CHAPTER 7
What Everyone Else Did
Earlier—much earlier—in time, at the moment of the first scan at 1:10, after losing contact with Llenn, her teammates began their own stories in the mist.
“Let’s see.”
Pitohui opened her window and flipped through her options until she had the right patterned poncho for her current location: in a forest of massive trees with vines wrapped around their roots.
Although it was a poncho, it was not made of nylon; instead, it was some kind of indescribable GGO-unique futuristic material.
It was so light that you could forget you were wearing it, and it moved seamlessly, so there was no flapping and crinkling. And if you spent some extra money, you could get them with special chameleonlike abilities that allowed you to change their camo patterns automatically or fool night-vision goggles. Pitohui had all those options enabled, naturally. There was no reason for her not to. I’m a hit singer in real life. I got money.
When she had it pulled over her head, it hid her KTR-09 assault rifle. She began to examine the area.
The large trees grew at intervals of about ten yards. She glanced from tree to tree in the mist, searching for something.
“Found it.”
Finally, about fifteen yards away, she approached a particular tree. It had a similar look and height as the other trees and was nearly ten feet wide, but there was one feature that set it apart.
At the base of its trunk, there was a very large hole, about five feet tall and wide and extending nearly seven feet into the trunk itself. In other words, a hollow in the tree.
Pitohui knew these giant trees were created and then reused to cut down on production and design costs when building out map data. Of course, if all the objects you could see were copied and pasted, players would notice. They would complain to the devs.
So every now and then, you’d see an alternate design slip in. Very occasionally and only a few in total number.
For big, huge trees, that would be a specimen with a large hole in the trunk.
Only someone as keenly observant as Pitohui, and with as much time logged in to GGO, would remember that.
“There we go!” she said out loud, intentionally trying to draw attention, and sidled into the hollow butt-first.
The Remington M870 Breacher shotgun she kept on her left hip was a bit in the way, so she dematerialized it and its holder, sending it back into her inventory.
Everything else, including the KTR-09, fit snugly under the poncho.
“Ahhh, isn’t this pleasant?”
In the real world, the hollow of a tree like this would be damp and clammy, with strange-looking mushrooms in it and tons of bugs with too many legs on them. GGO’s draw was its realism, but it didn’t go to that much trouble.
Inside the tree, you were surrounded by walls of a favorable thickness. It made for a very pleasant hideout for a person to cram inside.
“Ahhh, pleasant. Yes, pleasant, indeed.”
Thanks to the camouflage poncho, nobody would see Pitohui inside the hollow unless they really stared into it. Or used a flashlight.
And if they did, they would get skewered through the throat or brain with a photon sword the very next instant.
It was okay that she’d lent Llenn two of her swords, because Pitohui had three Muramasa F9s, in fact. She’d bought the extra just before SJ5. As she’d said earlier, she got money.
So after 1:10, she lazily closed her eyes and spent her time mostly napping, until Thane’s alliance woke her up.
First she heard voices in the distance calling for more players, and later, footsteps much closer.
She decided to keep an eye out because she didn’t have much else of a choice, but as it happened, she was quite fortunate.
Two of the players drawn by Thane’s summons happened to pass right beside her hideout tree. Though she couldn’t see them, she could tell that they recognized each other in the mist.
“You teaming up with the commentator guy? Guess we’re on a cease-fire, then.”
“Okay, sure. I want that hundred million, too. No point in killing each other here.”
They began to walk in the same direction shoulder to shoulder.
Right through the narrow view the hole in the tree offered her, she could see the two players walking away.
Here’s my chance.
Pitohui slithered into motion.
She kept her distance, careful not to lose sight of them in the mist as well as avoiding the presence of any other players behind her. And just when the meetup of Thane’s party was barely visible, she stopped to eavesdrop on their conversation.
Now, ten-plus minutes later, she was back in her cozy tree hole, listening to the distant sounds of gunfire until it abruptly stopped.
“Ah. I think Llenn and Fuka killed them all.”
She had no doubt at all in her teammates’ victory.
The clock said it was 1:50.
At 1:10, Shirley started off her game on a firm, packed field of snow that looked like a flat white desert.
“Well…time to kill.”
As she’d stated over the comm, she wore galoshes with skis attached to the soles. These were cross-country skis people used for hunting in the real world.
There was sealskin on the underside of the skis, so they were very smooth going forward but almost never slid backward. That meant you could alternate your feet and just keep sliding up a slope without worrying about traction.
They’d played a big part in her plan to mess up Pitohui in SJ2, and in the recent Five Ordeals, they’d made it possible for her to do the honor of knocking down the building in the snow on a suicide charge.
She also wore a mottled snowy camo poncho of white and gray, much like Llenn’s.
Her favorite sniper rifle, the R93 Tactical 2, swung in front of her body and poncho on a longer sling that ran behind her neck and right shoulder. She kept the muzzle low and the grip just in front of her right flank.
It would be easier to move around with it slung over her back, but this way made it much easier to react and shoot on short notice. She could lift it up, press the stock to her shoulder, and fire, all in one smooth motion.
Of course, she’d loaded her special killer explosive bullets, which detonated on impact. There was one in the chamber and five in the magazine.
As a licensed gun owner, she always wanted to keep the safety on—but this was combat, not hunting, and a game, not real life. So she kept it off.
There was one other difference between how she handled guns in GGO and in real life: whether she placed tape on the muzzle.
Shirley’s real-life identity, Mai Kirishima, primarily hunted in the snow. Setting aside hunts of Yezo sika deer in the summer for overpopulation, the hunts during the winter almost always took place in a snowy setting.
The R93 Tactical 2 that she took hunting, which she’d earned the license to carry and use, always had tape over the muzzle. She used masking tape so that she could tear it easily. The wide strip would completely cover the opening at the end of the barrel.
This was to prevent any foreign objects from getting inside the gun. That could mean dirt but usually meant snow. When you were hiking through the snow in the forest, snow falling off branches onto you was a very common occurrence.
If it fell on your head, no harm, no foul. But if you were carrying your rifle with the barrel pointed straight up, the results could be disastrous. And if you carried the gun pointed downward, the tip would invariably get dragged through the snow, which would have the same effect.
A little bit of soft snow in the barrel probably wouldn’t have an effect on firing. But if it melted inside and froze again into ice, you had a major problem.
Foreign material inside the barrel had a negative effect on accuracy, and at worst, it could increase the internal pressure enough to rupture the barrel when fired.
Hence the tape. You had to put masking tape over the muzzle, nice and firm.
What do you do when shooting? Rip it off each time?
No. When you see your prey in the mountains, you have to take aim and shoot right away before it escapes. So you shoot through the tape.
When a bullet and its accompanying gas come through the barrel, the tape might as well not even be there. Shooting the gun blows the tape right off, and it has no effect on the accuracy of the shot.
If there’s a problem with this method, it’s that recovering the tape is almost impossible, so every time you shoot, you’re creating litter out in the majesty of nature.
Of course, after firing, it needed to be applied again. So she always kept a roll of masking tape in her pocket.
Around the time they started playing GGO, Shirley and her friends in the Kita no Kuni Hunter’s Club had a serious debate over whether they should continue their taping practice within the game.
In the end, they came to a very simple conclusion.
“It’s such a pain in the ass.”
Diversion over.
Shirley held her stock with both hands and asked herself, “Now, which way do I go?”
And just like that, she started running.
The direction didn’t really matter to her.
No matter which way she ran, there would be someone, some enemy.
She’d make good use of her skis for quick mobility, and when she saw someone, she’d shoot them and put them away. There was nothing else for her to do at this point in time.
The area was covered in thick fog, and there was snow underfoot. Everything she could see was white and plodding, but Shirley moved for all she was worth.
Naturally, the skis made it much easier than running on her feet alone. The ground moved past her at a comfortable rate—swish, swish, swish.
There was one other feature of skis that spelled disaster for her foes in this scenario.
Ah, there’s one.
It was that they were much quieter than running.
He never noticed the faint sound of friction before he died.
It took Shirley only three hundred yards of distance from her starting point to find another player.
He was wearing very visible dark-green camo on the snowy background and showed no sign of turning around to see her. It was hard to know what he was doing, other than just standing there.
Shirley lifted the R93 Tactical 2 as she skied along and pointed the very large muzzle break at him.
The running snapshot—firing while on the move—was Shirley’s forte. And the target was only about fifty feet away. It would be hard to miss at that distance. If this were a tabletop RPG, she would’ve hit him without even needing to roll a die.
There was the crack of the gunshot, and the man took an exploding round to the back. The resulting shock wave from the explosion hurled him forward.
She didn’t even wait to see the DEAD tag, yanking the straight-pull bolt back and forth to load the next shot and continuing on her way.
She already knew full well that SJ5’s map was not going to be covered entirely in snow. Based on previous Squad Jams, each setting was going to cover only about a quarter of the overall map in total.
In other words, if the entire map was exactly ten miles to a side, each sector would be five square miles to a side. If she kept rushing about at this speed, she would reach the end of it before long.
But if that happened and the terrain was changing, Shirley could just stop, switch directions, and then race to the next borderline.
She would travel as far through the snow as she could and eliminate as many enemies as she could.
It was the greatest manhunt she could imagine, making the fullest use of her unique skills.
“Ha-ha-ha!” Shirley chuckled. Her legs moved ceaselessly. “GGO is so damn fun!”
It was 1:19 when Shirley found it.
She had shot and killed three players on sight so far. The next scan was imminent, so she was thinking she should stop moving on the skis, flatten herself against the snow, and watch the scan.
“There.”
On the left side in the direction she was heading, a dark shape appeared through the mist and vanished just as quickly.
In other words, Shirley had approached the figure at a diagonal and passed them. The encounter was just at the limit of visibility and lasted a fraction of a second.
If the enemy noticed her, too, they would come after her.
Shirley slowed on the skis, crouched down, and glared at the direction the shadow had vanished.
At the very least, if she stayed crouched, she’d be able to spot whoever might be coming first. If she could get off the first shot, she was guaranteed to win.
She waited ten very tense seconds, but there was no response.
In that case…
Shirley decided she would do the chasing instead.
She stood up, glancing around at her surroundings, and began to slowly move in the direction she’d seen the figure, striding silently on the skis and being careful not to make any extra noise.
She kept the R93 Tactical 2 pressed against her shoulder, but eventually decided to lower it a little. The instant she determined her target could be shot, she’d only need to lift the gun a little, peer through the scope, and fire. If the enemy noticed her at the same time, she’d flop forward to make a smaller window before she shot.
Shirley slid, foot after foot, through the snow and gave up on watching the second scan roll in.
More important was her target.
She would shoot them, dispatch them—but not rip out their entrails or cut off their head or anything like that.
There!
She saw it: the black shadow. Calculating from the depth of the fog, she estimated the distance at about twenty yards.
Shirley stopped to watch the shadow’s movement. If it got fainter, it was moving away. If it got sharper, it was coming her way.
There was no movement.
The shadow remained where it was, exactly as thick as it was. For a moment, she wondered if it wasn’t even a person at all but a tree stump or something of that nature. But the chances were low.
Then Shirley spotted a glowing white spot at the edge of the shadow, and at last she understood.
They’re watching the scan! she realized. That left just one choice of action.
She craned her neck to find the right angle where the light from the scanner’s screen was not visible behind the shadow—the angle that would let her approach from directly behind them.
She also turned left and right to confirm that no other enemies were nearby. She didn’t want to be so focused on her prey that she wound up someone else’s prey instead.
Even in real life, it was possible to be so intent on a Yezo sika deer that you failed to notice a bear approaching from behind. And if anything, the players in GGO were more ruthless and dangerous than that.
There were no enemies around.
All I have to do is take them out. Shirley snuck forward. Toward the shadow.
Carefully, sneakily, she approached, with the muzzle of her gun trained right at the figure.
If she shot now, she could hit their back and finish off the target.
But Shirley did not do that.
“……”
Even she did not know why.
Her finger had been reaching for the trigger, but she silently straightened it out.
She decided to get closer, shifting her feet to move farther forward.
The figure was utterly still and silent before her.
“!”
And then she properly saw him.
A man standing carelessly in the midst of the snow, gazing intently at the Satellite Scan terminal in his left hand, tapping relentlessly on the screen with his right.
She could make out all the details.
On his back was an enormous backpack that rivaled even M’s majestic example.
Over the curve of the pack, she could just faintly make out his head, which was covered by a helmet that looked like it belonged to a tinplate robot.
His busy hand and his stock-still legs were covered by similarly robotic armor.
He’s from that suicide-bombing team!
All of Shirley’s hair stood on end. Virtually speaking, of course.
She froze about thirty feet away, long gun pointed right at him.
If I’d shot at him a moment ago…
The bullet would have hit the backpack.
The high-performance explosives carried in his backpack did not act like plasma grenades. A normal bullet would only punch a funny hole in the explosive and would not start a chain reaction explosion.
But what if it weren’t a regular bullet, but one of Shirley’s special explosive rounds? Then it would have set off the bomb.
So if she had fired, she would have been blasted to smithereens and right out of SJ5 in the very next instant.
“……”
Shirley decided that she was now willing to believe in a sixth sense. In the virtual world, at least.
It was probably her grandmother who had saved her life just now.
“I don’t know how I feel about girls killing things,” she had said, expressing her reservations about Shirley becoming a hunter.
And then, after the first time Shirley cooked her a stew of Yezo sika venison, that same grandmother sent her a text message later, asking, WHEN’S THE NEXT TIME YOU’RE GOING HUNTING, MAI?
Her grandmother was still alive and well, by the way.
Well, what am I supposed to do now? Shirley wondered.
The bomber was absorbed in his Satellite Scanner, a shocking lack of caution for any Squad Jam participant. But there was no guarantee he wouldn’t spin around the next moment, and then Shirley would have no choice but to shoot.
However, he had armor on the front side that was meant to help him survive to get closer to the target of his bombing run. In the battle on the bridge in SJ4, Shirley had used an explosive round on her pursuer’s thigh, making him fall to the ground.
That had successfully gotten him to self-destruct where he was, saving the rest of the team—but she hadn’t been sure if she’d successfully shot through his armor plating at the time. Even on the replay, it was hard to tell.
According to M, their armor couldn’t be as tough as his shield or the expensive full-body armor that T-S spent so much cash on. But could she kill him instantly with a headshot using her explosive round?
If it wasn’t an insta-kill and it gave him even a single second before he died, he would manage to self-destruct. He just had to pull the string coming from his backpack.
If he were going to die and lose SJ5, he would want to at least blow up and take out someone else with him. It’s what she would do if she were him.
Should I pull back? she thought, but that, too, was a risk.
Her cross-country skis could not simply slide backward like regular skis.
To leave this location, she would have to lift her feet in sequence until she had completed a one-eighty turn, jump to perform a quick aerial about-face, or proceed forward and curve away from the hostile target.
Each option would take time and had the risk of making sound. If he noticed her, she’d be attacked from behind.
The man presumably had some kind of firearm. Perhaps something light and compact, like a submachine gun. Or even just a pistol.
He certainly wouldn’t have come to a ferocious, intense battlefield with an idiotic loadout like nothing but heavy explosives, after all.
In fact, he did have that exact idiotic loadout, but Shirley didn’t know that. She couldn’t be expected to know that.
Shit…I’m really slipping, Shirley swore at herself.
She’d gotten too close. But she wouldn’t have noticed the details of his identity if she hadn’t approached. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
If she crouched down, would he simply walk away without noticing her?
Her chances would be better, but she didn’t want to bet her life on something like that.
And thus in the end, by pure elimination, there is just one option.
Shirley made a haiku in her mind. With one extra syllable.
She took another step closer.
At 1:12, while her partner was away enjoying GGO, Squad Jam, and the pure act of killing to her heart’s content, Clarence was feeling more than a little freaked out and weak-willed.
“Man, I’m so lonely…”
She had told M, “Okay! I’ll just enjoy myself, then. It’s not like I’m carrying anyone else’s stuff. If I die, big whoop!” but that had been empty cheer. It was a bluff, and now she could admit it.
Being all alone in thick mist wasn’t lonely? How could it not be?
“And where am I supposed to hide…?”
As M had said, she was surrounded by wasteland.
It was rough, arid desert, with nothing man-made in sight. Under her feet was sand, gravel, and rocks, and each step brought up a little cloud of dust. The ground was essentially flat.
There were rocks scattered around, the smallest going only up to her knee, with the biggest being taller than her. The ones close-up were easy to identify as rocks, but the farther away they got, the more they blended in with the milky-white fog.
The details faded away until they were nothing but a vague, soft silhouette, at which point it became very hard to tell if a shape was a rock or a person.
“I don’t like this place,” Clarence muttered, squeezing the grip of her AR-57, a curious gun that placed the P90’s system inside an AR assault rifle. “But there’s no use just standing around daydreaming.”
She began to move.
M had instructed them to act slowly, but in this environment with this visibility, going slow and careful was mentally draining.
So she decided not to follow his rules. Nobody was watching her.
Clarence was pretty quick on her feet, if not as fast as Llenn.
“Hi-yah!”
She started off at a dead sprint. At least until she came to a large boulder that was just barely visible.
And once she was clinging to that giant piece of cover that would protect her from attacks, she surveyed the area around her.
She was looking to see if there were any other players nearby, but all she felt was terrified of how all the rocks looked like people.
There’s one!
She raised her AR-57 and pointed it, only to find that it was just an unmoving rock.
“Ugh, geez…”
She launched into another sprint for the next large rock she could see. Then she put her back to it, looked around, and ran to the next rock.
Clarence had no idea which way she was going; for all she knew, she could have been going in a circle. Maybe she’d look down at some point and see her own footprints from earlier.
But still, she ran.
“Someone be there, at least. Then I can kill you,” she muttered dramatically.
She spent the next four minutes wandering the wasteland in this manner. Then, when surveying the area near the latest rock she reached, she saw a flickering shadow in the mist.
At first she assumed it was just another rock, but then she realized that it was still moving.
“Eep!”
She hid behind the rock and peered around it at the shadow.
From the shadow’s point of view, Clarence was one with the rock. So as long as she didn’t make any drastic movements, the other person would not notice her.
Just in case, she glanced in the opposite direction to make sure there were no other people moving on that side.
Then Clarence slowly peered around the side to stare at the flickering shadow.
The mist made it impossible to see the finer details. So the shadow wasn’t coming into focus, but they also weren’t going away. They seemed to be moving from the right to the left, almost entirely parallel with the ground.
Just in case someone else happened to be following the shadow—in other words, if he or she had a traveling companion—she checked the direction that the shadow had come from, but there was no one else.
The figure was moving farther and farther to the left. At this rate, they would be gone before long. They were already going out of sight.
Clarence had a set of options to choose from.
Number one!
I can aim at them now, so shoot! Kill!
The distance was probably about sixty to seventy-five feet. If she took aim with her rifle and shot at full auto, she could probably take out her target.
But what about the low possibility that the shadow could belong to one of her teammates? Or some member of SHINC, who was allied with the team?
Shooting without confirmation was a bit of a problem. Of course, the chances that it was an enemy she could and should shoot were much higher.
Number two!
Let them go!
They didn’t see her, so it was a valid strategic choice to let them walk away unaware. The target was going to pass out of sight within a few seconds. As long as she traveled in the direction the shadow had come from, she was guaranteed to be safe.
Number three!
Talk to them! “Hello, hello! How are you? Wanna play, mister?”
That was a valid strategy. Whomever the person was, she could suggest a temporary team-up. But that was a risky ploy, because if the other person didn’t want to do it, they might immediately shoot her dead.
Number four!
Talk to them, pretend to want to fight together, then when they’re caught slipping, do a sneak attack!
That was a fun strategy, one that was sure to feature a very shocked facial expression to look forward to.
She loved that kind of stuff. Clarence was Clarence, after all.
But there was risk involved. She might speak up and immediately get a response of “I don’t need partners!” and get shot up.
If you’re going to kill them, it’s more reliable to just shoot them right from the start.
So what now? Clarence considered her options. She didn’t have time.
A second later, she made her decision.
Number five!
I’ll do something that’s “none of the above”! It’ll probably be more fun!
Clarence was indeed Clarence.
Without considering the consequences, she looked for—and found—a large rock near her feet. It was the perfect throwing rock, about the size of a fist and nicely shaped.
She moved the AR-57 to her left hand, picked up the rock, and hurled it with all her strength.
“Hi-yah!”
She’d had plenty of practice throwing in GGO, so she was good at it. Yes, from grenades.
She didn’t “throw like a girl,” or “fail to put her shoulder into it,” or anything like that.
The rock hurtled fifty feet or so through the air.
Whud!
“Aaagh!”
Huh?
She actually hit the man where he stood—his yelp confirmed it. Right in the head.
It wasn’t her intention. She just thought it would be funny to see him freak out if a rock landed near his feet, and she could play it by ear after that…
“What the—? Huh?!”
The shadow was clearly freaked out and flustered. The smartest move at the moment would be to flee, but he wasn’t even doing that.
“I-is someone out there?!”
He was probably pointing his gun in all directions.
Since his reaction was so funny, Clarence crouched again, found another rock, and hurled it the same way.
She did not manage to coincidentally hit him twice. Instead, it made a loud thud close by.
“Eep!” he shrieked, terrified.
Yes, let’s freak him out some more, Clarence decided. Because it was fun.
What else could she do at this very moment that would freak him out even more than he already was? Her brain went into overdrive, but shooting him was against the rules. That would kill him, and that wasn’t scaring him.
Should I strip to my underwear and make a move on him?
Clarence had attempted this seduction technique in SJ4, and it had worked like gangbusters.
Her body was just an avatar in a virtual world, so she didn’t care how much of it people saw—or even touched, if it came to that.
This was a place where you could enjoy things you couldn’t do in the real world, like engaging in slaughter and death matches, so in her personal opinion, Clarence thought that people who said getting frisky should be off-limits were off their rockers.
But she declined to execute Operation Underwear.
She’d have to put away the AR-57, and she didn’t want to get shot and killed. Plus, it was going to delight the guy. That was wrong. That was the opposite of what she wanted.
So what was the plan?
Bing.
A light bulb flickered on in Clarence’s mind.
She also had a stray thought: Why is the light bulb you see when people get ideas always just a single, bare bulb floating in space? Why isn’t it connected to a socket? It’s not being powered. It can’t possibly turn on that way.
But the thought had nothing to do with GGO or Squad Jam, so she decided to push it out of her head for now.
Back to her moment of inspiration. Pitohui had given her an item, something she might be able to take advantage of here.
Pitohui had used it gleefully at their meetup the other day, and when Clarence showed interest in it, Pitohui had given it to her as casually as if it were a piece of candy.
Clarence waved her hand and brought the item out in order to use it.
Honk-honk!
The wasteland’s silence was broken by a raucous trumpet.
In her left hand was a rubber honker, the kind that made a trumpet noise when you squeezed the rubber bulb. It was more accurately known as a bulb horn. In other words, the thing Pitohui had used in the bar.
“Eep?” the man shrieked, startled by the sudden noise. “Aaaah!”
Then there was gunfire. He had started shooting wildly, aiming at nothing, simply trying to dampen his terror.
But the muzzle did swing in Clarence’s direction.
“Yikes!”
She ducked behind the boulder, which trembled as it took a few bullets. With her back against the rock, she saw bullet lines running wildly from behind her to the distance ahead of her. The bullets erased them faster than the speed of sound.
He shot and shot and shot…for about three seconds.
That was probably when he had used up the thirty bullets in his rifle’s magazine. The world was suddenly quiet again.
Honk-honk-honk-honk-honk! Honk-honk-honk-honk-honk!
Clarence fired back. It was a rubber horn spray. She was liberal in her application of honks.
“Aaaah! What the hell, man?!”
The man finished reloading and resumed his gunfire. Based on the location of his bullet lines, Clarence knew she wasn’t going to get shot, so she kept up with him.
Honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk-honk!!
For as long as her wrist strength held out, she tried to match his gunfire with honks. The world of mist was colored with a raucous medley of gunshots and rubber horn honks. It was, frankly, rather insane.
And then all was quiet again.
The gunshots stopped after two seconds.
Honk-honk.
It stopped so suddenly that Clarence hit the horn two more times before noticing.
“Huh?”
She leaned out to take a look and noticed that hanging in the air in the direction where the man had been was now a shining DEAD marker. The fog did not stop it from being clearly visible.
Assuming he hadn’t given up in despair on the world and killed himself, or fumbled the gun and accidentally shot himself in the head, that would mean someone else shot him and that another enemy was nearby.
“Oh, crap.”
Clarence tossed aside the borrowed horn and gripped her AR-57 with both hands. The horn thudded carelessly to the ground. She had to apologize and tell it that she’d retrieve it with her item window later.
More important was the enemy.
Clarence hunched down behind the rock, preparing herself to fire mercilessly at whoever had shot the man if they came toward her…
“Here we go.”
Through the mist, she saw a small shape waver into being, right next to the DEAD tag.
The person was running her way at considerable speed, their silhouette taking shape rapidly as they approached.
“Oh! Ah…um…hey! You! Uhhh…”
Clarence recognized something and hurled not bullets, but her voice.
“Your name! Um, oh yeah! Tanya!”
She swerved around the side of the boulder and called the player’s name…
Shunk!
…right as Tanya, startled, fired a shot from her silenced Bizon submachine gun.
“Ughhhh, I’ll never forget this… I’ll curse you to your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s generationnnn…”
“I’m so sorry. I really mean it.”
“Eh, it’s fine. Today is No Worries Day.”
Clarence, with her black gear and black hair, and Tanya, with white hair and speckled green camo, sat at the foot of the large boulder, watching opposite directions.
There was still a bright-red damage mark on Clarence’s cheek from where she got shot.
About thirty seconds earlier, Tanya’s accidental 9 mm Parabellum bullet flew with unerring accuracy at Clarence, hit her smack on the right cheek, and passed through her left.
“Gblag!”
Clarence lost a third of her overall hit points. But if it had struck her just four inches to the side, it would have gone through her cerebellum and killed her instantly, so in a sense, she was lucky.
“Hyaaaa! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorryyy!”
Tanya lowered her gun and bowed frantically. She knew she had just shot a friend.
Clarence took a med kit immediately to start the healing process.
For now, they decided to stay put, hold their backs to the rock, and use all four eyes to monitor the surrounding area. If any enemies approached, they would fight them off together.
“In any case, now we have twice the eyes! That’s way, way more reliable than just wandering around alone!” Clarence murmured quietly but happily. She wasn’t just saying that; it was her honest opinion.
Since they were hooked up via the comm, Tanya heard every word.
“Yes, I agree! Also, I just have to say, this new rule that the team has to get split up like this…”
“Totally sucks!” they agreed in unison.
The two girls chuckled over their little moment. It was like something out of a school classroom. A refreshing, pleasant scene within the general misery of GGO.
But the man was already dead, so there was no else around to enjoy the moment. Too bad.
“I bet our team leader, Llenn, is having a terrible time,” Clarence murmured.
There was no X mark on the list of teammates in the upper left of her vision, so she knew Llenn was still alive, but that was the extent of the information; she could be heavily injured, for all they knew.
“How about your Boss?” Clarence asked.
To her surprise, Tanya replied, “Oh, SHINC’s team leader isn’t Boss this time.”
“No way!”
“It’s Anna. We thought we might use the leader position as a decoy trap. But we weren’t expecting these special rules. Anna’s probably feeling so lonely with everyone going after her… I hope she isn’t crying.”
“She’s the blonde one with the sunglasses, right? She’ll be fine; she’s pretty. I bet she’ll have all the men around her eating out of her hand. And then she’ll cut off their heads while they’re bending over.”
“Ha-ha-ha.”
They continued chatting like this, waiting for enemies to arrive, but no one did. Instead, the only thing that arrived was the scan at 1:20. It was the second of the day.
“But you know,” Tanya remarked, “there’s kind of no point to watching the scan, because there’s at least a hundred players wandering all over the place who won’t show up on it.”
She was right. Just because the scan didn’t show any dots near you didn’t mean you were safe.
But at the same time, your own location wasn’t going to show up, so it didn’t mean anyone was coming for you, either.
“So it’s probably best if we just don’t move,” Clarence said, right as the clock hit 1:20.
They watched the second Satellite Scan together, eyes roaming ceaselessly between their screens and the space around them. They didn’t forget to keep the scanners hidden against their bodies to prevent the light from showing.
Not a single one of the teams had been fully eliminated.
“Anna seems to have come a little closer to our location. We’re around the middle of the map,” Tanya noted. They had a general idea of their location now.
Since Clarence had run here and there, and Tanya had stayed on the move, the combination of their map data gave their auto-mapped area a notable increase in size. This change helped give them a good idea of where on the square field map they were located.
The center of the screen was where the map had been revealed. Anna, who had started all the way in the upper right (northeast) corner, had moved her way a bit closer to them in the middle.
“But she’s still at least a mile and a half away… That’s a really long distance to travel safely in the middle of this mist…since there are probably tons of enemies along the way,” Tanya explained.
“Should we go to her instead?” Clarence suggested.
But Tanya wasn’t convinced. “The thing is, Boss said that if you’re in a safe place, there’s no reason to risk danger to go anywhere. Although I did come over here because I heard the gunshots, so what do I know?”
“Uh-huh. I guess it would be best to just chill here for an hour, then?” Clarence wondered, sliding the Satellite Scanner back into her pants pocket now that its purpose had been served.
“Enemy!” Tanya hissed.
When Tanya came rolling over toward her, Clarence understood that someone had approached through the mist from Tanya’s side. She raised her AR-57, stood in a half crouch, and peered carefully around the edge of the rock.
There was a man rushing through the mist.
“It’s the optical team,” Tanya hissed.
He was holding an MG 2504, a machine-gun-type optical gun. Since it was clearly not a real-life gun, it was obvious that he was a member of RGB, the team that was infamous for always using optical guns. They were the only ones who did that in Squad Jam, in which optical guns were largely useless because they were unsuited for PvP combat. It was just their thing.
Shots from optical guns were weakened by the optical defensive fields that everyone carried with them, so they didn’t do a ton of damage, but the range was close, and the machine-gun type could be annoying because they fired so fast. It wouldn’t do to be careless.
Clarence was wondering what they ought to do when she noticed something about him.
“Wait, is he being chased?”
The man in the mist seemed to be backing away from someone, looking over his shoulder occasionally. So his gun was pointed away, and he had his back toward the girls.
“Yeah, he’s running away.”
The man eventually turned around to run in earnest. He rushed behind a rock to hide. It was about fifteen yards away from Clarence and Tanya.
With where he was hiding, over on their right side, he was actually exposing his left side to the two girls.
“He’s going to be a problem if he’s hanging out just over there,” Clarence murmured.
“Yeah. Should I shoot him?” Tanya suggested.
“I wanna shoot him, too.”
“Yeah, but my gun’s got the silencer on it.”
“I have a slight boost in damage, so mine is better.”
The two girls were bro-ing out and having a dick-measuring contest. It was really something.
“Okay, then! Let’s just have fun killing the target together,” Clarence offered, right as the RGB man started shooting. An optical gun was lighter than a live-ammo gun, so even as a bulky machine gun, he could quickly lift it to his shoulder to fire.
He steadied the MG 2504 and opened furious automatic fire while hiding behind the rock. It made a unique optical firing sound—pyew-pyew-pyew-pyew-pyew-pyew—and sprayed yellow projectiles toward the left, from Clarence and Tanya’s line of sight.
Optical guns could be customized to fire in either Power Mode or Firing Mode.
In Power Mode, the rate of fire was lower, but each shot carried a heavier punch, and Firing Mode was the opposite.
He had his gun on Firing Mode. He continued shooting, spraying the area with a wide array of shots rather than focusing on a single point. The rate of fire was so high that it looked like he was spraying a hose.
The lines of optical bullets snaked and curved like whips as they vanished into the mist, but the girls couldn’t see his enemy. Was he seeing someone?
After ten seconds of fierce optical blasting, everything went quiet at last.
“Did he get it done?”
“You think?”
Tanya’s and Clarence’s questions were emphatically answered with a furious volley of return fire.
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
It was deep and impactful, shaking the ground beneath their feet.
There was a good three seconds of this new, heavy gunfire, which made the optical gun sound like a child’s toy.
The bullets struck the rock the RGB man was hiding behind, gouging out chunks and chips of the boulder.
Tanya and Clarence found their gazes drawn from the man being shot at to the direction of his shooter. Through the haze of the distant mist was the bright and unmistakable light of a muzzle flash, along with the shape of the man holding it.
He was tall and well-muscled, with his brown hair slicked back like a rooster’s comb. He wore a green fleece jacket and black combat pants, with a large M240B machine gun pressed to his shoulder.
The large box on his back was a backpack-style ammo loading system.
It was Huey, one of the members of ZEMAL.
Huey was lashing the rock at a pace of ten 7.62 mm rounds per second. They blasted the rock, spraying chips of stone.
“Aaah!”
The unfortunate man was caught in the blast zone, red damage effects glowing all over his body and turning him into a big red doll. The DEAD tag popped into existence above his body.
Taking his finger off the trigger, he stopped walking. He seemed to be listening and watching the area carefully.
A wild ZEMAL appeared!
What now?
“Run!”
Tanya and Clarence spoke in unison. It was a unanimous decision.
They couldn’t take on a juggernaut of pure firepower like him. The instant they took a dinky little potshot at him, he would blast them to bits under a hail of bullets. Like he’d done to the man just now, he would simply tunnel through any rock they tried to hide behind.
If they attempted to jump him from two directions in a pincer attack, one of them might survive the encounter, but that wasn’t going to help their team. The point of this event was to be the champions.
When the only good outcome is a tie, then, as a wise man once said: Of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, retreat is best.
The two girls turned on their heels and began to run. The big rock should have been hiding them from Huey’s line of sight, but they sprinted all the same.
“Don’t come after us!”
“Stay away!”
It was a wild sprint throwing caution to the wind, with no thought for their course.
And somehow, they didn’t get spotted.
There was no chasing fire from Huey as they ran.
Even still, they charged pell-mell for safety.
“Where are we running?”
“I don’t know!”
“Let’s go as far as we can, then!”
“Sounds good!”
They ran with a wild, carefree euphoria, like the fabled runner’s high. Tanya was the faster of the two, but because of the poor visibility, she held back on her speed, which put her at the same pace as Clarence.
They were shoulder to shoulder.
“Ah-ha-ha, this is fun!” remarked Clarence, her white teeth sparkling.
“Yeah, it’s great!” Tanya beamed.
“What’s that?” muttered a player who spotted the two girls running through the mist, but because of the distance and angle, they lost sight of them. It seemed that luck was their running companion.
“The fun part about VR games is that you can really test your physical limits!” said Tanya, who’d started using full-dive gear for the sake of her gymnastics team.
“I get that! It’s really fun being able to do things you can’t do in real life!” agreed Clarence at a full sprint. The meaning of those words was slightly different in each girl’s head, but neither of them realized it.
Wistfully, Clarence added, “If only I could live on this side…forever. I don’t think…I like reality very much… Still hate it…”
Tanya had no response to this.
They ran together for three minutes, at which point they came to a stop.
“Hmm?”
“Wha—?”
There was a wall approaching through the fog.
First there was something black jutting upward beyond the veil of milky white, and then it approached them with shocking speed—in total silence.
In reality, they were the ones who were running, so when they stopped in alarm, the obstacle stopped as well.
“What is this…?” Tanya murmured.
“A wall?”
Clarence approached the object slowly, and when it was close enough to make out the details, she looked up.
What she saw was a huge, European-style castle wall, built of light-brown stone. Because of the mist, it was impossible to make out the top or the sides in either direction.
All she could tell was that it was really, really tall and really, really wide.
There were letters on the wall’s surface.
“Oh?”
“Ah!”
To Tanya’s and Clarence’s shock, letters about three times the size of a person rose to visibility, as though they were made with invisible ink being exposed to the light.
In other words, the letters were designed to provide information if a player came to them.
Soon the letters were fully formed and combined into a sentence.
“Oh my…,” said Tanya, reading them.
“Oh my…,” said Clarence, shocked.
Clarence looked at Tanya and asked the first question that came to mind.
“Why is it in the generic Mincho font?”
“Really?” Tanya replied. “That’s your question?”
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