CHAPTER 11
Ten-Minute Massacre II (Finish)
“And up we go…”
Once the gunshots had died out for good, Fukaziroh raised herself out of the hollow in the ground. When she saw the jungle, the grass had been thrown far and wide with dead bodies right and left.
“Wowzers. This sure is something.”
The space that had been cleared was maybe forty yards to a side—an extremely tight arena, all things considered. There were three bodies less than twenty feet from her position.
“Yaaaaah!”
And one of them got up and charged her. He’d just been pressed against the ground, not dead at all. The man was large and bald, dressed in green combat fatigues. He carried a SIG SG 510—a powerful 7.5 × 55 mm assault rifle commissioned by the Swiss Army. It was a very long gun at over forty inches, and the front end was as thin as a stick, with a heavy load at nearly thirteen pounds. All in all, a very rare gun in GGO.
The man charged Fukaziroh to make a body check. She noticed that there was no magazine in his SG 510. Apparently, he’d emptied one and removed it, but with Llenn’s attack, he hadn’t had the time to put in a new one.
“Whoo!” Fukaziroh hit the deck again.
“Aaah!” The man tripped over her and fell. The gun spilled from his hands, and he dropped a good ten feet.
“Heh! You wanna go?!” Fukaziroh growled menacingly, getting to her feet and dropping her shoulder-slung MGL-140s to the ground, as they wouldn’t do any good at a distance of ten feet. There were buckles on the slings just for this occasion that would undo if you squeezed the sides.
The pair of MGL-140s sank into the soft jungle earth on either side of the man’s SG 510, even as Fukaziroh’s right hand was sneaking to the holster on her right thigh for her backup pistol.
“Ugh… Oh, dammit!” the man exclaimed when he realized he was no longer holding his weapon.
“Too bad! Make peace with your god!” said the little girl five yards away in striking fashion, pointing her pistol at him.
The M&P in Fukaziroh’s hand spit fire.
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!
The gunfire was blazing fast. The slide retracted and spat out empties at a tremendous rate, springing forward to pull a fresh round back into the chamber each time, so that it was ready for the next pull of the trigger.
The golden casings danced and sparkled as they flew. After the last bullet was gone, the slide stayed back for good.
“Heh. How do you like that?” said Fukaziroh, jutting her chin proudly after that exhibition of wild one-handed firing.
“…”
The man had his hands in front of his face in a feeble attempt to block or hide himself from the onslaught. “Huh…?”
But then he realized that he hadn’t actually been shot. He wasn’t in pain, he wasn’t glowing with shot-wound effects, and his hit points hadn’t dropped.
“Wha—?” the bald man muttered.
“Wha—?” Fukaziroh muttered, in perfect synchronization.
“What the—? That was close enough to have hit him!” Fukaziroh fretted.
“Young lady… Are you really bad at shooting a pistol?” The man grinned.
He took a step forward, creeping closer to Fukaziroh.
“Heh, heh-heh… You know, in this tournament, dead bodies get treated like indestructible objects for ten minutes afterward…,” he said with a creepy leer, taking another step with his left foot. Then, unbelievably enough, he continued, “Th-that means…I have that much time to touch a dead body w-without a harassment warning…”
In VR games like GGO, touching the body of a player of the opposite sex (or same, if they didn’t consent) resulted in a harassment warning.
Penalties would be levied, or added upon, and if the player did not stop the activity, it could result in account termination. That ID would no longer be usable in any VR games, no matter how much time had been sunk into it. It meant starting over from the beginning—the worst possible outcome for any gamer.
But the exception was during battle. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to perform contact attacks with knives and fists and the like. Ordinarily, bodies turned into disintegrating polygons in GGO, but during the Bullet of Bullets event, they stayed in place until the end, while in Squad Jam, they lasted for ten minutes.
In other words, it was logically possible to feel up an opponent under the guise of attacking. And the camera wasn’t going to follow a player unless they were in the midst of an actual battle, so there was no fear of being seen by the audience.
“Heh-heh-heh…”
Meaning that after this man killed Fukaziroh’s cute little-girl avatar, he was planning on groping her dead body.
“Whaaa—?! Why, you repulsive low-down filthy knuckle-dragging spineless no-dick degenerate! I’ll kill you, goddammit!” screeched Fukaziroh, the realization of what he intended to do prompting an impressive torrent of verbal abuse.
“Heh! How will you do that? You wanna blame anyone, blame yourself for signing up for Squad Jam when you can barely play GGO!” he shouted, leaping toward Fukaziroh, hands raised. It had nothing to with GGO or SJ at this point; he was a sexual predator, plain and simple.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself!” She hurled her empty M&P pistol at the man with all her strength.
“Guh!”
Despite her not being able to shoot him, her pistol throw nailed him perfectly in the forehead. But that alone was not enough to stop a man driven by red-hot libido.
Fukaziroh noticed the man’s empty SG 510 at her feet. She stuck her left foot underneath one end and stomped on the stock with her right. “Hmph!”
Like a lever, it bounced the narrow stick-like barrel of the gun upward, where she caught it in both hands.
“And what are you gonna do with—?”
But before he could finish that question, Fukaziroh swung it upward and pulverized his chin from below.
“Yaaah!”
The audience in the bar saw this fight unfold as well.
When the man got up and rushed Fukaziroh only to fall, they cringed. “That was close!”
When Fukaziroh furiously unloaded her pistol on him, they assumed he was a goner, until—
“Wait, what?”
She had apparently missed every shot, and after a brief conversation, the man charged. Oh, the poor girl. She doesn’t stand a chance in a physical fight, they all thought before the man’s large body flopped backward from a vicious uppercut.
“What the—?”
“Gyah!”
The man fell directly onto his back, his chin glowing red with a bullet—er, nonbullet wound. He lost about a tenth of his HP.
“Wha…?” He looked up to see a little girl brandishing his weapon.
“Like I’d ever let you do that!” yelled Fukaziroh, holding the SG 510 by the barrel and brandishing the heavy hunk of metal like a greatsword.
“Huhhh?”
“Huhhh?” the audience said in perfect synchronization.
On the screen was a small girl holding a very long rifle backward.
“Uh, I know this fight is already kind of wild, but that’s not going to work, right?”
“I dunno, that last shot hit him pretty clean, didn’t it?”
“That was luck, right? GGO is a gun game.”
“D-don’t you humiliate me like this!”
The man with the shaved head got up and crouched for a tackle maneuver.
At this point, he was being driven by one simple desire: to knock over the little woman, strangle her to death, and then do something inappropriate after.
“Heh!” Fukaziroh slid her right foot out and turned in that direction, so her back faced him.
Nearly the entire audience assumed this was the start of an escape attempt. Of course, if she did so, he would catch her in moments and overpower her with the difference in size.
“Oh!”
Only one person noticed the truth behind the move.
She’s played fantasy VR games before! he thought. She knows how to use a long blade!
Turning her back to him was only the initial motion to swing a long and heavy blunt weapon.
“Hrraaaaaah!” she bellowed, pulling her left leg back and twisting in that direction, hurtling the SG 510 in a diagonal arc, up and over and down with ferocious speed.
“Huh?”
With perfect timing, it hit the man right across his left shoulder—a devastatingly powerful blow with the full benefit of momentum, strength, and velocity.
The upper half of the SG 510’s stock literally shattered the man’s collarbone to dust. Its impact continued to horrific effect on his ribs and sternum.
“Bwaaagh!” The man toppled over, a huge glowing gash of damage effects running from shoulder to belly. He stared up at the sky, wincing at his throbbing wounds, and saw a small shadow approach, its arms raised behind its head.
“Divine punishment to the enemies of womankind! Hi-yaah!”
“Huh?”
At a speed fast enough to leave an afterimage, she swung down her “sword.”
“Fuka? Where are you? You okay?”
When the pink smoke had totally cleared, pink Llenn looked around for her partner, P90 in hand.
“Oh, over here! See the black gun?” came a voice, just as a black gun stock came rising up over the jungle grass.
Huh? It didn’t look like Fukaziroh’s MGL-140. Llenn made her way through the grass, cautious for a trap.
“Hiya!”
“Ngfh!”
It was truly a pathetic sight.
Fukaziroh had a long, unfamiliar rifle held by the barrel with both hands and was swinging it down on her opponent, a blubbering bald man lying faceup on the ground.
She smacked his right hand with the stock, then swung it back up and went for the left next. Then the right ankle, then the left ankle.
“—Agh! —Agh! —Agh! —Agh!”
The man seemed utterly helpless, but blows to the outer extremities did not cause much damage, so the visual effects could not accurately portray his suffering. He was losing hit points, but death was far off. But the parts she was hitting had to hurt a lot even with the numbing effects the game applied. It was practically torture.
“Hi, Llenn—glad you’re all right,” said Fukaziroh with another upward swing. Llenn, who had no idea what was going on other than that her partner was perfectly fine and cheery, asked, “Wh-what’s up…?”
“Oh, I was just thinking, I could at least take one out myself!” Fukaziroh replied with a breezy smile. Then she glared at the man and said, “Go on! Just try to touch me and see what happens!”
She struck him again, bringing the rifle down onto the fingers of his left hand. There was an ugly cracking sound, and his fingers glowed red with the visual effect for damage. If this were real life, she would’ve shattered the bones in his fingers.
The shaved-head man looked up at Llenn and tearfully pleaded, “H-help me… I w-want to log out, but my left hand is…too numb… I can’t open…my window… P-please, just k-kill me…”
You shut your mouth! A tormenter of women like you doesn’t get to die easy!” Fukaziroh raged.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t do it, I won’t do it, I won’t do it!” he screamed at rapid speed, large tears falling from his eyes.
“…”
Llenn made eye contact with Fukaziroh.
“Okay, fine. You’re off the hook now. Ahhh, that feels better!” she said, lowering the SG 510 and tossing it to the side. The heavy-looking rifle twirled away and vanished into the heavy jungle.
Llenn placed the tip of the P90’s silencer against the man’s temple.
“Ohhh… I’m saved… Thank you, God…”
And with a single bullet, she gave the praying man peace.
“Well, I think that’s all of them, but let’s count!” Llenn said, beginning to number the bodies around them. The smoke had cleared, and the jungle was green again. It was also much more open around here than before, thanks to the hundreds of bullets that had torn the grass and branches to shreds.
She trotted from body to body, counting the floating DEAD indicators. “Eight, nine, ten…”
By the time she got to thirteen, Fukaziroh had recovered her M&P and had both MGL-140s slung over her shoulders. “There you go. That’s all of them, right?”
“You would think there’d be fourteen…,” Llenn murmured. “Oh! That’s it…”
She spun around, expression tense, and moved forward with her P90 at the ready. She was heading for the spot about ten yards ahead, where the dead bodies were overlapping in a pile.
“Hmm?” Fukaziroh followed her. Llenn stopped about four yards short, then started firing. Three shots at the dead body.
Corpses were indestructible, so the bullets wouldn’t do anything. It was just a strange kind of magical wall that absorbed all the impact of the bullets.
But this body was different.
“Yeow!”
It leaped up with a shout when the bullets hit and landed on its backside. It was the handsome character dressed in black fatigues, Clarence.
“I knew it!”
“Ooh! The possum routine!” the girls shouted. He was lying facedown atop another body, hoping that the floating tag would look like it belonged to him.
Clarence held his glowing, damaged hands up from a seated position and said, “Fine, fine, you got me. I give up, I give up!”
A handsome smile adorned his face. “As you can see, I don’t have a weapon. My main gun got shot in the battle, and I dropped it. I’ve got a pistol on my waist, but you’ll just shoot me if I pull it, right?”
“Of course!” Llenn said, her bullet circle trained on Clarence’s face. “I’m trying to save ammo, so I don’t want to waste any. I’d prefer it if you resigned.”
“Well, I’m in no place to argue. Actually, I was wondering if you wanted to talk for a bit? You girls are cute. And as it happens, I love-love-looove cute and powerful girls like you!” he said, his beaming smile not even trying to hide the fact that he was hitting on them.
“Ugh.” Llenn grimaced.
“Hey, he’s pretty funny! You always want one of these guys at a singles’ meetup,” said Fukaziroh in contrast, delighted. “But we’re not at one of those now, so it would be funnier just to shoot him.”
Llenn sighed and started to say, “I’m going to shoot you now, so don’t take it pers—” but she stopped.
“What’s up?” asked Fuka.
“Hmm?” mumbled Clarence.
Llenn pointed at the stomach of his black outfit. “H-hey… That p-pouch…” There was a long and thin pouch there, also black. “What’s inside?”
“Huh? Oh, this? May I move my hand?” he replied. Llenn nodded and tipped the muzzle of her P90, too.
“If you’ll pardon me, then,” he said, slowly lowering his right hand. When it got to the height of his shoulder, it suddenly sped toward the pistol holster on his waist to draw it.
Sh-pow!
Llenn’s P90 shot first. The muffled gunshot was still piercing and high-pitched.
“Yeowwww!”
He was a quick draw, to be sure, but Llenn was obviously faster, given that she already had the gun pointed at him. The 5.7 mm bullet pierced Clarence’s hand, causing him to drop the FN Five-Seven.
“Well? Are you satisfied now?” Llenn asked, pulling back with an expression of equal parts anger, embarrassment, and scorn.
Clarence turned his head to look at Llenn, beaming from ear to ear. Even though he was clearly getting dopey and lovesick about it, the frustrating part was that even that made him look handsome.
“I’m so satisfied! Whoo-hoo! That was thrilling! Hee-hee! Beautiful!” he said, suddenly in more effeminate tones.
“Wha—?”
“Huh?”
Llenn and Fukaziroh were both struck by this unexpected shift in behavior—in a bad way.
“Mmm, yes, girls give the best kisses! I just hate how rough and sloppy guys kiss!” Clarence giggled to himself. He was really enjoying this.
“…”
Kissing…guys?
It went so far over Llenn’s head that she just froze in place, like a little pink statue with a gun.
With her typical country charm, Fukaziroh said, “Wait, what does that mean? You usually kiss guys…? Does that mean what I assume it does? Like, homogenized milk without the genes? A tomato short of a BLT?”
But now it was Clarence’s turn to look confused. “Huh?” He looked between the alternately frozen and confused Llenn and Fukaziroh. “Oh! Oh, I get it now—sorry, sorry! I didn’t explain that part. Of course!”
“Explain what?”
“I’m a woman. My avatar’s pretty masculine, so I settled into talking like a guy to match it. I’m pretty flat, but I can show you my boobs. Oh, actually, this way is faster.”
Wha-wha-whaaaat?
As the stunned girls watched, Clarence produced an electronic name-card display, the VR equivalent of a business card.
It said it right there. CHARACTER NAME: CLARENCE. SEX: FEMALE.
“But in real life, I like both boys and girls,” Clarence said, unprompted.
At last, Llenn recovered her wits. “Er… Please don’t talk about real life here,” she pleaded.
“What?! Why not? Why don’t the three of us get some tea sometime soon? A virtual girls’ day out! There aren’t enough girls in GGO! C’mon, be my friend!”
“Y-you don’t know what we’re like in real life! We could be fifty-year-old grannies. You might find us totally unrelatable.”
“Oh, I don’t care! I’m a humanist—I just love people! Please! Since we’re here, why don’t we form a squadron of just girls? Let’s do it!”
Would you just resign already? Fukaziroh grumbled to herself.
“W-well anyway, I’m just going to borrow these magazines…,” said Llenn.
“Please, be my guest.”
Llenn opened her own window. She turned it to her inventory and started to pick up the pile of magazines to transfer them over.
“Taaa!” Clarence suddenly shoved her over, interrupting the process. Llenn’s small body was pushed close to Fukaziroh, who pointed her MGL-140 at Clarence.
“Get down!” he—no, she—shouted. Something in her expression convinced them to obey.
Llenn craned her neck to look up, while Fukaziroh was facedown in the dirt.
“Win this thing—you got that?” Clarence said in the end, her body covered in bullet effects as she died.
Then they heard the high-pitched gunfire.
It was the crisp automated fire of a 5.56 mm assault rifle. The sound came from the north, about fifty yards away. As soon as they were aware of it, a number of bullet lines appeared among them.
“Hyaaa!”
“Crap!”
Bullets screamed over Llenn and Fukaziroh as they lay back flat on the ground.
We talked for too long! Llenn thought, cursing her poor judgment again.
If a new enemy squad was coming from the north, it could be no one else but MMTM. They had approached silently through the jungle.
If Clarence hadn’t noticed first and pushed her over, Llenn would have been killed just now, too.
Thank you! Thank you so much! she swore in her heart.
“The ammo magazines!”
Just ten feet away, next to Clarence’s body, were the dozen or so magazines she hadn’t been able to store in her inventory. If she didn’t get them, she didn’t think she could last in this event. But…
“Let’s go, Llenn! We gotta retreat!”
Fukaziroh was right. When they could barely even look up without getting hit, the obvious move was to make use of the jungle to escape.
Fwip-fwip-fwip. Covering fire zipped over their heads. They could feel the breeze.
If their opponents moved even a little bit, they’d be able to get a clear shot on the girls. They needed to act now, or they’d lose out forever.
They had to escape.
But all that ammo…
After three seconds of indecision, a bullet line appeared right on Llenn’s face. It was coming down at an angle—the shooter must have climbed a tree.
“Aaah…”
There was no way for her to dodge.
The line vanished at the same moment that they heard a distant, heavy thump.
This came from the opposite direction of MMTM’s shooting, a deep animalistic boom from the right side that roared over their heads at supersonic speed.
“Wh-what…?”
“Just go, Llenn!”
Fukaziroh grabbed Llenn and dragged her away from the spot. The booming reverberated, joined by a faster, high-pitched semiauto rattle.
“There!”
“Oomf!”
Fukaziroh with her superhuman strength dropped Llenn into a low rut in the jungle, where she could listen to the fierce battle going on over them in relative safety. At last, she regained a measure of calm.
She’d heard that booming sound before.
Quite a lot, in the last Squad Jam—and at very close range.
Which meant…
“Fuka! Can you shoot normal grenades?”
“Sure thing! Should I go for a full six? Which enemy, left or right? Or both?”
“Left! They’re fifty yards away. Spray ’em over a span about thirty yards wide!”
I’ve got her right where I want her, thought the leader of MMTM when he caught the hateful little pink one in the scope of his STM-556.
But right before he fired, the “man” with her had noticed and knocked her over, leaving him as the only kill. He should’ve just splurged and fired a grenade, but it was too late for regrets now.
Instead, he had his teammates provide covering fire while he monkeyed his way up a nearby tree for a better shot.
“Gotcha…”
He had her cute little face right in the middle of his scope—when an even worse foe appeared and started firing mercilessly on his location.
If he hadn’t quickly jumped out of the tree the second he heard the first shot, it would have been him riddled with holes at this moment, rather than the tree trunk.
That deep sound could belong only to a Russian PKM machine gun. Based on the locations from the last scan, he could guess which team this was. That’s right—the Amazons.
They were firing from less than a hundred yards away, but the jungle was so thick that the bullet lines were the only visual evidence of it.
“All-out withdrawal! Don’t bother checking them back—just get away! Watch for the lines!” he commanded. His teammates responded immediately.
Facing the enemy, all six backed away, tightly dodging the lines when needed.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!
Several seconds later, a series of explosions happened right where they’d been shooting from, grass and trees exploding in a horizontal line. If they’d evacuated five seconds later, they would have suffered colossal damage.
“Yikes! That was a close one! What the hell?!” one of the squad members exclaimed.
“That’s the Denel grenade six-shooter. The little one’s partner had two of ’em. I wanted to get rid of her before she could shoot, but I failed,” the leader said. “We can’t handle both them and the Amazons. Sadly, we’ll need to leave the dome.”
He checked his watch as he ran. It was 1:49 and forty-five seconds.
A man in the pub who’d been watching this string of fierce, crowded battles in the jungle exclaimed, “Holy crap, this is awesome! I gotta go tell those idiots over there watching the other battle what they’re missing!”
He raced over to the crowd observing Pitohui’s battle and cockily stated, “Why didn’t you watch Llenn fight?! She’s incredible! If she keeps going like this, she’s gonna win this thing by a mile!”
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