Sword Art Online Alternative – Gun Gale Online - Volume 13 - Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

Tower Defense Battle

The audience in the pub observed it all on the screens, enrapt.

“This is brutal…”

They were watching the ultimate team, ZEMAL, absolutely annihilating their opponents.

“They’ve seriously improved so much…”

“They’re like different people—I mean, a different team entirely. Even though their names and faces and weapons are exactly the same.”

“Well, they always had firepower… I guess it’s what they say about nature versus nurture. They just needed the right circumstances.”

“Who is that Vivi anyway?”

The castle keep was now the only environment left in SJ5. In the southeast, three of ZEMAL’s surviving members were leaving an unstoppable wake of destruction on the orders of their goddess.

Huey the macho man, with a rooster haircut and an M240B machine gun, stood at the head of their A-shaped formation.

Thanks to the bullet circle feature, he didn’t even need to hold the gun up to his shoulder so he could peer through the scope. Like a badass movie star, he held his weapon at his waist and was able to shoot accurately anyway. Thanks to the backpack belt feeder system, he could shoot somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand bullets without needing to stop and reload.

He strolled around the side of a barricade, where he spotted a team in reddish-brown camo about a hundred feet ahead and unleashed a torrent of 7.62 × 51 mm NATO bullets.

One of them was unable to run and was shot through the head and killed instantly. Two others panicked and hid behind a barricade. The wall blocked a few of his subsequent shots before vanishing entirely, leaving them exposed and helpless. They followed their teammate off the map a second later.

At that moment, about forty yards to Huey’s left, a member of T-S bravely leaped out from behind cover. He charged with a Steyr AUG assault rifle tucked under his arm, willing to take a few shots first. The Steyr model had been customized to be what they called an HBAR, with a longer barrel and a bipod attachment.

The heavily armored man with the long rifle charged like some medieval knight. This kind of bold advance could only be attempted by someone with enough defense to believe that 5.56 mm bullets would not stop him.

“Ohhh!”

“Will he make it?”

The men in the bar stirred with anticipation. One of them rose a little from his seat, fists clenched.

“Awww…”

He didn’t make it.

The man on the left leg of the A formation, Max—who played a Black avatar with a fairly common Minimi Mk 46—promptly cut the man down with a hail of bullets.

On top of that, Vivi, who took the center bar of the formation, began to shoot a short-barreled RPD light machine gun.

The Steyr AUG slipped out of the T-S member’s hand and got blasted away. It would need repairing to work again. Pretty, colorful sparks began to shoot from all parts of his body.

The bullets that hit him weren’t penetrating the armor, but he was still getting smacked with their full kinetic force. He quickly lost his balance and toppled to the left.

Even still, he tried to fight back and get to his feet, but the hailstorm did not stop.

He was being showered like a flower receiving water. Too much water. Enough to drown the delicate flower.

Max and Vivi must have had plenty of extra ammo, because they simply did not stop.

“They wanna beat him to death.”

“Nah, I think they just enjoy holding down the trigger.”

Perhaps that was right.

Their victim was getting shot continuously, all over his body, and couldn’t get back to his feet due to the impacts and pain, even if he wanted to. It was difficult to watch.

“I swear I’ve seen this scene before in RoboCop. The original one, from 1987.”

“There you go, bringing up classic movies again…”

“I bet that T-S guy is thinking Kill me, just kill me right about now.”

“You never know. He could be a woman.”

“Absolutely no chance. But it would be sweet… I would totally nurture that T-S member back to health, brokenhearted and scarred after being unable to fight back…”

“No, I’ll do it! Me first!”

“I’d like to hear less from the virgins in the crowd.”

The audience members carried on, their imaginations getting the better of them. But in the meanwhile, the T-S member decided that giving up would be preferable to taking more of a beating.

In other words, he chose to quit the game.

He waved his left arm and then fell lifelessly to the ground. A tag saying RESIGNED appeared over his body. The machine guns stopped, and the world was quiet.

Then the camera centered on Vivi, who began to walk slowly out of the middle of their formation.

On Vivi’s right side was the smallest member of ZEMAL, Peter, who was identifiable by the bandage he stuck over his nose. His weapon was an Israeli Negev 5.56 mm machine gun. He moved right and left along with Vivi, ensuring that he was always within the space ten feet in front of her.

At a glance, it seemed like he was extremely agitated.

“Is that guy holdin’ it in or something?” someone suggested crudely, eliciting a wave of laughter.

“No, he’s changing position based on the barricades nearby to act as a shield for their team leader,” someone else said casually, drawing their attention.

“Wow… Do you have combat experience or something?” someone asked.

He smiled back. “Yeah. In GGO.”

On the screen, Vivi was shouting something. She was using a megaphone, which was very similar to those handheld devices you saw people talking into at school festival days, but this one was sci-fi looking, all angles, and rather small.

The men in the pub were just learning for the first time that such an item existed in the game. But they had no idea why she would have brought that with her.

Vivi was shouting into the megaphone. They couldn’t hear her.

“What’s she doing…?”

“Probably sending a message to the players around her…”

“Oh, I got it!” said one man, drawing everyone’s attention. “She must be recruiting others to go after the pink shrimp!”

“We are on our way to defeat the team that contains Llenn, the player with the hundred-million-credit bounty. They are currently trapped inside the north tower. But the target I really want to dispatch is the grenadier known as Fukaziroh. I don’t need the bounty. If you want to join us, speak up. Let’s go and beat Llenn together. You just might win that bounty. Or would you rather get into a firefight with us?”

She repeated her message over and over.

Her voice carried well, echoing behind all the barricades.

One man who heard it, wearing desert camo and holding an M16A1, a standard-issue American assault rifle, stood up and made a show of himself.

“Don’t shoot! I’m in!”

Once one person had volunteered, the rest felt less shame at the idea.

“Me too!”

“I’d love to join in!”

In small groups, surviving players—and sometimes teams—offered to take part in Vivi’s invitation.

Huey, Peter, and Max kept their machine guns aimed and ready, watching carefully, as the other players approached without their guns in hand. Soon all the gunfire in the area had died out.

As they came closer, Vivi said, “Very well. The place is the northernmost tower. Our partners in Memento Mori have it surrounded, so we’ll make plenty of noise as we approach. If you try to sneak up in silence, they will shoot you, so be careful.”

She beamed most fetchingly.

“Llenn, I’ve taken out that annoying sniper,” Shirley stated.

“Thanks for that. But I can’t get out…”

Llenn was in quite the predicament right at the entrance of the tower. Or exit, depending on which direction you faced.

Earlier, she had removed a magazine from her pouch that was low on bullets and very casually tossed it through the entrance to the outside.

The next instant, it was neatly shot through the middle. The magazine had taken more damage than the item could withstand and turned into little fragments of light that soon disappeared.

That was a sniper shot from David’s scoped assault rifle, but from the inside, Llenn couldn’t tell who had done it.

All she knew was one simple fact: “If I go out in any way, I’ll get shot!” The message was extremely clear.

But there was one other thing: “They’re not aggressively coming in here, either.”

If they had intended to do that, they would have done it while they had sniper support. If that had been the case, Llenn would have rushed up the stairs and shot back at them with P-chan. Heh. You suckers saved your own lives there.

“Llenn. Boss says she wants to communicate with our team. Is that cool?” Fukaziroh asked.

“Of course! Hook everyone up!” she replied at once. Two seconds later, Boss was speaking into her ear.

“Llenn. I wanted to get out of the tower ASAP, but now we don’t really have that option. We’re switching to a plan to shoot back from the top. If it’s just MMTM, I think we can hold them off. We’ll just have to pray that some other team comes by to pick them off while we’re in a stare down.”

It was a rather passive plan, but Llenn couldn’t see a better option. Besides, being camped in a higher elevation was an advantage in battle.

While the barricades might block their attacks from above, they could be destroyed with enough shots. Eventually they would return, but it would help push hiding foes out into the open.

On the other hand, as had occurred to her earlier, they might be surrounded by more enemies in the meantime, and if they came with weapons powerful enough to destroy the tower, everyone was screwed.

The scariest possibility of all was what Shirley did in the Five Ordeals: a suicide attacking using plasma grenades that would kill the target by toppling the building on top of her.

But it was Boss coming up with the plans now, instead of M. All Llenn could do was follow her lead.

“All right. I’ll stay down below. If anyone tries to come in, I can shoot them from higher on the stairs.”

“Great. Do that.”

“I will!” she announced confidently.

Not knowing, of course, that ZEMAL was recruiting companions who were making their way toward MMTM.

Just so Vivi could take out Fukaziroh.

There were about fifteen men who had either been convinced or hoodwinked by Vivi into approaching the tower that was currently surrounded by MMTM.

They moved in small groups together. Some were from the same team, while other groups were simply a product of happenstance. They didn’t want to get shot along the way by others who were unaware of the situation, so they made sure to have the same pitch ready that had worked on them: We’ve got a chance to seize that bounty; are you in?

Although none of them were aware of it, there were only about forty players still left in SJ5. That was all that remained of thirty teams totaling just under 180 players.

Not a single team was unblemished, either; nobody had their full lineup still alive.

It was still most of a mile to reach the tower, so they were all sprinting, but because it was a virtual world, nobody was short of breath.

“You don’t got your thang on you?” the man with the desert camo and M16A4 asked the fellow running next to him.

“Thang?” he replied, blank-faced. There was nothing in his hands.

He wore a green T-shirt and camo pants, just like your average person walking around Glocken. Just an average white avatar, average height, average build, with no real distinguishing features.

“I mean your main weapon. Come on, man, it’s not that hard to figure out,” the first man said, looking suspicious.

“Oh, my main gun. Sorry! I had it, but it got blown out of my hands in an explosion in the city area. I couldn’t find it, and I’ve been on the run ever since. I didn’t catch any of my squadmates, either.”

The suspicion turned into understanding. “Ah. That was the crazy suicide bomb team that messed things up last time, wasn’t it? I guess they were here again. We’re going to take out the pink demon, though. Are you gonna be able to do anything?” he asked.

The empty-handed man waved one of those hands as he ran. “Oh, no, no. There’s absolutely no way I could ever win the bounty. But since I’ve come this far, I’d like to see the outcome of the hundred million credits for myself. I’m the only survivor from my team, so I really appreciate ZEMAL’s proposal.”

“Uh-huh. Well, good luck. What’s your team name, by the way?” the desert camo asked.

The featureless man in light gear smiled back.

“We’re called BOKR. It’s our first time. Nice to meet you!”

“Aren’t you going to use any grenades, Captain?” Kenta asked David while he was carefully patrolling the area behind the rest of the squad. They spoke through the comm. Their comms were only tuned to be within the squad for now.

Under the barrel of David’s STM-556 was an add-on grenade launcher. Distance and skill-wise, David was capable of placing a grenade squarely into the entrance to the tower.

He smiled viciously, without turning back to show it—vigilance was more important. “If I blew up the pink shrimp, and she died, just like that, it would cause problems. We need those folks looking for her bounty to come here.”

“Got it,” Kenta replied. “Makes sense.”

“Vivi’s target is just one person, whom she bears a very deep connection to going back to ALO and whom she blames for killing Shinohara: Fukaziroh. She really respects that grenadier, apparently. So until then, we let them do what they want. If they’re going to send people our way, we’ll take anyone we can get to help cut down on Llenn’s remaining strength and ammo stock.”

“And after that?” Kenta asked, patrolling farther away from David now. It was his job to stay on the move.

“We’ll use everything we’ve got to defeat ZEMAL and be Squad Jam champions. I don’t care how.”

Although he wasn’t saying it out loud, his implication was that they were willing to play dirty. For example, if members of ZEMAL were tired out from dealing with Llenn’s group, MMTM might just shoot them in the back.

So in a sense, he didn’t want to tire out the folks in the tower too much just yet.

“I thought you’d say that!” Kenta chirped, delighted.

“They’re going to be thinking the exact same thing, that’s why.”

“Of course. Oops, I think our guests are arriving,” Kenta said, spotting a group of men approaching with their guns raised high. “Got an incoming party of grist for the mill, ready to be seated.”

It was 2:35 PM.

The men in the pub watched events unfold over multiple screens. Although there was no explanation being written up for context, a sampling of the various monitors told the story well enough.

These were folks who had put up with an entire hour of looking at nothing but milky-white fog. They were made of sterner stuff.

“So Llenn’s team isn’t leaving the tower. Or they can’t.”

The seven survivors of the combined squads of the pink demon and the Amazons were holed up in the tower directly to the north, where they were not attacking the others around them.

“They must be holding back their fire to conserve bullets. That makes sense.”

“I guess they’re staying put and hoping that the other teams will take each other out.”

The five members of MMTM had the tower loosely surrounded from a distance but were not actively attacking, either. They were just keeping it encircled.

“There must be some agreement between David and Vivi.”

ZEMAL was currently moving straight through the center of the small map, convincing other players to head toward Llenn’s location. The audience couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was clear on sight that the people they spoke to were turning on their heels and rushing straight toward Llenn.

The occasional burst of short machine-gun fire was simply the outcome of those who would not go along with the plan.

As a concession from the devs, there was a map on one screen that displayed the location of each surviving player as a moving dot.

Now you show this to us?! the audience all thought, but no one said aloud.

“All the survivors are gathering in the north,” they noted.

The lit dots aside from Llenn’s group and MMTM were all making their way north, like ants converging on a sugar cube.

“If I were down there, I’d sneak away to the south and just hide the whole time…”

“I can see it now. When the toughest team is the last left alive, they’ll track you down and corner you, and you’ll gnash your teeth and cry ‘Dammit! Better this than letting them kill me!’ before you jump over the edge.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you were a prophet.”

It was fun to be in the audience here, because you could eat and drink to your heart’s content and say whatever the hell you wanted to say while you watched other people fight to the death for your amusement.

“So this is setting up a thing where all the bounty-hungry scum come together to beat Llenn’s group, then get slaughtered by ZEMAL and MMTM, so they can face off for the championship, right?”

“Yeah, probably… I’m sure those last two teams are plotting to betray each other.”

“Once you know the outcome, it really drains all the tension out of it… It would be nice to have a new surprise or shocker right about now.”

“Those words mean the same thing.”

“Why don’t you run down there and join the fight, then, smart guy?”

“Oh, sure! Whatever you say! I’ll just dive right into the screen! Is that what you want?!”

“Yeah. Thanks for the mental image.”

“You’re welcome. May I sit here?”

“Be my guest. I kept it warm for you, my lord.”

“Ah, very good, very good… Wait a second, this is my seat!”

“Aaaand scene. Thanks for your assistance, my friend.”

The two of them had taken it upon themselves to accompany the show with some entertainment of their own.

“Can you guys get a room and stop being annoying here?” said a coolheaded watcher of the action. “Isn’t it weird that this much time has passed, but none of the dead participants have come back out to watch with us? That doesn’t make sense! Right?! Why isn’t anyone talking about this?! Tell me!!”

It turned out that he was not that coolheaded after all.

“Our goal is to win, so we’re going to let someone else get the hundred million credits. Tackling the tower is up to all of you. Go crazy on it,” David explained gently to the arriving men, who were all blinded by the promise of riches.

There was a heavy implication in his statement that “You guys will never come close to sniffing the victory,” but he made sure to stoke their greed by mentioning the hundred million credits.

“The current survivors in the tower are SHINC’s leader, one of their gunners, and two snipers. LPFM has their sniper, the tomboy, the little grenadier, and the bounty. Seven in total,” he offered helpfully.

He didn’t know the exact number, but there were close to twenty people in the group, it seemed, and no one was in direct command over them.

They passed by David, giving him sidelong glances. A man in desert camo with an M16A4 said, “I choose to be grateful for your generosity,” fixing him with a rather intense stare.

It was the look of someone who understood full well that David and Vivi were using them as pawns, or disposable tools to wear down their enemies.

And even knowing that, he was on his way to defeat Llenn.

His team had been split up from the start, and none of his squadmates had survived. Winning Squad Jam now was an impossible dream. If there was one way he could actually get back at SJ5 and its horrible special rules, it was this.

“I’ll pray for your good fortune and courage,” said David, who understood the other man’s plight. It was exquisitely sarcastic.

He moved out from behind the barricade he’d been using as cover and began to withdraw, carefully looking out for anyone who might sneak up on him. He didn’t want to get sniped from the top of the tower at this moment, so he had a teammate stay on watch.

It seemed that Boss and her girls were not looking out at all, however. They were probably staying put and keeping their heads down, hoping all the other teams would wipe each other out.

“But it’s not going to be that easy,” he muttered, a message to the unseen Boss.

“Damn. Blast it,” Boss muttered darkly, peering through the binoculars briefly as she stuck her head over the edge a tiny bit.

“Blasted, huh? What is?” asked Fukaziroh, sitting on the spiral stairs.

The population density in the tiny bell-less belfry at the top of the spire was too high, so they were sitting a little bit lower down.

“Your head, probably. From playing too many games,” Clarence said snarkily, her dark clothes a natural camouflage in the gloom, three steps down from Fukaziroh. She was rude as a general rule, but that was just how things worked with Clarence.

“We’re being surrounded by the teams that are left,” Boss announced.

The remaining members of SHINC—Rosa, Anna, Tohma—stayed low and silent atop the tower, the mood gloomy.

“I had a feeling,” admitted Shirley, who was recovering her hit points. “The others have called a temporary truce in order to hunt down Llenn. Someone must have rounded them all up and talked them into it.” She was sitting on the top step of the stairs.

“You had a feeling, and you didn’t tell us?! You should share that kind of information!” Clarence pouted, although she still sounded like she was having fun. She was always having fun; that was just how things worked with Clarence.

“It was only one of a number of possibilities I foresaw. And if Boss is our leader, I’m not going to tell her what to do,” Shirley explained.

On the inside, Boss grumbled. Shirley was probably a grown adult in the real world, unlike the teenage high schoolers in SHINC. It wasn’t a bad thing to have a hierarchy within the game, but surely she could have said something if it was on her mind. Of course, Boss wouldn’t say a word of this. She couldn’t.

Instead, she gave a silent apology to M, for making the wrong choice as group leader.

Shirley, meanwhile, told the downcast Boss, “Give me a little space,” as she climbed up the steps to the belfry where the four members of SHINC were all squished together. She popped her head out into the open. “I’ve got an idea for how to get us out of this predicament. May I?” she asked.

She asked because she wanted to give the leader the opportunity to make a decision, but she didn’t offer details because of the lack of time.

“Do it,” Boss said immediately, without asking.

“Good,” Shirley replied, satisfied. Into the comm, she demanded, “Llenn! Hurry back up the stairs!”

“Huh? You want me back?” asked Llenn in surprise, 140 feet below.

“That’s right. And get your second loadout from Fukaziroh. Might as well fight like Pitohui’s team would.”

“Huh…? Oh! I get it!” she cried.

“Hoh-hoh-hoh. Ah, I see, I see. So that’s what you’re after. Then I suppose I’ll oil up these old joints and get ready. Upsy-daisy!” Grandpa Fukaziroh added.

“Hmm?” Boss did not get it yet.

“Nice one, Shirley! It’s a brilliant plan!” said Clarence, pretending she understood.

While Llenn sped right back up the spiral staircase of the tower, Vivi and David were reuniting about a thousand feet away.

“Thanks for proselytizing and getting it all set up.”

“You’re welcome. Thanks for guiding them here.”

“You’re welcome.”

They faced one another at a distance of about five yards, locking eyes. Naturally, there were ZEMAL and MMTM teammates nearby, keeping an eye on the area. Surely there were no rogue players left to be their enemy at this point, but you couldn’t be too careful.

“Give me a bit of time. I need to back up the twenty who heard me out,” Vivi said, to David’s surprise.

“Meaning…you’re going to keep hitting the top of the tower with long-distance machine-gun fire, to keep them from peeking out?”

“Correct. Very sharp of you,” Vivi marveled.

That would certainly help. It would allow the twenty men to charge into the tower without worrying about being attacked from above.

“Honestly, I’m surprised. I figured you would leave all that up to them,” David admitted.

“That wouldn’t do,” she said. And even more surprisingly, she added, “It would leave more survivors that way.”

They started scattered across the map and alone, shrouded in thick fog, cowering in fear of unseen enemies and occasionally fighting them, then running from crumbling earth, struggling through an enormous maze, nearly plunging off the edge in another collapse, until finally reaching the last stage of SJ5…

These men had no team power left to count on. The kind of men who were described with various cruel and dismissive terms as stragglers, remnants, and dregs.

In the end, twenty of these men found themselves drawn to the allure of the bounty. Even they would admit they were just a random rabble, but they were passing from barricade to barricade on the way to Llenn’s tower all the same.

A hundred million credits were waiting for them inside.

Of course, only one person would get that—or if you were incredibly lucky and somehow got a simultaneous kill, two or three.

Naturally, these twenty had no team strategy in mind. Their comms weren’t connected, so they had no special coordination. If there was anything that gave them an edge, it was their sheer numbers.

Even if they managed to defeat Llenn and her cohorts and survive, it was obvious that they would be crushed under the total team power of ZEMAL and MMTM.

Still, they had no option but to attack the tower.

Pathos hung thick in the air around the men as they inched closer and closer to their destination.

There were a hundred yards left to go.

The approach was a subject of great interest in the pub.

“So what’s gonna happen? What are your bets?”

“I’d like to hear that. I’ll buy a drink for whoever’s right.”

“Very generous. But what if there are multiple correct guesses?”

“Well, then it’s obvious—”

“You’re buying a round for everyone?”

“—I’m going to buy one drink anyway, and you can all take sips and share, obviously.”

“Cheapskate!”

“How is that the obvious choice?!”

Soon they had set up their own action on the outcome.

“You came up with the idea, so you go first.”

“All right. I think…the attacking team is gonna come out ahead.”

“Uh-huh. Why?”

“Because they’re… By the way, let’s just call them Team Greedo…”

“I get that you’re calling them greedy, but don’t say it like ‘commando.’”

“Why, is it weird?”

“No, actually, it’s my favorite.”

“Can you guys get on with it already?”

“Anyway, having the high ground is advantageous, but since there are no windows, the only place to shoot down from the tower is the belfry at the very top.”

“Right, so wouldn’t you be invincible if you shot down from there? They got three snipers, a machine gunner, and the grenade launcher, from what I can tell. That’s a ton of power. I mean, they’re super tough.”

“That’s true, but to shoot at an enemy below at an extreme angle requires sticking way out over the stone lip, right? As long as they keep focusing their shots on the belfry from a distance, it’ll be too dangerous to lean out. So as long there’s plenty of covering fire, they should be able to sneak up closer.”

“Oh, I hear ya. It really helps to have the numbers in a situation like this, huh?”

“Of course, the folks in the tower don’t want to die yet, so they’re gonna fight their hardest, but they have fewer people, so each casualty is a major loss. They’ll be extra cautious for that reason and rarely stick their heads out. In the end, I think they’ll get whittled down to nothing. Once the attackers get into the tower, their numbers will win out. That’s why I think Team Greedo wins.”

“I see. A very convincing argument. Any other guesses?”

“I’m with him.”

“Me too.”

“Same.”

“I agree.”

“I’ve wanted to say that since yesterday, actually.”

“You guys really wanna share a single beer that bad?”

The pub was briefly full of pleasant chuckles.

“You guys suck! Have you not been watching every single Squad Jam as they happen?!” protested one man bravely, his voice high-pitched. Naturally, he was greeted with some very frosty glares.

“So what’s your prediction, then?” someone asked, naturally.

“You’ll see it happen soon enough. Clean out your eyes and watch for yourself.”

“Did you mean, ‘clean out your ears’? Don’t touch your eyes.”

“And did you notice that he didn’t actually say what his guess was? He’s just gonna go ‘See? I was right,’ no matter what happens.”

“Oh, no, busted! Is that what you want me to say? Well, too bad. My prediction is that the team creeping up on the tower will get wiped out. My reasoning is…”

“Let’s get started, then,” Vivi said, kicking off the first good battle in a while.

It was 2:43 PM.

“With pleasure!” Huey exclaimed, opening fire. His machine gun was propped up on a tripod to keep it steady. He was located about four hundred yards south of the tower.

The sturdy tripod cut down on the recoil significantly, making his concentrated firepower that much stronger. It also increased his accuracy at range. They had incorporated the use of the tripod in SJ4 to get the most out of their machine-gun power.

Huey had the machine gun placed low with the barrel pointed upward, so he could fire short, repeated bursts at the belfry space at the top of the tower four hundred yards away.

The bullets passed just over the top of the closest barricade, only a few yards from the muzzle of the gun. Since he was on the ground, it would be basically impossible for anyone in the tower to hit him at that angle.

Although not all of the gently curving bullets landed on target, most of them certainly did. They gouged out chunks of the stone and created little dust clouds where they struck. There was also an occasional burst of orange light.

One of every four rounds was a tracer that carved out a brilliant orange arc, and when they struck a surface, it was easy to see the random directions their deflections took.

In these circumstances, leaning out of the top of the tower was suicide. No intelligent player would attempt to shoot back now. The ricochets were dangerous enough even without exposing yourself to the open.

This was their big chance to storm the tower.

“All right, let’s go!”

Twenty men situated a hundred yards away came charging out from behind their barricades. From this point on, it was a mad dash to the entryway into the tower.

After that, it would be every person for themselves. If you were lucky, you’d be the one who landed the kill shot on the pink shrimp.

“Best of luck,” said the man who’d lost his weapon, watching the guy in desert camo with the M16A4 run off. The others all left in search of riches, leaving him behind, until he was all alone.

“So,” he said, waving his left arm to bring up the inventory.

An enormous backpack appeared in front of him. Next, a number of protectors stuck to his body, like parts on a tin robot toy.

The last member of Team DOOM, now known as Team BOKR, finally had his thang on him again.

“They’re coming. Shooting at us like crazy. Can’t look out,” Boss reported to the others. She had evacuated to the stairs.

There was no longer anyone in the belfry area that had been so cramped earlier. Sophie’s body was placed at the exit to the stairs to block it off. If Boss had stayed up there, even flat on the floor, she would have been vulnerable to deflections off the ceiling or pillars.

“Long-distance covering fire from machine guns. We had to deal with that when getting off the train in SJ4. It’s bad news,” Shirley commented. Her matter-of-fact speaking tone was very reminiscent of M’s.

She, too, was on the spiral stairs. In fact, all the survivors were. They were scattered throughout the tower.

“It’s just like Shirley said! Nice one!” Clarence exclaimed.

“People don’t just change the way they fight out of the blue. It’s like your special attack. If you’re really serious about winning, examine the videos from past Squad Jams. Bring those memories back,” Shirley said coolly. “Same for how we fight. Is everyone ready? If anyone out there’s forgotten, it’s time to educate them.”

The nineteen men approaching the tower marveled at the never-ending stream of bullets flying over their heads toward their destination.

“Holy shit!”

“This is amazing… Thank God for ZEMAL.”

“Once this thing is over…I think I’m gonna ask Vivi out…”

“You’ll get riddled with bullets before that ever happens.”

“Once I get riddled with bullets…I think I’m gonna ask Vivi out…”

“All right. Good luck with that.”

They were seventy yards away now, and still there was no response from the tower. They knew for a fact that the people stuck inside had not managed to flee.

There was only one exit to the structure, and there were no barricades nearby, so there was no place to hide. The only side of the tower they couldn’t see was up against a ten-thousand-foot sheer cliff.

“This is gonna work! I’m gonna rush in there and get a hundred million credits!”

“No, I will!”

“Over my dead body!”

A footrace started up. The earlier you were to get inside the tower, the more chances to take out Llenn. Of course, it also meant more chances of getting shot, but that was just a risk you had to take. Even if you blew yourself up with a grenade, as long as it managed to take out Llenn with it, you’d get that hundred million.

“I’m on death duty today!” cried the fastest man, hoping to be the first to reach the tower. Yes, he was a history nerd.

“Death duty” was a Shinsengumi term from the mid-1800s, referring to the man who walked first when they patrolled the city, charging into residences where their official business took them. Naturally, it was the man most likely to be cut down. The Shinsengumi would rotate who was on death duty each day.

This fellow had an MP5 SD6 silenced submachine gun at the ready near his waist. He had only fifty yards to go.

There was no doubt that he would be the first to get inside.

Would he be the lucky man this year? He couldn’t help but think so.

“That’s far enough. Let’s do it,” Shirley said.

“I’ll start,” replied Llenn.

The man running in the lead with a blissful smile suddenly erupted into hit marks all over his head. He flopped forward and tumbled, with a DEAD sign appearing overhead very soon after.

“Huh?” the audience in the pub wondered aloud. “He get shot from behind?”

“Someone tryin’ to stop the first guy from getting in?”

Their first guess was to assume it was some ugly infighting.

“What the—?”

The man running right behind him knew that none of them had shot the man. For one thing, the damage was on the front of his head, so it was clear right away that he’d been shot from the tower.

“But where?”

There was no bullet line or muzzle flash visible in the entranceway. If they had seen it, they would have dodged out of the way.

He had no idea where the enemy was.

“Gaaagh!”

And then, like the other man, he too was shot in the head.

“Fire, fire, fire!”

On Boss’s orders, everyone except for Shirley and Fukaziroh began to shoot.

“Don’t be cheap, P-chan! Let it all out!” Llenn cried.

“Got it! I’m ready for this, Llenn! Finally, the time when I can bark all I want! Even if I have this muzzle protector on! Guess I can’t do anything about that!” said the boyish voice of the P90 with suppressor attached.

“Raaah!” Rosa roared, her PKM thumping powerfully. “This is for Sophie!”

“And this is for Tanya!” Anna and Tohma added, the snipers with their Dragunovs.

“This is for Shirleeeey!” Clarence belted out, holding her AR-57.

“I’m not dead yet!” Shirley snapped through the comm.

They let loose at the approaching enemies.

“They’re shooting from the tower, Captain!”

Summon was stationed the closest to the tower of anyone in MMTM, at a distance of about 150 yards.

Instead of his usual SCAR-L, he was holding a monocular and poking his head out over the top of a barricade. It was possible for him because he was the tallest on the team.

Summon reported back with what he was seeing. “The invasion team is getting shot one after the other. They’re sitting ducks. The machine gun is flushing out the ones behind barricades and leaving them to snipers.”

“Roger that. It’ll do—tell me if anything else major happens,” David replied to Summon.

He recalled what Vivi had said earlier: “It would leave more survivors that way.”

Not helping out and forcing some of the invaders to hang back and provide covering fire would “leave more survivors.”

In other words, by having ZEMAL cover for them, it made the twenty men feel emboldened to charge into the tower, ensuring that they would all die sooner.

That makes sense to me… I can’t believe I forgot…it happened to me! David haiku’d in his head.

He couldn’t help but remember now—that Team LPFM had twice already used a strategy that involved shooting through holes created by lightswords.

“My prediction is that the team creeping up on the tower will get wiped out. My reasoning is,” said the man in the pub, a few minutes earlier, “they can poke holes in the tower using their photon swords, stick the barrels out, and shoot in total safety. They’ve done that before a couple times, remember?”

He was now watching with great satisfaction, while the others looked on in shocked disbelief.

It was a very sorry slaughter—a total massacre unfolding on-screen.

The men rushing toward the tower found themselves under attack from spots along the sides of the tower, from anywhere between ten and fifty feet up. They were firing from tiny holes in the wall, eliminating their targets.

“I see… So that was still an option…”

“Let me buy you a round, man. What’s your drink?”

The stone walls of the tower were thick enough that an ordinary assault rifle couldn’t shoot through them. But no matter how thick the stone was, those cool sci-fi lightswords were guaranteed to burn a hole right through it. Whether you wanted to or not.

Llenn’s backup gear was a pair of lightswords.

She got them from Fukaziroh, then went up and down the stairs, fashioning a bunch of holes in every surface aside from the north wall. The Muramasa F9 had a dial on the handle that would adjust the length of the blade.

After checking out the thickness of the walls at the entryway, she just had to extend the blade that same length and poke it into the wall, and it would be nearly impossible for the enemy to notice that she was making holes with it.

It had been a huge rush, but she managed to create a plethora of holes for shooting through. They were called loopholes, or eyelets.

The team had their gun barrels poking through, and they used separate, smaller holes above them for seeing through, so they could spot their bullet circles and aim. It was a very unnatural position to shoot from, but it wasn’t that hard. Llenn found it quite easy, in fact, because her gun was so short.

Poke a hole in a tough, defensive surface, and let it defend you while you shot. It was a trick—or technique, or tactic—they used in the log cabin of SJ2 and the train car in the switchyard of SJ3.

The man who guessed it correctly glanced sidelong at the man offering to buy him a drink and said suavely, “I’ll take…a hot milk.”

“Dammit! We can’t win against this!” swore another man as he was sent to Heaven. Or back to his squadmates, whichever you preferred.

He had been desperate to earn that hundred million credits, until the PKM shredded the barricade he hid behind, and one of the Dragunovs picked him off after he lunged for a new safe spot.

It was still seventy yards to the tower. You’d have to be incompetent to miss at this distance. They could see the bullet lines coming from the tower, of course, but that wasn’t going to help them when they were this close.

Of course, they weren’t all going to die hiding and running. Some of them bravely shot back. They realized they were being shot at through holes in the tower and decided they would shoot back through the holes.

“You won’t get me this way! I won’t let it be that easy!” one shouted, rather stereotypically, and started shooting at the muzzle flashes he was seeing. In no time, his magazine was empty.

“Blebhgh!”

Llenn’s merciless P90 shots pierced him through the head and body. GG, my man.

Clarence’s AR-57, which used the same magazines as the P90, exhibited the full extent of its power: a spray of fifty rounds at full auto.

Though they were small and didn’t pack as much punch, all it took was a few of those bullets to make a barricade disappear.

“Oh, crap!” exclaimed a man huddled on the ground behind one, now fully exposed for all to see. The other forty-plus bullets took care of him, though it was certainly overkill.

Even as he was shot through like a pincushion, he allowed his mournful parting words to mingle with the air of Gun Gale Online.

“Aw, man… I wanted that million yen…so I could take my mom on a hot springs vaca—”

While the group was getting shot, one player got quite close to the tower entrance: the man with the desert camo and M16A4.

He was calm, cool, and collected.

As soon as the shooting started, he dropped to the ground, watched the bullet lines coming from the tower very carefully, and moved from barricade to barricade while other targets were getting hit. He managed to approach without taking a single bullet, until he was only twenty yards away.

He was now huddled behind the final barricade. There was nothing but flat ground between here and the entrance to the structure.

Using a handheld mirror, he peered around the side of the barricade at the tower. Tanya’s body was facedown next to the entrance. The tower itself loomed very tall over everything, and beyond that was empty sky.

The man checked the pocket next to his magazines, where he had his hand grenade stock. They were M67s, just your garden variety shrapnel grenades. Not the powerful and significantly more expensive plasma grenades that swallowed up all matter within their midst in a blue sphere of destruction.

“Should’ve just splurged on the plasmas,” he muttered, but it was too late now.

If he had plasma grenades, plural, then he could have possibly knocked down the tower just by throwing them at his current distance. Or if the whole group of twenty temporary teammates had actually compared notes on their weaponry and come up with a plan, they might have learned that someone had plasma grenades, so they could keep him in the back while the rest opened the way forward…

But there was no point lamenting what could have been.

Even if they had succeeded, they would have broken down and fought over who would get the hundred million credits. Split it nice and clean down the middle? No. That would never happen.

If working with others only got him five million credits, or fifty thousand yen, he would have tried for the full million yen instead.

In that sense, the prize amount of a million yen was perfectly balanced.

It was realistic enough that you could imagine someone actually paying it, but also hefty enough to have a magical allure that made people do reckless things for it.

“Money’s a scary thing,” he murmured, trying to make an obvious statement sound profound.

Then again, “I’m still alive; gotta see how far I can get with this one…”

He placed his gun over his shoulder, grabbed a grenade, and pulled back behind the barricade. The plan was to throw it into the entrance, and when it exploded, rush in for himself. Assuming he didn’t get shot in that last twenty yards, of course.

He pulled the pin, cocked his arm back, and tossed the grenade.

“Take that!”

But his estimate was off, and it was just a tiny bit short. It landed six feet early and came to a stop when it hit Tanya’s body. The grenade did explode, but the dead body was invulnerable to any kind of damage and sat as still as stone with roots in the ground.

If not for Tanya, it might have rolled onward through the entrance. But like this, not a piece of shrapnel even flew in from the blast.

Even in death, she protected the tower.

“Ahhh, dammit!” he howled. The barricade he was hiding behind came into Rosa’s sight as she shifted positions, and her machine gun made quick work of it.

“So much for that.”

He hunched up in anticipation, just before Tohma’s shot passed through his skull.

Of course, as you might expect, some of the group saw the inevitable and decided to cut their losses and run first.

“Let’s get outta here!”

When they saw the men in front of them falling like sacks of potatoes, the ones bringing up the rear of the group—the slowest of the bunch—promptly turned tail and ran.

If they were any faster, they’d already be dead. Sometimes being slow will actually save your life.

One of them said to a fellow escapee from a different squad, “We got screwed over! That Vivi chick knew this would happen! She knew they’d shoot at us from holes in the tower! I’m outta here, man!”

“But what are you gonna do after running?” asked the other man, who was doing the exact same thing.

“I’ll find a place to hide! And once ZEMAL comes to tackle the tower, I’ll shoot ’em from behind!”

“Sounds good! I’m in! Let’s buddy up!”

“Yeah! Our fight is just beginning!”

As if to say Not so fast, the bullets started flying at them.

They were coming from the friendly fellows they’d passed earlier, with the shoulder patches of a skull with a knife in its teeth: MMTM. After the men had passed by the barricades where they waited, the squad started shooting them in the back.

There was no chance to return fire. The men were hit in the back and the head, dying as they fell forward. The ones who came after them, and the ones who ran in different directions, suffered the same fate.

All was quiet around the tower.

There was distant machine-gun fire, but even still, everything was much, much calmer than before.

“How many are gone? Asking you, Summon,” David asked, reloading his STM-556.

Summon had been monitoring the tower area. “I see twelve,” he said, counting the DEAD tags in the air.

Kenta and Bold, who had been down on the ground, reported in with their results.

“I beat two.”

“Three for me.”

David had dispatched two of them. “So that’s nineteen confirmed. That sounds about right.”

In his mind, they’d killed all of them. So he switched the channel on his comm and reported as much to Vivi.

“That’s enough. Cease covering fire,” she commanded curtly.

“With pleasure!”

Huey stopped shooting, and the world was quiet again. There were two used barrels resting next to his machine gun.

Vivi had known that all of these things would happen.

“Listen up, everyone. The last battle of SJ5 is about to begin. Our battle to avenge Shinohara and Tomtom,” she told her teammates. “There are only two orders I have for you. Strike down the foe who delivered an unjust death to our comrades. And take those machine guns you love so much and shoot them to your heart’s content. Can you do that for me?”

Three hearty bellows arose from different spots around the area. They were earthshaking roars. If the comm didn’t have automatic volume adjustment, Vivi’s eardrums would have been in trouble.

“Very good. Then shall we prepare the weapon that is the embodiment of our souls?”

It was just after two forty-five PM.

“Seems like we’ve made it through,” Shirley said. Everything was quiet outside the tower.

She wasn’t shooting, in fact. Her position was at the second highest of the holes they made in the tower exterior, about forty yards high. And Boss was another five yards up.

They were using binoculars to monitor the movement of the enemy and give directions to their teammates.

Since the shooters had only tiny holes to look through, having someone who could spot things quickly and give accurate instructions was extremely helpful.

“That was a brilliant plan, Shirley,” said Boss. “So—”

“Hang on, that’s the end of my leadership role. I’m not meant to be a leader,” Shirley said, cutting her off before she could continue.

“Grr…”

Fukaziroh, who, like Shirley, had not fired a single shot, added, “Hey, remember? You’re the leader, Boss. You inherited M’s will.”

Fukaziroh was ordered not to take a single shot, for two reasons.

First, the grenade launcher’s barrel was nearly three inches across and would require a rather large hole to stick out, which would likely draw the attention of their foes.

“Aw, c’mon, let me shoot! I got twelve whole plasma grenades waiting to get fired!”

And second, because an unlucky bullet that went through that hole and hit a plasma grenade would set off a chain reaction that would destroy the entire tower.

With that aside, Boss murmured “Fuka” with deep emotion. The person inside her avatar was the captain of the gymnastics team, so being accepted as the leader was something that made her very happy.

The team had gone through a lot before they were as tight-knit as they were today. And they still had some problems, considering that there were no new members this year.

“So go ahead and give that order! Tell me to go out there and raise hell!”

“I can’t do that. We’re conserving our firepower until we hit the two big teams.”

“Well, what if I get taken out before my moment to shine arrives?! I want to help everyone out!”

“Fuka…,” murmured Llenn, feeling a warmth in her chest at her friend’s touching sentiment.

“At least let me shoot Llenn before that happens!”

“Hang on.”

That warmth was for nothing.

Speaking of Llenn, she had blazed through plenty of barricades with full auto fire, constantly exchanging magazines as they dispatched their foes.

Her remaining ammo was still at 80 percent, meaning that she had a thousand bullets left. Getting those kill shots in helped replenish quite a lot. It was very helpful to her.

“Shirley! Switch loadouts!” Clarence yelled from much farther below.

“All right, fine. I’ll head down,” Shirley grumbled. Everyone could hear her.

“Yay! Shirley, I love you!”

Clarence had switched to her second loadout earlier, but on Shirley’s orders, she had been put back on AR-57 duty. This was because her secondary weapon was not suited for fighting back against invaders inside a tower.

“Hang on,” Boss said, confused. “If we’re going to fight off ZEMAL and MMTM here, wouldn’t it be better not to switch now?”

That had occurred to Llenn, too, but a much more frightening idea was now running through her mind.

“Shirley, you’re not gonna…”

“What is it, Llenn? Speak your mind.”

“You’re not gonna give up…are you?” Llenn asked, hoping against hope that she was wrong.

“That’s exactly it. You got it,” Shirley admitted.

“Ugh. But why?”

“ZEMAL and MMTM are gonna make their move on us next, right? The same trick isn’t going to work on them. Plus, I don’t know what their second loadouts are, but they probably have something tremendous up their sleeves. If we can’t escape, then we won’t be able to muster a good counter, and they’ll probably just knock the tower over with all of us inside it.”

“Wha—?!”

Don’t jinx us! Llenn wanted to protest…but she couldn’t.

“You might be right…”

“Then we’ll blaze a new path for us! The rest of you escape while you have the chance! Make use of your speed to circle around behind them so we can do a pincer attack!” Boss raved, full of purpose.

“That won’t work; the arena’s too small,” Shirley said, cutting that idea down. “If we could get distance by running all the way to the other end, I might have considered it. But if that were possible, we wouldn’t be taking refuge in here in the first place.”

Boss groaned, and Llenn had no comment to add; she knew it was true. They had made it through so far, but the crisis was ongoing.

“Well, we’ve enjoyed our SJ5 for this long. If we’re gonna die anyway, why don’t we each go out our own way, doing what we want?” suggested Shirley.

“Nice, Shirley! Let’s buddy up and wild out until we’re dead!” Clarence promptly added.

Of course she’d feel that way, since she got that monkey off her chest by killing Pito, Llenn thought. For her part, she was going to do right by the departed Pito and M and try to figure out a way to survive and win as a team. She had to think very fast, because there wasn’t much time.

If they stayed put, they probably wouldn’t withstand the attack.

But if they rushed outside and fought head-on—meaning, got into a typical barricade fight, with Llenn using her speed to rush and attack—they still wouldn’t be able to beat ZEMAL and MMTM together in either numbers or power. Which meant…

Out of ammo.

She had nothing left.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” she lamented.

“Llenn, my lass, it’s too early to give up,” said Fukaziroh, eager to speak up. “Look. I have a good idea.”

Her ideas were generally trash, but at this point, Llenn was willing to give her a chance. You never knew, she might have another solution that was completely outside of the box, in a way that no native GGO player would consider.

“And that is?”

“Shirley has a long and sturdy rope.”

“Yes, I know.”

“We’ll use it to tie you up.”

“Huh? And?”

“We’ll write, ‘Here’s the hundred million credits’ on a piece of paper, and Boss will use her monster strength to roll you out the doorway. You keep rolling the way you like to do, real fast. And no one will be able to read your trajectory, because you keep hitting the barricades. It’ll be a game of human pinball. The enemies will be distracted and go after you. And in the meanwhile—”

“Do I have to listen to the whole thing?”

It was a mistake to count on her for help, Llenn thought.

But in that moment, she had an epiphany.

If she had not been listening to Fukaziroh’s stupid idea, lightning would not have struck her brain.

“Shirley! Get out the rope! All of it! Now!”

“Oh, are we going with it? Was my flash of insight brilliant after all?”

“No! Not at all! But thanks!”

“Shall we put on the finishing touches?”

Vivi and the rest of ZEMAL made their appearance near David.

She chose not to call it “the final battle” to make it painfully obvious that they were ready to fight MMTM, too. It was practically a challenge.

The team had regrouped behind a barricade about three yards south of the tower. Only Bold was nearby to serve as David’s defense.

The other MMTM members were spread out laterally, watching the tower. They were on their feet and vigilant, so that they could move instantly if their barricades disappeared.

“Let’s go,” David told Bold. Then he mentioned to Vivi, “That reminds me, I didn’t get to hear about your ‘special attack.’”

In a display of etiquette, he started to trade second loadouts with Bold—in order to show his off first.

Bold’s ARX160 disappeared. It was replaced by a large weapon that resembled a three-foot-long narrow tube with a cone shape stuck to the end.

“We brought this,” David said, taking it from Bold and resting it on his shoulder.

“An RPG-7. That’s an antitank rocket. It must have been expensive,” Vivi said, identifying it at a glance.

The RPG-7 was one of the most powerful weapons in GGO, in particular for its rocket range and power. The projectile was an antitank rocket meant to blow holes in the thick armor plating of military vehicles. There were different kinds of grenades that could be fired from it, such as the classic exploding shrapnel heads, and they could be switched out as needed for tactical purposes.

Naturally, with all that incredible power came an equally hefty price tag. In response to her concern over his budget, David chuckled and said, “I really want to win one of these things.”

The RPG-7’s existence in GGO was confirmed in the playtest the previous month, and there was a team in SJ4 that was completely equipped with a set of them—the ammo refilling had helped them go crazy blasting people. The price was indeed laughable.

The launcher was expensive to begin with, and so were the rockets. Each one was equal in price to a cheaper SMG or pistol. It was like firing disposable weapons.

Vivi did not ask what happened with MMTM or how they were able to afford such a thing. Instead, she said, “I don’t want to make an enemy out of you. I suppose it’s our turn to show off.”

She turned to the three machine gunners behind her and said, “Summon the Big Mama, boys.”

The surviving members of ZEMAL traded loadouts, and the three aside from Vivi materialized their alternate gear.

Four separate things, roughly speaking, appeared.

A mammoth gun receiver—a hunk of metal well over a foot long, with two vertical grips coming off the rear. That was Huey’s alternate weapon.

A mammoth gun barrel—a thick and sturdy metal pipe with a grip along the middle, ready to bludgeon someone to death. And not just one, but a collection of ten of them. This was Peter’s alternate.

A mammoth tripod—big and low enough that it could probably support an elephant’s front legs.

And several large, metal ammunition boxes, the size of rice bins. The tripod and ammo were Max’s alternate gear.

“……I’ll be damned…”

David recognized what they were putting together. He could only watch in amazement.

Max handily spread out the tripod while Huey affixed the base of the receiver to the tripod. Lastly, Peter stuck a barrel into the receiver and jammed it into place by pushing on the muzzle end. The gun was complete.

“An M2…” David gasped, offering his shock as a return gift for earlier. And he was, in fact, shocked. Completely bowled over. “And it’s the M2HB-QCB model for easier barrel replacement!”

The M2 was a Browning machine gun made for the American military, starting all the way back in 1933. It used 50-caliber (12.7 mm) rounds, which is why it was called a heavy machine gun.

Despite its long history, it was a perennial bestselling heavy machine gun, excellent in both form and function and used all over the world. The Western powers, including Japan, liked to put these on their military vehicles.

The M2HB-QCB that David mentioned was the Quick Change Barrel model, which was the most popular model that everyone was switching to now.

The barrel exchange, which had taken too long due to the ancient modeling, was much easier with this model. It was Belgium’s FN Herstal that had produced the QCB—the same company that made Llenn’s P90.

Vivi pulled a—you guessed it, mammoth—ammo belt out of the ammo box and declared, “Correct.”

She was holding 12.7 mm rounds for machine guns known as .50 BMGs. That was the same ammo that Pitohui’s M107 antimateriel rifle from SJ2 used. Or to be more accurate, antimateriel rifles took the huge bullets designed for the M2 and put them in a high-powered, long-range gun that a single person could carry and operate.

The power of each shot was out of this world and could easily shoot through objects that an ordinary assault rifle could not penetrate. Its effective range was devastating as well, at well over a thousand yards. Two thousand, if your visibility was good. And if you didn’t care about accuracy, it could go even farther.

Thanks to the sturdy and heavy receiver and barrel, the M2 could shoot ten times a second. This was surely one of the most powerful guns found in GGO, alongside the M134 Minigun from SJ4 and the 7.62 mm Gatling gun.

There were downsides, too, of course. When you included the tripod, it was tremendously heavy; a single person could not carry all the parts together.

You had to dismantle it and split up the parts among different people, then assemble it when you were going to use it and carry the assembled gun with several people at once. It was very difficult to use when completing routine GGO quests.

But David broke into a grin. “It’s perfect!”

It was indeed the ideal gun for shooting at a group of people staying hidden inside a tower.

But he had to wonder something: “Did you see this situation coming?”

They had prepped their RPG-7 because there were many usable vehicles in Squad Jam, and they wanted a weapon against that. After watching the video for SJ4, they saw that another team had used them to devastating effect on the diesel train as M was driving it.

RPG-7s were not especially heavy and could be carried as you moved, so the negative effects they had on the team’s strategic options was negligible.

At the same time, MMTM did not select the option of preparing a different set of guns as their second loadout. They were used to the weapons they had now, and they liked it that way.

So where had ZEMAL come up with the decision to have the entire team carry an M2 as their alternate? Certainly there would be some level of the usual We love machine guns! We wanna have the biggest one there is! but that alone would not be enough for Vivi the tactician to choose it.

She gave him a little grin and said, “Oh, you know. It’s that sponsor’s—”

“That damned excuse for a writer! It’s from one of his crappy books!”

“Yes. If there’s one thing I have, it’s time. So I read all of them that I could find. There’s one where a high schooler barricades himself in a tower and starts shooting a gun wildly and making all these absurd demands, like Bring me twelve beautiful girls to be my little sisters and Force NHK to re-air all of my favorite anime and shows, and in the end, the SDF sends a tank that shoots the tower with a cannon and blows him up. It’s called Totally Toppled Tower: My Seven-Hour War.”

“And this is…a comedy?”

“No, it’s dead serious. Actually, there’s a whole explanation about the reason he turned to violence, and his hidden true identity subplot really gets paid off in the end. I thought it was pretty tragic.”

“Well, setting that aside… So that’s how you got the idea. And since everyone’s got the parts, you couldn’t afford to lose a single one of them. Though I know your love for them extends beyond this strategy,” David added hastily. He wanted to make it clear that he knew she wasn’t just mad about Shinohara and Tomtom dying because of the tactical deficit of losing their alternate gear. She was very team-oriented.

“Shinohara had ammo, and his partner Tomtom was in charge of spare barrels, so the silver lining is that they didn’t leave the gun unusable,” Vivi said sadly. It was a coincidence that the two of the six members who died just happened to be carrying spare equipment, but that didn’t make it a happy one.

“I see… Well, shall we go? Time to go beat the people we were allied with an hour ago.”

“Let’s do it.”

“An M2 heavy machine gun! No way! They have one?!”

The excitement of the audience over the appearance of the big guns for the finale of SJ5 was reaching a fever pitch. Because they were gun freaks. Emphasis on freaks.

“I’ve seen one of those attached to an enemy robot’s arm. Can’t believe they’re playable now.”

“I heard they showed up at an underground shop a few days back, but they sold out in minutes. For astronomical prices, of course…”

“ZEMAL made a bunch of cash for winning the last one… I bet all that prize stuff they got would make a nice pile of change if you sold it all.”

“The point is: This isn’t an item you can just decide to buy like that!”

“I hear you can see Vivi in Glocken at all hours of the day. Of course, you’re bound to notice. Because she’s hot.”

“I bet she’s diving all day long. Must be raking in the credits. Or else she hemorrhages real money…”

“It’s like, who the hell is she…?”

On the screen, the ZEMAL men lifted up the M2, tripod and all, and with covering help from Jake and Bold of MMTM, they started making their way toward the tower.

David had his RPG-7, and Kenta was watching the rear. Summon continued to monitor the tower closely. Though they were two separate squads without their comms hooked up, their distribution of roles was perfect. This was a benefit of having good leadership.

“So they’re gonna attack the tower with RPG-7s and an M2. Either that or—”

“No, they’re gonna blow it up, along with the people inside.”

“Brutal…”

“But the ideal option, right?”

“So? What next?” Shirley asked, having gotten out her rope near the bottom of the spiral stairs.

“We do this!” Llenn said, activating her photon swords—having traded with Fukaziroh yet again—and illuminating the gloom.