how to make use of in real life.
The four of them were in different rooms.
There were rooms that faced north, south, east, and west on the second floor, so they each took one. Boss was in the east room, Vivi was in the west, Llenn was in the south, and David was in the north.
They peered out the windows there, covering each cardinal direction. The interior of the house was a wreck, to the point that it was hard to imagine anyone had ever lived there, but at least the floor was sturdy.
Once they were all in place and could confirm that nothing was out of the ordinary outside, Vivi said, “Let me thank the three of you again. Llenn for the great idea, Eva for the nice catch, and David for the superb headshot.”
Her voice was gentle and genuine. Of course, they were all using the comm, which they’d connected to one another.
“You’re welcome,” said Llenn sprightly.
“Believe it or not, I’m good at catching people. I’m glad it came in handy,” said Boss happily; she was a gymnast in real life.
“Look…it just worked out that way. You don’t need to thank me,” said David, refusing her sentiment. But he certainly sounded pleased. He just couldn’t hide his true feelings.
“Now, as for the scan,” he continued.
Two minutes ago, the third Satellite Scan passed, and he was the only one who got to see it. Llenn and Boss were too busy guarding Vivi with their bodies and focusing on the surroundings, since a single bullet, or even a good graze, would have killed her.
“There were no leader dots within two-thirds of a mile of us. Of course, that doesn’t mean there are no enemies that close. There were still thirty dots, meaning no teams have been collectively wiped out yet. In fact, none of the leader dots moved much at all.”
Interesting, interesting.
That told Llenn that Boss wasn’t the leader of SHINC. It was probably Tanya, the speediest.
David, too, had given the leadership role to someone else. He probably decided he wanted to be a free-roaming soldier so that he could help trick opponents and ambush them.
Llenn had her P90—with all ammo refilled—propped against the side of the window, with her eye keenly watching the ground outside. Her hit points were recovering, thanks to the med kit she’d used. It should bring her back up to 100 percent. And none of her teammates were dead.
“You’re the leader of LPFM, right? So they know you’re here. But it’s not a bad spot,” David had said. And he was right.
If you were going to stay put and defend a position, this was a great one to choose. With a few exceptions in terms of enemies.
“If another one of those explosive freaks from before shows up, we’ll be screwed.”
Yes, those guys. Because of the thick mist, it was impossible to keep them a long distance away from you. And once they were close, they were invincible. DOOM still had up to five members remaining.
Boss said, “Even still, let’s wait here until Vivi’s back to normal.”
While she was recovering, Vivi’s remaining hit points were still low, and it would be dangerous to let her go out into the open.
“Agreed!” said Llenn.
“Got it,” said David.
“Thank you all again,” said Vivi.
And that was how the four of them agreed to put down roots and watch their perimeter. They were going to hold down the fort.
With their strategy decided and her position secured, Llenn went ahead and asked what she wanted to know. “Boss, what have you guys been doing?”
“Well, once these shitty rules were revealed, we planned on survival, nothing more. We said, ‘Let’s stay in place and hide until two o’clock, no matter what.’ In fact, I ordered the team to do that. I started from this residential block.”
“Oh, I see.”
So by coincidence, Boss’s starting point hadn’t been that far away from Llenn’s. Their unified map data, which popped up once they were standing next to each other, proved as much. The only thing it added to Llenn’s map was a bit more of the neighborhood.
She’d also gotten map data from the three players who tried to run her over, but she still had less than 10 percent of the map overall.
Despite knowing she was fairly close to Llenn, Boss had been disciplined enough to stick to her words and stay put. After all, if she’d gone chasing after Llenn and died, it would have been for nothing. And given how fast Llenn was, they could have simply passed each other in the mist without realizing.
“Right at the start, I put down some chairs in the back of one of these houses and hid. And around twenty minutes in, someone actually snuck inside.”
“And that was David?”
“No. It was one of the all-optical team guys that keeps entering Squad Jams. I was thinking I’d take him out, but he wouldn’t come into a position where I could get out my gun and aim. I could have used a pistol, but I didn’t want to make noise. Eventually, he just started hanging out at the window and made himself at home. It was a real pain.”
She could have taken him out with a single shot from the Vintorez, a silenced sniper rifle, without drawing any attention, but only if she could manage to aim it at him.
David explained, “Through some odd twist of fate, I happened to start very close by. And by coincidence, I happened to see him hiding in there. I got in and quietly eliminated him—and the next thing I knew, Eva and I were glaring at each other in the same room.”
“I see.”
So it was similar to what happened with Llenn and Vivi.
At that close range, it would be a mutual kill at best. So in that situation, better to team up with someone you already knew was talented.
“I wasn’t planning to team up with anyone, and I told my teammates the same thing—but I didn’t want to die before I could meet up with them… And when I saw Eva leering at me with a grand grenade strapped to her forehead, all I could do was click my tongue with disgust.”
“It didn’t seem like a proper attitude to exhibit toward a lady,” Boss said gleefully.
If David had shot her, the extra-large plasma grenade would have gone off and exploded the entire house.
Boss continued, “We were just going to wait until two o’clock from there, but that mammoth explosion busted up most of the house. We should have taken that bombing team into account from the start. If only I’d picked out a brick house to hide in. Can’t believe I forgot the age-old lesson from ‘The Three Little Pigs.’”
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” Llenn roared.
“So once I managed to dig myself out of the rubble, I heard a P90 going off like crazy. I knew there was a good chance it was you, so I carefully made my approach until I saw you.”
“Interesting!”
It was a good thing the house they’d been hiding in was only half-destroyed. If they’d been any closer to the center of the blast, they could have been obliterated along with the house or crushed under the rubble, and that would have been it for the both of them.
Plus, Llenn and Vivi would have gotten shot by that man, and it would be curtains for them, too.
David said, “I know it’s a little late for this, but…these are the only two real options for the first hour of this Squad Jam: Either you do nothing and hide on your own, or you find someone else at random and temporarily team up.”
“That’s right. And three is better than two, so four should be better than three, right?” said Vivi. Llenn and Boss could tell what they were saying.
“Very well,” said Boss with a grin, her voice deep and menacing. “The four of us can’t possibly find fault in one another’s skill.”
“No, no, no! Of course not!” insisted Llenn quite sincerely.
The other three were right there among the toughest players in Squad Jam. If anything, she was easily the weakest of the four.
Her wristwatch said it was 1:35.
For the next twenty-five minutes, the four of them could take whatever that nasty sponsor threw at them and survive, easy.
And after all…our real battle starts at the hour! SJ5 begins at two o’clock. We just showed up a little early, that’s all.
“Very well. Then with that decided—with that decided…let’s…stay here and do what we’re doing,” said David, who realized belatedly that he had run out of ways to end that sentence.
Llenn had no objections. Camping out in the upstairs of a sturdy building with eyes in all four directions was a huge advantage. Except against antimateriel rifles. And suicide bombers.
However, there was one cause for concern: herself.
“But my location will be known at forty and fifty minutes. I know I pretended to not be participating. But maybe some people weren’t aware of our trick.”
“Well, we can’t do anything about that,” said Boss at once. “If it happens, we’ll just use you as a marker to lure suckers closer.” What a pal.
“There you have it. I’ll heal myself up to sixty percent. But until then, let me take the back-seat role,” said Vivi.
She had used her second med kit, then. Even that would only put her a bit short of 60 percent, three minutes from now. She had only one more after this. That was a big blow to suffer right at the start.
David said, “You have a silencer, right, Llenn? Put it on your P90.”
“Oh! Roger!”
It was the first time he’d ever given her tactical instructions, but she wasn’t going to complain.
Llenn removed the cylinder from her inventory and stuck it onto the muzzle of her P90 to prevent its sounds of battle from spreading far and wide. Like the gun, it was painted pink, of course.
In addition to dampening the sound, the silencer also hid the blazing muzzle flash of the gun, too. That would make it harder for enemies to notice her, even when shooting in the mist. There was no hiding the bullet lines, though.
Of course, such a convenient item did not come without its downsides.
First, it was simply an expensive item to acquire. And having it attached lowered the gun’s accuracy.
Most of all, though, it increased the length of the barrel, making the gun less mobile. This was Llenn’s least-favorite part of the silencer, since part of the reason she chose the P90 was because of how short it was.
It was best to put it on while they were holed up in here, though. She decided to be good and equip the item.
She felt much more reassured with plenty of companions around.
Llenn thought, At this point, with this group, I feel like I can easily survive until two o’clock. First, I teamed up with Vivi, and despite some spills, we survived, and then we teamed up with David and Boss, two more powerful players…
I really am a lucky girl.
That was at the same moment that Boss hissed, “Enemy attack!”
Boss was at the eastern-facing window. Llenn was facing south, so she moved along the windowsill and angled herself so she could look in that direction. Unfortunately, because of the house’s construction and the angle, she couldn’t see the enemy.
“There are two players running from the east. Neither appears to be a teammate. I don’t see anyone else. They’re aiming to get inside this house. I’ll shoot,” Boss reported, firing precise information to the others in a prompt fashion.
If they’re not from any of our four teams, then waste ’em, Llenn thought.
“Firing. Two down,” Boss reported.
Thanks to the silenced Vintorez, Llenn didn’t hear a single sound.
Surely that would mean no one else had realized they were hiding in the building. Yeah, it was still a secret.
The Vintorez had a firing-mode switch that allowed you to use automatic fire, too. Though the range was lower, you could use it as a silenced assault rifle, if you wanted.
Boss must have turned it on full auto and showered the two oncomers with bullets. Llenn had a terrifying run-in with that gun in SJ1, but it was great to have on your own side.
Relieved, Llenn checked her watch again: 1:38.
It’s a little early, but I guess I’ll prepare to check the next scan, she thought comfortably, just before the building shook.
“Hyeep!”
Some kind of explosion had rocked the brick building. The sound of the blast filled the room.
“Grenade launcher!” said Boss. “It landed below my room. I don’t see who—”
Gunfire drowned out her voice. It was a furious machine-gun racket that filled the entire world. Sounds that heavy and that close together could only come from a 7.62 mm machine gun.
“Gah! Pulling back!” Boss exclaimed. Her tone of voice was what caused Llenn to finally realize how serious the situation was.
The machine gun was hitting the east side of the building, it seemed. Llenn could actually feel the vibrations slightly from her room.
“Need backup?”
“No!” said Boss. “Don’t lean out toward the east!”
“Wait a moment!” said Vivi in what was a positively panicked voice by her standards. “That’s our Shinohara! It’s an M60E3!”
Ugh! Llenn thought.
“Ugh!” David yelled out loud.
“Either way, there’s no way to get back at him. Do something!” pleaded Boss.
If it was someone from ZEMAL, then his machine gun would be hooked up to the backpack-loading system. That would give him about a thousand bullets he could fire consecutively.
He couldn’t actually shoot that long due to barrel overheating, but ZEMAL had more practice switching out barrels than washing their own faces. He could do it in a blink.
Although Llenn couldn’t see it, she could envision the situation in her mind’s eye.
Boss was hiding in her room, which was under a hail of bullets at the moment. Shinohara must have seen her bullet lines when she shot the other two players. He must have come running right after them.
Thanks to the brick construction, the bullets wouldn’t immediately hit every corner of the room, but with that rate of fire, there was no way to peer out the window or stick your gun out to shoot back.
That’s not good!
And even if she could shoot back, she shouldn’t. Shinohara was Vivi’s teammate, after all.
If only she were on the east side, she could use the infrared strobe light on the top of her poncho to show Shinohara that she wasn’t an enemy, and he wouldn’t open fire. What bad luck.
If only she had a time machine, she could have protected the eastern side instead, just a few minutes ago.
“I’ll go!” said Vivi’s voice.
Llenn couldn’t see her, but she must have been crossing the house from the west side. Llenn was on the south side, which was closer to Boss. She wondered if she should go, since she was faster. If she could somehow show off the strobe light, Shinohara should stop shooting.
But since Vivi was already on the way over, she decided not to butt in.
The gunshots continued.
She needed to keep an eye out for new enemies on the south side and the west side, now that Vivi wasn’t covering it anymore.
No worries, Vivi will solve this one, Llenn thought, but then a different idea occurred to her. Wait, grenade launcher? That’s what Boss said first, right? That first vibration was from a grenade?
“Vivi! Does Shinohara have a grenade launcher?”
“No. I think he must have teamed up with someone,” said Vivi. Of course, she was smart enough to have guessed that.
Shinohara was probably forming a tag team, or perhaps a trio, with someone who had a grenade launcher. But if they showed Shinohara the strobe light, the attack would most likely stop.
He would tell his companion not to attack his own teammate, and if they were a decent player, they would heed his request and stop, too.
“Made it!” said Vivi. She had entered Boss’s room. That horrible machine-gun clatter would stop very soon. Please, please let it stop.
Please don’t let Shinohara shoot Vivi! Llenn prayed fervently. It would be too tragic to believe.
And just like that—the M60E3 stopped shooting. The world was silent.
In that new, sudden silence, Vivi shouted, “Shinohara! Come and meet up here!”
Llenn heard her through the comm in her left ear and through the air in her right. Apparently, she had an impressive set of lungs on her.
And then, at least as loud: “Ohhhhhhh! Leader! You’re in there?! I’m so sorry for shooting at youuuu!”
Shinohara’s voice sounded even louder than Vivi’s.
Llenn was totally relieved. At the very least, there would be no tragedies of friendly fire.
“I’ll go over there now!” Shinohara continued, getting closer. Llenn snuck a look out the window and saw a figure emerge from the mist to the southeast of the building.
Just in case, she pointed her P90 toward him, but made sure not to let her finger touch the trigger.
Sure enough, the man coming through the mist was Shinohara, the member of ZEMAL who had black hair and a headband, just like the hero of a certain action movie. He rushed over, making his way around the rubble from other exploded houses.
“I’m so sorry, Leader! I was following two other players, and I believed they had fled into this house!”
“No, we beat them.”
“Understood! You may scold me as much as you want later!”
Uh-huh.
So Shinohara had teamed up with whoever had the grenade launcher and was tracking the two whom Boss had just taken out. He never noticed that the two had died, so he simply assumed that whoever was inside the house was his enemy and started shooting.
Apparently, those two players were running to get away from Shinohara and his friend, then. That was understandable.
Shinohara rushed up to the building, where Llenn could see him.
He was wearing a green fleece jacket with black combat pants, the uniform of his team. His M60E3 machine gun was hooked to a metallic silver belt that ran around to his backpack.
This meant the team of four had just gained a very excellent, powerful machine gunner. Their chances of surviving until two o’clock instantly got even higher.
And there was also a grenade launcher thrown in with the deal, which was even better!
Ahhh, I’m so glad, Llenn thought, right at the moment that Shinohara blew up.
“Huh?”
The explosion blew Shinohara forward. The grenade had blown up right behind him and hurtled him through the air, though she didn’t see it before it blew up.
“Nwaaa!” he screamed, flying through the air as Llenn watched, and smashed into the first-floor brick wall of the house headfirst. He did not move after that.
The system must have calculated that he’d broken his neck, because—bing—the DEAD tag glowed bright over his body.
One member of Team ZEMAL: dead.
“……”
If Llenn was stunned by what had just happened, so were Boss and Vivi, who had witnessed the same thing.
“What just happened?” asked David, who was watching the north side and couldn’t see what had unfolded.
Llenn told him honestly, “Shinohara’s travel companion hit him in the back with a grenade from the mist… He’s dead.” There was no other way to say it.
Apparently, they were dealing with someone who had no sense of honor.
“I see…a real sicko, huh?” said David, quiet anger in his voice.
Boss said, “Whoever it is, they don’t have a shred of samurai honor in their bones… If I catch even a glimpse of them, I’ll shoot. Don’t try to stop me!”
Nobody argued with her. They didn’t even comment on the samurai bit.
It was scary that Vivi didn’t have anything to say. Very scary.
She cared deeply for her teammates, so her guts had to be boiling with rage.
I’m glad I’m not in the room with her, Llenn thought but did not say aloud.
And then—Oh…wait…, Llenn thought but did not want to think.
Who would use a grenade launcher to shoot someone they’d been working with just moments ago in the back, and not think twice? She could imagine at least one such person.
Yes, she could.
Oh…please…no…
Her pulse rose so quickly that she was afraid the AmuSphere might shut down on her. Her heartbeat was racing.
Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no…
No, it couldn’t be.
After all, M was very clear in his instructions. “Just hide. Don’t go anywhere,” he’d said. He gave her tactical orders.
But…
She would totally ignore a plan if there was something that seemed more fun to do…
Yes, she would do that…
Yes, I can totally imagine it…
I mean, how many years have I been friends with her?
I know this about her.
But please—! Please let it not be true!
As if to answer the cry of Llenn’s heart, a vengeful voice emerged from the mist.
“Viiiviiii! You biiiiitch! Time to answer for yeeeears of your criiiiiimes!”
“Oh no,” Llenn lamented, looking to the sky.
“This is a grudge maaaatch! A hundred years in the makiiiiing! I’m going to use my plasma grenades to blow that entire house off this plaaaaaaneeeeeeeeet!”
It was Fukaziroh’s voice.
To be continued…
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