Sword Art Online Alternative – Gun Gale Online - Volume 13 - Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

Ghosts of Squad Jam

At 2:53 PM, there were eighteen survivors left in SJ5.

They were as follows:

From LPFM: Llenn, Fuka, Clarence, Shirley.

From SHINC: Boss, Anna, Tohma, Rosa.

From ZEMAL: Vivi, Huey, Peter, Max.

From MMTM: David, Jake, Kenta, Bold, Summon.

And one member of BOKR. Wherever he was.

“Let’s go,” Vivi said casually.

“With pleasure!”

Huey began to fire the M2 at full power.

After they assembled the gun, they carried it to a spot about two hundred yards from the tower. For the M2, that was practically too close of a range.

He sat behind the gun, firmly planted on its tripod, with his legs splayed out in front of him. The vertical grips were in both hands, where his thumbs could press on the plate-style trigger between them.

Dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud.

It vibrated the ground beneath their feet.

A bullet of this size shook the air when it passed through, especially at that speed. The pressure of the gas escaping the muzzle was phenomenal. The amount of air it punched was enough to make your head hurt, not just your eardrums.

And it was happening ten times a second, which turned it into a continual explosion instead.

How did it feel to shoot a gun like that?

“Hya-haaaaaa!”

Huey’s delighted smile told you all you needed to know.

The thick barrel extended from the side of a barricade and fired at the tower. Extra ammo and barrels were within reach to the side. For now, he just kept repeating full auto, ten bullets a second.

The massive bullets began to gouge chunks out of the tower.

The sheer kinetic force of the projectiles was over five times that of 7.62 × 51 mm NATO rounds, by rough calculation. The amount of dust it created when striking stone was phenomenal.

Each bullet tore about half of the wall’s thickness out, so a second one would punch a hole through it. Eventually the stone would lose enough of its durability as an item that it would vanish in a puff of light. That started happening here and there all over the tower.

Huey adjusted the vertical angle of the M2, sweeping his bullets all over the tower from top to bottom. The tripod had a fixture that would hold the gun’s height, with a dial for fine-tuning the angle, but they weren’t bothering with that. This wasn’t long-distance sniping, so the gun worked fine for their purposes without it.

His bullets riddled the tower from about fifteen feet up, all the way to the top at 150. Dust kicked up from the stone all over, holes opened up, and eventually entire chunks of stone started to disappear.

Summon from MMTM had his gun ready to shoot into the tower if he spotted any counterattack, but for now, there was no sign of that.

Jake had his HK21 machine gun pointed at the entrance, but there was no one coming out there, either. If they had, he would’ve pumped them full of lead.

The non-Vivi members of ZEMAL had switched out their regular weapons for the M2 parts and ammo, so the only things they still had left to shoot with were M17 pistols using 9 mm Parabellum bullets.

Max took on the job of refreshing the ammo box, while Peter’s role was to exchange the barrel once it overheated and no longer functioned as well.

Exchange ammo boxes, reload, exchange overheated barrel, and shoot, shoot, shoot some more. After about a hundred seconds, the M2’s roar briefly stopped, and the dust cloud surrounding the structure cleared.

The tower was still standing.

About half of the stone on the south side had vanished. It was now a lousy, bug-eaten tower instead. At times there were huge holes nearly three feet to a side in the wall, revealing the spiral stairs on the inside.

When Kenta saw that it refused to fall yet, he commented, “It’s like a really long, expert game of Jenga.”

Vivi used the comm to speak to David. “That’s enough from us. I’m sorry, it’s just—the ammo.”

She did not clarify whether she meant “the ammo is gone” or “the ammo needs to be saved for later,” and David didn’t press for details. This was an adult conversation.

Instead, he offered a guess. “No refill, huh? I guess that means nobody inside died. They’re tough.”

It seemed that no one inside the tower had died yet. He could only assume that they had fled to a part that wasn’t shot up yet.

“Can I ask you to take over for us?”

“Even if I end up killing Fukaziroh?”

“I would be delighted to see it.”

“Very well.” David grunted and rested the RPG-7 on his shoulder. It was his role on the team to fire their ultimate weapon.

Not because he was the leader and demanded to have the spotlight. It was because they had done a shooting competition, and he proved himself to be the best with it. David assumed that Huey was shooting the M2 for a similar reason. But as a matter of fact, it wasn’t that—Huey had simply won the rock-paper-scissors tournament they had held before SJ5. But that was neither here nor there.

“It’ll be a bit of a letdown to have you die this easily, but we don’t want you surviving, either,” he muttered to his distant targets, cocking the RPG-7’s hammer with his thumb.

By peering through the simple optical sights and putting his finger against the trigger, he created a huge bullet circle in his field of view. There was no wind, and the distance was close, so as the circle contracted with his pulse, its edges did not go over the side of the tower. He was close enough that there was no way to miss the target.

He took aim at the middle of the tower, height-wise, and was just about to pull the trigger.

“Captain! Get down!” Kenta snapped. David promptly fell to the ground and rolled, disengaging from the gun, of course.

“Enemy at the top!” he continued, right as the shooting started.

A PKM machine gun’s low thudding sounded, and bullets hurtled down at the barricades from above.

From over the corner of his barricade, David could see SHINC’s machine gunner leaning out from the top of the spire, spraying bullets all around the area.

MMTM promptly started firing back, so Rosa withdrew and hid behind the low stone wall around the belfry. Once the shooting stopped, she popped up and started shooting again.

Fortunately, she wasn’t shooting in David’s direction.

“I’ll get her first!” David snarled, leaning around the barricade, taking aim, and firing.

The RPG-7 was a cannon.

By pulling the trigger, the powder ignited, propelling the heavy rocket inside the tube forward. In order to cancel out the powerful recoil, the launcher had to expel a ton of gas out of the rear—a recoilless launcher.

Once shot forward, the projectile’s rocket lit up at about thirty feet and rapidly accelerated. In other words, a tandem charge.

The exhaust of the rocket enveloped David. It was like having a very heavy, hot blanket tossed onto you. The rocket shot forward at nearly the speed of sound, expelling combustion gas, zeroing in on the bell-less belfry at the top of the tower.

It struck the underside of the roof and exploded.

Even without coming into contact with the fire of the explosion, the sheer shock wave of the blast itself was incredible, slamming the inside of the belfry.

The person inside was pushed outward, back-first, into open air.

“Nwaaaaaaa!”

Rosa wailed and flew, along with the PKM resting on her shoulder.

She was hurled southward, fell 150 feet, and landed on her head. She was dead, of course. One less SHINC member.

Right at that moment, a countdown started.

The number 240 against a black background.

The next second, it said 239.

“Why did she just start shooting?” David wondered aloud. He jumped over to the next barricade.

An RPG-7 expelled a ton of exhaust smoke to the rear after each shot, so it would tell you exactly where it was fired from. That made it easy to get counterattacked after every use.

As he rushed, he kept his hands busy, reloading the launcher. From his storage he pulled out a grenade head attached to a long, narrow tube and jammed it onto the launcher. Then he pulled the safety pin from the head, so that it was ready to fire.

It took only a few seconds, because he’d practiced the process to perfection.

Once it was ready, he slid on his knees behind another barricade and warned, “Second shot! Watch out behind!” in case any of his squadmates were nearby. Then he leaned out around the barricade and took aim at the middle of the tower this time.

The second rocket shot into one of the holes created by the machine gun where it struck the spiral stairs, activating the fuse and exploding. A bunch more stone blocks were blasted out of existence, including some on the far side of the tower.

At last, the climax of their Jenga game arrived.

“It’s gonna fall!” Summon warned the others. The tower slowly tilted over from the middle, its top falling southward.

Then, from a few yards below that, the collapse began.

Not topple, but collapse.

When it started to lean over, the part of the tower significantly weakened by all the gunshots was unable to support the additional weight, lost its item durability and crumbled, or in some cases, just vanished altogether.

A chain reaction of destruction and gravity took over. The tower began to collapse straight downward.

An unpleasant sound of stone scraping stone filled the air, the earth below them shook—and then dust enveloped the area, hiding everything from sight.

Once the sound of destruction died down, David continued to wait for the dust to stop blowing past the barricade.

“Did that do it…?”

Bold promptly ran up to him and began to switch their gear. He was not going to need the rocket launcher up ahead as much as the assault rifle. David picked up his familiar weapon again and loaded it, bullet and grenade.

The members of ZEMAL were trading their gear back, too, so that they had their regular machine guns now. The three aside from Vivi had their backpack ammo-loading systems equipped. The end of their ammo belts went into the guns.

They took formation, the three of them surrounding Vivi, and approached the tower.

Although there was no wind, the system ensured that the dust cleared after a certain amount of time. In real life, it would still be dropping thick and heavy for a while, but this was a game. Like mist, it would steadily clear at a comfortable rate.

ZEMAL approached the tower from the southeast, and MMTM from the southwest. Facing the tower, ZEMAL was on the right wing, while MMTM was on the left.

As usual, they moved carefully, guns up, covering for each other, winding from barricade to barricade. By the time they were seventy-five yards away, the dust had totally cleared, and the nine of them could see clearly what was left of the tower.

The lowest fifteen feet or so of the structure was still remaining, but all the rest of it had fallen to pieces. The base was buried in the stones that had fallen from above, and the stairs were completely covered up. No one could still be alive under there.

Around the base were hundreds of stones that still had some item durability left, piled into a mountain about thirty feet tall and across.

Aside from the chipped ones that had been shot, all the other stones were still in their pristine shape, which made the scene appropriately video-gamey. It was like a pile of toy blocks.

The tower was now a mountain of stone, but there were no red DEAD tags in sight.

“Vivi, can you see any tags from over there?” David asked through the comm.

“Not a single one,” she replied.

“That’s so strange… Are they buried underneath?” he wondered aloud.

It seemed physically possible that the dead bodies could be under the stone—if they were originally at the bottom of the tower, for example—and simply far enough down that even the tags weren’t visible.

Even still, there were seven of them after Rosa, so you would think at least one more would be in sight.

“We’ll shoot. Watch out for deflections,” Vivi said.

“Roger that. Give me a moment.”

David sent some hand signs to the rest of MMTM, who pulled back behind barricades. At seventy yards away, it wasn’t unthinkable for machine guns firing from their right to deflect off of surfaces and hit them.

“All right, you’re clear,” he said. Huey and Max started shooting.

Twin trails of machine-gun fire lashed at the hill of collapsed stone, tearing up the blocks. A number of the stones that had already been low on durability simply vanished. Bit by bit, the mountain of stone got lower and lower.

They paused after five seconds of continual firing. A faint cloud of dust was rising, and the pile was getting smaller, but there were still no tags to be seen.

“Did they fall off the opposite side…?”

“It’s quite possible. But if they fell, we wouldn’t be able to see them.”

The two squad leaders weren’t sure what to do yet.

If all of Llenn’s group had fallen to their deaths ten thousand feet below, the only thing left to do was kill each other.

But they had totally lost the right timing to decide on that. It was like a sumo match in which neither side had won, and they were just standing around awkwardly.

Either they needed a foe nearby to turn all their firepower against, or they needed to stop and reset.

David and Vivi faltered for just a few seconds, uncertain of what to do next.

“Fuka! Do it!”

“Aye, aye!”

That was when Fukaziroh started blasting with her grenade launchers.

The audience in the pub witnessed Fukaziroh point her pair of MGL-140s into the air and begin launching.

The massive rotating canister chunked and changed angles with each shot, loading the next grenade of the bunch directly into the barrel. Then that one, too, would be launched into the air.

“That’s the spirit! Fight back!”

“Hit ’em hard!”

Displayed in close-up on the big screen in the pub, Fukaziroh was hanging from a rope. It was tied around her waist and thighs, with her feet planted firmly against a vertical wall to keep herself steady.

In fact, it was almost exactly the same as how Shirley was hanging when she shot off the tower.

The difference here was that Fukaziroh’s boots were not pressed against the side of the tower, but against the sheer cliff that was the outside of what remained of the castle itself.

There was nothing but ten thousand feet of empty air behind her now.

Or should that be more like 9,990 feet? She was actually a bit lower than the flat, level area where Vivi and everyone else were standing now.

Just to the right of her, Llenn was dangling in the same fashion. On her left were Clarence, Shirley, Boss, Anna, and Tohma.

The ropes the seven were dangling from were tied around the base of the tower. Llenn had created two holes with her photon swords that they then tied ropes through. Since the base was still intact, the ropes would not come undone, even if it was covered by rubble.

This was the one means of survival Llenn had come up with, based on Fukaziroh’s nonsensical rambling.

Even splitting up the duties among them, it had taken time to prepare the trick, and so they were still inside the tower when the M2 started shooting at them. The only reason none of them got hit was that Huey had kept the angle reasonably high to avoid shooting the ground.

They escaped down the side of the cliff on ropes when the RPG-7 had started shooting. While they were hanging, they had to face the anxiety that the tower would surely be destroyed and possibly fall off the cliff with them attached, or that big chunks of rock would land on their heads. It was all a gamble.

But Llenn’s lucky streak was once again going strong.

“Grenade!”

David heard the soft, silly pomp-pomp sound of grenades, followed, contrastingly, by the horrifying recognition of their imminent destructive power.

Then he saw the extremely high arc of bullet lines bending down toward them.

“They were behind it!”

From that location, Fukaziroh was firing in an almost totally vertical position, with just the tiniest angle toward them. The grenades soared high, high into the air and would soon give up and let gravity pull them down—toward his team.

And what if they were the same plasma grenades that utterly demolished his hideout from about an hour ago?

“Don’t run! Shoot them down!” he barked to his teammates, but ZEMAL was already firing.

Vivi’s order to her men was “Sweep the sky clean.”

Four machine guns unleashed their full power on the bullet line above them.

MMTM followed suit a beat later.

The projectiles were traveling in a very high, soaring arc and hadn’t yet hit their peak. You could see on the bullet line that they still had over half of the distance left to cover.

Nine machine guns and assault rifles began to spray bullets into the sky.

“Knock ’em down, knock ’em down!” David raved at his men. His gun was going at full auto, too, of course.

“Don’t worry, as long as you keep shooting, one of them will hit it,” said Vivi, very calmly and gently in comparison.

It was a shower of bullets, falling upward from the ground instead of the other way around.

A large blue sphere appeared high in the air. In the sky over ZEMAL, a blue firework exploded, stretching to a diameter of sixty feet. Another firework went off at the edge of it—a chain reaction of the grenade that followed it.

Over MMTM, similarly, more fireworks went off: one, two, three.

The blue orbs hovering in the sky actually became the shield that protected David and his squad, ironically. The plasma surge would not dissipate right away. So when another grenade followed the same path, it would hit the explosion and go off, too, expanding the overall blast zone.

The explosions went off in overlapping circles, like star mine fireworks.

The reddish GGO sky regained some measure of blue color, illuminating the faces of the players below.

The big screen in the pub blazed blue.

A dozen plasma grenades were fired off in succession, each one setting off the next in a chain reaction. There went another. And another.

“It’s a chain!”

“What is this, a falling block game?”

“Fireworks go boom!”

“Kaboooom!”

“See, kids, there used to be this old video game called Missile Command…”

The audience was in an uproar over the latest burst of excitement.

A moment later, the camera pulled back to show the full extent of the scene. There was blue, blue, blue covering the sky in a span of dozens of yards and stretching sixty yards tall.

“If they’re gonna do a fireworks show, I’d appreciate a bit more color variety.”

“Don’t complain about a free show.”

There was another explosion, another blue flower blooming, then another…

“You know, it looks like they’re getting lower.”

The height of the blue surges was getting closer to the ground.

“Shit! Gotta make it in time!” David shouted, glaring frantically into the sky.

He wasn’t shooting anymore. He’d run through his entire magazine.

The air overhead was glowing blue, and there was a red bullet line coming through it, meaning that any new grenades that could hurt them would be caught in the blast, too.

But it was clear at a glance that they were coming lower and lower.

That only made sense, of course; as the grenades exploded and spread, they were on a downward vector, so the sphere of destruction would drop as well.

They were a full twenty yards across, so if they exploded low enough, and the orb touched the ground before it dissipated, it would obliterate MMTM with it.

“Make it in time!” David shouted, right as the wind blast of the initial explosion, and those that were set off in chain reaction behind it, slammed into the ground.

The pressure was tremendous. It was like five typhoons, all hitting them at once.

“Aaah!” David grunted.

“Eek!” Vivi shrieked.

It hit the other seven as well, not only bowling them over backward, but powerfully beating them down as well.

“They got shot…”

Llenn noticed the light show in the sky above while she pulled herself back up the rope.

It was their shot in the dark, their ace up the sleeve, the one secret weapon she thought might actually get them the win: a full twelve-grenade sweep from Fukaziroh’s plasmas. She unloaded everything she had on hand. A total going-out-of-business sale.

But they got shot in the air.

Llenn understood that this was possible.

At the start of SJ3, Fukaziroh had launched one straight upward and M shot it with his M14 EBR in order to send a signal to Llenn.

Since GGO had the concept of bullet lines, a large, slowly flying target could certainly be shot down by certain folks confident in their accuracy. The freaks.

And once a single one was shot, the rest would fall prey to the chain reaction after it.

“Whoo-hoo! These are the only fireworks I need to see this year!” marveled Clarence, who was climbing up the wall using the rope and her feet on the surface, just like Llenn. She had a shotgun over her back on a sling: her secondary loadout.

It was an Italian-made weapon, the Beretta 1301 Tactical. This was a semiautomatic shotgun that could keep firing if you held down the trigger.

It was about three feet long, with a tube magazine that could load seven shells into the gun. There was also a shell holder on the left side of the body for more ammo storage.

The stock and fore-end had Magpul custom accessories. To the left of the muzzle was a powerful flashlight, and to the right was a laser sight. They weren’t necessary in GGO, but she put them on because they looked cool.

This was what Clarence had happily purchased for herself after M offered her some advice upon seeing her combat style.

She had materialized it once earlier, but it hadn’t been helpful for defending the tower. She used double-o buck that fired nine pellets at once, so its range was short. But it would be perfect for the upcoming fight.

The three SHINC members climbed as fast as they could. Even with a rope and one’s feet planted on the side, it was very difficult to make a vertical ascent. It required a lot of arm strength, and extra weight and guns made it even harder. If you lost your grip on the rope, you were also in danger of falling back to where you started.

If it wound up tangling around your neck, you would essentially hang yourself. If it grabbed a limb, you’d be stuck dangling, perhaps upside down. And you were unlikely to recover on your own.

But at this point, it was their only hope for survival.

It was Rosa, no longer with them, who had taken on a crucial role that made the whole strategy possible.

Her job was to lean out of the top of the tower and make a big show of attacking, both to slow down or delay the enemy’s attack on the tower, and to make them think that everyone else was still inside.

And she was absolutely certain to die.

Rosa popped her head out at the best possible time, fired her gun like crazy, and got David to fire his first RPG-7 rocket at her.

If not for that, he would have destroyed the tower sooner and likely killed the whole squad with it. In that extra window of opportunity, the others finished prepping and were able to hang from their ropes.

“Don’t let Rosa—!” Boss shouted, thick hands pulling her up the rope, bit by bit, lifting her weight.

“Have died—!” followed Anna.

“In vain!” finished Tohma.

Their final chance—the true last opportunity of all—hinged on climbing back up as quickly as possible and attacking before the other teams could regroup.

Llenn took advantage of her small size and weight. She was very nearly up at the surface when she shrieked.

“Hya!”

A gust of blast wind hit her, blowing her tiny body backward.

The result of Fukaziroh’s dozen plasma grenade barrage was that they all exploded in the air, in a chain. It was a very impressive and attention-grabbing fireworks show that did not succeed in eliminating a single enemy player.

The reason for this was Fukaziroh’s excellent skill. She had shot them too accurately.

With a rope around her waist and thighs. Hanging with her feet planted on the side of a sheer wall. Aiming at targets above her on a slight forward angle.

If Miyu Shinohara weren’t a total unhinged gamer—pardon me, an aficionado and lover of all things video games—who had practiced shooting for hours on end until she had mastered the multi-shot grenade launcher, and she weren’t the most Fukaziroh Fukaziroh that had ever Fukaziroh’d, the shots would have spread out a bit more.

Or if she had thought ahead and intentionally spread out her projectiles better, they might still have gotten shot out of the sky, but they wouldn’t have all automatically exploded against each other after that.

If one or two had slipped between the aerial explosions and hit the ground, they might not have eliminated all the enemies, but it could have at least taken out a member or two of ZEMAL and MMTM.

“Is everyone all right…?”

It was one of those GGO things that people often asked out loud, despite the fact that a simple look at the team status in the corner would tell them the answer.

David was slammed to the ground by the blast, then knocked backward, and slid about sixty feet along the ground, but it wasn’t enough to be ruled as damage. It was a sign of his skill and experience that he didn’t lose his grip on the gun.

All the MMTM members had survived.

Kenta had lost a solid chunk of HP, about 30 percent, because he’d slammed his head against a barricade. But as long as they were alive, things would work out. He used an emergency med kit and got the slow healing process started.

“On your feet, boys. We’ve still got some fun left. You’re going to shoot those machine guns of yours,” Vivi instructed. She always gave her orders with good cheer.

“Yeah!”

“Hell yeah!”

“Open bolts!”

Her teammates were healthy and motivated.

They’d been knocked around by the explosions, and some had lost HP, but so what?

As long as they blazed their targets with their beloved machine guns, those hit points would come right back. Well, no, they wouldn’t. But it felt like they would.

From a distance of about sixty yards, the four members of ZEMAL readied their machine guns and began to march, issuing brief bursts of gunfire, on their goddess’s peculiar order.

“Shoot, enjoy yourselves, and move forward!”

“They’re fine, too! Don’t let the machine gunners beat us!” David yelled, lashing his squad into shape. “Advance, but don’t get too close. Always watch out for grenades.”

He steadied the assault rifle against his shoulder.

“Yo, Llenn. Welcome back.”

“Ugh…”

Llenn was dangling next to Shirley. Upside down.

She knew exactly why.

She’d been climbing up the rope as fast as she could and reached the top before anyone else, but the wind from the blast hit her just before she reached flat ground and knocked her back.

It tossed her back outside of the castle keep area, but since the rope was still tied, she did not fall ten thousand feet to her death. She only fell twelve.

But now she was upside down. The force of her fall caused the rope to dig into her waist and thighs somewhat painfully.

“After I did all the work to climb up,” she grumbled, staring down at the sky overhead.

“You went up a bit too early.”

“Grrr…”

Shirley had not climbed up at all. She’d figured that even though it was a straight-pull reload that was generally quick to execute, having only a bolt-action rifle to fight with would make it impossible for her to get up safely.

So she had told them that she had no intention of climbing up. She was just going to relax and hide here. If they found her, they found her. But she didn’t want to just sit there and get shot, and she didn’t want her gun to get broken, so she’d cut her rope with the ken-nata and enjoy ten thousand feet of skydiving instead.

“Aw! Shirley, remember all the snap shooting you did while running around in SJ3?!” Clarence protested, referring to their rather extreme encounter there.

“That was because I started in a very advantageous position that time. Plus, I’m just tired,” Shirley said. She was no fun.

And yet, she did lift Llenn’s head and body until she was able to get her footing against the wall. “Here, start with your left foot.”

“Thanks! I’ll go back up there!”

“You do that.”

Llenn attempted her second climb of the wall.

She looked up and saw that the others were nearly to the mountain of rubble at the top. She had to get up there with them and beat ZEMAL and MMTM while they were at least somewhat damaged.

Her gloved hands grasped the rope. Quickly, she began shimmying back up, her eyes skyward.

Which is how she saw the many bullet lines extending over their heads above.

“Look out, Boss!”

Boss had been the first member of SHINC to the top. She turned and reached for Anna, which is why she did not see the lines at first.

“Huh? Gah!”

A bullet passed through her shoulder.

She dropped to the ground, ensuring that she didn’t get hit by any others, but Anna was unable to get all the way up. Which was for the better, actually. The bullets flew directly over the rubble, deflecting off of stone.

“Awww…” Llenn sighed heavily. She couldn’t see over the lip, but she could guess what was happening.

The survivors of ZEMAL and MMTM—probably many of them—were closing in on them, shooting heavily.

At this point, they wouldn’t be able to look over, much less fight back. She could envision an imminent future in which their enemies would climb over the rubble with guns pointed, shooting their helpless targets.

“It’s over…”

She stopped climbing.

Above and to her left, Fukaziroh had her grenade launchers hanging from her shoulders on slings. She smiled and said briskly, “Well, we did what we could.”

Her partner’s smile lured Llenn into a smile as well. They had done all they could. If they died here, even Pito would understand.

Not that there was any need for her to understand. She was her own person!

“Yeah, I guess,” Llenn murmured. “We did well. I did well, and you guys did well.”

Maybe it was okay to just let it end here.

“Now, I’d like that million yen more than anyone else, so I’m thinking of putting you down now. Would you be a dear and climb up level with me, so I can hit you with my pistol?”

“Screw you!”

Llenn changed her mind.

Dammit! I can’t let it end here! she decided.

“We’re not dead yet! Fuka, hurry up and reload your grenades, then focus on the enemy and git!”

“Well, how about that?” Fukaziroh grinned. “You said ‘git!’ Is that the Hokkaido in you talking?”

Llenn ignored her friend and snapped, “Clarence! Climb up and shoot for all you’re worth!” She was already near the top anyway, in a different spot than Boss and the SHINC girls.

“Um, so you want me to get shot?” she replied.

“Just buy Fuka time to reload! I’ll find your bones and bury them later!”

“Ha-ha-ha! This Llenn is abusive!” Clarence exclaimed with delight. She pulled herself up the rope.

“And Boss! You guys just shoot back! We’re not dead yet! So don’t act like it!”

“You got it!” Boss replied, crawling on her stomach in the rubble with a glowing shoulder wound. She helped Anna and Tohma reach the top, too.

And between the enemy’s bursts of shooting—not that there really were any pauses—she tried to toss a grenade. She only had ordinary grenades on her belt, to prevent a catastrophe if they got hit, and she gave some to Tohma and Anna, too.

Hidden by the rubble, they pulled the pins on the three grenades, kept the levers depressed, swung their arms behind, and started a count of “Un, deux, trois!”

It didn’t matter if the grenades didn’t reach their targets, as long as they bought some time. But they did not actually let go.

Right at that moment, ZEMAL’s machine gun spray reached their area, destroying the stone right at the top of the heap ahead and passing through to pierce all three of their throwing arms.

“Argh!”

“Gah!”

“Ow!”

They suffered just enough damage that it didn’t sever the limbs. The grenades they failed to throw dropped from their hands. The safety levers flew off, and the grenades fell backward, hit more stone, deflected—and began to fall ten thousand feet.

“Huh? Eeeep!” Llenn shrieked, and she saw a trio of grenades pass just on her left as she was climbing up her rope.

And in their path was another teammate.

“Huh?”

Shirley looked up and saw three grenades, falling directly toward her.

“Oh, come on, this is the punch line?” she squawked—her final words.

The grenades exploded in short order right beneath her feet, enveloping her in shrapnel and explosive force.

There was no player who could survive something like that.

“Aw…”

Llenn saw the DEAD tag appear on Shirley’s body.

Visually, it was a grisly amount of damage, but it promptly returned to its original state. It was a video game, after all.

Shirley’s body was now an indestructible object, hanging from its rope. It was immobilized horizontally, perfectly perpendicular with the vertical cliff. Based on the placement of the rope, it shouldn’t have gone horizontal, but that was video games for you.

Fukaziroh observed the surreal image and said, “She’s glitchin’ out.”

“S-sorry! Sorry about that!” Boss said frantically.

“No worries! Happens all the time in GGO!” Llenn reassured her. She didn’t have time to worry about it.

If the grenades hadn’t exploded under Shirley, incidentally, the shrapnel could very likely have hit Llenn, too.

“Rrrraaaahhhh! Vengeance for Shirleyyyyyy!” Clarence growled, getting to her feet with the 1301 Tactical. Since Shirley was dead, she couldn’t tell her off for being stupid.

She pulled the trigger.

Nine pellets shot from the barrel at once, and a single shell fell out of the right side of the receiver.

“That feels good!” she marveled.

The next moment, all members of MMTM trained their bullet lines on her.

“Let me shoot at least one more!” Clarence begged—her final words.

But she did not go out quietly.

Before the bullets tore her apart, Clarence pulled the trigger twice and succeeded at pounding the side of Bold’s body with pellets. They hit the receiver of his ARX160 (also a Beretta) and knocked it out of his hands.

And so Clarence left SJ5, having taken a third of Bold’s hit points and damaging his gun.

“Shit!” Llenn swore, seeing the DEAD tag on Clarence’s body as she climbed up her rope. Once she was at the top, she leaped toward the freshly dead body and hid behind it.

“Vengeance for Clarence!”

Using the teammate she’d just driven to her death as a shield, she stuck the muzzle of the P90 over the top and held down the trigger.

It was a wild spray, sight unseen—blind fire. Pitohui had warned her long ago never to do that, but she didn’t have a better option now. She just had to buy a little time.

She had just emptied an entire fifty-round magazine and pulled the barrel back a tad to load up a new one when a perfectly aimed and timed bullet hit the base of the P90’s muzzle, showering her with sparks.

“Aaagh!”

The force ripped the gun out of her hand and inflicted a bit of damage on her, too, calculating that her fingers would have been broken.

The fingers were one thing, but the bad part was that the gun, sling and all, got yanked free of her tiny body altogether.

“Aaah!”

She lunged with her right hand, but it was already too late.

P-chan, the pink P90, cried, “Good-bye, Llenn! Until we meet agaaaain!”

It crashed atop the stone, bounced twice, and fell over the edge of the arena map.

“Aaaaah!”

She scrambled over the stone and stuck her head over the abyss.

“Ah!”

The sight of the little pink object falling to the ground ten thousand feet below burned itself into her retinas.

“Goooood-bye, bye, bye, bye…”

P-chan’s voice got fainter and fainter.

“Bye…”

And then it was gone.

“Awww…”

She slumped with her face over the edge, feeling weepy.

“What’s wrong, P-chan dumped you?” asked Fukaziroh, who was reloading her MGL-140s. Even though she had use of both hands, you needed to keep your feet firmly planted to avoid losing balance, so it took quite a long time to reload. But from what Llenn could tell, she’d just finished with Rightony, the launcher in her right hand.

“Fuka…shoot me with that… You wanna split the bounty with SHINC?”

“Llenn,” Fukaziroh replied, an uncommonly serious look on her face. She stopped reloading. “You should have mentioned that earlier. If I’d known you were up for it, I would have blasted you to bits with a plasma the moment we reunited.”

“You’re right. I should have said it earlier…,” Llenn said.

But she trailed off, because she had just realized that when they were reunited, she had nearly been evaporated by a plasma grenade.

“No, never mind! I still have the Vor-chans!”

Without getting up, she reached around her back and pulled out her combat knife, using it to slice through the rope around her waist and thighs. The action apparently nicked her skin, too, because she suffered a bit of damage, but she didn’t care.

“What, is that all you need from me?” asked the knife as she tucked it back into its holster. She ignored it and waved her arm to switch out her gear.

A backpack with ammo magazines appeared on her back, and the magazine pouches on her thighs were replaced by holsters carrying her Vorpal Bunnies, the .45-caliber pistols.

Llenn drew them from the holsters, then dragged the rear sight against the corner of a nearby stone to pull back the slide, first on the right one, then the left.

“Wait a second, what are you doing?”

“Once you’ve reloaded, go and help SHINC, Fukaziroh!”

“Wait! My million yen!”

Llenn turned away from Fukaziroh and glanced at the SHINC trio about five yards to her left, prone before the mountain of rubble. Their arms had regained feeling, apparently, because they were busy taking off the ropes.

With bullets flying overhead, Llenn shouted, “Boss! Two requests! One, pull Fuka up after she reloads! Anna and Tohma, protect Boss as she does that!”

“What’s the other one?” Boss asked.

“Bring out the grand grenade for me, just one. Along with a hook to hang it from my belt,” Llenn said.

“Hrrg,” Boss grunted. She understood right away what Llenn meant to do.

The grand grenade was the colloquial term for a large plasma grenade, which was the size of a small watermelon. It had about the same power as one of Fukaziroh’s plasma grenade rounds. In other words, a blast diameter of sixty feet. It was scary, because it meant you had to throw it at least thirty feet to avoid getting killed by it.

It was also heavy as hell, to hold all that power. So while Llenn could carry it around, she couldn’t actually throw it.

Boss hadn’t thrown it at the enemy for two reasons: If there wasn’t enough distance to throw it, they would die, and if it got shot in the air before it reached its target, they would die.

And she wanted it along with a hook for her belt. Which meant…

“You’re going out there…to die…”

Boss couldn’t see any other answer, because there was only one.

Llenn was going to hang it from her belt, then dangle that around her chest or stomach, and rush out there with her Vorpal Bunnies blazing.

With her ultra speed, she might not get hit. Or if she had the armor plates in the backpack and Vorpal Bunnies in her hands, she might be able to run and point her back to incoming fire at the same time, long enough to get into the midst of one of the two remaining teams before she died.

Once she was close enough, the grand grenade would blow up if she got shot. And if that didn’t happen, she could press the switch with a zero timer on it and detonate it before she died.

If all went well, it might succeed at eliminating one of the two enemy squads entirely. As long as they didn’t mind losing Llenn.

“If I get half of them, you and Fuka’s launchers will have to try taking out the rest! Good luck!” Llenn smiled at Boss, bullet lines and bullets whizzing over their heads.

“I suppose there’s no point trying to stop you,” Boss said, opening her inventory. She didn’t want her own hesitation to hold them back until the plan would no longer work.

The enemy was being cautious for now, but she could tell that the source of the intermittent shooting was getting closer and closer. Whether thirty yards or forty, they were very close. If they got any closer, Llenn’s suicide bomb would harm her allies as well.

Boss grabbed the large sphere that popped into existence before her and crawled over to Llenn to deliver it.

“Thanks, Boss,” Llenn said, hooking the heavy ball to the belt that ran diagonally over her chest.

All you had to do with the little hook was bring it close to the belt, and it would attach. It didn’t look big or sturdy enough to support such a heavy object, but once it was on, it was locked. Just another one of those GGO things.

A round object nearly as wide as Llenn’s torso, stuck to her chest and stomach; it was unmistakable. Llenn quickly fiddled with the timer switch and set it to zero. If she firmly pressed the large switch at chest height, it would immediately explode.

“……”

Anna’s sunglasses pointed at her.

“……”

Tohma’s eyes did the same. Neither could muster a word.

“Well, here goes!” Llenn smiled.

She took off on a journey to the land of death.

And immediately got shot.

About two moments after hopping up to her feet, a bullet pierced her left shoulder.

“Eep?”

Shoved backward, Llenn found herself tumbling to her right, and she cracked her head on the corner of a stone.

“Owww!” she yelled, louder than when she got shot.

She was now sprawled out on top of the pile of rubble.

“Oh, crap!”

Llenn rolled over and, using the backpack as a sled, tumbled down the pile. As she did so, a second sniper shot passed right through the spot where she’d been resting.

It very well could have hit the grand grenade on her stomach.

“Brilliant work,” David murmured with admiration.

He was peering through the scope of his STM-556 at a distance of fifty yards when he saw the instant the pink shrimp popped up, but another bullet came flying in from the right before he could even react.

It hit Llenn on the left shoulder and sent her sprawling. The second shot missed on account of her slippery speediness, but he certainly caught sight of the grand grenade she had affixed to her front.

“Llenn’s got the grand grenade. Don’t let her leave that spot!” he warned his squadmates.

The target of his admiration, Vivi, muttered, “I was trying to hit her in the face.”

Vivi was crouched beside a barricade with her secondary loadout, having failed to eliminate Llenn. The long rifle she had steadied against the side of the structure was an English L86A2 LSW.

This was an updated version of the bullpup-style 5.56 mm assault rifle known as the L85. A 4× scope was equipped by default.

LSW stood for Light Support Weapon, a designation that was often called Squad Support Weapon. In other words, a light machine gun designed to provide support for a squad of troops.

They extended the L85’s barrel, made it thicker to increase precision and durability, then placed a bipod under it and added a left-hand grip so you could lie down behind it and fire with both hands and called it the L86. A2 meant that it was the second improved model.

It was a machine gun, but it used assault rifle thirty-round magazines, so it could only load and fire a few bullets at a time. But the US Marines used a similar gun, with the logic being that precision shooting would be more effective and desirable than a gun with a larger magazine wasting its bullets.

Then again, back in England, they had already phased out this gun by 2019.

Because the L86A2 had the benefit of high precision, it was often used for simple sniping, amusingly enough. It underwent a class change into a marksman rifle: a gun that snipers did not need, but that a skilled foot soldier could use for aimed shooting.

ZEMAL were the Machine-Gun Lovers, so they had an ironclad rule that nothing aside from machine guns could be used as main weapons. Actually, it wasn’t a written rule, just a general vibe. An ironclad vibe.

So Vivi’s choice was the light L86A2, because it could actually provide some sniping support for the team.

Just another brilliant Vivi decision that everyone could admire. They called that a brill-Vi for short.

“An L86A2. What a rare gun,” David said admiringly, watching her from afar.

Before the L85 series was refined in the 86A2 model by H&K, it was infamous for its poor performance. But after it was improved, it still got treated like a joke gun or a novelty; even in gun-crazy GGO, there were few people who would choose it, the poor thing.

“And she’s good with it…”

He was confident in his own shooting skills, but he’d been late to notice the target and missed out on the chance to shoot. She was very good. Very, very good indeed. Or at least, highly leveled up.

You would never imagine that from her red hair and adorable profile.

And it caused David to slip into a bad habit.

“Vivi, I’d like to talk to you in Glocken sometime. Maybe over a cup of tea.”

Fortunately, his comm wasn’t tuned to all the members of ZEMAL.

“Are you asking me out?”

“I just want to know the secret of your strength,” he lied.

“Like I told you earlier, I have a lot of time to dive; that’s all. I have more time than anyone else here, so I spend it all in GGO.”

“So would you happen to know a restaurant with a nice ambience and good food? I would appreciate your experience in this regard. It would be on me, of course.”

“Why, you charmer.”

As they listened to David speak in a more pretentious air than usual, the other members of MMTM thought, Captain. Hey, Captain. You sure you wanna do this? You’re gonna get stiffed.

Plus, searching for a girlfriend in the virtual world was inadvisable. After all, you never knew what they’d be like in real life.

But they didn’t say anything.

They were good teammates and helped their captain look good. By thoroughly enjoying his escapades at a distance. If he got dumped, they’d be there to help him recover. Anything to have a party.

“Maybe once this massacre is over.”

“Good idea.”

That’s right. The pink shrimp is still alive. This is no time to be picking up chicks.

“Aw, dammit!”

And yet, Llenn was, in fact, half dead and in a pretty hopeless situation.

Getting shot through the shoulder had inflicted damage on her lungs, a critical organ. She had lost 40 percent of her hit points all at once. Llenn could not take many shots.

On her back, with the heavy pack acting as a table on the side of the stone slope, Llenn popped a med kit. Would she still be alive by the end of the minute and a half it would take to heal her its full amount?

“Crap…”

She’d jumped up expecting to die and didn’t make it a single step before being shot and incapacitated.

The only remaining shred of luck on her side was that the bullet hadn’t hit the grand grenade resting against her stomach. If it had, all her friends would have been wiped out. Except maybe Fukaziroh, because she was hanging down below? But no, it would have disintegrated the rope, too.

The enemy’s sporadic shooting was still ongoing. Could ZEMAL be intending to keep shooting in place until it had destroyed all the stone blocks? Given their ammo stock and trigger-happy nature, they might just try.

Llenn stared at the sky and thought, Pito, M, I think I might really be a goner this time.

It was a thought she’d had several times today, but this time felt more serious.

This was definitely the Squad Jam whose special rules messed with me the most, she thought. Even in SJ3, which had the betrayers system, it wasn’t the rules that messed with me, but Pito.

The thick fog, the split-up squad, the collapsing map, the teleportation…

If she was going to be jerked around by the rules throughout the game, they could at least save her butt once. But that didn’t seem likely.

Her eyes brimmed with desperation. The image of Pitohui’s face floated into her vision.

The usual tattooed face, which was hard to read at first glance but ultimately proved to be just that: hard to read.

Next to it, she saw M’s craggy face as well, bounded by the reddish-blue sky above.

It almost seemed like his expression was saying You fought well. Almost. It was just her imagination.

Have their ghosts come to greet me? she wondered. It was the crisp clarity of their faces that made her wonder.

They started out faint, then steadily got deeper and darker, coming into focus.

“Look, Pito’s come to take me to Heaven,” Llenn murmured to herself.

“What?! You see her, too?” Boss yelped.

“Huh?”

Llenn sat up and looked around.

A few yards to her left, Boss and Anna and Tohma were hiding on the downslope of the rubble, staring at the sky, too.

About four yards away from them in the direction they were staring floated the faces of Sophie and Tanya, two of their members who had died in combat. In fact, it wasn’t just their faces, but their bodies as well, hazy but waving happily.

“Aieeeee!”

Llenn felt a thrill of horror zip up her back. Her agility was so high, even the chills seemed to move quickly.

“Oh?” Fukaziroh had finished loading her grenade launchers and looked up from her rope harness. “What’s this? Hang on, I can see Pito’s and M’s ghosts in the air to the right of Llenn. Is it Obon already? I thought the day of the dead was later in the year.”

“Can you see them, too, Fuka?”

“Yeah. I’d recognize the contour of Pito’s ass anywhere. When you’re an assficionado like me, you can even tell a person’s life experience and personality from their ass contour—”

“Wha…wha…wha…?” Llenn ignored whatever Fukaziroh was saying, rolled over, and stared at their inverted faces this time. “What is happening?!”

Pitohui’s face and body were becoming crystal clear now, except for her legs. Most of the translucency of the finer parts of her figure were gone, and Llenn couldn’t see the sky through her anymore.

Between the bodysuit, the KTR-09 in her hand, and the other gear, she was clearly outfitted in whatever she had at the start of the game.

“Huh?”

Pitohui jabbed M in the side with her elbow.

M reached out to Llenn as far as he could with his shield, which was now visible.

“Huh? What?”

Llenn was completely bewildered by what was happening. All she knew was that the shield was being pointed at her, so she squinted at it.

There was a message written all across the surface of the shield, probably in whiteboard marker.

It was in Japanese, so she could understand it.

It said: We set the stage for support. The rest is up to you; keep fighting until you die.

“Huh?” Llenn gaped.

And then, somewhere in GGO, a countdown timer reached zero.

The Pitohui, M, Sophie, and Tanya that they could see now had fully visible legs and feet. They slid through the air without a sound until they were standing right at the lip of the arena.

Pitohui and M were about twelve feet to Llenn’s right.

Sophie and Tanya were about twelve feet to Boss’s left.

It was like they had come back to life, but upon a closer examination, their bodies, clothes, and guns were just the tiniest bit fuzzy. It was like they weren’t quite in camera focus. And floating over each of their heads was a conspicuous orange letter G.

“Wh-wh-wh-what is happening here?!” Llenn wailed, practically screamed—when the Satellite Scanner buzzed with the answer to her question.

Text appeared on the screens in the pub, and on the Satellite Scanners of each surviving player. It began with the message that appeared in the waiting area at exactly one o’clock.

About the special rules of SJ5: Here are some more! It’s very important! Read carefully! Don’t give up just because you’re dead!

Only those who have died in SJ5 get to read this. We have a very special opportunity for all of you!

You may have died, but there’s still something you can do, right? Yes, you can come back and haunt people.

So…would you like to be a ghost?

GHOST, as you know, stands for:

G ranulated

H omogeneous

O bject of

S piritual

T ranscription!

Granulated Homogeneous Object of Spiritual Transcription or, in easy-to-remember Japanese, Konpaku-tensha-ryuujou-kinshitsu-buttai!

Thanks to nanomachine producers run amok, the souls of the dead have fused and taken temporary form again in this blasted hellscape of Earth!

They possess the wills of the dead and have full free movement!”

It was a bombastic message.

And what the hell did they mean, “as you know”? Nobody knew that nonsense about ghosts. It was entirely invented for SJ5.

The following text was much more straightforward and descriptive.

So with that said, in SJ5, even players who have died in battle will be able to return to the field as ghosts.

Super-duper important! Special ghost rules that will be on the test tomorrow!

1. Those who wish to return to SJ5 as ghosts must choose to go to the Graveyard after spending ten minutes in the waiting area. If you do not go, you will be returned to the pub like usual. The Graveyard is set up to be just like the pub, so you can eat and drink and enjoy the live feed as you wait. Dead souls can converse with one another. If you change your mind, you can also return to the regular pub from there, or log out.

2. Once there are seventeen or fewer players remaining, a 240-second countdown will begin. If the timer reaches zero while there are still surviving players active, all players in the Graveyard will be returned to the battlefield as ghosts to fight again.

3. To the living, ghosts will appear hazy and faded, and the letter G will appear over your head to distinguish you. To ghosts, both the living and other ghosts will be clearly visible, and the letter L will be displayed over the bodies of the living.

4. Ghosts are an amalgamation of nanomachines and have physical form. Their feet touch the ground, and they move the same way the living do. Ghosts cannot pass through physical objects in the battlefield or other ghosts.

5. Ghosts can use both their main weapon and special alternate loadout freely. They can be switched between in the inventory without needing a partner. Ammo and energy stocks will match what was brought into the event and will not be refilled. Communications items are not usable.

6. Ghosts can only do damage to other ghosts and cannot attack the living or physical objects. Attacks from the living will not hit any ghost; bullet lines and projectiles will pass through harmlessly. Sound cannot pass between ghosts and the living. Vocal communication is not possible.

7. Any ghost hit by an attack will lose hit points, but its damage will be only a tenth of the same attack on the living. (You may think of it as having ten times the hit points instead.) No recovery items can be used. When all hit points are gone, you will “ascend to Heaven” and be sent back to the waiting area, never to return as a ghost.

8. Ghosts cannot touch the living. Approaching within twelve feet of the living will generate an optical defense field that slows and impedes the ghost’s movement. Within nine feet, recoil will occur, and the ghost will be flung away.

9. Experience the other features of being a ghost for yourself. It’s annoying to list them all out here. If there are bugs, the sponsor and developers take no responsibility for any undesired effects.

10. Lastly, ghosts can claim “hidden spots” throughout the arena to gain experience points. When within six feet, the spot will emit a faint glow. Place your hand over the hidden spot to claim it. A random value between zero and ten will be granted, which can be converted into experience points or GGO credits after SJ5 has concluded. It is a treasure hunt, so explore the map to your heart’s content.

“They’ve got a system to come back as a ghost!”

“More unique rules…”

“No wonder nobody was showing up here.”

“You get to return to the game and you get experience and credits? Mighty generous.”

“Who wouldn’t take part in that?”

“The mysteries have all been solved!”

“Dammit! I wish I’d been in SJ5…and hadn’t lost in the prelims…”

The men in the pub chatted among themselves after reading and absorbing the rules displayed on-screen.

“Keh. Like any of you cared,” grumbled one man who had noticed quite early on that no one was returning to the bar. “Another round over here, Pops!”

“Yo. What’s the plan?”

“What do you mean, ‘What’s the plan’?”

Shirley and Clarence were in the darkened waiting area, where the elder girl pressed the younger for her opinion.

“Are you going back as a ghost?”

They sat on the black floor in a daze, legs splayed out in front of them, guns at their sides.

“I dunno, we have to wait eight minutes before we can come back to spook people. It’ll all be over before then,” Clarence complained.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Shirley shrugged. She opened her player window to put the gun and gear into her inventory. But then she noticed something. “Huh? There’s a food menu here, just like in the pub. Is this a ghost thing?”

“Really? Do they have French fries? With lots of ketchup and mustard! Order a ton of them!”

“Fine, fine.”

“Do they have chips? Hash browns? Ooh, I’d like some croquettes!”

“Do you eat anything other than potatoes?”

“Well, I was in Hokkaido in real life recently. It helped turn me on to the taste of potatoes! Man, I wish I could go again.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re aware that I live in Hokkaido. I guess I could tell you a little something about myself. Just for you.”

“Ooh, I wanna hear!”

“Oh my word,” Llenn remarked, having sped through the text on her device.

“C’mon, why don’tcha give us an explanation? And make it simple!” ranted Fukaziroh, who had to pull herself up from the brink using her own power, since everyone else was too busy looking at their devices.

She crouched next to the pile of rubble and waddled over to Llenn.

“Ghosts!” Llenn exclaimed, breaking into a smile.

“That doesn’t tell me anything!” Fukaziroh shot back.

“Oh, sorry. The people who died can come back into the game as ghosts! But they can’t attack us, and we can’t attack them. They just earn points.”

“Ah, I see.”

“But it’s a chance for us! I’m sure Pito’s got some ideas! We can still fight! Thank you, shitty rules!” Llenn said excitedly, waving around the Vorpal Bunnies.

“Fine, fine, I get it. Just put that pregnant belly away. You almost pressed the switch on it.”

“Eep!”

Llenn hastily activated the safety on the grand grenade.

“So what now?” smirked her helmeted partner.

Llenn said, “First of all, shoot off Rightony and Leftonia! And then—”

She didn’t even get the rest of the sentence out before Fukaziroh started shooting.

In fact, the shooting started around the words First of all, which made Llenn want to believe that Fukaziroh was actually psychic.

“Grenades!”

Distracted by the ghost of Lux appearing twelve feet to the side and the abundance of text on the Satellite Scanner, David and the rest of MMTM did have the presence of mind still to react when they heard the firing sound and saw the descending bullet line.

It was one of Fukaziroh’s high-arcing grenade attacks. What if it was another plasma grenade?

David was about to order his men to shoot into the air again, but then he remembered something Llenn had said an hour earlier.

“They’re all normal grenades!”

Yes, just before blowing off the roof of the brick mansion in the neighborhood, Llenn had said that Fukaziroh had a stock of twelve plasma grenades. That was crucial information.

Knowing her personality, she had shot them all off earlier. And they had exploded in the air. If no one died, then there was no chance they’d been refilled.

“Roger!” his squad replied, taking action to avoid the bullet line with minimal movement. An ordinary grenade round was lethal to a radius of about five yards. As long as they moved farther than that and hit the ground, they’d be safe.

David glanced to his right at the girl he wanted to ask out for tea—at Vivi—and her teammates, who were busy doing the same thing.

A ghostly Tomtom and Shinohara were nearby, but not within ten feet. They only hovered around the edges of the scene.

They were doing something to the ground, trying to communicate with Vivi. She looked confused; whatever message they were sending, she didn’t seem to get it.

“What should we do, Captain?” Kenta asked, speaking for the rest of the squad.

“It’s our chance!” David said, making a lightning call. He put his left hand to his ear and switched off the channel to Vivi. “Finish off Llenn’s group now! Flank them from the left.”

In his head, David was thinking they’d finish off that team, leaving only Fukaziroh alive, perhaps, then chasing her over toward ZEMAL.

It might be a tricky strategy to pull off, but he believed that, with their level of expertise and coordination, they could do it.

And if they did, Vivi would be grateful to him. His stock would rise in her eyes.

She would find him more appealing.

The perfect plan.

“Roger that!” his squadmates said, completely aware of his motivations.

They knew what he was doing, and they wanted to assist his quest for love. They were okay with it, because if it worked out, it would be funny, and if it didn’t, that would be funny, too.

Ghost Lux was panicking, his expression worried behind those sunglasses, but David didn’t see it.

“David, pull back. Regroup.”

Shinohara and Tomtom lined up the ammo from their magazines to spell out a message for Vivi, finally getting their intent across.

“Attacking right now would be a bad idea… David?”

Vivi was trying to send him a friendly warning, but David could not hear her by now.

The five surviving members of MMTM swung around to the left as fast as they could, moving toward the mountain of rubble. The six grenades that came flying toward them exploded in vacant space and did no damage.

They backed each other up, covering blind spots and sight lines, executing to perfection their brand of methodical advance. The men slid from barricade to barricade, with one person on the move while the others always stayed vigilant, a smooth and practiced formation.

If Llenn’s group popped out from the barricades, they were ready to shoot back at any time, but there were no shots forthcoming. They passed the final barricade, with only the sixty-foot open space beyond.

Jake silently crouched, held his HK21 in position for covering fire, and the rest of them prepared to rush in.

“Let’s goooo!” Pitohui commanded.

“Huh?”

Kenta, the lead in MMTM’s formation, was about to cover the last sixty feet when he saw a woman in black charging at him with a glowing photon sword in either hand. He was stunned.

“Son of a—!”

He slowed down a bit and fired his G36K. All the bullets passed through Pitohui’s smirking face.

Next to him, Summon saw a large man in green with an M14 EBR pointed in his direction.

“Gah!”

He fired, too. The bullet from his SCAR-L passed through M as well.

“Uh…”

“Crap.”

That was when they both realized that they’d just been turned into ghosts.

“Fire!”

Boss, Anna, and Tohma had climbed to the top of the rubble heap and started shooting for all they were worth with their Vintorez and Dragunovs.

Their targets were the two members of MMTM who had just gotten distracted. They were charging toward Llenn, so their flank was wide open. Very easy targets.

“Damn!”

Bold saw his teammates getting shot ahead of him and continued his rush. If he stopped moving and turned now, that would only make him an easier target to hit.

He had a Beretta APX 9 mm pistol in his hand. His usual assault rifle, an ARX160, had been broken by Clarence.

He’d seen through the enemy’s strategy. There would be no more teammates turning into ghosts. This location was easy for SHINC to attack, so he was going to rush straight for the rubble for cover, then attack Llenn behind it.

Pitohui and M were just ten yards ahead. He rushed straight for them, like he was going to execute a body tackle. When he was within four yards, they slowed down unnaturally, and at three yards, they were thrown backward.

It was a fantastic effect, as though the air around him had become a giant ball of rubber that repelled them. Pitohui and M soared a good five yards away. M was pushed to the left and very nearly flew right off of the castle edge.

“These ghosts ain’t sh—”

He wasn’t able to finish that sentence. Right behind the ghosts was what looked like a large trash can placed upside down. In the slim crack near the bottom, two spots flashed with light.

Then he couldn’t see anything.

It was only later that Summon learned he was looking at the Pseudo-Trash-Can Two-Man Human-Powered Armored Vehicle, also known as the PM; that Llenn had shot her two Vorpal Bunnies from the slightly ajar lid; and that her 45-caliber pistol rounds had hit both of his eyes.

“Screw this!”

Jake’s HK21 roared in anger at the defeat of his teammates. True to its German precision, the gun slammed the trash can with powerful 7.62 × 51 mm NATO rounds. And every shot that hit the can simply bounced off.

“What?! Is that the same as M’s shield?!” he realized promptly, although it didn’t cause him to stop shooting. As long as he was firing, they couldn’t pop out of the crack to hit him back.

But that only left him vulnerable from another direction.

Boss descended the mountain of stone, opening herself up to attack from David or ZEMAL, swung around to the right of Jake, and put a clean, well-aimed shot from her Vintorez into his head. There was no sound.

ZEMAL was not shooting at them.

The moment his mates started dying, David stilled and clutched the STM-556’s magazine. In front of it was the trigger to the grenade launcher stuck underneath the gun barrel.

However tough the armor on that suspicious box was, a direct hit from a grenade would flip it over. And once it was overturned, he could just shoot whoever was there.

But the next moment, David’s vision went dark.

“Huh?”

Actually, the world went dark.

Coming up behind him on a diagonal in his blind spot was a gang of about fifty ghosts, circling around in front of him, on the sides, and behind, completely surrounding him from a distance of just over four yards.

On top of the scrum of men surrounding him, more men climbed up, followed by even more. The pyramid structure began to topple toward David.

Ordinarily, this meant they would simply fall on their faces near him, but the special ghost rules prevented that from happening.

“Approaching within twelve feet of the living will generate an optical defense field that slows and impedes the ghost’s movement.”

The ghosts at the top of the pyramid covered the dome of space around David and came to a stop in the air.

As a matter of fact, they were falling—but very slowly, and the closer they got, the slower it went. So it looked like they were simply freezing in midair as they covered him.

Physically, this arrangement was simply impossible, but because of the ghost rules, this was the only way it could play out.

“But so what?!” David roared, surrounded by ghosts. That was the extent of what they could do to him. They had temporarily blocked his view. They couldn’t even inflict any damage on him.

However, if he couldn’t see past them, he couldn’t shoot his grenades.

“Move it!”

He rushed forward. The instant he was within nine feet, the base of the scrum and the ones standing on their shoulders were yeeted clean out of the way.

In the moment that the world became bright again, there was a small watermelon rolling on the ground before him.

Well, it was similar in size and shape to a melon, but it wasn’t one. It was a large plasma grenade.

“But how…?”

He looked up and was surprised to find that the rubble heap and the trash can were a hundred feet away. Was there anyone left alive with the strength to throw such a heavy item that far?

The grand grenade rolled to within six feet of David’s right side and exploded about twelve feet behind him.

As the blue plasma obliterated him, all of the many ghosts choking the area suffered nothing more than a bright light in their eyes.

After the grand grenade blast died down, Llenn quietly peeked out of the PM and saw five whole DEAD tags around her.

“Wow! We completely wiped out MMTM!”

Because the grenade explosion removed the barricades, too, there was nothing but a wide area of flat, empty ground, decorated by five fresh bodies and the tags hovering over them.

“You okay, Boss?” she asked. Boss had rushed in from the left on her own.

“I’m okay! Looks like ZEMAL pulled back. I’ll stay on the lookout!” she replied thankfully.

This made it seem like ZEMAL had escaped from them, but Llenn did not think they could have beaten the machine gunners in a direct fight, so this was a welcome outcome. Now they had a chance to regroup and reset.

Then she yelled, “Fuka! Nice kick! That was brilliant!”

It was the answer to David’s mystery: how that huge, heavy grand grenade moved a hundred feet to land right next to him.

With her powerful legs, Fukaziroh kicked the timer-activated grand grenade from the edge of the PM. Throwing it might be impossible, but kicking was different. The legs are three to five times more powerful than the arms.

The grenade rolled over the flat surface, a long pass to David. Although it wasn’t perfectly on target, it was close enough. Thanks to the ghosts blocking David’s sight line, he didn’t see it until just before it went off.

Fukaziroh replied, “No big deal. I played some full-dive soccer games on an alt account.”

“How many games do you play?!”

“Listen, sports are great.”

“Spoken like a former tennis team member!”

“Don’t you wanna try, Llenn? People are really into this one game where all the avatars are giant bugs.”

“What happened to sports?”

“At any rate, long live the ghosts.”

“Agreed.”

Llenn popped her face out of the PM and gave the fifty ghosts milling around the area an adorable little bow of her head.

They returned a collection of smiles that indicated some very conflicted feelings.

A few dozen minutes earlier, in the Graveyard where the ghosts waited to return, Pitohui shouted, “Hey, everybody, listen up! Attention please!”

The space was built to the exact same specifications as the familiar pub in Glocken.

In other words, it was reused assets. It was easy to forget which of the two you were in if you weren’t paying attention. On the familiar monitors, Llenn and her teammates were wandering aimlessly through the maze.

Pitohui was a well-known face around Squad Jam, so more or less all the men turned to look at her. Some of them had gone through agony in past Squad Jams because of her, or torment, or fire and brimstone. But all of that was in the past. There was no point feeling hatred toward her now. Just play it cool.

Anyway, you couldn’t attack anyone else in the pub, and even if you could, there was no guarantee you’d actually win.

“Listen up, people! You died! Too bad!”

“Yeaaah!” some celebrated.

“So did you!” others jeered.

Who among them would have guessed that Pitohui, of all people, would be dead, too, at this point?

“Yeah, yeah! It happens to me, too!” She smirked, facial tattoos dimpling. “But more importantly, too bad about those hundred million credits! Or the million yen!”

It was like she’d shot them all with an arrow.

“Shuddup!”

“Do you really feel sorry about that?!” they yelled back.

“So I’ve got a deal to discuss with you. All you guys whose teams are wiped out or aren’t likely to last to the final seventeen! Aren’t you angry? Doesn’t it frustrate you to know that someone else is gonna make off with that prize?”

Their eyes glinted savagely. It was an unmistakable answer: Of course we’re angry!

“In that case, once we’re ghosts, why don’t you ignore these cheap little points competitions and offer your full support to Llenn instead? You want some other jabroni to make off with those hundred million credits? Well, if you help Llenn survive and win the event, then no one’s going to end up with that bounty money!”

The men gulped loudly.

“Not that I’m gonna force ya!” she said, completing the sabotage.

“Pito’s ideas scare me,” Llenn said with equal parts admiration and exasperation. Even after death, Pitohui was still Pitohui. “If she hadn’t died earlier…then I would’ve lost back there.”

In the distance, Llenn could see Lux’s ghost suffering unspeakable things. Pitohui’s and M’s ghosts, along with all the other ghosts who’d gone along with Pitohui’s plan, were ganging up on him.

She couldn’t see the bullet lines the ghosts were producing, but she could faintly see the tracers from their shots. M’s MG5 emitted a beam of light that struck Lux’s long sniper rifle and destroyed it.

She didn’t know what would happen to a ghost’s weapon if they lost it, but she could only pray that the item wasn’t gone forever. That was an expensive rifle.

“God damn youuuuu!” Lux howled with rage, his voice resounding across the arena.

Of course, only the ghosts nearby could hear him, so only those ghosts bothered to respond.

“Don’t blame us!”

“It’s nothing personal, man.”

“It is for me. He beat me up in SJ2.”

“And he sliced me up with a knife in SJ3.”

“Okay, mess him up, then.”

The ghosts around Lux were switching off taking potshots at him. It was really rather cruel.

They were all Greedos. Greedy folks who didn’t want anyone else to claim the hundred-million-credit bounty. They couldn’t stand the idea.

So they attacked anyone who was an enemy of Llenn’s team.

MMTM was wiped out, so they really didn’t have any reason to beat up on Lux, but their thought process was very pure and simple: Make everyone who served as any kind of impediment to Llenn disappear.

Despite getting shot by Pitohui and M, and beaten up by Team Greedo, Lux was still alive. Well, ghost-alive.

Since his hit points were ten times as high as usual, he just wouldn’t die. He couldn’t die.

When he got shot, it still hurt as much as it did when he was alive, somehow. But because he had too many HPs and couldn’t die, he was helpless to do anything but suffer.

“Agh!”

A rifle round went through Lux’s head. Ordinarily, this would be an insta-kill shot, but his hit points only went down 10 percent.

His FD338 sniper rifle had already been shot and broken, and while he could repair it, it was unusable for now. He pulled his Beretta APX from the holster and shot at the ghosts surrounding him, but there were so many, and all with ten times the health, that of course he didn’t stand a chance of killing any of them.

The ghosts swarmed him, all shooting. Some of them got hit with deflected bullets, but they didn’t care.

“I hate that stupid sponsor! I’ll come back to haunt you as a ghost, you hack!” Lux bellowed. Despite the fact that he was already dead.

At long last, with over fifty players chasing and shooting him, his times-ten HP was gone, and Lux moved on to the afterlife in a most ignoble way.

“Damn youuuuuuu!”

“Thanks. You two are free to do as you will,” Vivi said to Tomtom and Shinohara. They couldn’t hear her, but the two ghosts grinned and dispersed all the same.

Knowing them, they’d probably shoot the other ghosts until they ran out of ammo. It would take ten times the bullets to finish off their targets now, which sounded like a whole lot more fun.

The remaining members of ZEMAL survived because the other two ghosts had warned them that it was dangerous over there. They had heard Pitohui’s plan and promptly used their ammo to spell out a message to Vivi.

Run away.

She saw it, understood, and immediately made the decision to move south.

She also warned David, but their team did not survive. She didn’t know why.

She had no idea that David had been trying to act cool out of a growing infatuation with her—and that he and his team had happily thrown themselves into an unwinnable situation as a result.

After beating MMTM, Llenn’s group finally had the chance to rest.

It was just turning three o’clock. They’d been fighting without a break for nearly ten minutes.

At the two-hour point, people started getting full-dive fatigue that steadily dulled their abilities and decisions. If it got bad enough, the AmuSphere’s safety functions could kick in and auto-shutdown the unit. Fortunately for Llenn, she’d gotten used to it in past Squad Jams. At the very least, she was fine while she was playing. Afterward, she might get a headache.

From her seat atop the PM, Llenn switched Fukaziroh’s second loadout. The PM promptly vanished, and the MGL-140s returned to Fukaziroh’s hands.

Llenn returned her Vorpal Bunnies to their holsters and materialized the backpack that held her magazines for easy reloading.

She couldn’t wear it inside the PM because it was too big. It was even hard to shoot the P90 in there. That was the biggest drawback of their defensive vehicle: It limited Llenn’s firepower.

“Fuka. Did you get your plasma grenades back?” Llenn asked.

It had been on her mind. If she could have gotten back up to 80 percent of her ammo in plasma grenades for having kicked the grand grenade over to David, that would have been nice.

“Nah,” Fukaziroh said, however. “I never went below eighty percent in the first place.”

“Ohhh…”

Well, that settled that. Fukaziroh had too much strength and brought too many grenades to actually run out of them and earn a refill.

“You stay here,” Boss said to them. “We’re gonna focus on ZEMAL and—well, not ‘eliminate’ them, but at least lower their numbers!”

She, Anna, and Tohma were about to take off, with the other two ghosts in tow.

Immediately, Llenn cried, “Noooo! Stay and fight with us!”

Boss had been marching off in a cool, manly way, but that made her stop.

She’d sent Rosa to her death to protect LPFM, which was more than enough to repay what had happened with M.

“Hmph… I guess we could do that. Until we’re the only two teams left.”

“That’s right! We’ll beat ZEMAL together! Without losing anyone! And then we’ll have a real true duel again!”

“That sounds perfect. But how do we attack them? We don’t know how many of them are left, but whatever the number, they’ll have the advantage in firepower,” Boss said.

She was correct. They didn’t know who aside from Shinohara might be dead. Certainly not Vivi.

How to beat those firepower-obsessed knuckleheads? Was it possible?

Llenn could run around alone at max speed to draw their attention, but if more than one of them started shooting at her with machine guns, she probably wouldn’t be able to evade them for long.

Also, no one else was fast enough to pair up with Llenn anymore. And most important of all, she didn’t have her P90 either.

Fortunately, they did have a firepower-obsessed knucklehead of a different sort in Fukaziroh. She would be a good linchpin for their attack strategy.

Could Llenn be a decoy and help the sniping support from SHINC put pressure on the enemy? That seemed difficult…

Llenn’s mind was racing a mile a minute. Suddenly, fifteen feet ahead of her, Llenn saw an unfamiliar ghost waving at her. It seemed to want her attention.

More people were gathering, joining the group that had already shown up. The numbers had swelled to probably eighty or more by now.

Meaning that nearly half the ghosts had been suckered—er, inspired—by Pitohui’s passionate speech and were coming to her aid. There were so many Gs over their heads that the wavering effect was slightly nauseating.

Their support was appreciated, of course, but she had to ignore them, because they didn’t have time for that now. She focused on coming up with a strategy.

The SHINC members didn’t have their backup gear anymore. Or more accurately, they didn’t have their partners to trade with, so they couldn’t change weapons. They had to use what they had on them now. Fortunately, Boss had another five or so grand grenades…

The ghosts were flocking to Llenn, waving and smiling. They were extremely distracting.

“Shut uuup!”

She started sprinting at them.

By plunging into the pack of twenty or so ghosts, she went within the danger zone of nine feet, which hurtled them all far away.

The ghosts who got hurled away stood back up where they fell, with big smiles, and flocked back to her, as though to say That was fun! Again, again! She decided to ignore them. She wasn’t in the mood to play fetch with dogs.

“Hey, Llenn, wouldn’t that work?” Fukaziroh muttered.

“What would?” she replied.

While the two girls were holding a strategy meeting, ZEMAL’s two ghosts were having a strategy meeting of their own—if you could really call it that.

“Save us! Save our goddess!”

Having left Vivi’s side, Tomtom and Shinohara were now firing their machine guns into the sky and rounding up more ghosts to speak to them.

It really wasn’t any way to ask people for help, but the other ghosts decided they would rather hear out their story than fight them and die. They had gathered over seventy players, easily, from across the southern half of the arena. More were coming up every moment.

Maybe some of them were hoping to get a closer glimpse of the pair’s beautiful teammate, Vivi, but that was neither here nor there.

“Our goddess and our squadmates, as of this moment…”

Shinohara began to deliver a speech to the gathering of ghosts. So he had a means of speaking with others aside from bullets, after all.

“…are about to defeat the pink shrimp and her alliance! What do all of you ghosts want to do with your time? You’re back in the game. Do you want to go searching for cheap trinkets or get into shoot-outs with other ghosts, fighting over them? Would that really be fun for you? Yes—yes it would! You get to shoot like hell, and it takes forever to die now!”

Tomtom jabbed Shinohara with an elbow to stop him from digressing even further. He took over the speech.

“But why not choose a more satisfying battle to take part in? I want you to follow us, then throw yourselves at that pink shrimp! There are ghosts on the other side who have been misled by the devil woman Pitohui! You can’t beat the living, but you can beat other ghosts, block the enemy’s line of sight, and help support our goddess!”

This one was much more effective and persuasive.

“All right, then! I’m in! I’m not coming back as a ghost to go scraping together chump change or sit around on my ass!”

“Exactly! I don’t care about the hundred million credits anymore. I want to have a fight with meaning behind it, man!”

With two players loudly coming forward to voice their support, a number of other men in the crowd reluctantly offered their support, too. This sentiment spread until the entire crowd was more or less committed to the cause.

What the rest of them didn’t know was that the first two to speak up had been bought off by Tomtom back in the pub. The reward he promised them was the location of a hunting ground that ZEMAL favored because of its high rate of machine gun drops.

Of course, he didn’t tell them it would be easy to get those guns.

“I am a ghost! A ne’er-do-well rascal of a ghost! When I make threats, the storm winds blow to make good on them!”

Among this group was Thane, the live-commentator player, who was thoroughly enjoying himself.

“Can one bloom after death? I will show you what is possible! Prepare for commentary from the perspective of an apparition from beyond the grave! I have not a shred of anger toward Llenn for cutting off my head, but my allegiance and utmost efforts will belong to this side!”

It sounded like he was holding a grudge.

At 3:04 PM, both teams had come up with their tactics, their plan, or to be as broad as possible, their strategy.

“Oooh, there they go!”

The screens showed a pack of ghosts charging forth.

The final battlefield remaining of SJ5 was a round arena a mile and a quarter across.

A grouping of players on the north side started running toward a different group on the south side.

“There we go! Run, run, run!”

Standing at the lead of the eighty-ish ghosts on Llenn’s side was, of course, Pitohui.

With a KTR-09 in her left hand and a photon sword with blade extended in her right, she cut a bold figure at the head of the pack.

The striking nature of her pose was reminiscent of that classical painting of a charging woman leading her people into a glorious revolution. But not with her chest bared, of course.

The swarm of men outfitted in various gear rushed after her, eager not to be left behind.

Pitohui bellowed into the sky, “Come one, come all! If ye be distant, hear the sound! If ye be close, see the sight! For we are the No One Gets the Million Yen Friends! Or in abbreviated form, the Pitohui Army!”

No one there was going to make fun of the fact that there was no way that title abbreviated that way.

“Yaaaah!”

“Let’s goooo!”

“If I don’t get to be rich, no one gets to be rich!”

“That’s right! If we’re all miserable, we have nothing to fear!”

They were all too busy yelling and joining the charge to care. These people were in it for a good time, not for grammar and logic.

M was not present in the Pitohui Army.

So where was he? He had climbed up the tower where Lux was hiding earlier and readied his monstrous six-foot gun, the Alligator antimateriel rifle. Its effective range was over the full length of the arena, so he could hit anyone across the map from there.

“Pito, proceed south. There’s about ninety of them. Three hundred yards to go,” he said through the comm, which ghosts could use as well.

“You got it!”

The Pitohui Army started a ferocious charge, slowing down only to weave around any barricades in their way. Like an arrowhead, some of the members naturally wound up ahead of all the others, and they tore right into the enemy.

“Enemy troops incoming! Stay put and shoot back!” Tomtom instructed his companions.

From the gaps between barricades, they could see the enemy ghost army on their way. They took positions shoulder to shoulder, ready to fight. They would stay here and shoot as much as they could, rather than turning to run, leaving their backs exposed.

“This is where we hold the line!” Shinohara called out.

“If you want our machine guns, you’ll have to come over here and take them from us!” Tomtom added bravely. No one had actually said they wanted the guns.

The group of ninety or so ghosts spread out laterally. They were lying down, crouching, or standing as needed, ready to fire. They were shoulder to shoulder, ready to deliver the maximum firepower to the enemy.

“The battle is set to begin!” Thane said, filming unsteadily as he walked in front of the lineup. “It’s just like the setup to fight off the famed Takeda cavalry at the Battle of Nagashino! The alliance of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu! Ie-yes-u, I say! Our victory is guaranteed! Look at how tight-knit our group is!”

One of the ghosts looked at the capering Thane and asked, “Can I shoot him?”

But the person next to him warned him not to.

At the very ends of the line were Tomtom and Shinohara, whose 7.62 mm machine guns could shoot over eight hundred bullets each.

The formation was complete.

“Here we go; it’s a full-on battle!”

Naturally, the audience in the pub was thrilled.

Whether Japanese warlords from the Sengoku era or cavalry battles from medieval Europe, this kind of large-scale, two-sided group battle simply wasn’t something you ever saw in GGO.

The overhead camera caught the two lines of players, rapidly coming into range. There were only two hundred yards of space between them.

“Who’s got the advantage, you think?” someone wondered.

“Ordinarily, the side that’s spread out and waiting has the edge,” said the orthodox mind.

When one force was charging fast, only those at the head of the movement, or the ones on the wings of the formation, could shoot. Conversely, everyone on the defensive side had a clear shot.

But there were special rules this time.

“If you have ten times the hit points, even a bunch of shots won’t kill you yet, right? Or uh…send you to Heaven, I guess?”

“True. So as long as the charging side puts up with the pain of getting shot, they can punch a hole right through the defense, huh?”

A hundred and fifty yards left.

Because of the rows of overlapping barricades in between, neither side had fired a single shot yet.

“What happens if the charging side breaks through the center? They’ll be where Vivi’s team is, yeah?”

The image on-screen made it clear. Located around ten yards behind the center of the Vivi Army’s lineup were the four members of ZEMAL. They were spread out at intervals of about twenty feet, with two watching left and right in the fore—and two watching left and right in the rear. In other words, full-perimeter defense.

“Nothing’ll happen. Ghosts can’t attack the living, remember?”

“Aha, gotcha. And that’s what Vivi’s aiming for.”

“What do you mean?”

A hundred yards left.

“The offensive side can break through the defense, but what happens when there’s four living behind them?”

“Oh! I know! They get tossed backward!”

“Exactly. It’s a two-tiered defensive line, both ghosts and living. Once the attackers are rebuffed by the living, the defense’s ghosts will finish the job.”

“Ah, I see…”

Fifty yards left.

The defensive side fired first.

“Yaaaaah!”

“Doryaaaaa!”

Tomtom and Shinohara uttered sweaty man-roars over the thudding of their machine guns. They created a pincer effect of heavy fire from the edges of the formation against the group rushing for the center of their line.

That was the cue for ninety ghosts to start shooting.

Instantly, the world was full of clamor. There was so much shooting happening that it was impossible to hear it stopping and starting. It was just a constant, raging roar.

“It’s   and  y…! I think   getting  !”

Thane was shouting something from behind the line, where he had retreated, but no one else could make out the words.

Hundreds of bullets raced toward the long, vertical spear of charging enemies in a cloud of death. Naturally, as the head of the spear, Pitohui took a ton of hits.

“Bwaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Damn, that hurts!” she crowed. Her body was covered in damage effects.

But it was still far from the ten-times damage needed to kill her, so she kept running. In the meantime, the KTR-09 in her left hand fired wildly.

The men who followed behind her did the same. They ran as fast as they could and unloaded the maximum possible firepower at their disposal. Because the Pitohui Army was plunging straight toward the center of the defense, they got blistered by shots from either side of them. But they still weren’t dropping dead, and as long as they didn’t, they ran.

And most importantly, the ghosts farther on the inside of the spear formation were not easily hit by those bullets.

“Switch!”

“Oh, fine.”

That was one of Pitohui’s strategies, too. By having the inside and outside of the formation periodically switch places, they could alternate who was doing the guarding against enemy shots.

Some shots hit the barricades around the area, but shots from ghosts had no effect on the obstacles. The only thing that happened was the bullets being deflected.

The attackers fired as they ran, sending many of their bullets to hit the men who stood in place, shooting back. But the defenders were holding their ground, too. There was a long way to go before they started getting summoned back to Heaven.

This bizarre situation, which did not feel like it represented a shoot-out, led to the Pitohui Army drawing very close to the Vivi Army’s defensive line. Thirty yards left.

“Hya-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Pitohui cackled as she ran.

“I’m gonna kill her!” said one man, who set aside his gun and started to throw a plasma grenade instead.

He would have preferred to keep shooting, and he didn’t want to throw the plasma grenade out of fear that it would hurt himself, but there wasn’t a better option.

He pulled the dull-gray sphere out of his pouch and was about to press the activation switch—when his upper and lower halves separated and fell to the ground, three feet apart.

“Wh-what happened…?”

He had no idea that, from four hundred yards away, M had sniped him without a bullet line. A direct hit from an antimateriel rifle to the stomach would easily split the torso in two. Ordinarily, that would mean instant death, but now they were ghosts.

“Whuh?”

The upper and lower halves began to move on their own, as though drawn by magnets, until the wire-frame cross sections fused, and the avatar’s skin and clothes returned to normal.

He’d lost enough hit points for three lives over. The plasma grenade that had been in his hands was gone.

“Hya-haaa!”

As the point of the spear, Pitohui was the first to reach the defense, twirling the lightsword in her left hand and roaring.

“Damn youuuuu!” bellowed a man with an M4A1 assault rifle, who shot back without faltering a step.

“Move it.”

“Guh!”

She kicked him out of the way. Once in the midst of the enemy, there was just one thing for Pitohui to do:

She hurled the KTR-09, which had emptied out its drum magazine, into the waiting face of some stupid sap, spun around and drew another photon sword with her right hand, then began a dual-blade reign of madness in the enemy’s midst.

All she was doing was running around and flailing her arms, but because the all-cutting power of the photon swords was so great, she left a trail of players behind her whose hands had been cut off, dropping their guns and falling victim to the Pitohui Army’s gunners, or losing their legs and rolling on the ground, and… Well, you get the point.

“Hya-haa!” Pitohui howled, literally hooting and hollering, until she finally inflicted ten lives’ worth of damage to someone, turning him into dwindling motes of light.

“One ticket to Heaven!”

Of course, there were many, many men trying to shoot Pitohui, but M took it upon himself to pick off the targets who posed the highest threat, so she was still doing fine for now.

“Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

The sheer force of the lunatic woman was enough to put the gun-toting men on their back feet. And they found themselves getting shot by the rest of the Pitohui Army coming up behind her.

“What a joyful scrum! In any era, the only true law is chaos! A dual-bladed menace on the loose! We are witnessing the birth of a new school of swordfighting!” jabbered Thane animatedly.

“You wanna go next?!”

“Nooo!”

Pitohui cut him into four pieces or so. Then she moved on to her next prey.

That hadn’t been enough to send Thane to the afterlife. When his body reconnected, he said, “Being resurrected as a ghost is a truly, indescribably strange experience. But it’s also rather fun. In fact, I daresay that if implemented as a play mode in GGO, many players might find it enjoyable! This has been Thane, reporting to you live from the battlefield.”

“Damn youuuu!” howled Tomtom.

He pointed his gun in the direction of where Pitohui was chopping up his comrades to pieces and sprayed full auto fire with his FN MAG.

A number of the bullets struck Pitohui, who made a show of pain. “Oh! Ow! Ow, crap!”

But that was only a minority of the shots.

“Hey! It’s us, you idiot!”

“Is your brain a machine gun?!”

“Owwwww!”

Most of them smacked into his own side, interfering with their ability to fight and concentrate. In the meantime, the highly motivated men who’d been at the lead of the attacking group with Pitohui tore into the defenders.

“Doryaaaaa!”

“Kill ’em aaaall!”

They split off to the sides and engaged in close quarters combat. Some used combat knives, while others charged with bayonets, if they had them. Some switched to pistols and enjoyed the experience of up-close fighting.

“God dammit!”

“Don’t fall back! Give ’em hell!”

There were also bloodthirsty—scratch that, passionate GGO players on the defensive side as well. They rushed into the midst of the fray, leaving their positions to do so.

The scene was now a mess.

Since shooting rarely actually killed anyone, it was a constant rattle of endless gunfire. It was hard to distinguish friend from foe, so some people were just randomly attacking without really knowing what they were doing.

And then the main force—or at least, the thickest part—of the Pitohui Army pressed into the line and broke through the defensive quarantine.

“We’re through! Let’s go!”

The triumphant chargers continued to rush, slowing for nothing—

“Vivi! Your life is ours!”

—straight for the ZEMAL leader.

The men in the pub watched as the group pushed straight through the defensive line and swarmed around the surviving ZEMAL members.

They were aghast.

“What’s that supposed to…?”

“What are they going to do now?”

Soon, the thing everyone expected to happen, happened.

Invisible barriers rose around the four survivors. Not because they had a special item or ability, but simply because that was how the special rules were programmed.

“Ah, geez.”

Once the attackers got within ten feet, they suddenly slammed on the brakes. But there were more and more ghosts rushing in behind them, pushing them closer, until they made contact with the defensive barrier around the living and were promptly ejected out of the way.

More and more came running up, got knocked back, and flew through the air.

“What the…?”

Pitohui was enjoying the sensation of being tossed through air, and despite the looping, spinning vision, she was able to observe not just the dark mass of their group charging at ZEMAL and getting knocked away—but also who was rushing up at the end of the pack.

“Why would they do this…?”

Vivi hadn’t even fired her gun yet.

She and her three companions—front, front left, and left—were under a completely meaningless assault by hostile ghosts. It was an onslaught. And their assailants got deflected, tossed into the air, and pushed away.

Some of them were bounced up by one player, soared into the air, then came down on another, only to slow down briefly and get tossed up again, like on a large and very strange trampoline. It seemed fun.

Vivi’s vision was full of the ghosts, faded and indistinct figures with the letter G over their heads. For each one who was knocked away through the air, another was already behind it.

It was like being behind a windshield in a snowstorm. Vivi wasn’t getting touched by any of it.

Whatever this was, it was totally pointless.

It would be one thing if they just wanted to play a game of rag doll, but if these ghosts were trying to defeat the enemy ghost team to benefit Llenn, they shouldn’t be wasting their time with Vivi.

They’d already broken through the line, so the smart course of action would be to take out the individual members of the Vivi Army one by one.

Instead, they were playing this silly game, which was allowing the Vivi Army to regroup and shoot them from behind instead.

Tomtom and Shinohara were blazing away without a care, taking out ghosts from the Pitohui Army bit by bit.

Even still, the advance on the living did not stop.

“What’s the purpose…?”

“Grab on tight! Here we go!” roared Fukaziroh, who was driving.

The Pitohui Army pack had been rushing ZEMAL, getting tossed around, and rushing back, for over ten seconds, and it was starting to lose steam—when Vivi saw it.

“!”

Beyond the Pitohui Army, there was a ghost flying through the air.

She could tell it was the man who’d tagged along with them from the rare SG550 assault rifle he was holding.

And then everything clicked.

“Everyone shoot!”

But her order was too rushed—and too simple.

Keeping orders simple was crucial, but in this case, it backfired, because the other members of ZEMAL just watched in mute bafflement.

“Here’s the first one!”

“Awright!”

Fukaziroh’s PM was racing forward, barreling the Vivi Army’s ghosts out of the way.

The PM had tires. And on a perfectly flat and smooth surface like this, Fukaziroh’s propulsion efficiency—which came entirely from herself—was at an optimal level.

Peter’s cause of death was faltering at Vivi’s orders, and turning back to glance at her.

The PM zipped past the man with the tape on his nose, as quick as the breeze, and in that time, Llenn’s extended arm extended its photon sword arm, too, neatly cutting off his head.

“They’ve gone in,” said M.

Pitohui, who only had a few percentage points left of her expanded hit points, made a triumphant pose with her lightsword.

“Hell, yeah!”

Fukaziroh and Llenn’s plan had been conveyed to Pitohui via messages carved into stone with Llenn’s photon sword.

Ghosts

Charge

We come

Behind

The plan was to use the ghosts to distract and blind ZEMAL to the approach of the PM behind them, and it had worked like gangbusters.

“Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Pitohui brandished her lightswords high as the remnants of the Vivi Army swarmed her and riddled her with bullets. “I regret nothing!”

She had a joyous smile as she moved on to the afterlife.

“Vivi, forty-five degrees right!” Llenn instructed.

“Don’t worry, I see her!” Fukaziroh said, already steering the ship in that direction before Llenn had even closed the lid again.

The PM had been improved onsite. They had prioritized visibility over defensive capability.

They fashioned a single, two-inch hole near Fukaziroh’s right eye with the photon sword, so that she could see as she piloted. Despite the excellent defense of the shield, pressing the sword against it at full power output would eventually burn a hole into it. If not for this hole, they would not have been able to speed around barricades and keep up behind the ghost charge.

Their first attack just happened to be on Peter, who was the closest at hand, but their true target was Vivi.

The PM ignored Huey and Max, who were stunned to see a garbage can running by, and rushed straight for Vivi.

“Ah!”

Vivi’s RPD barked at them, but all the bullets were deflected, and none were lucky enough to pass through the sight hole.

“Take thiiiiis!” Fukaziroh bellowed, the sound muffled by the cramped interior. Her powerful glutes bulged as she pushed.

Although the shots did slow down the PM slightly, it still continued its push toward Vivi—who, recognizing the futility of shooting, tried to jump to the side to avoid it.

That prevented the vehicle from delivering a body blow on her, but it did produce the dull thud of metal on metal. The RPD was jolted out of her hands. It was hanging on a sling, so it dangled on her body rather than being thrown free.

The next moment, a blade emerging from the open lid of the PM swiped at Vivi.

“Ah!”

With brilliant reflexes, she dodged this as well.

The blade had been meant for her neck, but it only grazed her shoulder and chest instead. There was barely any HP loss, most likely. But Llenn’s determined attack succeeded at severing the gun sling, dropping the RPD to the ground.

“Damn, I missed! Nice dodge!”

“What did I tell ya? She’s real tough. Close combat is her forte,” Fukaziroh said of her bitter rival. The momentum of their surge took the PM well past Vivi’s position.

“Then let’s attack again!”

“Anytime, anywhere, anyhow!”

Fukaziroh’s boots jammed against the ground hard enough to burn the surface, jolting the PM into a rapid brake, followed by a screaming one-eighty turn.

“Augh!”

Llenn smacked her head against the inside of the vehicle up above.

The turn was finished, and the PM began to close the gap with Vivi again. It was a distance of about twelve feet.

“Goddess!”

“Take this!”

Huey and Max started shooting, but the expensive plating on the PM repelled all their bullets. There was no power like wallet power.

They stopped shooting just as quickly. They were afraid that they’d hit Vivi, either directly or on a deflection.

“Doryaaaa!”

Fukaziroh made another furious charge. Vivi easily stepped aside, like a matador avoiding a charging bull.

But Fukaziroh had read her all the way. “You always dodge to the left!”

With her entire body thrown into the steering, Fukaziroh jolted the PM’s helm to the left.

“Augh!”

Llenn smacked her shoulder against the inside of the vehicle up above.

There was also an ugly thud as the PM slammed into Vivi’s body. She was thrown up into the air and landed directly on top of the vehicle.

“Goddess!”

“Get back here!”

Huey and Max could only watch as their leader was taken away on top of the fishy upside-down garbage can.

“Hmm? Why is the car heavier?”

“She’s on top of it!” Llenn noticed. She tried to push the lid on top open with her lightsword hand. “It’s too heavy to open!”

“Trying to mooch a free ride? You’ll pay for that!”

Suddenly, the interior of the PM was bright.

“Huh?”

Llenn looked up in surprise and saw that, despite doing nothing on her own, the lid was open by about four inches—and there was a pistol pointed right at her through the crack.

Vivi had slid down off her stomach and clung to the edge of the PM, ripped the lid open with her right hand, and jammed the M17 pistol she drew from her waist into the opening.

She fired.

“Aiee!”

Llenn dodged. If her agility hadn’t been buffed to its current level, she would have gotten a 9 mm Parabellum bullet through her head.

Instead, however, the bullet struck the helmet of Fukaziroh, the driver, bounced off, deflected against the inside of the PM again, then lodged itself into Fukaziroh’s side.

“Gaagh! First you try to ride for free, then you hijack me, Vivi?!”

The bullet ignited her fury. She’d lost 20 percent of her health.

“Tah!” Llenn output a short bit of blade from the photon sword and thrust it at the gun. But Vivi was quicker to withdraw her hand, and the sword singed nothing but empty air.

Then the lid was slammed back shut.

“Yeow!”

Right on top of Llenn’s head.

Vivi clung to the outside of the racing PM. Over her shoulder, she called out, “Shoot them! Shoot me!”

“But…”

“We can’t…”

Huey and Max hesitated momentarily, watching the PM carry their leader away.

“Your goddess commands you!” she yelled.

“Open bolts!”

“Yes, sir!”

They immediately jumped into action, pointing their machine guns at the trash can rushing away at a distance of fifty yards.

“Wha—?!”

But a huge swarm of Pitohui Army ghosts rushed in to block their visibility.

“Move it!”

“Damn youuu!”

They started blasting at whatever they could see through the crowd.

The bullets roaring toward the back of the PM did not hit it.

Fukaziroh did a left turn to take them around a barricade, causing the bullets to shoot harmlessly past them. If not for the ghosts’ interference, she would not have made it in time.

“Llenn! Cut down our fare dodger! Cut through our baby if you have to!”

“Got it!”

Llenn pointed the end of the photon sword at the roof of the PM and adjusted the output to maximum. The blade extended upward and penetrated the lid, which was not as thick as the armor on the sides.

“Did that do it?” asked Fukaziroh, who was staring through her forward hole.

“I didn’t feel anything!” Llenn replied, right as the hole went dark.

When Vivi had slammed the lid down, she trapped her left hand under the edge.

In real life, that would have broken all the bones in her fingers, and she did lose some hit points, but it wasn’t worth worrying about.

She clutched the front of the speeding PM, found the little hole in the exterior, and stuck the end of her pistol against it.

“Gyaaaaaa!”

Llenn was stunned to hear Fukaziroh screaming in a way she’d never heard before. She checked the status area and saw that her teammate’s hit points were all the way into the red zone.

“She shot me in the eye… Damn, I can’t see a thing!”

Even still, Fukaziroh did not stop running. She craned her head out of the way to avoid getting shot a second time.

“Take thiiis!”

Llenn shoved the lid upward with her head and swiped sideways with her photon sword.

Clink. The hilt of her sword smacked against Vivi’s M17.

The sound of metal striking metal was dull and hard.

While the driver continued to run, sight unseen, Llenn and Vivi stared each other down atop the speeding PM.

“I did say we’d be enemies the next time we met, right?” said the pretty redhead, smiling.

“Yeah, I know…,” Llenn muttered reluctantly.

She’s scary—for the opposite reason as Pito, Llenn thought, but she didn’t have the time to say it.

She wanted to push her lightsword through and finish the swing, but Vivi’s brute strength, which even Fukaziroh admitted was impressive, kept her hand in check with that pistol. Vivi’s other hand was gripping the pipe edge of the PM and couldn’t let go. If she did, her entire body would get sliced in two.

But because Vivi had the butt of the pistol pressed against the hilt, she couldn’t point the gun at Llenn, either. They were both using the side of the PM to prop themselves up and couldn’t let go.

The word logjam came to mind, an impasse of a situation.

Then for some reason, it morphed into gunjam in her head.

She had thought that neither of them could move, but Vivi’s arm strength gradually showed Llenn that she was wrong.

They weren’t in a stalemate; Vivi was pushing Llenn down. The butt of her pistol slowly moved the hilt of the photon sword lower and lower.

Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap. This is bad. Like, bad-bad.

Sirens were blaring in Llenn’s mind. If she got pushed any lower, the photon sword would cut through the PM and Fukaziroh alike. But if she switched it off to remove the blade, Vivi would instantly be able to point the gun and shoot Llenn with it. She wasn’t likely to dodge at this distance.

What should I do?

There was nothing she could do.

And that was when she saw something preposterous over Vivi’s side.

Something preposterous—a tower.

A structure with the exact same appearance as the one where she’d gone through so much hassle, just ahead and on the right. And that meant one thing…

“Fuka! We’re going to fall up ahead!”

Somehow, they had come to the edge of the central keep arena. There were no barricades to block them up ahead.

Llenn tilted her head, and Vivi craned her neck to see the direction they were heading.

In another sixty feet, the vehicle was going to plunge ten thousand feet downward.

“Fuka! Stop, stop, stop! The cliff’s ahead! Danger, watch out!” Llenn shrieked.

“I will triuuuuuumph! Now is the time to avenge yeaaaaaars of hatred!” Fukaziroh bellowed back.

Realizing what she was about to do, Llenn screamed, “No, dummy, doooooooooon’t!”

But the car was not stopping. Sixty feet to go.

The next moment, a hand shot up from below.

It was Fukaziroh’s little hand, clenching Vivi’s wrist.

“Urgh!”

She fixed it in place with an iron grip. Llenn could withdraw her hand and not get shot.

Thirty feet to the cliff.

Now Llenn understood what Fukaziroh really wanted to do.

“Thank you, Fuka…”

She retracted the glowing blade and jumped. Her feet launched up off the pipe frame inside the vehicle, hurtling her upward. The lid on top came off and flew with her into the air. Llenn was clear of danger.

From her position above it all, Llenn could look down to see the topless PM accelerating even more, rushing ahead with Vivi held captive on the side.

There was a cliff just ahead, which the vehicle charged toward.

All the way to the end, Vivi tried to keep her pistol pointed at Llenn. But Fukaziroh’s firm hand kept its grip steady.

The PM’s wheels hit air at the same time that Llenn’s feet hit ground.

The soles of her boots landed ten feet from the edge of the cliff.

“!”

Then she did a somersault, on purpose. Llenn ended up on her stomach, clinging to the ground with every inch of her that she could, using her entire body as a brake.

“Stoppppp!” she willed, with every ounce of her being, praying to the god of Gun Gale.

The prayer was heard, and she came to a stop. Her face was over the edge of the cliff, giving her a perfect view of the plummeting PM below.

“Fukaaaa!” she cried, mourning the loss of her partner.

“Hey, what the—? Llenn! No! What?! You jumped off? Why did you do that?! C’mon! This was my chance to kill you and Vivi at the same time! My hundred million crediiiits!” Fukaziroh wailed a cry from the soul, reaching Llenn’s ears through the comm.

“Huh? Oh, uh, happy travels! Glad you could beat Vivi at last,” Llenn replied. It was the only thing she could say.

As the PM got smaller and smaller, she spotted some bright flashes of light.

The sound of faint gunshots rose upward, and through the comm, Fukaziroh shouted, “You biiiitch!”

As they fell, Fukaziroh and Vivi were engaged in a pistol shoot-out.

“Oh geez…”

There was nothing more to say. Llenn kept her head poked over the edge so she could watch. Even after the vehicle was completely out of sight, she could hear Fukaziroh in her ear shouting “I’ll beat you! I swear to God I’ll beat you! This day has been a hundred years in the making!”

Llenn recalled a Japanese class lecture in which she’d learned that the previous stereotypical saying, often used when confronting a nemesis, used “a hundred years” as a metaphor for the human life span. In other words, “This is to be your dying day.”

On the left edge of her vision, Fukaziroh’s hit points emptied out and were accompanied by a little X, exactly sixty seconds after she plunged over the cliff.

Llenn sighed, pulled herself up to a sitting position, and turned around.

“Yo.”

“Hey.”

“Yeep!” she shrieked. A hundred feet away stood the two survivors from ZEMAL.

Huey and Max had their black imposing machine guns readied at waist height. Bullet lines extended from their muzzles, and the other ends were pointed right at Llenn.

They did not shoot her right away, however.

Mohawked Huey said somewhat sadly, “I’d demand revenge for our goddess and shoot you right here and now, Pink Devil…but you actually saved our leader’s life near the start of the game, didn’t you?”

“Huh? Oh yeah. Just kind of happened that way.”

“While you may be our foe, we will repay your good deed. This is an obligation that every machine gunner must fulfill in order to be beloved by the machine gun. You understand that, of course.”

She did not.

“I sure do,” she said.

“So we will not shoot until you have gotten to your feet, brandished your weapon, and taken a fighting pose.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Well, I’m grateful that you didn’t just shoot me right on the spot. But I mean…”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I still have teammates left. You know that, right?”

Two Dragunovs fired in unison, high-pitched and crisp.

Their bullets pierced the heads of the two men standing across from her.

At the edge of the map, beside a tower, and facing the bodies of the last two members of ZEMAL, Llenn slumped to the ground.

“Ugh… I’m exhausted…”

Even the photon sword that slipped from her fingers muttered, “Yesss! Berry, berry tired!”

“Thanks for your help, Pho-chan.”

Llenn was nothing if not consistent in her naming standards.

Three women came strolling up on the right, bold and proud, in the open.

“Well done! A brilliant plan!” said the gorilla in pigtails, favoring her with a smile that would make little children burst into tears. The sniper pair of Anna and Tohma beamed at her, too.

It had been Llenn’s plan to keep these three out of direct combat, to hold in reserve as backup power if needed.

So she’d had her comm hooked up to them the entire time, and each had heard everything the other said.

“So what now? The ghosts seem to be enjoying themselves, but they’ve really got nothing to do with us,” Boss said, walking up to Llenn.

“Good point. I say, let’s settle this with a normal duel—but with one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t care how we do it, but it should be a one-on-one with you and me. And if I win, I want either Anna or Tohma to shoot me.”

“That’s not—”

“I don’t know who placed the hundred-million-credit bounty on me, but I want to make sure they’re out a lot of money! Your whole team can split the prize!”

“Hrmmm,” grunted the pigtailed gorilla.

“And I won’t go easy on you, of course!” The pink demon grinned.

“Um… Do you think I could join in, too?” said the man.

He stepped right out of the tower.

The tower he’d been hiding in the entire time.

The man’s whole body was covered in protective armor, looking like a tin robot toy.

Over his shoulders was a gigantic backpack.

And he was holding a string that went into the pack…

“Nwaaah!” Boss roared, launching into a forward kick.

“Glurgbh!” It slammed into Llenn’s stomach.

Her little body hurtled backward. The impact was strong enough to inflict damage equivalent to about 30 percent of her health.

“Aaaaahhh!”

Llenn flew over the edge of the cliff and began to plummet the ten thousand feet to the surface below.

The pull of freefall gravity tugged her downward, bottom toward the ground and feet pointed at the cliff. Right beyond her feet, the cliff climbed upward, going thirty-two feet faster every second.

Of course, she was the one who was falling, but in terms of how it looked to her, the surface beside her was shooting upward, faster and faster.

There was a bright-orange light on top of the cliff.

Llenn understood what it was, of course. It was an explosion from the self-detonating team. The one member who had survived was hiding inside the tower the whole time, then popped out just so he could blow himself up.

Boss had recognized who he was and kicked Llenn to knock her off the arena. To ensure she wouldn’t die.

“Boss…you saved me again… Thank you…,” she murmured, gazing at the orange light in the sky.

And then, just as loud and flashy, accompanied by a musical fanfare, a message appeared in front of all of that:

Congratulations!! Winner: LPFM!

The orange light promptly went out. There was no blast wind, no sound. The center of the castle just kept shooting upward, faster every second.

“Oh, right…”

With the last survivor of the suicide bomb team, there had been five players left, including Llenn. Four of them had just died in that blast, so Llenn was the last person alive. The winning team was LPFM.

SJ5 was over, and no one had successfully claimed the hundred-million-credit bounty.

As she dropped, Llenn had only one question on her mind.

How long am I going to keep falling?