CHAPTER 10
The Castle Trap, or Vivi’s
An hour and six minutes had passed since the start of SJ5. It was 2:06 PM.
“All right. We’re heading into the castle!” M called out. But his teammates did not budge.
They were distracted by something else. Something their eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to.
That something was the sight of Pitohui’s body, facedown, resting before the massive gate of the castle in the center of the map—with a DEAD tag hovering over it.
Llenn, Fukaziroh, Boss, and Anna—every surviving member other than M—was staring at her.
And they also saw the ground begin to crumble.
There had been a minor earthquake-level rumbling for quite a while, and now its cause was coming into view. It was quite apparent, as the forest they’d just been inside only five hundred yards away was vanishing.
Although they could no longer see it, the earth beneath the trees must have simply withered and given way like an aged sponge. The massive trees the earth supported tumbled with it, causing the green of the forest canopy to grow thinner by the moment.
“Good-bye, forest…,” Fukaziroh offered wistfully just as the final piece of the verdant forest tumbled out of sight. She said it in English, too, for some reason, and Llenn didn’t bother to ask why, because she knew the answer would be stupid.
Lastly, the five-hundred-yard stretch of barren ground they had raced across to get there began to disappear as well.
“Good-bye, earth…”
Llenn didn’t ask Fukaziroh why she said it. She just watched the process happen, marveling at the strange wonder of it all.
While the rest of them were distracted by the magnificent sight behind the group, M was the sole member who kept his wits about him.
He stared in the other direction, toward the center of the castle, with two shields propped up defensively to hide the MG5 machine gun at his side.
The ramparts were fifty yards thick, which meant that the entry gate was also that long; a pitch-black tunnel ten yards tall and twenty wide.
The exit, however, was shining brightly. For now, there was no one standing at the other end.
“Oh…the right side…”
Llenn noticed something as she watched the earth crumble nearby.
On their right, a single player was running across the wasteland. It was an unfamiliar man dressed in a dark-green jumpsuit. He was sprinting for all he was worth, legs working madly, as he raced toward them, for the castle.
Based on his position, he must have been hiding at the southwest edge of the map, then had panicked and started running for his life to stay ahead of the collapse.
There was still a space of three hundred yards between him and the castle, a cruelly unfortunate number.
“He’s not going to make it,” Boss noted flatly.
This mystery man was one of the many opponents between them and winning, so it was a good thing for him to die here, of course.
But then again, having just sprinted through that stretch herself, Llenn couldn’t help herself. There was just one thought on her mind: You can do it!
“Yep, he’s not making it,” added Fukaziroh, equally without sentiment. “If he can’t run the distance, why doesn’t he just fly?”
“Because it’s not ALO,” Llenn snapped. Fukaziroh’s old haunt was ALO, where every player was a fairy, and if you wanted to fly, you had wings right there waiting to be used.
Little tendrils of dust began to rise up from the ground near the man’s feet. From overhead came the faint, dry sound of gunfire.
Someone in a position of safety was attempting to off the man who was so desperately trying to survive.
“That’s harsh. But that’s the way it is,” Boss commented.
If not for the assistance(?) of the suicide bomber, that would have been them, too.
“Oh! Aw…”
After a few more seconds of sprinting, the man fell to the ground in silence, about two hundred yards away. There was a glowing red damage effect on him, so one of the bullets must have hit him.
There was no DEAD tag, so he was still alive, but not for long. The ground soon gave way underneath him, and he vanished from sight.
The only sensation left at the castle gate was the rumbling of the seismic collapse and an air of chilly pathos.
“Poor guy,” Fukaziroh muttered. “If only he’d gotten closer…I could have hit him with a grenade instead…”
They were so occupied by the tragic fate of the nameless contestant that they never realized, off to the left, just out of their sight line, that Shirley was engaging in a desperate sprint of her own.
“Shit, crap, shit, crap! Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh!” Shirley hissed, running for all she was worth. She kept the long R93 Tactical 2 rifle in front of her, running as fast as she was physically able to move.
The people shooting at her from atop the castle struck her in a few spots. Fortunately, however, they didn’t hit any bone, so she was able to maintain her momentum. There was no time to stop and wince at the pain.
She ran, and ran, and got shot, and ran, and got shot, and ran again…
Shirley’s HP was down by half when she finally came within range of the gate.
But the collapse was right behind her. She could tell from the sound and didn’t need to look back to see it. There was no guarantee that there would be any ground beneath her foot the next time she set it down.
“First ice…now dirt! Goddammit!” she swore, recalling the time that breaking ice nearly killed her in SJ4. She was almost at the massive gate, but the sound of the crumbling was so close that it could practically reach over and tap her on the shoulder.
“Hraaaaaaah!” she bellowed, the sort of thing she would never do in real life, and leaped, putting herself airborne into the space where the gate yawned wide. It was the biggest jump of her VR life.
She soared through the opening and landed inside the gate.
Clutching the sniper rifle close to her chest, she tumbled onto the paved ground, rolled, and bonked her head hard against the side of the tunnel.
“Ow.”
She sprang to her feet and gasped.
“Whoa!”
Her surprise was understandable. Just ten feet away, outside the castle gate she’d just leaped through, there was nothing to see. It was only sky.
Because she’d been facing the other way, Shirley hadn’t realized just how close she was to the edge. The instant after her foot had pushed her into the air, that bit of ground was gone.
She’d survived the ordeal as dramatically as the final scene of an action movie.
“Hell yeah!”
Shirley turned around and began to race down the tunnel, which was as long as the rampart structure was thick. When she heard how loudly the sound of her boots echoed down the tunnel, she murmured “Oops” and slowed to a quick walk.
She also made sure to use one of her emergency med kits to start healing back some of the HP she’d lost. There were two left after this.
While Shirley’s HP began its slow regeneration, Fukaziroh was a few hundred yards away, marveling at the wonder before her.
“What a sight! What a sight!”
Barely twelve inches from the toe of her boot was a drop of ten thousand feet to the earth below.
“It’s terrifying,” Llenn admitted, backing away from the open gate.
The earth’s collapse stopped just short of the gate itself. In fact, the edge of the earth and the outer circumference of the castle wall were in perfect alignment. It was literally a sheer cliff. The two-mile-diameter castle sat atop a pillar of earth its precise size.
“See? This is what you people get for not flying all the time,” Fukaziroh said smugly.
“Another reason not to play ALO,” Llenn replied, straight-faced. The biggest reason she wouldn’t go back was because her avatar there was an ultra-tall and gorgeous babe.
“Once you get your first hit of winged flight and chase that dragon, you’ll never go back, sweetheart.”
“Don’t compare your game to doing drugs,” Llenn snapped.
Behind them, M, the only one actually paying attention, said, “It’s time for us to move.” His instructions were to the group—but primarily the two little ones. It was hard work keeping them in line.
“Ah, roger that,” Llenn replied, turning on her heel. The change in view brought Pitohui’s body into her line of sight.
Watch over me from Heaven—I mean, Hell—I mean, the waiting room. I’m gonna kick some ass, Llenn thought, squeezing her pink-dyed P90 for good luck.
“I’ll kick some ass, too!”
You sure will, P-chan.
“Oops… I forgot, the suppressor’s on, so I’m supposed to be quiet… I’ll kick some ass, too…”
Tee-hee-hee. Oh, P-chan, you’re so clever.
“Hey, Llenn! We’re leaving you behind! What are you staring at? What’s with that crazy look in your eyes?”
“Boss. Any response from the others yet?” M asked without turning back to look at her. They were carefully proceeding down the dark, fifty-yard tunnel.
The group was going down the middle because being closer to the walls made ricocheting bullets more dangerous. If a bullet struck the wall, the deflection tended to stray closer to the wall as well. In other words, the angle of reflection was smaller than the angle of incidence. So being in the middle, rather than along the wall, was ever so slightly safer. Just a little life hack to follow. Or battlefield hack, rather.
These were the bits of knowledge that GGO players picked up from the tendency to get shot while walking along walls. You know, things that no one in modern Japan would ever have to worry about in daily life.
The gorilla in pigtails known as Boss had her Vintorez pressed snug against her shoulder, ready to fire at anything that crossed the light at the end of the tunnel.
“Nothing yet,” she murmured through heavy lips.
Boss and Anna were the two members of SHINC present. Tanya was higher up in the castle.
The others were Sophie and Rosa, the two PKM machine gunners, and Tohma the sniper.
She knew from the status readout in the corner that they weren’t dead, but they weren’t responding at all to her messages over the comm.
That left only one possibility.
The three of them were in a situation that left them absolutely no room to speak.
In other words, there were enemies so close by that talking would blow their cover.
In yet other words: big trouble.
Anna recognized that. She looked pensive as she took her position behind Boss. Even with her trademark sunglasses on, she could still see fine in the gloomy tunnel. The sunglasses were purely cosmetic; their vision would adjust automatically.
In the rear were Fukaziroh, holding an MGL-140 launcher in each hand, and Llenn.
Llenn was the rear guard, meaning that she was walking backward, facing the rear. All that she could see was the bright, shining exit of the castle gate, where the earth had fallen away—but that didn’t mean no one could get in. They could lower a rope down from above.
Or because the surface of the rampart wall was so rocky, they could practice free climbing and make their way over using handholds and footholds.
Of course, even though it was a game and the stakes were low, nobody would bother when the price of failure was instant death. But perhaps someone out there was desperate enough to gamble on the chance to win a hundred million credits.
The last thing Llenn wanted was to get herself and her whole team slaughtered by a freak like that, so she made sure to keep her eyes on their six, as unlikely as that threat was.
Her eyes were peeled; she knew that her allies wouldn’t dare do something so foolish, so anything that moved was an enemy, and she was ready to shoot.
Her weapon ammo and energy were fully replenished as of two o’clock.
P-chan and the Vor-chans were all topped off. After all the slicing and dicing she’d done, her backup twin photon swords should have had all their energy restored, too.
As the special rules suggested, Llenn and her teammates had their remaining ammo displayed as a percentage—or in dual mode along with a bullet counter. She hadn’t taken a shot yet, so naturally, it said 100 percent.
From this point on, there would be no more automatic refills. Only when she got a killing shot on someone would she receive some bullets back, based on the percentage of her remaining ammo.
According to what the rules had said, if you had between 0 and 10 percent left, you would be replenished to 50 percent. In a similar fashion, under 30 would get refilled to 60. Under 50, to 70. Under 80, to 80 itself. And if you had over 80 percent ammo already, there would be no extra.
It wouldn’t make sense to shoot a whole bunch and run out of ammo just to get a little back, so scoring some last hits was the plan, but she still didn’t know yet if the combat she ran into would allow for that level of strategy, either.
Also, while it would be pointless to have teammates fighting over who got the last shot on a kill, it also might be arrogant to assume that they’d have the wherewithal to pull back and allow the player with the least ammo to score the bonus. Things rarely worked out that cleanly.
When M had inched his way up to the last hundred or so feet of the tunnel, he spoke into the comm. “Clarence, are you somewhere safe enough to talk?”
“Hoh-hoh! Ahoy-hoy,” she replied, sounding carefree. So it seemed talking wouldn’t be a problem for her.
“Can you tell what’s going on in the castle from up there? We’re about to come through the gate from the south entrance.”
“Yeah, I can tell. What the what? Did I not tell you earlier?”
She hadn’t. And the others hadn’t asked. They had needed to reach the castle before the ground gave out beneath them, so they hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask.
“Please, tell me whatever you can see from there.”
“Okey-dokey. Well, the castle is very round, and according to the map, the diameter is almost two miles. It’s big. Almost like a whole town. Inside of the big thick outer wall, it’s like a donut hundreds of yards thick, where the pathways are twisting and turning with dead ends and stuff. It’s like one of those, um, whatchamacallits. A maze from a theme park. You can’t tell which way to go to get to the middle. Tanya and I wandered around in it inside the fog, and then we just somehow got here. Either we were lucky, or it wasn’t such a complicated maze before now,” Clarence reported back. The others tried to paint a mental picture based on what she had said.
According to her, once they got through the tunnel, it would be a theme park. Yay, how fun. Was it going to cost them to get in?
Also, the maze not existing until a certain point in time was just one of those things that happened in games. You couldn’t get that mad about it. That was just how things were.
“Also, in the middle of the circle is the center of the castle—the keep? Anyway, it’s a big ol’ thing. That’s about a mile and a quarter across. And it’s, um, a couple stories tall? It’s like the base of a cake. The roof of the middle part is like a big open space. It’s flat, but with a bunch of obstacles, so you can actually fight there. You know, like a coliseum-style training map.”
The training maps were places where GGO newbies—or more seasoned players—could practice their shooting and other tactics. The “coliseum-style” map was the simplest kind.
The ground itself was perfectly flat and similar to concrete; the actual material, like everything in GGO, was a mystery. There was no physical texture to it. The color was gray.
And placed at random but appropriate locations were barricades or obstacles made of boards that you could hide behind. The barricades were cream-colored and six feet wide. They came in simple rectangular shapes and sometimes had stepped corners that allowed for better aiming. They were four inches thick, also of indeterminate material.
These barricades could receive damage, too. In other words, they could be shot and destroyed. They’d block ten or so pistol rounds, and five shots from a rifle, but anything more than that could cause spontaneous destruction of the barricade.
The trick was that they wouldn’t take localized damage that chipped away at the material. No, once it crossed the damage threshold, the entire barricade would simply vanish. That was what made it scary.
After ten seconds, the barricades would reappear like normal. They needed to, or else the battlefield would quickly turn into a barren, empty arena.
The point was that you couldn’t simply hide in one spot for the entire time. As the barricades went down, you had to keep moving around tactically from spot to spot.
GGO players used these training maps to get their fill of shooting practice, increase their skills, and prepare to leave the nest.
“The flat area is connected to the ramparts with these thin, long bridges. A bunch of them. But you probably shouldn’t use them anymore, since you’ll get shot from every direction. It’s better to just give up and get through the maze. I’m up in a round tower that comes up from the edge of the foundation; it ends in a pointy spire, but there’s a space like a belfry below it, only this one doesn’t have a bell in it. I guess I’m about three hundred feet off the ground. I’ve got a really good view. Um, there are eight towers all spaced out, and I’m in the one the farthest to the north. That’s all I can tell ya!”
So it was like a rounded platter with a tall rim—and a big cake in the middle with eight candles coming out of it, Llenn imagined. It looked tasty.
“All right, thanks. If it’s safe, I want you to stay there. And if you can see enemies below, go ahead and shoot them,” M said.
No sooner had the last word left his mouth than there was a thwack! sound, and Clarence shrieked, “Ah!”
Did she get shot? Llenn checked the upper left, where Clarence’s previously full HP bar was rapidly dropping. It went from green straight to yellow. The speed was considerable.
It wasn’t an OHKO, was it? Like Pito! Llenn thought, envisioning the worst-possible scenario. Thankfully, the bar stopped shrinking when it got to the red zone.
There was only 10 percent left. She had been shot somewhere that could nearly have been fatal.
“Ouch! I got sniped! Dammit!” Clarence grunted. Someone must have picked her off while she was leaning out of the tower.
But from where?
“Aw, no, crap! Someone climbed the next tower over! Now if I stick my head out—eek! I’ll get shot!” she wailed, while the sharp sounds of bullets cracking and whizzing by sounded in the background. It was quite a deluge. Based on the speed of the shots, the enemy was clearly using an automatic sniper rifle.
If the castle keep had a diameter of 1.25 miles, then its circumference was about 3.9 miles, Llenn calculated. If you divided that by eight for the eight towers, that put the distance between each one at roughly half a mile.
Of course, it would actually be slightly shorter than that, because you were aiming on a straight line, not along the rounded circumference, which meant—ugh! It was impossible to calculate beyond this point. Someone else do it for me! It should be around twenty-five hundred feet.
That was a distance that a good sniper could still use. It wouldn’t be an easy shot, but this one managed to hit her on the first try.
“Thanks. Stay hidden and focus on healing,” M said.
Having a stream of overhead reports would be unbelievably helpful, but it would be cruel to expect that kind of assistance from Clarence and Tanya without clearing out the nearby sniper first.
And their guns, the AR-57 and Bizon, could not shoot back at that kind of distance.
The bullets could reach, of course—and you could spray them at the correct angle to land in the area—but it would not be accurate, and they’d just get picked off while they were attempting it.
Effective firing range was a cruel number. Unless other circumstances were on your side, you just couldn’t beat a gun with a longer range.
“Okay, I’ll do that! If anyone tries coming up the stairs to the tower, I can shoot them and drop grenades from above! As long as I keep my head down, I think I can stay put here for as long as I want, until the end of the game! So our team won’t get wiped out! But it’s so lonely… So hurry and get over here, guys!”
“We’ll head for the center, too, but first we want to rendezvous with the other SHINC members.”
“In that case, look for my teammate Shirley, too! I wanna use the shotgun in my second loadout—I practiced with it and everything! I had to put down big bucks for that one, and I need to at least shoot one person in the face before this is over!” Clarence begged, rather selfishly.
“All right. I’ll make it happen,” M said, ever the gentleman. “Now, as you know, Pito got killed a short while ago.”
“Yep.”
“It was a sniper shot. Based on the damage, it was probably Shirley who did it.”
“Whoo-hoo! You did it! You did it, Shirley! Way to go!”
“She certainly did.”
“Damn! I wish I could’ve been her spotter for that!”
She was, of course, talking rather gleefully about one of her teammates killing another one of her teammates.
That was just something that happened on this team. You got used to it.
“Didn’t get the job done, huh…?”
In the tower next to Clarence and Tanya’s, sheltered within an identical alcove under the steeple, was Lux, a member of MMTM.
He was dressed in his usual uniform, a Swedish military camo consisting of many shades of green in angular patterns, plus a patch on his shoulder featuring the team logo of a skull with a knife in its mouth. As always, his trademark sunglasses were on.
Behind the stone pillars that surrounded the square tower space, he had a long sniper rifle set up on a tripod.
The gun was an F&D Defense FD338.
The AR rifles—such as the M16 or the larger-caliber AR-15—were the most famous rifles in America. Once the patent had expired, other companies were able to use its design to put out their own guns in the same style, one of which was the FD338.
One of its features was the loading handle being on the left side. It was not like the other AR-series guns, which had it higher up on the rear of the gun. There was a large muzzle brake at the end of the barrel, which directed the firing exhaust behind at an angle, reducing recoil.
As you might have guessed based on the rapid firing earlier, this was an automatic sniper rifle that could fire in semi-auto mode each time you pulled the trigger.
As the name indicated, it fired .338 Lapua Magnum bullets. That was a very powerful high-precision ammunition, the largest kind for a standard sniper rifle, boasting a maximum effective range of almost five thousand feet.
Because it was a bullet for long-range sniper rifles, it was primarily used in bolt-action rifles that boasted very high precision. So between the real world and GGO, there were not many rifles that could shoot them in semi-auto. Although there were conflicting accounts, this was said by some to be the first gun on the world market that could do so.
As the biggest gun freak on the team, Lux had paid through the nose for the latest model of FD338, which was very pricey within GGO, so he could use it in SJ5. Although he couldn’t tell his teammates, he had withdrawn quite a lot of his savings in real money to convert to credits. They would be horrified if they learned how much he’d spent.
Lux was the member of MMTM who had changed his main weapon the most.
In SJ1 and SJ2, he had used a 5.56 mm H&K G36K assault rifle, like his teammate Kenta.
In SJ3, he had felt the lack of a sniper was hurting the team, and so he switched roles to take a 7.62 mm automatic sniper rifle called the H&K MSG90. In the battle on the cruise ship at the end of SJ3, it came in very handy, keeping the team leader at bay when he was on the Betrayer team. Lux, however, ended up drowning.
But in SJ4, he was in battle with LPFM at the airport and toppled from his trike at high speed. Not only did he die from a vehicle accident, his MSG90 broke when it slammed against the runway surface and had to be scrapped. What a shame. It had been expensive.
In the recent Five Ordeals, he’d had no choice but to go into his gun collection and select the SDF Type 20 rifle. It was a 5.56 mm gun and wasn’t suited for long-range sniping, so he had once again selected a new gun this time around.
Lux was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the tripod adjusted to the right height for him to aim the FD338 comfortably. He increased the zoom on the scope and examined the adjacent spire carefully.
He had been lucky from the start of this game, being placed in the snowy field close to the castle and then spotting the towering edifice very soon after the game began.
Where he was unlucky was in heading straight through the gate in one shot—because he never saw that very important warning message printed on the wall in the generic Mincho font.
He had wandered alone through the nearly empty castle and the misty town inside and eventually arrived at the center of the keep.
Inside, he had climbed the stairs to reach the arena on the roof, where he hid behind the obstacles placed there. Of course, that meant he couldn’t see anything, and when no enemies came near him, he ended up spending a very boring hour in the empty fog. He was so bored that he nearly took a nap.
Then the time came at last, and the fog cleared…
Revealing several very tall spires, all quite close by. Oh, I didn’t know those were there.
He was a sniper, so he instantly knew that he’d have a major advantage by climbing them. He sprinted over, leaped inside one, and raced up the spiral staircase.
His next burst of good luck was that members of the despicable LPFM and SHINC were in the tower right next to his.
But then he was once again struck by bad luck, as his first shot on the careless Takarazuka girl, who was leaning way out with binoculars in hand, failed to kill her in one. Apparently, the shot had not been a direct hit on Clarence. His aim had been just off enough that it hit the stone pillar next to her and struck her on the ricochet.
She had been careless before, but now she wasn’t allowing any part of herself to be exposed. The other one, whose camo suggested that she was the silver-haired member of SHINC, was out of his field of view, too.
It was very frustrating that he had hit her yet failed to seal the deal, but he had to report it anyway.
He said into his comm, “Team Leader, I’m in place in the north-northwest tower of the keep. Ready to provide sniper backup. The Takarazuka from LPFM and the silver from SHINC are in the next tower over. I failed to get a kill shot. But I’m keeping their heads down.”
“Good job, Lux,” said David, his voice calm and soothing. Then he added, “Listen up, all of you. We’re joining forces with ZEMAL. If you see any of them, don’t shoot. Provide backup. Someone really wants to finish off the pink shrimp’s team themselves, so we’ll help with that. If that person gets to eliminate Llenn, they’ve promised to share the hundred million.”
Behind his sunglasses, Lux’s eyes bulged, but a smirk soon crossed his lips.
“Roger that! This is getting fun. Where you at, though, Captain?”
Fifty feet of tunnel remained to go through.
No enemies shaded the bright exit. It was so bright, in fact, that there was no way to tell what it was like past that gleaming dawn.
The time was 2:09 PM.
“M, what do you think the next scan will tell us?” Boss asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. M was the kind of honest person who would admit when he didn’t know something, rather than find a way to avoid saying it.
Now that the map was nothing but the castle, would the Satellite Scan still happen the same way? Or would a different set of rules take over?
In SJ3, the Satellite Scan stopped happening once they were on the cruise ship. Instead, the scanners showed a detailed map of the ship and automatically updated with the locations of the surviving players every five minutes.
As he went, M gave directions to the teammates behind him.
“Once we get into the town, I’ll take the lead. The combination of shield and machine gun will be huge in cramped hallways. Boss and Anna, you provide support. Keep an eye above us in particular; there could be snipers on the outer walls of the keep. Fuka, bombard targets as needed. Just don’t shoot any level shots in close quarters. Llenn, continue watching the rear. If you have the chance, check your screen. There are no effective strategies from this point on. We’ll just keep moving toward the center and destroy every enemy we see. If you get any info from your teammates, Boss, let us know at once.”
The others murmured their assent.
Llenn was in the most protected position of all, but there was nothing she could do about that now.
All right. Let’s do this, she thought, right as they reached the end of the tunnel at 2:10 PM—the entrance to the town within the castle.
Six feet back, M lifted the shield on his left arm higher and held the MG5 with his right hand alone. “Let’s go. I’ll jump out first.”
The reason M bolted straight out into the light, rather than craning his neck to carefully peer outward, was to draw the gunfire of anyone who might happen to be waiting with their sights trained on the tunnel. He had the shield, which meant he was less likely to die right away than the rest of them.
Furthermore, if he had peered out with just his head, they would have fired directly into the tunnel, raising the chances of shots hitting the members farther back. That was something to be avoided.
In other words, he wanted all the heat himself.
“Hup!”
M’s large, powerful legs carried him forward into battle, just as the minute on the clock ticked upward.
At that very moment, Sophie contacted Boss for the first time:
“Boss! If you haven’t gone into the town yet, don’t go in!”
As the clock turned to 2:10 PM, M’s foot took its first barreling step out of the tunnel. At the same time, Boss shouted, “What…? M, wait! Don’t go out there!”
She was too late.
A number of things happened, all at once.
Llenn’s scan terminal vibrated, drawing her attention to the words that appeared on the screen.
Special rules for SJ5, two ten additions.
Satellite Scan will not activate within the castle.
Instead, within the town inside the ramparts, the names and distances of any players within fifty meters will become visible to you as cursors, starting from the closest. (If unwanted, cursors can be turned off by tapping them in the air.)
Around him, M could see a castle courtyard area in brownstone. The spaces between structures were as narrow as any back alley, only six to ten feet across. To either side, one-story houses were crammed together, their walls closing in on the path. There were no visible entryways, so the “houses” were really just obstacles meant to turn the place into a maze.
Beyond the brown walls, three cursors appeared in succession, from closest to farthest. Each one popped into existence with a cute little ping! sound, solely inside his brain. It was very helpful and hard to miss.
[ KEES 41m ]
[ BOB 46m ]
[ YAMACHAN 49m ]
“Shit!” M swore, immediately stepping back into the tunnel.
But it was too late.
Anna was watching M as he jumped out of the tunnel ahead of her. A small green cursor appeared over his back.
[ M 5m ]
Around three meters behind Anna, Fukaziroh saw the same cursor, only with a different number.
[ M 8m ]
In her case, the cursor overlapped with the wall of the tunnel. In other words, whether there was a wall or a house in between or not, the cursor, name, and distance would always be visible, telling you where the nearest players were at all times.
“M was there! I saw his cursor for a second! Did you see it, too?”
“Yeah, it was twenty-four meters to the south! If M’s here…then it’s possible that the pink shrimp actually is in the event, too, right?”
“Yeah! Let’s go get ’em! Screw winning; I want the hundred million credits!”
These were the three players whose locations M had learned: Kees, Bob, and Yamachan.
“We’re screwed,” M spat bitterly, retreating into the tunnel.
“I’m sorry… If only I’d warned you a few seconds earlier,” Boss said, feeling responsible. But it wasn’t her fault. It was just the worst possible timing, that was all.
“Sophie, Rosa, Tohma, you’re all good, right?” she asked her teammates. She could see their remaining hit points, so this was more about all the other circumstances.
Sophie replied, “I’m all right, but I’m in the tunnel. Before this—things were bad!”
“Well, at least you’re okay. We’re at the south gate.”
“Oh! We’re on the north. Basically the opposite side!”
So they were two miles away, as far as you could possibly get on the circular zone.
“The north end…,” Boss murmured.
M replied, “We’ll do whatever it takes to survive. Tell them to do their best.”
“Got it!”
On the opposite end of the circular castle walls, inside the tunnel from the north gate, hid the three remaining members of SHINC: Sophie, Rosa, and Tohma.
Sophie: the short, wide, dwarflike one.
Rosa: the stout, freckled mom type, tall and red-haired.
And Tohma: the slender, black-haired girl with a green beanie.
Sophie and Rosa were SHINC’s machine gunners, the brunt of their firepower. Both of them used the Soviet PKM.
Since SJ2, Sophie had also carried around the Degtyaryov PTRD-41 antitank rifle. While it was called an antitank rifle, they would not be shooting any tanks in Squad Jam.
It was simply a large-bore antimateriel rifle, or in other words, a super-powerful sniper rifle. Tohma, the team’s best sniper, was the one who would fire it.
Even Sophie, who had a considerable carrying capacity, couldn’t carry both and had given up her machine gun for a while—until the special rules of this event came into play. Now Sophie could carry around her favorite PKM like usual and actually use it.
Instead, the PTRD-41 was Sophie’s second loadout, which Tohma was carrying in her inventory, along with the ammo. When the time came to use it, they would switch out to materialize the gun, which she would promptly hand back to Tohma to use.
This wasn’t the way the loadout-switching mechanic was intended to work, but it wasn’t against the rules, either. Everything was fair play here.
The secondary loadout Sophie was carrying was a GM-94 grenade launcher, which had come into use in the previous quest, the Five Ordeals. This was a very odd weapon: a pump-action grenade launcher that could fire four times in a row.
If they conducted a gear switch, it would appear in Tohma’s hands, where she would consequently hand it back to Sophie.
Up to this point, at least so far, the three of them had played SJ5 comfortably, suffering only minor damage at worst.
Sophie’s starting point was the mountainous region in the northwest part of the map, while Tohma had been on the highway south of her. They had both quickly found a hiding place and waited out the first hour without being spotted by anyone.
Rosa started out near the northern edge of the snowy field that took up the southeast quadrant of the map. There were no obstacles in the snow, making it ill-suited for waiting. Instead, she walked over to the city, which was barely visible from her location.
There, she’d found a tall building and hidden inside it, hardly making a sound—and because of that, she had almost become a victim of the massive blast caused by the suicide bomber going after Anna and M.
The blast had ripped through the building, and because the glass was already broken, it had sent everything inside flying all over the place. She herself had been tossed out of the room she was hiding in like a vigorous sweep of dust. The tumbling left her dizzy.
The silver lining was that she wasn’t inside to get trapped under the building when it collapsed. Ultimately, she only suffered some minor damage.
If she’d been closer to the center of the room, she wouldn’t have been tossed out and instead would have gotten crushed and died. So that was lucky.
After Anna rushed past the blast, Rosa gave up on catching up to her and headed farther west. She had evacuated to the wasteland area and found a large boulder shrouded in mist, which she had used for cover.
Just after it turned two o’clock, she’d heard the warning from Tanya.
Not everyone was safe to report back in, but they all rushed as fast as they could toward the castle.
Tohma, who was the farthest away, only made it because she’d spotted a working car on the highway just after she’d started running. It was a manual Toyota Land Cruiser 40, sitting there in the mist.
At this point in time, whether in real life or GGO, there were few people left who knew how to drive stick.
Nearly half of the new vehicles sold at this point were electric or hybrids. It was hard to even find a manual transmission.
Tohma blazed a path straight to the castle in the Land Cruiser. She was utterly grateful to her father for teaching her how to drive a stick back home. It had finally come in handy—in GGO.
Along the way, she had spotted Sophie plodding along on her own two feet and offered her a ride. They had also found Rosa near the castle rampart, by pure coincidence. She was being followed by an opponent who wasn’t going to make it and was firing like crazy at her, hell-bent on taking her down with him.
If not for Sophie’s PKM in the passenger seat to help, Rosa probably would have died in that pursuit.
With the ground crumbling behind them, they had driven the Land Cruiser straight into the tunnel, racing all the way through—where they made the unfortunate mistake of driving into the town.
They regretted it immediately.
As soon as they were there and got out of the car, they saw the cursors appear, along with names and distances.
Naturally, their own locations were revealed. And coincidentally, there were two other players just on the other side of a wall who promptly started shooting.
It was bad luck, pure and simple. The trio had turned on their heels and run back into the gigantic castle rampart.
They tried to shoot back from within the fifty-yard tunnel, but once a grenade was shot in after them, they were helpless to stop it.
The blast hit them and pelted them with shrapnel, taking about half the hit points from each one. They thought about running back to the exit and circling around to a different tunnel entrance, but by then, the ground outside had totally fallen away.
There was no escape.
With grenade smoke choking the air around them, Rosa and Sophie waited for death to arrive.
But Tohma did not.
“You can’t give up! There’s still more we can do!” she had cried as she removed all her equipment. Suddenly, they understood what she was planning.
“They’re gone…”
A man in reddish-brown camo carrying an AC-556F and a man in American woodland camo with an M16A1 and an M203 grenade launcher attached were peering downward, right at the very edge of the rampart.
They were looking at a ten-thousand-foot sheer cliff, the likes of which they’d never seen in GGO before—or in any other VR game. It was such a long drop that it made no sense. It was like looking out an airplane window.
A bit earlier, they lost sight of the three cornered Amazons in the smoke but fired all the bullets they could into the tunnel. Frankly, it was overkill.
They also shot three grenades in. That was overkill, too.
Naturally, they were expecting a furious report back from the tunnel, or perhaps a suicide charge from their three opponents, but nothing happened.
And after the smoke had cleared, and they’d walked all the way down the fifty-yard tunnel, there were no people inside—and no bodies.
“They must have fallen…”
“Yep, they fell. Don’t blame us. Rest in peace,” they concluded, turning around at the edge of the cliff.
They never realized that their three targets were clinging to the wall above the gate, on the outside of the castle.
The members of SHINC were teenage girls on a school gymnastics team in real life.
Whether in virtual reality or real reality, their athletic ability was second to none.
Sophie, Rosa, and Tohma removed all their gear, even their boots and socks, leaving nothing except their camo fatigues—and then they climbed up the outer wall, using whatever tiny edges and footholds they could find.
It was a very risky decision.
They nearly fell on multiple occasions, and if their enemies had looked up even once, they would have been sitting ducks. Sophie’s only plan was to drop and land on them, if it came to that.
The girls’ gamble paid off, though. They got past the two men.
Once the men left, they climbed back down and silently returned to the tunnel. Then Sophie and Rosa snuck after their foes, and just at the end of the tunnel to the town, they reached out to strangle them from behind.
“Mrrgl!”
“Aaagh!”
The men squeezed their triggers, firing wildly, but all it did was cause noise and deplete their ammo faster.
Two pairs of thick arms wrapped around their necks, dragging them forcefully back toward the outer edge of the castle.
They had just seen what awaited them there, moments earlier.
Nothing.
“Hey, what—? No, don’t! Please don’t! Please!” the man in the reddish camo pleaded.
“Come on, don’t be shy,” Sophie teased, dragging him mercilessly onward.
“Huh? Stop! Look! Your giant tits are pressing on me! I can feel them!” the man in the woodland camo cried.
“What do I care? Doesn’t hurt me a bit,” Rosa said, unconcerned. Her ample clutches refused to let him go.
“Dammit! A lady’s pressing her boobs on me, and I’m not happy about it at all!”
“Oh yeah? Sorry to hear that, kid.”
“Arrrrgh!”
The men stomped and kicked their feet childishly, all the way down the fifty-yard tunnel.
“Don’t blame us. Rest in peace,” the women said, repeating their earlier words, before hurling the men over the ten-thousand-foot cliff.
“Damn youuuuuuuuuuu!”
“Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!”
They fell and fell, the Doppler effect causing funny things to happen to their voices.
The women watched them go, but the DEAD tag wouldn’t show up over the falling men.
“I guess that means they’re still alive until they go all the way down the ten thousand feet.”
“Hope they enjoy skydiving.”
So that was a new fact to take away from this, useful or not.
After all that, the trio had escaped their string of dangers for the moment.
Boss’s orders: “Whatever it takes to survive! Do your best!”
They equipped their gear again, stopping before the exit of the tunnel this time to examine the town carefully.
They could tell from the cursor that one unfamiliar person was a few dozen yards ahead. From this point, they could see the cursors, but once they took a single step out of the tunnel, everyone else would be able to see them.
And the area ahead was a very complicated, mazelike town.
In other words, they would know the direction and distance of any nearby enemies but not how to actually reach them.
“In situations like these, there’s just one thing to do,” said the short woman, PKM held firmly at her waist.
“Yep, only one,” replied the plucky mom, identical PKM at the ready like a part of her body.
“And I’ve got your backs,” said the woman in the beanie, leaving the Dragunov over her shoulder in the cramped environment and holding her unholstered Strizh pistol instead.
Rosa took the first step into the town and said, “We just pick directions at random and hope for the best!”
Just after 2:10 PM, David stood right before the exit to the tunnel and remarked, “Ah, so if you’re within fifty meters, you can see the enemy location…”
That was because someone just so happened to be within that distance at the moment. The visible cursor came with a name he did not recognize.
He was at the rampart gate on the northwest side.
That was about four exits from Rosa’s trio, but neither was aware of the other’s location yet. If anything, they might have heard some distant gunfire.
Next to David was a beautiful woman with red hair, his rather unlikely partner: Vivi, goddess of machine guns.
She was in a crouch, bearing an RPD machine gun with its barrel cut short. “That just makes me even less interested in going in,” she admitted.
David and Vivi were well-known players in their own right, if not quite as famous as Llenn and her hundred-million-credit bounty.
If they walked out, and their names were revealed, people would be coming after them.
“Then let’s have all these troublesome folks go after the most infamous target of the day,” David smirked.
“Oh, you are a most wicked fellow… Isn’t that what they say in these scenes?” The woman grinned.
“First, however,” David went on, “where are your survivors?”
He knew that Shinohara and Tomtom had died in battle, but he hadn’t heard anything about the others.
The three other members of ZEMAL were…
Max: the muscular Black avatar with the Minimi Mk 46.
Peter: the shortest one (still tall), with trademark tape over the bridge of his nose. He used the Israeli Negev.
And Huey: the tough guy with the slicked-back brown hair, who easily whipped around a huge and heavy M240B.
All three were firepower-heavy maniacs, with backpack ammo feeders that allowed them to shoot eight hundred to a thousand bullets without stopping. You couldn’t ask for better allies—especially because they would do whatever Vivi told them to do.
“Max and Peter are hanging out in the eastern tunnel. Huey’s somewhere in town. He apologized and said he didn’t know where. I told him just to survive for now.”
“Got it. As for us,” David prefaced, “Lux is atop the northwest tower, as I mentioned. It’s the perfect position for sniping and monitoring. Summon is inside the western rampart, closer to us, I believe.”
Summon was the largest member of the team, who used a SCAR-L assault rifle. He had started on the highway on the western edge of the map and spent fifty lazy minutes hiding in the bed of a broken-down truck he’d found nearby.
He probably had no idea that his team leader was in a switchyard quite close by. He had nearly died in the collapse, but by running for all he was worth after getting the warning, he had just barely made it.
“Fortunately, Jake and Bold have already met up. They’re inside the castle wall to the east-northeast.”
Skinny Jake was MMTM’s only machine gunner. He liked to use an HK21.
Bold was a fashionable fellow who set his custom hairstyle in dreads. His weapon of choice was a Beretta ARX160.
Jake had started in the snowy field but quickly fled to the city, then traveled west after the titanic explosion. He had taken almost the exact same route as Rosa, but fortunately for both of them, neither spotted the other due to the thick, choking fog. If they’d encountered each other, it would have been a deadly battle. When two machine gunners ran across each other at close range, it was quite possible for both to end up dead.
Bold had started in the same city. He was lucky enough to spot his buddy Jake en route to the castle.
“Kenta’s in some castle gate on the south side. Seems like he almost died in a big blast.”
The quickest member of the team, Kenta had black hair and a G36K assault rifle. He started in the woods but was lucky enough to be right next to the castle when the fog finally cleared.
The special rules that split everyone up were particularly galling to the members of MMTM, who were highly disciplined and coordinated as a team. David was dying for a chance to shoot the event sponsor.
But it was also pretty sweet that all six of them were alive and nearly unharmed. Anyone would agree, they were in the best position to win it all at the moment. Of course, he couldn’t tell that to the heartbroken Vivi.
“It’s really sweet that you’re all alive,” she said to him first, instead. “So I hate to burden you, but could you ask Kenta to do some running?”
David had his STM-556 pointed to the outside, in case an enemy appeared in the tunnel mouth all of a sudden. “Oh…yes, I see!”
She had a plan. They didn’t know where Llenn’s team was—they could be dead, for all anyone knew—but if they were alive, the chances were highest that they were in the south.
After splitting up in the suburb, David’s side had gone north, while Llenn’s side had gone south and toward the middle. If they ended the hour there and rushed straight for the castle—assuming they weren’t inside already—they would be somewhere on the south side of the structure right now. Meaning Kenta was closest.
If he could at least spot Llenn’s location by cursor, they could proclaim, “The hundred-million bounty is over there! You can attack her and not lose sight of her! Do you really want to fight us right now?” and most enemies would apply pressure to Llenn instead.
“Let’s do that,” he said in his typically decisive manner. He was about to speak to Kenta when Vivi cut him off.
“And…if the enemy latches on to Llenn, we should all rush straight for the middle of the castle, as fast as we can.”
This idea was more confusing to David. “Wouldn’t we be safer here?”
Inside the tunnel, they could see the locational cursors of the enemies in the maze, and any who might be approaching, while the enemies couldn’t see them in return. It was a safe zone that almost felt like cheating.
Couldn’t they just wait here in safety while the situation with Llenn’s team played itself out?
“No, wait!” David exclaimed, realizing his mistake. “This part’s going to collapse, too. Is that what you’re saying?”
He was too busy watching for anyone who might come to attack, but he could sense that Vivi was nodding in confirmation.
“Yes.”
“What makes you think that?” David asked.
“Because that’s how I would design it,” she replied simply.
“Seems like a really mean-spirited rule that’s going to piss off the playerbase…”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Huh?”
“If you’re going to make up some mean rules, you can’t be half-hearted about it. You need to commit to it all the way. That way, it annoys the players that you’re being so mean, but by the end, it swings all the way back around into admiration, doesn’t it? And that makes it harder for people to bash you by that point.”
Although David couldn’t see it, Vivi was grinning.
David smirked. “Guess I’m up shit creek without a paddle. Incidentally, that’s the first time in my life I’ve ever used that saying.”
“It’s 2:13 PM right now. The collapse will probably happen at the half hour. Twenty would be too soon. I’m guessing there will be an announcement with more info at 2:20, and it’ll start at 2:30.”
“There’s the paddle.”
“Only one?”
“Are you…serious, Captain?” asked Kenta, standing about sixty feet from the exit to one of the rampart tunnels to the south-southwest, positioned at seven o’clock. He was flat on his stomach in almost total darkness.
“Dead,” replied David.
His order had been to run around and spread a message designed to draw enemy attention to Llenn.
In particular, to let the ones who were more than fifty yards away from Llenn know where she was and direct them toward her. It was a siren call to look for the hundred million credits, rather than fight each other.
But Kenta himself was instructed to get to the center by two thirty PM.
Given MMTM’s reputation—for better or worse—for fighting by the book, this was an almost unbelievably fresh and novel idea.
“Roger that!” Kenta happily replied. “It sounds fun!”
A little fun was the best motivation.
He held up his G36K, which had been customized to use M16 magazines so he could share with his teammates, got to his feet, and announced, “Time to get my running in!”
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