CHAPTER 11
Interior Battle
Inside the castle, the various machinations and plans of the players doing battle intertwined in curious and nasty ways—without any of them realizing it, of course.
It was 2:14 PM.
“Let’s go.”
M and his companions started to move.
M, Boss, Anna, Llenn, and Fukaziroh chose to trust in their own instincts and continue forward, rather than wait at the end of the rampart tunnel.
It was easy to see where the middle of the castle was, thanks to the player’s compass visible directly above, which had returned when the fog cleared. The problem was that it was impossible to know the route to get there.
It was a maze, after all. A gigantic maze, in which the shortest possible distance to the center was still five hundred yards.
Looking at the map on the Satellite Scanner wouldn’t show you a detailed look at the maze, either, of course. They didn’t give you school test sheets with the answers on the back, after all.
But staying put and doing nothing wouldn’t help much either, since the enemies would come after M anyway, now that his location was visible to them.
Sitting here and playing defense would not lead to winning SJ5. They had to go on the offensive.
Let’s go! Llenn thought, pumping herself up.
She’d been through the wringer so far, but she was still alive. And if she was alive, she could fight. She gripped the bright-pink P90, feeling her weapon respond to the touch.
M popped out of the huge tunnel and rushed into the labyrinth, shield and machine gun in hand.
Boss, Anna, Fukaziroh, and Llenn followed him, in that order.
Just before she left the tunnel, Llenn finally got her first look at the maze ahead.
Brown walls about fifteen feet high bordered a passage about ten feet wide. They were clearly long walls of townhouses, but the buildings held no doors, meaning they were just environmental items meant to make the area into a maze. Some of the walls were just that—walls.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
Enemy cursors appeared in Llenn’s vision.
KEES, BOB, and YAMACHAN. She had never seen any of these names. It was clear that they were working together, so she decided to think of them as Kees’s team.
The distance to Kees’s team was about twenty yards. M headed north, toward the center of the castle. The three cursors were slightly to the left, meaning they were to the northwest.
In GGO, a distance of twenty yards was close enough to reach out and tap someone’s shoulder. In other words, very close.
But she couldn’t see them.
All Llenn could see were brown walls twice as tall as she was. And they ended in a crossroads just a few yards away. It truly was a maze.
I really don’t like this map, Llenn grumbled to herself. It was so difficult to fight in a place like this.
M continued quickly in silence; he was moving more or less at full speed by his standards.
Boss and Anna stayed about ten feet behind him, followed by Fukaziroh, and lastly Llenn.
Of course, she was only going at a light jog. She could run about three times faster if she wanted. She could turn and run backward and still not have to worry about falling behind.
After the party had traveled about sixty feet since leaving the tunnel, they came to a T-intersection. They would have to turn here; the left and right choices each went another ten feet.
Ordinarily, they would stop running and check for enemies down either path, but M immediately decided “right” and burst around the corner toward the east.
Boss and Anna glanced to the left just after M went around the corner, then continued their pursuit of his path.
Oh, I get it! Llenn thought, putting the picture together.
The cursors were nasty in that they gave away your location, but it also meant you could avoid an unexpected run-in with enemies. In other words, as long as the other cursor didn’t get too close, you could keep moving through the maze without slowing down.
Meaning…
“What the—? So if you can see the cursors…that means you can just run through the maze however you want,” Llenn commented, watching the distance to Kees’s team carefully; they were now seventy-five feet away.
Apparently they weren’t able to find a route that brought them closer to the group and were stuck going in circles on their own.
“What, did you just figure that out? That’s the maze game, baby!” said Fukaziroh, ten feet ahead.
“Finally. Gotta love a good game,” Llenn replied, running backward. At last, it made sense. They didn’t have to fight as long as they could stay on the run.
Just then, a cute little ping! sound happened in Llenn’s mind.
“Uh-oh, a new one. At four o’clock,” Fukaziroh said. Indeed, if M was traveling toward twelve, the new cursors appeared in the vision of the entire team in the four o’clock direction.
There were four of them at a distance of fifty yards. Then it turned to forty-nine, then forty-eight.
But in the next moment, they stopped at forty-seven. Llenn was fairly confident she was correct. They had run into a dead end in the maze.
Of course, the other side could presumably see her LLENN cursor and her distance. They would also imagine the tantalizing one hundred million number as well.
Shirley’s name was not one of the four. In fact, she didn’t recognize any of their names.
If she tried to stop and memorize every name she saw, it would take too much time and mental energy, so Llenn just focused on the direction and distance.
They were still wavering between forty-seven and forty-nine, so it didn’t seem they had anything to worry about at this point in time.
Up ahead, M came to another T-intersection. Ordinarily, which direction to go was a difficult decision, but he took no time at all. He went right, to put more distance between them and Kees’s team, which was still closer. It put them a bit farther away—and the new group of four a bit closer.
“This could end up with the enemies just ten feet away, on the other side of a thin wall, right?” Llenn asked hesitantly.
“It’s possible,” M replied.
“Could they throw grenades over the wall?”
“Well, uh…” He sounded surprisingly hesitant.
“Should I blast ’em first? It’s a bit close, but I could probably get a good shot on those four,” crowed Fukaziroh, the grenadier. It was as casual as if she’d asked, “Want me to get some popsicles at the convenience store? It’s a bit of a hike, but with my moped, it’s a quick trip.”
If Fukaziroh knew the distance and angle, she could indeed land an arcing grenade shot with considerable accuracy. In a maze like this, it was an almighty, one-sided means of attack.
But Llenn had her misgivings. If it were really an advantageous tactic, M would have given her the order to do that already. So why hadn’t he?
A number of possible answers occurred to Llenn.
One: to save on grenades. Even if there were refills, it wouldn’t do to start wasting them on distant enemies before the final battle.
Two: to prioritize movement. Getting through the maze was more important.
Three: ummm…
“You don’t need to,” M stated, before Llenn could actually think of a third reason. “Llenn, take a single shot into the air with your P90.”
“Huh? All right.”
She didn’t know why, but she knew there was a reason. She followed the leader’s instruction.
Wait, I’m the leader. Oh, whatever.
Llenn stopped briefly and aimed the P90, which had a sound suppressor on the end, at an angle into the air.
The P90ists of the world are aware of a fact of life as simple and profound as “The sun always rises in the east,” but which most other, normal, healthy people have no idea about. And that’s: “Even with the P90’s selector in full auto mode, a light pull of the trigger can fire a single semi-auto shot.” A feature known as a progressive trigger.
Llenn lightly depressed the trigger.
Shpak!
P-chan jolted in her hand, emitting a tiny 5.7 mm bullet faster than sound. An empty cartridge ejected from the bottom of the gun.
The bullet vanished in the distant reddish-blue sky—
“Oh!”
Or so you would have thought. But instead, it stopped at a height of fifteen feet, right at the top of the maze wall. The little bullet was too fast to see coming out of the gun, so it was like it had just appeared, hanging in the air.
There was also what appeared to be a ripple in the air. Then the bullet simply fell back to the ground, clattering lightly.
“It stopped! It fell back down!” Llenn said, announcing what she’d just seen.
“I figured,” M murmured.
“No surprise there,” Boss added. They’d both expected this.
“What does it mean?” Llenn asked, just to be sure. She had an idea of her own, but it would be dangerous to just make an assumption without confirming it with the others.
“You can’t attack over the top of the maze. If you shoot, the bullets will stop. It probably works the same way from above, too.”
“Like an invisible barrier?” Llenn asked.
When playing GGO normally, there were certain enemies out on the map, especially the “mid-boss” larger ones, who used invisible defensive shields like this. The phenomenon didn’t have an official name, so people just called it an invisible barrier.
Sometimes it was a localized effect that just covered a weak point, and sometimes it surrounded an entire foe. In the case of the latter, you needed a strategy to get past it somehow.
Up to this point in time, invisible barriers were not an item that players could acquire. It would be too big of an advantage.
“Exactly. It’s like they’ve placed an invisible barrier over the entire top of the maze,” M explained.
“I see. Makes total sense.”
“So if Fuka tried to shoot a grenade,” M continued, not bothering to stop running, “the barrier would probably stop it before it explodes. And because it’s within the safety range, they won’t explode, period.”
Launched grenades had a safety feature that measured distance and refused to allow them to explode until they’d traveled a certain distance from the shooter. If Llenn’s memory was correct, Fukaziroh’s launchers had a safety range of about sixty feet.
“But I can still shoot a plasma grenade down the path ahead of us.”
Don’t do that! Llenn’s mental commentary snapped as soon as the words were out of Fukaziroh’s mouth.
“Don’t use a weapon with a sixty-foot blast diameter in this cramped area. Have you forgotten how you almost blew me up earlier?” she said aloud, glaring pointedly.
“Yes, I forgot. Do you think I can knock these annoying walls down?”
Don’t do that either! Even in her mind, Llenn was fast.
M interjected, “I doubt anything we do will destroy these walls. If that were possible, it wouldn’t be a maze anymore.”
Exactly, Llenn thought. If that were possible, you could just create your own path straight through. Every player with grenades would be doing it.
“So I’m basically useless until we’re through the maze.” Fukaziroh sulked. “Fine, then. I’ll put Rightony and Leftonia away and use my pistol. The Smith & Wesson will be my passport. My hard, gleaming passport. Any enemies that come flocking to us will get a bullet in the brain courtesy of this.”
The Smith & Wesson M&P was Fukaziroh’s sidearm. That was an abbreviation of Military & Police. It was a 9 mm automatic.
But before Fukaziroh could draw it from its holster, Llenn snapped, “Don’t do that. You’ll put someone’s eye out.”
Right around the time Llenn discovered the ceiling on the maze, or perhaps a bit earlier, Shirley had figured out the trick at the exit to the tunnel that went through the rampart.
“I see… So that’s what this is… Well, that makes sense.”
There was a maze of a town ahead. As a test, she fired a 7.62 mm bullet from her R93 Tactical 2 rifle at the spires over the center of the castle—just an ordinary bullet, rather than wasting an exploding round—but it was stopped by an invisible ceiling.
Sniping up from below was impossible. And presumably, vice versa.
Whether because they heard the high-pitched sound of the gun firing or out of sheer coincidence, two cursors became visible to her, wandering around forty yards away behind the walls.
Shirley was a sniper. Her style of combat was finding enemies at long distance and shooting them. She was decent at snap shooting as she ran, too, but for that she still needed to be a decent distance away, with no obstacles in between.
If there were no cursors, and no one knew their opponent’s location, then she might be able to shoot someone when they appeared around a corner in the maze. But if they knew the distance and everything, she was at a total disadvantage.
“I can’t win…”
The thought of charging into the labyrinthine town and holding her own was a pipe dream.
Shirley hated to lose, but she knew her own qualities, what she was good and bad at, better than anyone else. She didn’t get lost in her own fantasies.
“If only she were here…”
If Clarence were present, Shirley could hand over her second loadout, a shotgun, and have her stand in front and do all the blasting. A shotgun was the perfect gun for this environment, with a short range but wide spray, with the effect of stunning anyone hit.
But Clarence wasn’t here. She had to accept reality.
So what to do?
“Should I just stay here…? No, think about these shitty rules. Who knows what might happen to this spot later… Could be that the middle is the only part that’s left at the end…”
Like Vivi, Shirley was concerned about the safety of the area. Perhaps it was her wild instincts as a hunter. Perhaps it was something else.
“Should I just keep running, without even bothering with my gun…?”
If she put the long and bulky R93 back into her inventory, she could reach max speed and be much nimbler. But it would mean that the ken-nata blade was the only weapon she could use.
One method would be to pay close attention to the enemy locations via the cursors, pray that she didn’t run across them, and rush through the maze as quickly as possible.
“But if they track me down, I’m done for.” Once she realized that, she eliminated that option.
You didn’t have to be Llenn to outrun Shirley; there were plenty of players faster than her. If they started catching up from behind, she would simply die without a means of fighting back.
While she had fulfilled one of her life goals—her Squad Jam life goals—by killing Pitohui, Shirley was not interested in resigning, committing suicide, or allowing someone to take her out.
Even if her ultimate fate was to be shot and killed, Shirley was going to do her damnedest to delay that moment as long as she possibly could.
“Then that leaves only one thing,” she concluded. No matter how impossible it seemed, if that was the best option, it would have to do.
Shirley turned on her heel and began to run through the tunnel—toward the outside of the castle. As she ran, she swung her left arm, turning the long rifle into brief motes of light that soon vanished.
Then she reached the threshold of the entrance, the place she’d scrambled so hard to reach, at the top of a ten-thousand-foot cliff—and glared at the sky and the wall around her.
“……”
“Hey! Just hear me out!”
At that shout from an adjacent passageway in the maze, a new player startled. He had a young male avatar of medium height and build, with short blond hair and blue eyes. But he wore a mask that hid his face.
He was in a black jumpsuit made of leatherlike material, one of those mysterious fabrics that was unique to GGO.
His gun was a Soviet SKS, recognizable by its wooden stock. It used 7.62 × 39 mm bullets, like the AK series, and could fire up to ten shots consecutively on semi-auto.
He recognized the name KENTA on the cursor ahead of him. That was one of the MMTM guys. He’d seen the man fighting (and getting killed) in a number of video clips before.
The name on his own cursor, which Kenta would be seeing right now, was MURACHI.
As for Murachi, he was panicking. “Wh-why are you talking to me?!”
He had seen Kenta approaching for the past minute or two, based on his cursor. He’d fled through the maze but found himself trapped in a dead end now. Walls surrounded him ahead and to the sides. There was nowhere to go.
The distance on Kenta’s cursor grew smaller and smaller. Murachi had no escape. The man was ten feet away now. If they hadn’t been in adjacent corridors, he would have been shot and killed by now.
“Hey! Guy on the other side of the wall! You can hear me, right? Your name’s Murachi?”
“Wh-what the hell do you want? Huh? Y-you want me to s-surrender?!” he shouted back, although it sounded more like a shriek. He didn’t know what else to say.
Murachi had just started playing GGO, as a matter of fact. He was a total noob.
Originally, he’d played a different full-dive VR game. It was called Tekken Seisai Online: We Are the Beatdown Busters, or simply TSO for short. It was a fighting game that involved piloting giant robots in massive, physical melee battles.
Basically, it was like a supersize, online version of those RC robot fighting events. You had three-hundred-foot-tall steel monstrosities engaged in a destruction derby of sorts, and it was very impressive.
There was also a PvE city destruction mode where you smashed up buildings instead of opponents, which was awesome for stress relief.
He had played that a fair bit and gotten pretty good at it, but sadly, it must not have been that popular, because it had been shut down just three months ago. What a shame.
So Murachi was here because a real-life friend who had a long and fairly prominent history in GGO needed him on his team to round out their numbers. He was only temporarily present in the game.
Converting a character brought over your relative strength from the previous game, so his GGO character was still pretty good numerically, but he had never used a gun in a full-dive game before.
He was here in SJ5 without even really knowing how to shoot. But his friend had said, “Don’t worry! You’ll just be hanging out with the team as the holder of my alternate loadout. My teammates’ firepower is seriously crazy! We’ll all keep your ass safe! Just come along for the ride!”
Thanks to the damn rules, however, none of them were anywhere to be seen. And as had just been revealed to him earlier, his friend had already died in battle. What the hell? What kind of crappy ride was this?
That friend was one of the people who had gotten their heads chopped off by Llenn in the neighborhood to the south. Of course, Murachi had no idea what had happened, exactly.
The gun in his hand was only borrowed from that same friend: the SKS, which could fire ten shots on semi-auto, and that was it.
Frankly, it was a piece of crap. A beginner gun, cheap and feeble. The only thing it had going for it was that it was easy to use.
Thanks to its classic look because of the wooden stock, however, the people who liked the SKS really liked it. It was one of those “rare classics” that certain historical nerds loved to obsess over.
But if you weren’t a gun freak, why would you care? It’s the only gun I’ve got. And it’s not even that good.
Alone in the thick mist, plagued by fear and anxiety, he ran and ran for survival, made it to the castle, and promptly got lost in the maze. And then he found himself in the crosshairs of a powerful enemy, of whom his friend had said, ‘MMTM is tough. They’re all tough. I wouldn’t want to fight them head-on.’
He’d had enough for one day.
He just wanted to surrender and get out of this map already. The only reason he hadn’t done so up to this point was because he didn’t want his friend and all the other members of the team to whine and complain to him afterward.
Kenta called out to Murachi, “Surrender? No, I’m not talking about that. I want to send a message to you: Llenn’s in the south.”
“Huh? Who?” Murachi asked. An honest question. He was just trying to survive.
“Have you forgotten? Llenn! The little pink shrimp, a powerhouse in Squad Jam, who has a hundred-million-credit bounty on her head. They’re saying nobody saw her in the pub, but she’s here, all right. She slipped into the castle from the south. She’s probably still hanging around that area.”
“F-for real…?”
“For real, baby. If you finish her off, you get a hundred. Million. Credits.”
“Hundred…million…credits…”
The power of that number coursed through his mind. It completely banished all fear from Murachi’s being.
“Rrraaaahhh!”
Yes, people do act on wonderfully laudable, human qualities like love and bravery and friendship and kindness. They also act on greed for money. Lots and lots of money.
Murachi’s mental CPU was running at full capacity. What could he do with a hundred million credits, which was worth a million yen?
He could go all out and buy himself a phenomenal rare gun that would blow his friend away. (Not literally.)
But forget GGO. He should think about using that money in the real world. This was one of the rare games that actually let you trade in-game currency for real money.
A hundred million credits. One million yen. Nearly ten thousand US dollars. That would be one hundred Eiichi Shibusawas, who was on the ten-thousand-yen bill.
With a million yen, he could fulfill a lifelong dream and go on a luxury cruise. See countries and places on the other side of the world that he’d always wished to see! They would be within his grasp! Flying business class!
Or if he stretched his money, he could complete a backpacking trip around the world. He could totally take some time off from college to do something like that.
He could also stay in school, save his money, and spend it on certain businesses like that offered certain services, and maybe even fulfill a fantasy to do one day. The thought was giving him a nosebleed.
Kenta laid on the pressure even harder. “Hurry and go south! And in just this one situation, if you see folks from different teams, let them know, too! That way everyone can attack Llenn without worrying about wasted conflict elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if everyone else does a bunch of damage, as long as you’re the one who scores the last hit. Easy, right? It’s like you’ve practically won the million yen already.”
“Yaaaarrrgh! I’ll do it! Thanks for the tip!”
He was reborn.
The old Murachi, weak-willed and pliant and helpless and pathetic, had just died.
“C’mon, SKS. I’ll feed you the blood of that pink shrimp…”
No one else could say whether the SKS spoke back.
“A million yen!” the man screamed, rushing off down the corridor.
“There goes another one. He was easy,” Kenta commented, looking around for the closest cursor after Murachi’s. “Better keep moving.”
2:17, a bit more than three minutes after Llenn’s team left the tunnel.
Up to this point, there had been no unfriendly contact with opposing players. In other words, no battle.
Llenn could now see ten cursors in total—the three with Kees, the four after that, then another three—but the distance between them was not closing significantly.
First it would seem like they were getting closer; then they would stop and move away. It seemed like the maze was just that twisted, because their opponents were not closing the gap.
Of course, thanks to the invisible ceiling over their heads, they couldn’t get sniped from the top of the castle, nor blown up by grenades lobbed over their way.
They must have been quite visible from the center keep, the outer ramparts, and the bridges that connected the two. You would have expected a sniper to try to shoot them already, but there hadn’t been a single shot so far.
The base of the cake that was the center keep was getting a little bit larger. At first it was just barely visible, when it was five hundred yards away, but now it was taller, closer, and more imposing. Due to the maze, it was impossible to measure precisely, but she guessed that they were halfway there.
As the rear guard, Llenn was the one watching behind them. In fact, she was basically walking—no, trotting—backward, so when they reached a dead end in the maze, Fukaziroh had to tell her, “Whoa, Llenn, stop!”
She turned around. Before M, the lead member of the group, the path ahead came to an end. The walls were all the same color, so unless you got fairly close, it was hard to tell if it was really a dead end, or if there were side passages at the end. The whole thing was very nastily designed.
M came back this way, stomping past Llenn. The shield and MG5 looked very powerful in his hands. Following him went Boss, then Anna.
For the past few minutes, Boss and Anna had each been holding a spare magazine in their left hands, each belonging to the Strizh handgun that their entire team carried. Every now and then, they used a thumb to pop out one of the 9 mm Parabellum bullets and drop it alongside the wall.
If M turned down a path and saw a bullet lying on the ground ahead, he would therefore know that they’d already been this way. A very Hansel and Gretel strategy.
The rest was up to M’s mental mapping ability.
M’s geographic sense was unparalleled, thanks to his experience as a stalker. (As a reminder, children, do not follow his example.) He never got stuck in the same place twice and was steadily finding the most efficient route to the middle of the castle.
There were ten enemies within 150 feet. If they had to pass down the same hallway, battle would be unavoidable. If that happened, M was ready to use his machine gun in the lead to overpower them. Surely he could handle about ten people, if needed.
With each member using their wits and abilities to the fullest, the group smoothly made their way through the maze without any combat. It felt like they might actually make it.
Llenn was just allowing herself to taste the sweet, syrupy allure of that possibility, when something else dashed a bucket of cold water over her head.
Beep, beep, beep, bee-bee-beep, beep.
The rapid-fire pinging of new cursors appearing.
“Huh?”
Bee-bee-beep, beep-beep.
“What the—?”
“Hang on, what’s this all about?” yelped Fukaziroh, alarmed by the sudden increase in enemy cursors within fifty yards, all closing in quickly.
Wow, even Fuka understands that this is a crazy situation, Llenn thought.
No sooner had the words entered her mind than Fukaziroh continued, “You really want to come see my adorable beauty up close, eh? Fine, the more, the merrier! Step on up to catch a glimpse of me, and I’ll give you all signed grenades.”
Sorry, it was Fukaziroh who was crazy.
“Tch!” Boss snapped.
“This is…not good,” Anna said worriedly.
Try as she might, Llenn could not prevent these comments from raising her hackles. Maybe Fukaziroh had said what she did in an attempt to keep Llenn’s nerves loose and comfortable. Oh, who was she kidding—of course that wasn’t it.
She waited for what M would say.
“……”
And when he didn’t say anything, then the fear set in.
“Yo! You after the hundred million credits, too?”
“That’s right. So make your choice: Either we kill each other here over nothing, so the winner gets to chase after the prize alone and is beaten up, or we call a temporary truce and stay healthy, betting it all on getting that lucky kill shot.”
“I don’t even have to think it over. I’ll take the latter. There are two things almost as important as your life. One is money, and the other one is money. I got a car loan to pay off.”
“Exactly, money is everything. I’ve got a newborn to support. So that’s our choice.”
“That’s our choice. Oh, and…congrats.”
Here and there, other conversations were taking place, often with quite different details, but all leading to the same outcome: temporary team ups.
Let’s call their team the Wannabe Millionaires. Was there an abbreviation for that? Willionaires? Who knows.
None of them were from MMTM, SHINC, or ZEMAL, of course, but they did include the armored soldiers of T-S. There was a member of NSS, the historical cosplay squad. There were even some members of RGB, the optical-only team that once served Llenn’s team a bitter loss.
These were delightfully honest men who chose not their own team, nor winning SJ5, nor honor, nor glory—but the chance at a million yen in the pocket.
And now they were slinking farther and farther south around the castle.
“It’s like a trade fair for the greedy!” someone in the pub yelled, either out of exasperation or admiration—or both.
The folks watching on the screens could see it all. In the big monitors mounted on the walls, or hanging from the ceiling, or floating in the air over their tables, they could see a very clear map of the castle: the final arena of SJ5.
By employing a pinch zoom out on their personal screens, the chaotic and tangled picture of the maze was made very clear. They could even see the characters’ locations and names along with their cursors. It was a god’s-eye view.
It made something else very clear, too.
The cursor for LLENN on the south side, grouped with her four companions, was increasingly becoming the focus of a large southward migration of players. Like ants drawn to sugar, many yellow cursors were flooding downward through the brown environment.
Of course, it was still a maze, so they went back and forth, left and right, but overall, they were making progress. Seeing the cursors closer to the center undeniably moving away from the middle made it clear how they were aiming for Llenn.
One eagle-eyed viewer spotted Kenta approaching an opponent in the southeast part of the map and making contact. Rather than disappearing, the other player turned and started moving south. When he realized what MMTM was doing, he spoke up to share his finding.
“Aha, so that’s what this is. A brutal strategy…”
“Freakin’ awesome!”
“That’s my MMTM!”
“They’re not yours.”
“Thanks for doing our usual joke.”
It was after 2:19 PM, and Llenn’s group was totally surrounded.
One person examining the zoomed-in map said excitedly, “Hey, holy shit! The pink shrimp doesn’t have a single route through to the center without crossing at least one enemy!”
At 2:19 and thirty seconds, a number of things happened all at once.
First of all, Kenta reported back to David between his various recruiting attempts around the maze.
“It’s looking good, Leader! I can tell from the cursors! We’ve got a whole bunch of people going south!”
In the rampart tunnel to the northwest, David confirmed that no one was within fifty yards of him, then spoke to his teammate in the tower. “All right, we’re going to move. Lux?”
“Ready! I’ll give it a shot, Leader!” came the response.
David hurled a smoke grenade. A burst of yellow smoke appeared in the maze town, spreading and rising.
“Confirmed!” said Lux. He was looking in that direction through binoculars from the northeast spire of the center keep. He could see the maze from above, so he was able to give directions to a certain extent.
Being as complex as it was, he couldn’t give the most direct route, but he at least had a better idea if the current path was a dead end ahead, or if it was one the player had already passed through.
While it was a cheap advantage—some might call it cheating—this was simply a privilege of those teams who had members who had gotten into the castle early.
The drawback was that, by focusing on the team leader, he could not provide the same help to Summon at the west gate.
“Sorry, Summon,” said David. “All I can say is: Good luck!”
“No worries, boss. Let’s meet in the middle.”
“Yes. In the middle,” his captain replied.
“Leave the rear to me,” said Vivi. The two of them rushed out of the tunnel they’d been hiding inside the entire time.
“That’s weird… The enemies are all moving really far south,” said Sophie, feeling suspicious at noticing the lack of cursors as she stomped along through the maze. “Ohh! Are they moving toward Llenn…? Boss! The enemy’s converging on your location! I think someone’s intentionally giving them directions!”
Nearby, Rosa and Tohma scowled.
“Yeah, that sounds right,” Boss replied through the comm. “We’re surrounded by enemies at this point. I’m sure that’s cleared things up around you, though.”
“Yes, true!”
“Then head straight for the middle. Don’t attempt rescue. There are too many of them.”
Sophie had only one choice of reply.
“……Roger that!”
“Mmm, I’m bored. Wanna play a word game?” suggested Clarence, lying on her back at the top of the spire, clutching her AR-57. She was completely relaxed.
“Now’s not the time…,” muttered Tanya, who was also lying down to avoid being sniped. She had just learned of Boss and Llenn’s predicament through the comm. Unlike Clarence, however, she was maintaining a vigilant watch on the stairs.
There was a grenade in her hand; if anyone started coming up, she was ready to pull the pin and drop it into the hole over the steps.
Clarence was listening to the LPFM chatter through the comm as well, so she should be aware that her team was in danger, Tanya assumed.
“‘Time’… Time rhymes with…rhyme!”
She had to take that back. Clarence wasn’t aware of anything.
“Wait, that makes no sense!”
In the real world and in GGO, the clock struck 2:20 PM.
At that moment, Llenn followed M’s lead and stopped moving, because there were too many enemies around them.
Bzzzzzt.
Thanks to that, she promptly noticed that the Satellite Scanner in her shirt was vibrating.
“There’s something on the device!”
“Probably info. You look at it for the group and tell us what it says.”
“Got it.”
She did as he said, pulling the device out of her shirt pocket and looking at the screen. There was a message that started with Additional Information at 2:20, which she read aloud.
“Um, it says, ‘I intentionally forgot to say that this castle will also crumble from the outside in. At two thirty, everything will fall away, bit by bit…’ Huh? What is this crap?!”
“Just read all of it, Llenn. Remember, stay calm,” Fukaziroh admonished.
“‘Everything will fall away, bit by bit, until only the center remains. In other words, the final stage! Enjoy your last battle up there! Good luck!’ The end!”
“Gah! What the hell is that?! Screw you, asshole!” Fukaziroh exploded.
“What happened to being calm?” asked Llenn, who felt positively cool in comparison.
“What? Are you serious?”
The members of Llenn’s group weren’t the only ones who felt like panicking.
“In less than ten minutes…”
“That’s all we have…?”
“And if we don’t finish her by then…”
“We’ll all die.”
These comments came from the shallow—er, enthusiastic, income-oriented—men who were dead set on killing Llenn for the million-yen bounty on her head.
They were now faced with a simple question:
Keep chasing Llenn for a chance at earning that million-yen bounty? Or give up on it and rush for the keep as soon as possible?
“Um… What should we do?”
“They’re definitely better off heading for the middle of the castle right away,” someone in the pub said.
Their screens all contained the Additional Information at 2:20 message, too, of course. Many of them jeered and laughed when it appeared. It was easy to sit back and enjoy the pageantry when you weren’t in the middle of it.
“Better to go for the castle…because?” asked a man who was drinking yet another virtual root beer. He’d lost track of how many it had been.
“Because,” the other person replied, “Llenn is obviously going to rush for the castle like crazy. She’s very fast and dangerous. Her chances of surviving are higher. And you’ll still have a chance to kill her in the final battle at the keep. It’s better to head for the center now, rather than risking it here.”
“Ah, I see. Yes, that does seem to be the more rational choice.”
“Assuming the folks in the maze aren’t totally blinded by money, of course.”
“On the other hand, if they’re all going for greed, that increases the chance that Llenn won’t make it out, right?”
“True, but I think that Llenn will find a way out of this mess.”
“Because?”
With a dead serious expression, the man answered, “Because she’s my Llenn.”
“She’s not yours! Hey, we just did this bit!”
“Are you serious?!” Clarence cackled happily, still lying on her back in the narrow space at the top of the spire. She was surprised, but even more than that, she was delighted. It meant her location was safe. That was the kind of person she was.
Clarence was also on her back, holding the Satellite Scanner over her face with her left hand. Yes, like a smartphone in bed. Right before you drop it directly on your face as you start drifting to sleep.
Next to her, Tanya sounded hopeful. “Does this make things easier for Boss and Llenn? People won’t want to die, so they’ll all come toward the middle, right?” She was still gripping a grenade in her hand.
“No,” said Clarence in English.
“Why English?” Tanya asked. She shook her head. “I mean, why do you think that?” she tried again.
“Because, the whole time in SJ5 so far, we haven’t had the chance to do the team battles we’ve been looking forward to. I’m guessing there aren’t many teams with all members still alive, and nobody’s been able to regroup. So in that situation, wouldn’t you focus on getting a million yen, rather than trying for a team victory?”
“That’s a good point…”
“What now?”
There was just one question on the mind of the guys who’d surrounded Llenn’s position.
Do they keep chasing after her, trying to get a million yen? Or do they give up on that, prioritize survival, and rush for the middle of the castle?
“What now? It’s obvious! I’m on the hunt for that bounty!” said a man who was just fifty feet away from the target. He wore black fatigues and held a Benelli M3 automatic shotgun. “If you wanna go to the center, go. I’m not gonna blast you in the back. I don’t wanna waste my shells. Every one of these is for Llenn!”
The man’s powerful greed—I mean, soul—struck the hearts of the others nearby, whose names and faces he hadn’t known until moments ago.
“My team’s all jacked up anyway…”
“And it’s not like winning Squad Jam is going to pay out a million yen…”
“Plus, our chances of winning are super low anyway…”
They all had a different excuse, each one more pathetic than the last.
“I’m gonna shoot for that million yen after all!”
In the end, the group that had already been lured by riches were unanimous in agreeing to continue their pursuit of Llenn.
“At this point, we’ll just have to break through the enemy’s containment. Well, that’s always been true,” M admitted.
“Exactly,” added Boss.
“That’s what I intended to do,” Anna chimed in.
Just then, M snapped, “Enemies dead ahead!”
He slammed the bottom of the shield in his left hand against the ground.
“Llenn, Fuka, crouch down in the back! Boss left, Anna right!”
Even Llenn could tell what had happened. There were two cursors visible to her straight ahead, moving fast. The readout on the cursors on the far end of the passage beyond M had originally indicated seventeen and sixteen meters of distance, but in the next moment, they were already at fourteen and thirteen. It was a rapid approach.
There were four meters of space between Llenn and M—and a corner about seven meters ahead of M. The two enemies were surely rushing right for that spot. They would pop out right in front of the group.
“All right! Bring it!” roared Fukaziroh, getting Rightony and Leftonia ready.
“Stop!” Llenn snapped, shoving her head down on the ground and flattening herself as well.
“Fire!” M commanded.
The next moment, the air was suddenly full of the sound of shooting.
M’s MG5 was in full auto, while Boss and Anna fired their Strizh pistols from the wings just behind M’s large body and shield.
The sound of the gunfire echoed off the side walls, as well as the far wall ahead of them, lashing at Llenn’s eardrums.
“Gah!”
It was so loud. The shooting was about as loud as you could possibly bear in the virtual world. If you were the one shooting, adrenaline would go a long way in helping to ignore the sound, but it was agony for those who were just listening. Sheer agony.
The MG5 in M’s hand howled like a hound whose owner had just died. The mechanism pulled the ammo belt inward, spitting out nothing but empty cartridges and links. Bullets came out of the muzzle in a stream of fire with no end.
“Aaagh!”
“Hrrg!”
The shots punctured the legs of the two men who came darting around the corner.
In fact, what they did was less puncturing than severing.
A stream of consecutive bullets could easily cut off a limb. The men leaped around the maze corner and into the hallway with Llenn’s team, just as anticipated. But the bullets hit their legs, cutting them off and causing them to topple forward with no means of propulsion.
And then, at almost the exact same moment—they exploded.
Ba-ba-ba-ba-bakam!
With a blast that vastly overwhelmed the gunfire, a series of grenades went off all at once, blowing the toppled men to pieces.
In reality, this would have been a gruesome butchery, with blood, flesh, and scraps of organs splattering everywhere. But in the relatively peaceful virtual world, it was just a scattering of obviously fake polygonal chunks: body parts with wire-frame cross sections, hands and heads and legs and torsos, launching up to ten feet in the air and spraying apart. Yeah, it was still pretty gross.
“Wha—?”
Llenn had no idea what had just happened.
M stopped shooting the MG5 and explained, “They were carrying a ton of grenades. They pulled the pin and started charging us. They must’ve thought they could rush through the shots to reach you, Llenn. A suicide bomb attack.”
“Yeesh…”
Their tenacity was disturbing.
“I had a hunch about them, so I shot their legs out first to make sure they fell.”
Scratch that; M’s calm descriptions were more disturbing.
“Well, well, must be hard to be so popular,” grunted Fukaziroh, who was pressed flat to the ground under Llenn.
“Anyone coming next?” wondered Boss, switching from the Strizh to her Vintorez, now that she had fired all the pistol’s shots. Both she and Anna were changing from the nimbler pistols to their longer guns, the Vintorez and Dragunov.
“No, we should be fine,” M said, and Llenn could see why. No other cursors were rapidly closing distance.
“Hmph. Those two were the only ones bold enough to try us. Thank God for that. The worst thing for us would be if they’d all come at once,” Boss replied, replacing her Strizh’s magazine and sticking it in the holster.
“Hmm? Someone got ahead of themselves.”
There was a group of five huddled up about a hundred feet from M. They were an impromptu team that had just come together, judging from the totally random gear across the group. They didn’t have a name yet.
Based on the visible cursor movement and the sound of shooting and explosions rumbling through the maze, they could guess what the two dead players had attempted to do.
Llenn was still alive. They could see her name, right there.
The gunfire had been fast and heavy. “Either M or one of SHINC’s 7.62 mm machine gunners did that. But was it a new weapon or a backup set…?”
True to their reputation as gun perver—as gun enthusiasts, GGO players could tell these things right away.
“They were idiots, though. Why would you attack M’s group with just two guys?” one of them muttered. “Didn’t they learn from the Russo-Japanese War that you can’t split your strength into consecutive small bursts?”
Someone spoke up: “Listen up, people! There’s no point attacking in groups of two or three in such close quarters! M has that shield. We’ll be outgunned! We should get everyone together, then surround them on two sides and roll through them, before the clock reaches the half hour! This fight is all about numbers!”
“That’s right, Bro. You got the right idea,” someone else said. Of course, no one disagreed with him.
“How about 2:27, then? It shouldn’t take more than three minutes for either them to die or us to die.”
“No argument here. But what about the idea of tossing a plasma grenade at the end? I’m pretty sure—no, definitely sure—it would hit everybody.”
“If you can get within throwing range, then why not? As long as we take out Llenn, who cares about the rest of them? Same for me.”
“Roger that!”
“Sounds like a plan. Let’s all rush ’em in brutal fashion, very immaturely, just to kill one target!” the first member concluded. “Of course, if we could get in contact with the guys on the opposite side of them, that would be great…”
Unfortunately, none of the members of the impromptu gathering here had teammates on the other side—or anywhere else nearby. If they had, they would’ve been in contact through the comm.
“No use lamenting the things we have no control over…”
He glanced at his watch. 2:22 PM.
“Let’s just do what we can. Watch the cursor distances and surround them.”
Out of trouble for the moment, Llenn’s team was—oh, who are we kidding? They were in trouble from start to finish.
The cursors were spreading out to surround them, while the time limit approached, threatening to collapse the very ground from under their feet.
M had fired thirty merciless bullets from his MG5’s ammunition box earlier and boldly changed it out for a fresh hundred. It was better, in his mind, to have a hundred bullets ready to go, than save a few and enter the next battle with a capacity of only seventy.
The MG5 had originally belonged to Pitohui, and there was no more ammo than this. Unless he landed a kill shot on someone to recharge his stock.
“Llenn,” he said.
“Yes?” She got to her feet, not bothering to help up Fukaziroh.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen up ahead, but in the worst-case scenario, slip out past us and rush for the center. We’ll focus on support instead.”
“Aw, man!”
It had to be a really bad situation if the usually unflappable M was speaking about disaster scenarios. It was clear to Llenn and the others that if even M couldn’t come up with an optimal plan, they were in very hot water, indeed.
Boss added, “I’ll be your shield at the end. Should be easy, since I’m so large.”
“Hang on, wait!” Llenn panicked.
Just because she had a bounty on her head didn’t mean she wanted everyone else to suffer. The fact that she could simply run off on her own and allow the others to escape weighed heavily on her conscience.
But what should I do? What can I do? Her brain cells were racing at high speed, formulating the one possible answer that would work.
“That’s right! What about the PM?”
Couldn’t her team-up attack of friendship with Fukaziroh work?
“Nope,” M said immediately. “You’d be faster just running on your own. It has high defense, but a single plasma grenade will be the end of you.”
“Argh…”
Her one suggestion had been shot down.
I guess this is it, she thought, resigned. But she couldn’t say it out loud.
In the midst of battle, no matter what kind of difficulty you faced, speaking your resignation aloud was contagious. It would infect other people’s mentalities. It would infect your own mentality. You mustn’t give up before you’re dead. You mustn’t say you’re giving up.
Neither Boss nor Anna spoke.
That meant nobody had an idea of how to escape their plight.
At that moment, a strange old man’s voice resounded.
“Hoh-hoh-hoh. Would you youngsters mind answerin’ a question o’ mine?”
We’re going to die soon, so I might as well let her act like a fool, Llenn thought.
Llenn stayed silent, however, so Fukaziroh got to her feet. Using the edge of the grenade launcher in her left hand to adjust the angle of her helmet, she looked upward.
“I ain’t been around in GGO as long as y’all, but can anyone explain to me what this invisible barrier over our heads is, exactly?”
While Grandpa Fukaziroh was chatting with his granddaughter’s teammates, the men camped in positions around them in the maze said, “Very good. The pink demon isn’t moving. The enclosure’s a success…”
“One million yen! But what if she gives up and disqualifies herself?”
“Gotta take her out before then…”
“What it is…?” Llenn repeated back to the mystery old man—Fukaziroh.
“Oh-hoh-hoh! I mean, gun bullets can’t get through, but could a person?”
“Oh! I don’t know…”
Llenn’s answer was also M’s and Boss’s and Anna’s answer.
Nobody actually knew if the invisible barriers that mid-bosses and worse put up in GGO could actually keep people out. Nobody had ever tried to figure it out. None of them had ever gone that close to a mid-boss, for one thing.
“This is the problem with folks who only use ranged weapons, I tells ya… You don’t have wings on your back, so your minds can’t take flight.”
“Are you a fairy godfather?”
“From the start, I been thinkin’…if I could get up there, couldn’t I just hop all over the top of the walls? Don’tcha think it’s worth a try at this point…?”
“Yes, I suppose so… But how will you get up there?” Llenn asked, looking up.
The walls were fifteen feet tall, near the upstairs ceiling of a two-story house. They were totally smooth. Without anything to put your hands or feet on, it seemed impossible to climb.
Maybe it would work if you had climbing gloves with claws. But almost any GGO player would not bring something as heavy and bulky as those unless they were going on a spelunking mission in old ruins. And they especially wouldn’t bring them into Squad Jam, where you needed all the ammo you could get.
Did Shirley have them? She was certainly abnormal. QED.
“I would say to unfold your wings and fly away,” Grandpa Fuka muttered, “but…”
She shrugged. Wings did not unfurl out of her back when she did so. Instead, she peered under the rim of her helmet at the large man in the group.
“M…that’s a mighty long gun you got there, eh?”
“Let’s try it,” he said, immediately catching on. M waved his hand to bring up the inventory screen. Boss and Anna kept an eye out while he did so.
What he pulled out was the Alligator antimateriel rifle, like a six-foot-long drying rack rod. He placed the stock on the ground and leaned it against the wall. “You two don’t have to be on watch. Come and prop this up.”
There were no enemies approaching at the moment.
“Okay!” announced Boss.
“Roger that!” agreed Anna.
They returned their rifles to their shoulder slings and held on to opposite sides of the Alligator to keep it steady. It might have been a six-foot barrel, but that still left at least nine feet from the muzzle at the end to the top of the wall.
Fukaziroh repeated M’s gesture and opened her own inventory. Her large backpack and the twin MGL-140s went away into her item storage. Much lighter now, she approached the Alligator and said, “Go on, M, if that really is your name. Toss me from the top.”
“Got it.”
Llenn could tell what Fukaziroh was thinking of doing. And she was certain her friend would do it.
Thump. M lowered his backpack to the ground, placed a foot on the magazine, and deftly climbed up. Anna and Boss did their best to keep the gun barrel steady.
Guns are big hunks of metal. They are tough by definition and won’t break under a person’s weight, but the smaller, more delicate parts might certainly bend or come off. This was not something to do in real life. It was certainly the wrong way to use a gun.
With surprising balance for a man his size, M climbed up the bizarre ladder and turned around when he reached the top. He placed his right foot and ankle over the large muzzle brake at the end of the Alligator’s barrel, let his left foot dangle in the air, and straightened up with his back to the wall.
“Whoa!” Llenn marveled.
A large man was standing on one leg at a great height, supported by two women, with his back to the wall. What kind of religious ceremony was this?
The six-foot-long gun supported the nearly six-foot-tall man, leaving only a bit over three feet.
“Here I go. If I break my neck doing this—no hard feelings!”
She backed away from M by a few steps.
“It’ll be Llenn’s fault!”
She started running.
“Hey!”
Then she jumped. Llenn’s futile cry only gave her an extra push on the back.
Fukaziroh’s foot landed on the Alligator’s magazine. Her next one landed on the bipod—and the next one on the muzzle brake.
“Hi-yah!” She jumped even higher, reaching out.
M’s thick arms, slightly outstretched, appeared to lock firmly with Fukaziroh’s short little ones.
“Sey!”
Then he yanked upward, like pulling out a giant turnip. Llenn thought she could hear the groaning of his back.
“I can flyyy!”
The momentum lifted up her little body, hurling it into the air, her uplifted face getting closer to the invisible barrier atop the wall…
“Wooo!”
…and then she went through, soaring into the air beyond.
“Whoa!”
From the ground, Llenn saw the two women supporting the precariously balanced large man, above which was a tiny figure coasting through the air, her arms outstretched. What kind of ascension into Heaven was this?
M could do just about anything, it seemed. The angle and height of his throw were perfect. Just after the apex of her arc, Fukaziroh’s little feet plopped lightly onto the top of the maze wall.
“Amazing!”
She’d seen it for herself. Fukaziroh had flown right through where the invisible barrier was supposed to be and came out on top, fifteen feet above the ground.
“Uh-oh!” She started to lose her balance, as though she would fall backward onto M.
“Eek!” Llenn shrieked.
“Wuh-oh! Hah! Hoo!” Fukaziroh straightened out and stayed upright.
Did you just do that on purpose? Llenn thought but did not say aloud.
They had the results of the experiment. The invisible barrier that cruelly deflected all attacks did not have any effect on people, just as Fukaziroh suspected.
Llenn had a pretty decent history in GGO by now, but this was a totally new fact for her. Now that she thought about it, however, it seemed so logical. If the barrier’s power did work on humans, then if someone fell from above, they would stop on the barrier itself.
Then you would be able to walk around on top of the barrier; basically, on the air itself. Visually, it would make no sense.
Fukaziroh looked down on Llenn, literally and figuratively, reading her mind. “This is the problem with you old-fashioned GGOers, bound by the earth’s gravity… You are trapped by your own self-created logic. But it’s not too late. Don’t you wish you could be reborn as the new humans?”
“For this one time, we’re grateful to you, mysterious old man!”
“Oh-hoh-hoh, the pleasure is all mine. You can simply wire the three hundred million yen for succeeding at this experiment to my Swiss bank account. Within three working days. Each late day will incur an additional ten percent fee.”
Llenn ignored whatever it was Fukaziroh was talking about up there. M told her, “You’re next,” so she followed suit.
First she removed all her gear to lighten up, waited the split second for the P90 and the magazine pouch on her waist to vanish, then started running.
“Tah!”
She didn’t know if it would work, but even if she failed and fell, she wouldn’t die from this height. And more importantly, she was concerned about the approaching enemy cursors.
Llenn leaped onto the Alligator, using the magazine and grip as footholds and bounding up like a monkey, an acrobatic trick she could perform thanks to her lightness and agility.
She got both of her feet on the bipod near the center of the barrel to make her last jump. She could reach the right height just from that, without needing to climb farther up to the muzzle.
“Hah!”
M’s thick arm caught Llenn’s thin one.
“Whoop!”
She thought her shoulder would be pulled out of its socket. There was a powerful g-force pressing down on her.
Her vision blurred for a moment as she was lifted up atop the wall.
“Yo!”
“Why are you still here?!”
She very nearly collided with Fukaziroh, who was absentmindedly hanging out in the spot where she had landed. Thankfully, it did not lead to disaster.
Llenn stuck the landing.
“Whoaaa!”
“Nice one!”
Her acrobatics were captured in great detail on the monitors in the pub, to the delight of the onlookers.
“I give it a ten! A perfect landing!”
“You think so? I’ve never seen anyone do it like that.”
“She looked like a boiled prawn to me.”
“No, like a motorcycle that’s been totaled after an accident.”
“Like a lazy cat lost in the midst of a daytime nap.”
“Or the frame of a pair of glasses that got stepped on.”
“It reminded me of cucumbers that you can’t sell in the store.”
“Hey! Are you trying to level up your simile game or something?! Llenn is beautiful, no matter what form she comes in!”
Finally, someone said, “Never would have guessed you could walk on top of the maze. So how will those greedy bastards respond?”
“What about the rest of you?” Llenn asked the other three down below, while she put her gear back on. M had already jumped down from the Alligator, so Boss and Anna were free from their physical labor.
“We can’t make it. You two will have to head for the center together,” M said, packing the Alligator back into his inventory.
“Aw, no!” Llenn lamented.
“Don’t cry. It’s better that way for everyone, don’tcha see?” Fukaziroh drawled behind her back.
“Oh… I guess so…”
The people with dollar and yen signs in their eyes were all going after Llenn—and Llenn alone. She needed to keep that in mind. Everyone else was suffering on account of proximity to her. She felt bad.
Llenn clenched her P90 and spun around.
Her vision was so much clearer now. The wall beneath her feet was about twenty inches wide. It was a narrow path to walk, and very scary being over fifteen feet up, but not so bad that she might cower and be unable to move.
Every GGO player had to cross steel beams in a factory every now and then. Not that it made you want to try the feat in real life.
Since it was a maze below, it was also a maze above, but one where you could figure out the correct answer. It seemed like they could run all the way to the center keep from here.
Llenn glanced at her wristwatch. It was 2:24 and thirty seconds. There was no time to hang around waiting.
“Got it! M, Boss, Anna, thank you! I’ll hang up for now! Meet you in the middle!”
“You bet.”
“Yeah.”
“Later!”
They smiled and waved back to her. She turned off the comm.
“Let’s go!” she called, turning to Fukaziroh. The woman had pulled out her grenade launchers again.
“You bet. I’m with ya, kid!”
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