CHAPTER 12
Save the Last Battle for Us
“Llenn’s number keeps getting lower! She’s coming this way!”
Some of the men surrounding the team, a trio who were bunched up in the maze, began to liven up with excitement. The number next to Llenn’s visible cursor, representing the distance between them, was getting smaller. Twenty meters. Fifteen meters. Ten meters.
“What? How is that possible?”
It was not the speed of someone feeling their way through a labyrinth. It was not the speed of someone rushing up to an enemy, either.
“She’s gone desperate and made a mad charge! She thinks she can get by on speed alone! She’s ours!” blurted one of the men, grinning widely.
“Huh?”
The color pink was visible. So was the cursor.
It was not in front of them, however, but above and to the side.
“Whaaaat?”
Llenn was running—on top of the wall.
The cursor position had seemed oddly high to them. Now they understood why.
But their minds were just a bit too slow to actually do anything about it.
Llenn glanced down at them. She saw them, noted their presence. But she did not stop running.
As she rushed past, followed by Fukaziroh, the man’s eyes lit up like gold. “That million yen is miiiiiine!” he yelled, pointing the Beretta AR70 assault rifle upward and promptly opening fire.
He did not call out to the men behind him, whom he’d only met for the first time today, to let them know he’d spotted her. He wanted to eliminate the target and collect the hundred million credits for himself.
““Huh?””
The other two noticed Llenn when he started shooting, but it was already too late.
The bullet circle in his field of view was perfectly placed over the running target. The 5.56 mm bullets he was firing at full auto would hit her, guaranteed.
They did not hit her.
“Huh?”
All the bullets stopped at a height of fifteen feet and dropped back to the ground.
“Dammit!”
He knew, of course. He had just forgotten out of a temporary, greed-induced amnesia.
One of the two stragglers started blasting wildly with his M870 Tactical Remington shotgun. Boom, cha-chuk. Boom, cha-chuk.
Fire, pump. Fire, pump. He had nine cartridges of double-ought buck in the gun to shoot, but Llenn just passed right over him on the side, and the shot scattered harmlessly to the ground.
“Sorry! It’s an invisible barrier! Hey! Hey! C’mon, shoot at us some more! Waste your money! Hey, hey!” Fukaziroh taunted, her voice changing pitch from the Doppler effect as they passed above. “Hey, hey!”
“Give it a rest, Fuka.”
“No, see, in one of my favorite classic manga, there’s a middle-aged man who runs on top of a wall and says ‘Hey, hey,’ because hei is the word for a wall or fence! I’m so delighted that I finally get the chance to copy him! Hey, hey! Do you mind if I talk some more about that manga? It’ll only take nineteen minutes.”
“Do it later!”
“She got us! They’re running on top of the walls!”
Someone elsewhere had more wits. He had instantly figured out what Llenn and Fukaziroh did by noticing the change in the distance numbers.
“Huh? You can climb these things?!”
“Dammit! Let’s do it, too!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! How?!” someone asked.
“I’ve got an idea!”
One of the men coincidentally happened to have an answer. If you had a variety of people, they would come with a variety of knowledge. Too many cooks spoil the broth—errr, not that one. Two heads are better than one, or however it goes.
This man, who wore the camo style of the Marines, and used a standard-issue M16A2, took a look around and confirmed that there were eight people present.
“Three of you! Form a scrum against the wall! That’s the base! Two of you form the middle row, hunching on the shoulders of the base! Two of you form a step support in front of the scrum! Cross your arms and let them step down, then lift them up on top of the middle row! Then the middle row will stand up straight! You should be able to reach, so clamber up there! Then the guy on top will use a sling to pull us up!”
In other words, a kind of human pyramid, which was an old-fashioned exercise during school athletic festivals in Japan. There were still a few schools that practiced it.
“Yeah!”
“I think it’ll work!”
“Nice idea!”
They started working together, certain that a failure to act quickly would let the million yen slip away. Soon they had created a two-level human structure.
“I’ve got a sling! It’s leather, so it should be nice and tough,” said a man who used a Remington M700 VLS bolt-action hunting rifle. He held up the sling he had attached to the gun.
“Great! Climb on up!” said the man who proposed the idea in the first place. He helped push the other man upward and on top of the second level.
“Here goes! One, two, three!”
The second level, with the sling man standing on their shoulders, stood up. With the man now standing an extra ten feet tall, he was able to reach for the wall and use his arm strength to pull himself up.
“Whoa!”
“He did it!”
The men cheered with delight. By cooperating, it was possible to conquer a wall an individual could not. It was beautiful, beautiful teamwork.
“You go next!”
The man with the M16A2, who had come up with the idea, clambered up next and managed to make it to the top of the wall. Now the M700 and the M16A2 were both on top. A third man was making his way up.
“Here!”
A hand reached down to him.
It was the man with the M700. In his hand was a grenade. It was a round plasma grenade. The activation switch had been pressed, and the indicator light was blinking.
“Huh?” bleated the man who had just gotten on top of the second row.
“Sorry.”
The hand dropped the plasma grenade. It clonked off the head of the man trying to get to the top.
“Ow!”
Then the man with the M700 pulled his hand back. Above the invisible barrier.
“Fire in the hole!” he warned his friend, turning around.
“You son of a biiiiiiiitch!”
“Evil bastaaaard!”
“You’ll pay for this!”
“Dirty motherf—”
The furious bellows of the six men left on the ground vanished, swallowed up by the blue fireball caused by the plasma grenade.
The invisible barrier absorbed all of the explosion’s force, and the walls were designated as indestructible, so they didn’t budge. The blast simply funneled down the maze hallways instead. When it had calmed, there were only two men alive, standing atop the wall.
“You beat me to the punch,” remarked the M16A2 man with a little smirk.
There was a detonation grenade in his hand, but he hadn’t pulled the pin yet. Instead, he put it back away in the pocket where he kept his grenades.
“To think I’d be teaming up with you once again. We’ll split the cash.” He grinned.
“You never know what’ll happen in life. Half-and-half sounds good to me. There’s no point in competing over it at this point.”
So the two men knew one another.
With a grave expression, the M16A2 man said, “By the way, about that girl I ended up stealing from you? Turned out she was super high-maintenance and selfish. It was straight-up hell being with her… In the end, I got an ulcer, and she broke up with me when she found herself another man.”
“Yeah, I heard the rumors. I warned you not to do it!”
Sounded like it was a very complicated relationship.
“Dammit! It’s not fair! The million yen is gonna get away!”
From down below, Llenn and Fukaziroh could hear someone lamenting their escape. Thanks to the barrier blocking any shots from down there, they could run on top of the maze.
But while they could avoid being stuck in the passageways, it was still a maze, even atop the walls. They could see the center of the castle, but they couldn’t just run straight toward it.
They ran down the narrow wall, turned, ran some more, turned, continued running, turned again, and so on. Their goal was only two hundred yards away on a straight line, but it was taking ages to get there.
And that was when a bullet line reached for Llenn’s back at an angle.
“Get down, Llenn,” Fukaziroh warned lazily.
“Ah!”
She followed the instruction, dropping to hug the top of the wall. A 7.62 mm bullet zipped right over her back.
The man with the M700 who’d gotten on top of the wall was sniping at her. He was about 150 yards away. That was sure-kill range for a sniper rifle. If Fukaziroh hadn’t noticed him and his bullet line, Llenn would be dead.
“You punk!”
Llenn spun around atop the wall and pointed her P90, but she was too late.
“Take this!”
Fukaziroh was not the target, so she stood boldly and shot several grenades from her grenade launcher, Rightony. Pomp-pomp-pomp.
The trio of grenades flew with unerring accuracy toward the sniper and the rifleman behind him.
“Got ’em,” Fukaziroh said, pleased and certain.
They were standing atop a wall. The grenades didn’t even need to hit them as long as they landed nearby. The explosions would knock them clean off the narrow walls. Though they weren’t plasmas, even the regular grenades were dangerous enough in this situation.
But the men leaped out of the way.
One dropped down on one side of the wall, and the other leaped down on the other. The grenades exploded against the wall and barrier, but the invisible surface blocked the explosions and shrapnel from going down.
“Tsk!” Fukaziroh hissed, but she decided it was fine after all. “At least they fell down; that’s all that matters.”
She had just turned around when the man with the M16A2 popped his head back up and fired with one hand. It was a three-shot burst, and one of the bullets pierced Fukaziroh’s shoulder.
“Aaaah! How dare you!”
She hurled more grenades. The man’s face and arm vanished under the barrier again. The grenades exploded, but the men weren’t damaged by them, it seemed.
“What the hell?” she demanded, confused.
“They’ve got a sling draped over the wall!” Llenn announced, watching through a monocular.
She could see how the two men were hanging from the top of the wall by each holding an end of the four- or five-foot-long leather sling that went with the M700.
So that was how they could slip under the invisible barrier and find safe cover.
“Very clever…”
She pointed the P90 at them and fired full auto. You couldn’t snipe with a P90, so this was just covering fire to keep them in check. It was still better than not shooting anything. Maybe she would get lucky and a stray bullet would hit the sling and cut it in half.
The shots landed close to where the men were hiding. Based on what she could see through the monocular, the sling was just fine. The man popped up again, aiming his gun.
“Dammit! We gotta run!”
“Crap!”
Llenn and Fukaziroh started running. Their path was only twenty inches wide.
As Llenn ran the other way, the man with the M16A2 held tight to the sling with his left hand and kept his feet planted against the side of the wall, aiming with only his right arm for support.
This was quite an extreme firing position, but his targets were running rather than fighting back, which meant he had plenty of time to take aim.
He squinted, watching carefully as the bullet circle, pulsing with his heartbeat, centered over the targets, which were already small and now getting smaller. Once the two things almost perfectly overlapped, he murmured, “That million yen is mine…”
The M700 man holding on to the other end of the sling as a counterweight replied, “Remember, let’s split things evenly this time.”
“You got it.”
A high-pitched gunshot echoed across the castle interior.
“Gaaah!”
The man with the M16A2 gasped in pain, and the man with the M700 started dropping down the wall.
“Wha—?”
He fell the whole fifteen feet, totally baffled, and landed on his butt.
“Gwugh!”
He didn’t die, but he suffered a decent amount of damage.
“Whoa…”
The sling was still in his left hand. But on the other end, which his partner had been holding, was just the man’s arm. It had been torn off near the elbow but still gripped the leather tight.
The cross section of the arm was drawn in polygonal mesh and flickered red. It was clear at a glance that he’d been shot with a powerful 7 mm bullet, which tore the limb in two and dropped him down on the other side.
“But who shot him—and from where…?” he muttered to himself. No one could tell him the answer.
“You owe me for that one, Llenn.”
Flat on her stomach in front of a retaining wall atop the outer castle structure 180 yards away, Shirley pulled the bolt action of her R93 Tactical 2 and pushed it forward again to load the next bullet.
“I guess we are teammates, technically speaking.”
As for why Shirley was atop the outer rampart, she had determined that she couldn’t win in the maze and climbed up the outside wall instead. It was as simple as that.
If she slipped and fell, she would travel ten thousand feet, but Shirley climbed it anyway, using nothing but her hands and feet. She was very, very careful, determined to avoid certain death.
Shirley was experienced with outdoor activities and had been climbing before in real life, but this was her first attempt without a lifeline.
She went very slowly, as careful as a turtle’s walking pace. Even then, she lost her grip and nearly died on three different occasions.
Luckily for her, because she was so careful, the process took a long time, and when she finally reached the top of the wall, it was already past 2:20 PM.
Thanks to the announcement, by the time she was up top, nobody was still around on the top of the rampart—or the bridges connecting to the central keep. They didn’t want to wait around and fall victim to the collapse when it started again in less than ten minutes.
While Shirley was climbing, the players who had been on the rampart—the ones happily shooting the helpless players who’d been running for their lives toward the castle gates—turned and fled toward the center of the castle.
They ran and ran, down massive bridges thirty yards wide and five hundred yards long. Players in the center shot back at them, and a fair number died, but some did reach the center safely.
That was the situation when Shirley finally ascended the rampart and pulled her rifle back out. She was crawling on hands and knees when she heard very clear sounds of gunfire. It was close. And some of the shots were the familiar rattle of a P90.
Is that Llenn?
She rolled over to the other side of the rampart, clutching the gun to her chest. That was faster than crawling.
Then she looked over the edge and saw, about three hundred yards away, Llenn and Fukaziroh running over the top of the maze, and two men shooting at them.
Shirley took aim and fired. It was a quick snap and took less than a second.
She’d been aiming for the arm and hit it perfectly. The man whose arm she shot off fell down, and so did the one on the other side of the wall.
“Did they fall? I dunno what happened, but I think we’re safe now! C’mon Llenn, hurry!”
“You don’t have to tell me!”
They didn’t know about Shirley’s act of kindness. They couldn’t have.
“Go right up there, Llenn.”
“Can I trust you on that?”
“Yeah. Rightony said so.”
“We’re going left!”
They hurried over the top of the walls, making their way toward the keep.
“What should I do, Captain? Should I shoot Llenn?” asked Lux from the top of the spire. David was still down in the maze presumably.
He was bent over in a crouch, aiming his FD338 on a tripod, with the scope reticle trained right over Llenn. His finger was not touching the trigger, of course.
He was ready to shoot, if he should feel like it.
It was a fair distance and at a downward angle, plus Llenn was running nimbly over the tops of the maze walls, so it might not be easy to finish her in a single shot—but the FD338 was auto-capable. He could shoot many bullets, and with the power of the .338 Lapua, he only needed one bullet to dispatch his target.
This was their best chance of any Squad Jam at taking out Llenn.
The pink devil had done so many unspeakable things to Team MMTM over the last few months. And now he could kill her.
Three seconds later, Lux had his answer from David. “Got it. I hear your orders. Say hi to the lady for me!”
He took the FD338 off the tripod, lowered himself flat, and hid. If any snipers climbed the other spires, he could easily get shot. He had checked them earlier, but there was no guarantee someone wasn’t climbing one now.
Better to avoid getting picked off before he could regroup with the team and utilize their collective power to its fullest in search of triumph.
And because of that, Lux just barely missed seeing something as he withdrew to safety.
He missed seeing Shirley, running down the massive bridge connecting the rampart to the keep, as fast as she could go.
If he had seen her, he would have been able to shoot her. It would have been quite easy, in fact.
Llenn’s good luck had rubbed off on Shirley, it seemed.
“Let’s get going, too.”
“Yeah!”
“Okay!”
Slightly earlier in time, as Llenn and Fukaziroh started running on top of the walls, M, Boss, and Anna began to run as well.
The enemies around them were being distracted in amusing ways by Llenn, and nobody wanted anything to do with the rest of them.
Since the two who’d covered the rear were gone, the remaining three changed formation.
M placed two panels of his shield vertically, spreading them out, and Boss and Anna each took one with both hands. They would take the lead down the corridor, with M following them. He had his heavy MG5 machine gun propped up on his shoulder like a rifle.
They moved quickly. Boss and Anna turned right at an intersection and saw three enemies. They knew they’d be there, thanks to the cursors. The distance was ten meters.
“Huh?”
“Wha—?”
“Oh, crap…”
The three were so distracted by Llenn running overhead that they totally failed to react until M opened fire on them in brutal fashion. Boss and Anna ducked down so that the storm of bullets could pass over their heads.
“Gah!”
“Guh!”
“Goh!”
The three victims sang a little tune in sequence. The men whose eyes had glinted with the color of gold were now glowing red and were quickly sent on their way to the waiting room.
After a quick look around, Boss checked her watch: 2:26 PM.
“Four minutes remaining,” she reported to M.
“We’ll make it in time. Take the next left.”
The crowd in the pub could see how the players in the maze—the donut section surrounding the middle of the castle—steadily made their way toward the center.
It was easy to tell, because they had an aerial view of the area, with cursors indicating each player’s location. There were too many to count at once, but there were probably at least forty or fifty surviving players at this point. They couldn’t tell how many were in the keep, because those cursors were not displayed.
It was 2:27 PM. Three minutes left until the collapse.
“The folks still lost in the maze are goners at this point.”
“Yeah, they should just stop and write a will.”
“Well, they can’t use a brush. There’s no time to grind up the ink.”
“They’ll have to use a ballpoint pen instead.”
Some players were stuck wandering in the maze, almost certainly too late to find their way into the keep at this point. But others had made it through and rushed through the entrance leading to the top of the center arena.
One guy had reached a point in the maze where the corridor ran up against the side of the keep but had no entryway in, keeping him trapped outside and out of luck. The poor guy just sank to his knees on the ground. He was shouting something—probably filthy insults toward the sponsor-writer. That had to be it.
“Uh-oh, is that…the leader of MMTM…and the chick from ZEMAL?” said an eagle-eyed watcher, looking at an array of smaller monitors. David and Vivi had just reached the end of the maze and found their way to the entrance to the keep.
It was shown on the biggest screen in the house, the one hung on the wall. Out of all the many monitors in the pub, the screen on the wall was designed to show the scene attracting the most attention. It was a VR environment, so the system could keep track of exactly who was paying attention to what.
On the big screen, David had his STM-556 in hand, checking out the six-foot-tall rounded tunnel.
It was pitch-black inside, so he was confirming that there wasn’t someone waiting just inside the entrance to pick them off, and that there weren’t any simple wire-and-grenade booby traps ready and waiting.
Vivi’s sawed-off RPD machine gun was ready at her hip, trained on the maze behind them.
“No surprises from those two. Except that they’re temporary buddies.”
“Yeah, very impressive. By the way, are they going out?”
“You really should fix that assumption you have that any man and woman standing in the same place are a couple.”
“I assume the same thing when it’s a man and a man. Does that make it better?”
“No.”
David and Vivi vanished into the blackness of the tunnel to the keep interior. It looked like a mouth of darkness swallowing them whole.
The screen abruptly switched to show Llenn’s position.
“Oooh!”
“Did they make it?!”
The audience buzzed with greater intensity.
At last, Llenn and Fukaziroh had reached the center of the castle.
Llenn and Fukaziroh were running atop the walls.
They’d been shot at numerous times on this trip from below. But with no damage suffered, of course.
After a while, the unwanted sight of enemy cursors popping into existence simply stopped bothering them. They no longer needed to worry about them. And soon, they reached the edge of the massive wall standing 150 feet high.
There was a large black hole just below Llenn, since she was perched up on the maze wall. It was the entrance to the keep.
It was too dark to know what was in there, but there was definitely something. All she could do was pray that it wasn’t painted with the world’s darkest black paint, so that she ran face-first into it.
They did have a real problem, however. “Um, Fuka…how are we gonna get down? It’s fifteen feet up…”
Only now did Llenn consider the problem of how they’d get back to the ground. A drop of three or four yards was still short enough that you could absorb the impact, but the extra yard made it much scarier.
The hallway was narrow, too, so she wouldn’t really have room to tumble and absorb the shock. Maybe she could try it diagonally?
Fukaziroh’s matter-of-fact answer was, “Well, I guess we just gotta count on some damage going down. We can’t fly, after all.”
“I guess it’s our only option… Please don’t do too much damage,” Llenn prayed reluctantly.
“Hang on, Llenn,” Fukaziroh suddenly chirped. “Don’t be too hasty. Our cushion has arrived!”
“Huh?”
She looked in the direction her partner’s grenade launcher was pointing. Two men were running down the hallway below, toward the dark tunnel mouth.
Both were tall and large, wearing matching French army camo. Llenn didn’t recognize these players.
Both were equipped with an iconic French gun: the FA-MAS bullpup assault rifle. Naturally, they could see Llenn and Fukaziroh, too. But they knew they couldn’t shoot them, so they relied on a different kind of attack.
“Hey, you! Particularly the devil’s million yen!”
It was a rather cruel insult. As well as being grammatically out of order.
“We’re gonna kill the hell outta you later!”
“Yeah, that’s right! So wash your face and prepare for the ax to fall!” they sneered as they rushed closer.
The numbers next to their names weren’t necessary to indicate distance anymore. They were thirty feet away from being directly below Llenn and Fukaziroh.
“Let’s do it,” Fukaziroh said, waving her hand to call up the inventory.
“I guess we have no choice…”
Llenn swiveled the P90’s sling around to her back. Fukaziroh’s MGL-140s disappeared from her hands.
“Here we go, Kni-chan!” she said, drawing the black combat knife from behind her back.
“Ready for combat!” the knife called back.
The men were sprinting closer, down below.
“Bombs away!”
“Hah!”
Fukaziroh and Llenn leaped.
The players in the pub got to see it happen on the big screen.
Two little bodies plunged toward two large men and slammed feet-first onto them.
The force of their drop landed on one torso each, knocking the men off their feet. The women’s knees bent and slammed into the solar plexuses of their targets next, cushioning the blow of their fall.
Although there was no sound to the video, the audience could see the faces of the men contorting in unspeakable agony—and some kind of liquid flying out of their mouths.
Immediately after that, Llenn stuck her combat knife in the eye of the man and, perhaps assuming she wasn’t going to get an instant kill from that, promptly stabbed his other eye for good measure.
Fukaziroh kept her knees on the other man’s solar plexus, stuck her M&P pistol into his gaping mouth, and held down the trigger.
Golden cartridges flew out of the gun. She fired fifteen bullets, the entire magazine. The pistol’s slide did not return into place.
He was dead, of course. From the upper jaw on up, it was nothing but red shapes. He was suddenly significantly shorter.
In the now-quiet pub, someone muttered, “Fukaziroh’s really bad at aiming pistols, but that’s one way to be accurate.”
“Whew… Finally, you’re actually listening to what I tell you… You’ve become mine at last. Guess I’ve got to give you a name,” Fukaziroh purred, placing the reloaded M&P back in her thigh holster as she stood over the dead man. “It’s an M&P, so it should be…um…empee…”
“You can figure that out later,” Llenn said coolly, sliding her knife back into its sheath. She grabbed the P90 from behind her back and glanced around.
Someone was very close, only thirty feet away, but they were on the other side of the wall and not coming any closer.
Her clock said it was 2:28 and thirty seconds. Only ninety seconds left until the crumbling resumed.
“Let’s go inside, Llenn!” Fukaziroh said, MGL-140s in hand again.
“What about M and the others…?” Llenn wondered, glancing back at the maze. There were no cursors reading M nor EVA nor ANNA yet. That meant they were all more than fifty meters away.
There had been intermittent gunfire in the distance for a while, but Llenn had no means of telling if it belonged to them. The walls of the labyrinth deadened the sound, so it was impossible to tell the distance and precise type of gun.
In just over eighty seconds, the collapse would begin. It was highly unlikely that such a wide area would fall away all at once, but either way, it wasn’t enough time to travel at least fifty meters within a twisting maze.
Llenn considered connecting the comm again, but her partner said, “Don’t worry. They’ll be fine. No proof of that, but…we should focus on our own survival.”
“Yeah…”
Llenn turned around, held the P90 at shoulder level, and approached the hole in the wall.
“They’ll be fine,” Fukaziroh had said about M, Boss, and Anna.
“Urrgh…”
They definitely were not fine.
In fact, they weren’t anywhere close to fine.
“There’s no time left!” Boss shouted, leaning halfway around the corner and spraying fire with the Vintorez. Since it was silenced, there was almost no sound. The clatter of its bolt and the rattling of the cartridges ejecting onto the ground were louder than the shooting itself.
“You jackasses!” cried Anna, the filthiest word she could think of. She was watching the rear with her Strizh in hand.
They were stuck in place at an intersection within the maze.
Around the corner on the left was a very long hallway by the standards of this maze, at nearly a hundred feet. M suspected it was the answer, the proper route to leaving the maze.
At the other end of that corridor was another intersection, this one a T with branches leading left and right. There were five players camped out at the far end.
They were sticking their guns out around both corners and firing incessantly toward the trio. One person would unload an entire assault rifle magazine on full auto, and when they were out, a different person would pick up the slack.
They weren’t aiming, just firing randomly, but when the width of your passage was only ten feet, that was enough to be a lethal threat.
They could have gone ahead to get closer to the castle keep, but instead they were staying here and holding M’s group back, possibly out of vengeance for helping Llenn escape. What happened to trying to get that million yen?
Even with M’s shield, a hundred feet was not a distance they could cross in these circumstances. They would be shot at the entire time. And even if they could close the gap, a single grenade could easily take out all three at once.
“One minute left!” Anna wailed.
M waited for their magazine change, then stuck the MG5 around the corner and added one last burst of shots. The other side pulled their guns and hands back, but now the MG5 was out of ammo.
The machine gun had been salvaged from Pitohui’s body. M put it away in his inventory so that it didn’t get repurposed by anyone else—or perhaps destroyed.
Then he turned his stony face to the two women and said gravely, “Listen close. I have a plan.”
At 2:29 and fifty seconds, Llenn’s watch warned her of the time. She was right outside the tunnel entrance.
Ten seconds until the collapse. It didn’t seem likely that this spot closest to the center would go right from the start, but in any case, there was very little time left.
From what she could tell, there were no traps or enemies inside the entrance. Or maybe there were, but it was too dark for her to see them. Either way, she couldn’t spend any more time out here.
She made up her mind.
“All right, I’m goin’ in!”
Llenn hopped through the darkened entrance with both feet and immediately felt a strange sense of weightlessness.
“Oh, I’m being teleported!” she realized at once, saying as much to Fukaziroh behind her.
It wasn’t an uncommon sensation in a game to be forcibly sent to a different location, i.e. teleported. It was like the simulated Earth gravity got weaker, and her body was suddenly floating. Or perhaps like a rapid descent in an elevator.
“Guess I’ll go in, too,” said Fukaziroh, following suit.
“Huh? Wait—” Llenn panicked.
In her mind, she was thinking that her warning meant: I don’t know where I’ll get teleported. So I’ll get sent there first and report back on the comm. If it’s safe, or if I need you, I’ll want you to come right after me. But if not, I’d rather you stayed there as long as possible to preserve your own safety.
Instead, Fukaziroh had come running in right after her.
Oh, she did that on purpose, Llenn realized.
Fukaziroh was a hardcore gamer, and she would have understood the meaning of the warning right after Llenn said it—in fact, a whole three years before she said it.
But she thought it would be more fun to tag along.
She had misjudged Fukaziroh’s willfulness. Then again, Miyu had always been like this. It was her own fault for forgetting that.
Something more than just regret dimmed Llenn’s vision. Her eyes were open but saw nothing. Closing them would surely do the same.
In the next instant, she was going to be somewhere else. There might be an enemy right in front of her. Such mean-spirited teleportation did not usually happen in the game, but you never knew with Squad Jam.
Her finger was poised at the ready, just short of touching the P90’s trigger.
And then…
…the floating sensation stopped, and her feet touched a hard surface. Light began to coalesce and return into vision.
“Hey! You’re here!”
And there was Clarence’s smiling face. It was always such a dashing smile.
Llenn was standing, while Clarence was crouched in front of her, handsome and boyish Takarazuka face tilted slightly upward. It wasn’t a hard angle, because Llenn was so short.
It was such a shock that she nearly started shooting on impulse. Thankfully, she was able to hold back her finger.
“Hey! We’re here!” said Fukaziroh, appearing behind Llenn.
She turned around and saw Fukaziroh being her best self.
Where are we? She turned around to get a better view.
She was inside a square space about three tatami mats in size. Meaning: a bit over seven feet to a side. Under her feet was a flat stone floor. In one corner of the floor was a hole big enough for a person to fit through, followed by a very steep staircase.
Around the edge of the space was a stone wall less than two feet tall, and in each of the corners was a thick, round, stone pillar with a diameter of about sixteen inches. She looked up and saw that the pillars were supporting a stone roof overhead.
“Oh!”
Llenn figured it out. Actually, she should have figured it out when she saw Clarence.
“We’re at the top of a spire!”
“Bingo, correct! But get down, get down,” Clarence warned, in the same tone of voice as someone saying Sit down, have a beer.
“Ah!” Llenn did exactly as she said. She had just remembered how Clarence had been shot earlier. This was a place where you could get sniped.
Fukaziroh had already hit the deck, so to speak. She was good at this sort of thing. Those hardcore gamer instincts.
“Gosh, it’s been so long since I saw you two, though. What’s it been, three years?” Clarence asked, now that their faces were looking at each other, pressed to the ground.
“No, not since college graduation, so it’s been five years. Everything going well with you?” Fukaziroh joked back. Llenn didn’t need to say a word.
Clarence seemed satisfied with that comeback and asked quite seriously, “You’re both alive, right? You’re not ghosts?” She was more serious than earlier, at least.
“Yes, we’re alive, somehow. It wasn’t easy!” Llenn answered.
From behind Clarence, Tanya’s silver head popped up. She was flat on the ground too, of course.
“What about Boss, Llenn?”
“……”
She wasn’t sure how to respond.
That was when Boss popped into the space just to her left. That giant bulk, hanging pigtails, and gorilla face couldn’t belong to anyone else.
She was followed by golden-haired Anna, shades and all.
Llenn was startled in the extreme by their sudden, ghostlike materialization and realized that she must have appeared in the same fashion. She found herself oddly impressed by how Clarence had taken her presence in stride, with a healthy smile.
“Oh? Ohh…! You guys!”
Boss was startled at first but grinned when she recognized Tanya, although it was not as delighted as you might have thought. Behind her sunglasses, Anna’s expression was clouded, too.
They understood where they were and crouched down at once.
Six people on the floor in the same three-tatami-mat space was very cramped. Even with the diminutive size of Llenn and Fukaziroh, they were fairly squished, jammed in like hikers in a mountain cabin in the busy season. The guns were getting in the way. (Don’t bring your guns to a mountain cabin, by the way.)
Unperturbed by the lack of space, Clarence marveled, “I knew it! The teleportation mode automatically places the teams back together again!”
That made sense to Llenn.
The mean-spirited rule that forced them to fight apart was finally over. It had been such a bother that she was not in any kind of mood generous enough to think Thank you for letting us regroup!
Most likely, she guessed, it was set up to teleport you to the first teammate to enter the keep after the announcement at 2:20. For Llenn’s team, it was Clarence, and for SHINC, it was Tanya.
“What about M?” she asked Boss, but she realized she already knew the answer.
She forced her attention into the upper-left corner of her vision, where she could see the status of her various teammates, arranged neatly out of her regular line of sight.
Right as she saw the truth, Boss said, “M’s dead. He did it to get us here.”
Like Pitohui’s, M’s spot was red, and there was an X above his name.
“……”
Boss felt that she had an obligation to explain what had happened.
“The enemy had us pinned at the end of a long hallway. In order to break through the stalemate, M took my large plasma grenade and his shield and charged at them. Then he blew himself up and opened the way for us. We were just able to make it in time.”
The world shook a little bit just then.
“Well, if he’s dead, he’s dead. Seems like the castle is starting to crumble,” Fukaziroh said, distinctly lacking in solemnity. Meanwhile, Llenn could see the distant ramparts crumbling.
It was the second collapse of the day.
The ramparts were the farthest part of the castle. They went first, disappearing over the edge, and then, as though dragged down with them, the huge stone bridges that connected to the central keep fell, one after the other. If you happened to be stuck beneath them, you’d be crushed to death.
But even if you weren’t flattened by the bridges, you would lose the ground beneath your feet in moments. Right after the ramparts and bridges, the maze town was next.
The central area was lifted 150 feet above the town, and the spires rose another 150 from there, so the group had a three-hundred-foot vantage point over the destruction. It was very easy to tell what was happening.
“What a sight,” Fukaziroh murmured, popping her head over the edge to see. That was the moment that a bullet twanged off her helmet and deflected into the sky.
“Gmburgl!” she squawked. The helmet saved her life, but she still felt like someone had punched her in the head, and the shock traveled to her neck as well, causing the weird gurgling cry she made. She rolled around on the ground in agony; the shot had cost her 5 percent of her hit points.
“Sniper! Southwest!” Llenn called out, cursing their lack of caution in watching the collapse below. She fell to the floor as a red bullet line extended over Fukaziroh, only to be erased by its bullet. A nasty hiss buzzed in her ears.
“Yikes…,” she murmured, having seen it out of the corner of her eye. She asked Clarence, “Is that sniper in the next tower?”
“Yep, that’s my stalker. That creep’s still around? He’s pretty good, right?”
“I’ll admit it.”
“Why did he shoot just now? We were pretty chill before this. I really thought that there was a loving truce between the two of us.”
“Ow, my head… Must be because he’s found himself another woman,” Fukaziroh chimed in.
“I don’t think it’s anything as sweet as that,” Boss pointed out. She had sunk back against the stone wall, with binoculars pointed around the side of the pillar. Only the right lens was extended around the edge, because both would be too much of a target.
She reported back on what she saw. “MMTM’s in the next tower to the southwest! It’s the sniper in the sunglasses who shot at us: Lux. But there’s no one else in the tower… I think.”
“Ha-ha, so he’s the only one left, eh?” Fukaziroh snorted. However, while the chances of that being true were not zero, they were definitely very, very low.
Brrr! Llenn felt a sudden shiver down her spine. She had a very bad feeling.
“That’s not it! The others are there, too! They met up with the teleport, and they know we’re here…so they’re coming toward our tower so they can climb up!”
“That’s it!” Boss agreed, right as a sniper’s bullet cracked just past her head. Another three inches, and it would have pierced both the lens of the binoculars and her right eye.
No matter how many times she heard it, that sound like insect wings magnified hundreds of times in volume was a horrible sensation. The only good thing about it is that if you heard it, it meant you didn’t get hit by it.
Boss hunched down and said, “Dammit! Everyone, hurry down the tower! If they block us in, we’ll never get out! That’s what MMTM wants!”
Brrrr! Llenn’s back shivered again. Her dark premonition was exactly correct.
In other words, this was the situation.
David’s Team MMTM was reunited via the teleporter and realized the situation in this tower: M and Pitohui were not there. Then they leaped into prompt action to eliminate Llenn.
First, they left Lux to be a sniper atop the tower and prevent Llenn’s group from looking down or getting any closer. In the meantime, the other members rushed down their tower and were making their way toward Llenn’s tower now.
Then they could surround it at a safe distance and keep the group trapped inside. If they had plasma grenades, they could try knocking over the tower. Or they could steadily attack from below until they picked off everyone.
And if they didn’t want to risk the danger, they could just tell everyone else “The million yen’s up in that tower!” and let the opportunists do the rest.
The end result would be the same: Llenn’s group would be stuck in the tower, surrounded by enemies and unable to gain an advantage over anyone.
It was exactly the kind of plan MMTM would execute, given their overall team skill and David’s sharp, uncompromising tactical leadership. They were a formidable foe.
But this wasn’t the time to be paying compliments.
“If we don’t get down, we’re screwed…”
“That’s right! Let’s go!” Boss urged—right as she got trampled on. “Mrglh!”
Sophie and Rosa and Tohma had just jumped into the entrance from the crumbling castle and were promptly teleported on top of Boss as a group.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. There just wasn’t any room.
“Oh! Sorry, Boss!” remarked Sophie, realizing that she was stepping firmly on her squad leader’s head.
“Just get down!”
“Huh?”
She was just a fraction of a second too late.
A bullet line flashed for a moment on Sophie’s wide face, and the .338 Lapua was upon her.
It struck true, passing through her head.
Sophie only had the time to murmur, “Alas…”
It was a headshot insta-kill; Sophie died on her feet.
And in that instant, Sophie’s second loadout in Tohma’s inventory—the PTRD-41 antitank rifle, which Tohma was actually supposed to use—would no longer appear in SJ5.
When they saw Sophie get hit, Rosa and Tohma stepped off of Boss and dropped down—Rosa landing on Clarence, and Tohma on Fukaziroh.
“Urgh.”
“Oof!”
The two got squished, but it couldn’t be avoided. There just wasn’t any room.
“Hrrrg!” Boss roared furiously. She was incensed.
Llenn glanced over to see what she’d do and was so startled that she actually said, “My word!”
Boss was lifting up the freshly dead corpse of Sophie. She carried it over to the stone pillar where she’d just been using her binoculars, then set it down hugging the stone and propped it up from behind.
The pillar was only sixteen inches across, not adequate to hide behind, but now it was significantly bolstered by Sophie’s wide body.
In Squad Jam, a corpse was an indestructible object. It would serve as a shield that would block any and all attacks for the ten minutes until it vanished.
SHINC hadn’t used Sophie’s body as a shield since at least SJ2. That time was an intentional tactic, but this time around, her death was incidental and unplanned.
“Anna! Tohma!”
“Roger that!”
“Yah!”
The two SHINC snipers, Dragunovs in hand, set up next to the body. They hadn’t had them materialized, probably because they were sprinting to get to the keep, so they had to retrieve them from their inventories and load them.
With the dead body acting as a shield, they allowed only the muzzles and scopes to protrude, minimizing the amount of space that could be hit. If he still got them after this, you just had to give him props.
They fired.
High-pitched Dragunov semi-auto filled the partially enclosed tower; on top of that, it was doubled. Empty cartridges flew out and over the edge into the open air.
At a distance of 2,500 feet, the Dragunov’s precision left a little something to be desired. With Lux crouching out of sight, their chances of hitting him were low, but if they could just keep his head down and prevent him from sniping, that was a big win.
They kept shooting, while Boss held the body in place.
“Girls!” she shouted. “Go down now, while you’ve got the chance! Tanya, you take lead! Leave the tower if you can!”
“Roger!” said silver-haired Tanya, rolling over to the hole in the floor with her Bizon in hand. Llenn watched her drop out of sight.
She was going to descend the stairs and attack MMTM, who were very likely to be outside. She’d be surrounded and die, of course, but it would buy more time.
“No!” Llenn fumed, outraged that this was costing SHINC more members.
But Boss said, “M’s last words to me were, ‘You have to survive and protect Llenn.’ He kept us alive, so I’m going to keep my promise to him alive, too.”
“……”
A storm of emotions passed through Llenn’s mind, robbing her of the ability to argue back.
So Fukaziroh took it upon herself to join the conversation. “Well, well, look who’s a real samurai. C’mon, Llenn, let’s go. Our battle is only just beginning! Have no fear. I’ll be the one to accompany you and keep you safe to the bitter end!”
“Fuka…”
Her friend’s touching attempt to cheer her up brought a little moisture to Llenn’s eyes.
“After all, it’s the only way I’ll be able to shoot you in the back and get that million yen for myself at the end.”
Llenn was forced to consider the idea of making sure she shot Fukaziroh first before the end of the game.
After losing Pitohui and then M, Team LPFM was suffering a major decrease in power.
Regardless, Squad Jam would continue until either you died or the game was over, so simply giving up wasn’t an option.
No matter how bad things got, she would never give up—the only option was to fight as hard as she could.
That was simply the courtesy she owed all the players she’d killed up to this point.
That was what Llenn—er, Karen Kohiruimaki—had learned in GGO.
Huh?
But I started GGO so I could be a different person, so… Huh?
Wait, no, this still fits… I think?
Inside her own thoughts, Llenn had gotten herself totally confused, but she realized that this was not something she should bother herself with at the moment.
What should I do right now? I should do what I can!
Once again, after so many times today, Llenn steeled herself for action.
“We’ll secure the area below! You come after us later, Boss!” she said, crawling on hands and knees toward the hole in the corner.
“Huh? Where am I?” said Shirley, teleporting into existence. She landed with both feet directly on top of Llenn.
“Gaaah! You’re too heavy!”
The staircase inside the tower was dark and spiraling and endless.
Llenn had been teleported atop the tower, so she hadn’t been here yet.
The spire was only six feet wide, with a round and delicate pillar placed in the center and narrow steps descending in a spiral. The steps were quite steep and had wide gaps between them. A child could easily fall through. If this were an ordinary home, it would be condemned for code violations.
There were no windows and no artificial lights at all, but somehow there was enough light inside to see where you were stepping. It was a game, so you were allowed to do things like that.
Llenn sped down the stairs, trying to catch up to Tanya. Whatever the reason for Shirley’s last-second teleportation, if she hadn’t totally stomped on Llenn, she could have left the spire opening at least thirteen seconds sooner.
It was a 150-foot spire, which would make it at least ten stories ordinarily. That took some time to descend. Llenn rushed as fast as she could go, battling centrifugal force.
“We’re all hooked back up,” Clarence announced lackadaisically into her ear. That meant that the four remaining members of LPFM had active comms once again.
“Thanks!” Llenn said, too busy rushing down the stairs to have taken that step for herself.
“Yo, Llenn. Sorry for killing Pitohui,” said Shirley, who had just been teleported on top of Llenn moments ago.
Shirley did not sound sorry or guilty at all. In fact, she sounded proud of having bagged a particularly desirable prey. Their feud had been going on for ages, so Llenn couldn’t blame her. She must have been very happy to snipe her archenemy.
In any case, what’s done was done. There were more important matters now.
“I don’t care about that—just help us! We wanna be the last two teams with SHINC!”
“Got it. Now that we’ve reached this point, I promise to do anything I can for the team. Although the money would be nice, too.”
“Thanks!”
They had a crack sniper back on the team. A very good sign.
Clarence took it as a sign that the conversation was over. She chimed in, “Anyway, Shirley! Get out my backup gear! I went to all the trouble of getting it and practicing with it—I was afraid I wouldn’t get a chance to shoot it once!”
“Okay. I’ll give it to you now.”
“Yesss!”
Llenn continued to rush down the steps, leaving them to their business. She had to hurry, or things were gonna get bad. Real bad. If she didn’t reach the exit at the foot of the spire before MMTM had it surrounded, she’d never be able to get out.
She couldn’t see Tanya ahead of her, but she felt like she could hear her footsteps ahead. And sure enough, being faster than Tanya, Llenn soon saw the flash of white hair ahead of her.
They were almost at the doorway. Just past the final step of the spiral stairs was the lowest floor of the spire, with a hole just large enough for a person to fit through, facing south toward the center of the castle. There was no door to shut.
Beyond that was the foundation of the keep.
She hadn’t been able to look down earlier, but according to what Clarence had said while they were back in the forest, it was a round, flat space a mile and a quarter across, arranged with a bunch of breakable barricades like a coliseum-style practice arena.
The maze had collapsed by now, so this was the only place in SJ5 that you could move around in. Originally, it had been a map six miles to a side.
But this was good news to Llenn.
An area with solid footing and reasonably placed obstacles was a godsend for players like Llenn and Tanya who had maxed out their agility. The final battle of SJ1 took place in a wasteland that was just like this.
She could use her innate speed to hit and run (or hit and gun) and kill as many foes as possible while staying on the move.
“Wait, Tanya! I’ll go out with you! Two is better than one!” she called out.
“Got it! But I’m under orders to protect you. So don’t make it too difficult!” she replied, stopping to wait a few seconds at the door for Llenn to reach her.
There was no telling who might be waiting for them in the bright sunlight outside, but with their speed, it would be difficult to hit them.
Tanya gave Llenn a brief look, silenced Bizon raised at her shoulder. Llenn nodded back.
Her combat boots hit the mysteriously smooth but non-slippery surface outside. A beat later, Llenn followed her—and immediately gasped.
“Huh?”
The instant Tanya had jumped out into the light, she turned back around, hard expression on her face. The muzzle of the Bizon was pointed straight at Llenn.
Helpless to react, Llenn could only watch as Tanya jabbed her with the suppressor end of the Bizon, right in the chest. She put her weight into it, a very clean hit. Light as she was, Llenn was thrown right back into the tower she’d just exited.
“Wha—?!”
Llenn landed on her butt and stared up through the open entranceway, where Tanya was lit up in the sunlight. The silver-haired woman grinned at her, clearly satisfied with what she’d just accomplished.
“Get down!” she yelled, right as the bullets came flying.
Llenn twisted and dropped flat to the floor at the very same moment that the bullets riddled Tanya’s body.
All she could do was watch helplessly at a distance of ten feet as they shot through Tanya, one after the other. She was pockmarked with red damage bits all over her body.
“Hrya!” Despite her shock, Llenn leaped instinctually into action.
She scuttled across the floor like a certain black, shiny, oily insect that shall not be named—and clambered up the stairs.
An instant later, bullets tore in through the tower entrance, either passing through Tanya’s body or because she had fallen. They hit the stone of the tower interior, some chipping away at the surface and others twanging and deflecting farther.
Somehow, Llenn managed to evacuate up the steps and out of danger. Either because she was tiny, or lucky, or some combination of the two, not a single bullet struck her.
But still the hail of bullets continued.
“Hyaaa!”
Red bullet lines filled the narrow entryway, and orange tracers added their own touch of color.
She didn’t know if this was actually MMTM, or some other group. But it was highly likely to be the former.
In either case, there was one thing she knew for certain.
There was no longer any escape from this tower.
“Dammit!”
Boss had just learned of Tanya’s death. She saw it on the team’s status screen and then with her own eyes.
With Sophie’s body propped up before her, she was able to crane her neck as far as it could go and get a glimpse of the ground below.
Fifty yards down and a few dozen yards away, a man stuck his gun out from behind a barricade and fired. Tanya leaped out of the entrance, noticed the enemy, and turned around to push Llenn back, just before she was shot and dropped like a pile of rags. There was a DEAD tag floating over her body.
“Tanya’s dead,” she announced heavily, right as Lux shot back. The bullet grazed Boss’s cheek. “Dammit!”
Lux continued to snipe from his tower perch, all alone.
He made full use of the FD338 he’d paid so much to acquire. In other words, he fired and fired and kept firing.
It was too dangerous to keep using the tripod, because it placed the gun in too vulnerable a place, so he sat behind the pillar and pressed the barrel against its side to steady his weapon.
From there, he fired at a target nearly half a mile away, as small as a sesame seed by the naked eye, but so large through his magnified scope that they appeared to be right next to him.
His bullet circle was pulsing powerfully, so that it was larger than the circle of the scope itself, but right as it shrank to its smallest width, he pulled the trigger. This pattern he continued, again and again.
His mission was to ensure that the people at the top of the spire could not look out from their shelter. That much was just as Llenn’s group suspected.
All the members of MMTM reunited around Lux when they used the teleport tunnel. Since there wasn’t enough room, several of them got stepped on.
In an instant, David came up with a plan to trap Llenn’s group inside their tower, and they promptly began to execute on it.
If the snipers in that tower were able to get a bead on targets below, it would be relatively easy for them to pick off the other MMTM members making their way over. Lux continued to fire, keeping that possibility at bay, even if it resulted in his death.
The FD338’s ten-shot magazine was empty, and the bolt stopped. Lux promptly picked up a spare magazine—he’d materialized a bunch from his inventory earlier and scattered them across the floor for easy access.
He exchanged the magazines and smacked the bolt catch on the left side of the gun with his palm. The large bolt grabbed a .338 Lapua round and slid forward, sending it into the chamber at the rear end of the barrel.
In that brief span of time, the snipers in the other spire poked their heads out and fired their Dragunovs with merciless speed. Their barrels flashed from the side of the dead body they were using as a shield.
But despite the bullet lines flickering all across his location like mosquitos, Lux did not attempt to flee the area. If a red bullet line entered the scope through which he was watching them, then he would avoid it. That would mean it was on course to shoot through his eye to the brain.
But anything short of that, he stayed firm and shot back.
If they hit his body, the only thing that mattered was that he kept his vital zones protected and out of danger. Anything to eliminate a one-hit kill. As long as he stayed behind the pillar and wall, the chances of that were extremely low.
And anywhere outside of those spots, he could stand a few shots.
For example, if his right arm got shot, because it was jutting outside of the pillar by necessity to keep his gun aimed, that was not going to be instantly fatal. As long as he could withstand the numbing pain, he could still shoot back.
But if there was a deflection, or a line he failed to see, or some other prank by the God of Gun Gale that caused him to get hit, he would just have to curse his own body and pay his respects to a worthy foe.
So Lux kept shooting. Right into SHINC’s attack.
Bullets zipped back and forth between the two towers, fifty yards above the ground, keeping things very busy.
Although he didn’t know why, he felt very lucky that SHINC’s ultimate weapon, that PTRD-41, hadn’t fired at him yet. It was powerful enough that it would destroy the entire stone wall he was hiding behind and take him with it.
The trade-off for that monstrous power was the incredible length of the gun, so he would notice right away if they tried to point it at him. For now, though, there was no sign of that. Of course, he did not yet know that one of his earlier shots had killed the owner of the antitank rifle.
But there was something Lux could not hear over the sound of his own gun.
It was David and the other members of his team, deployed at barricades surrounding Llenn’s tower, opening fire all at once and riddling Tanya full of bullets.
“We’ve surrounded the tower and eliminated SHINC’s attacker. Llenn probably snuck back inside. That’s fine, though!” David reported over the comm.
The strategy was a success. Lux had completed his mission. Not only that, he received praise from his team leader:
“This is all thanks to you, Lux. Good work!”
The squad loved David because when he scolded you, he did it in private, but when he praised you, he did it in front of the group.
If only my boss at work were like this. When he gets mad at you, he screams at you in front of everyone, and when he praises you… In fact, has he ever paid me a compliment? No, he just takes the credit for himself. Listen to me, complaining about work in my head.
“Time to enjoy a little overtime, then!” Lux smiled, loaded his next shot, and peered through the scope.
The snipers from SHINC, who had been shooting back so furiously just moments ago, gave nary a glimpse of a bullet line.
He didn’t know why.
Had they figured out they were surrounded and given up their futile resistance, or were they plotting something new?
Lux didn’t know the answer, but he was going to keep firing anyway.
Until a single bullet hit the flesh of his upper right arm.
“Not done yet!” he crowed through the pain. He squeezed the trigger finger of his right hand.
The order came from his brain, sending a virtual signal to his finger.
But no bullet came out of his gun.
“Huh?”
The long and heavy FD338 succumbed to gravity, toppling to Lux’s right. It struck the stone wall and fell to the floor, clattering twice.
“Huh? Why?”
His eyes dropped to the right, where he found his answer.
On the ground with his gun was his own arm.
The arm was covered in familiar camo, its cross section just a polygonal wire frame shrouded in red light. It had a firm hold on the grip of the FD338.
“What?”
He looked farther to the right and up a bit, at his right shoulder. There was nothing coming off of it.
“Are you kidding me…?”
A shot had hit him on the arm without a bullet line.
And it wasn’t from the antitank rifle.
But it completely severed his arm.
“Aaah! It’s her! The exploding-bullet sniper chick with the pink shrimp!” Lux surmised correctly. He twisted and reached for the gun with his left hand.
Because the other hand was still holding the grip, he had to pry it loose with his left and toss the offending arm over his side.
Tossing your own arm over your shoulder was an experience that was hard to replicate outside of virtual reality. It was not something you wanted to do, ever.
Lux lifted the long gun with his left arm alone, rested the front atop the short stone wall, and pressed the stock against his left shoulder.
“I’m not done yet!”
He resumed firing with his other arm. It wasn’t possible to aim closely; he just had to wait for the bullet circle to contract as far as the naked eye told him and place it over the other tower.
“I’m not done! I’m not done! I’m not done!” he shouted with each shot, just as loud as the gun’s report.
Finally, he had emptied the magazine, and the bolt was locked in the rear.
“Not yet!”
The moment he dropped the empty magazine one-handed was the moment that Shirley’s next bullet put a hole in his trademark sunglasses.
A split second later, the bullet exploded in Lux’s eye socket.
The woman who took the shot said, “Whew… He was tough…”
She pulled the bolt handle on the R93 Tactical 2 back. An empty cartridge popped out on the right side and started the long fall 150 feet to the ground.
“Did you get him, Shirley?” Clarence asked.
“Yeah.”
“Can I let go now, then?”
“Of course not!” Shirley snapped at her. She wanted to believe that Clarence was joking, but this was the kind of thing she would do. “Just pull me up already.”
She was hanging on a rope over the edge of the spire.
Shirley had tied her own rope around her torso and thighs as a harness, then dangled down on the north side of the tower, out of sight from Lux and the rest of MMTM. Once she was hanging down there, she planted her feet on the wall of the tower and pressed her rifle against the side to stabilize it for shooting.
This idea had come from one of the snipers working for Fire during the SJ4 battle in the shopping mall. The man with the XP-100 had climbed up the pillars with a rope and tormented Shirley.
Her acrobatic feat ended with two successful shots on target, but she was now dangling six feet from the edge of the open space under the spire, meaning that she couldn’t easily get back up with her rifle in her hands.
“All right, fine,” Clarence said. “Heave-ho!”
With the help of the SHINC trio, she pulled Shirley back up inside the tower.
Tohma took a look at her and noticed, “You got shot!”
There was a wide red damage effect on Shirley’s side.
“Oh, you’re right,” she murmured. She’d been so focused on shooting that she never noticed she’d been hit. Her hit points were cut in half.
“Gwaaah! Are you gonna die, Shirley?” Clarence asked.
“Why do you sound so excited about that?” Shirley demanded.
She replied, “We don’t need to get into that. Just use your med kit.”
David learned about Lux’s spectacular death through the change in his status bar.
“Lux is down,” he announced to his squadmates, who had their guns pointed at the entrance to the tower.
David, Kenta, Jake, Bold, and Summon were hiding behind barricades, each one spread out at least thirty feet from any other.
They were a few dozen yards away from the tower itself.
If they were any farther back, other barricades would block their line of sight (and fire) and prevent them from aiming at the entrance. But if they got too close, the height of the barricades would no longer help, and they’d be susceptible to gunfire and grenades from over the top.
Only speedy Kenta kept on the move between barricades, ensuring he had visibility and could check on their rear. His G36K was ready to fire if anyone came up on them.
The other four kept their guns trained on the entryway to Llenn’s tower. Jake had his HK21 machine gun on a bipod, ready to attack at any moment. If there was any hint of movement, he would open with continual fire. The bullets that killed Tanya earlier were his. That was the power of a machine gun.
“Watch out up above. Don’t poke your head out if you can help it,” David instructed. Without Lux up there, the enemy had nothing stopping them from attacking from above.
Jake hunkered down lower and lowered his HK21, too.
“I’ll stay posted on it,” Bold said, Beretta ARX160 in hand, taking over the watch on the entrance.
David had an STM-556 with a grenade launcher attached to the underside of the barrel. He was ready to shoot a grenade at anyone who tried to leave.
“Switch to Incoming Channel Two,” he said, a preprogrammed voice instruction. It caused the comm to switch to a different channel. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you,” said a lady’s voice.
“We’ve got Llenn’s group trapped in a tower. The northernmost one. Can you make it here?” he asked Vivi.
“Of course,” she replied. “I’ll ‘convince’ the others around here and be on my way as soon as possible.”
Her voice was the very model of refined grace, smooth and patient.
“We’ll be on our way to eliminate the pink demon’s companions soon.”
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