CHAPTER 12
Shirley
Just before 1:50, lying on the ground on her back, Llenn listened to a large woman with braided pigtails say, “We didn’t do this to save you. We did it because it looked like the best chance to take down MMTM, a fearsome enemy. And then they got away. So I guess we’ll call this a temporary cease-fire between us. It would be easy to kill you, but I want to do it right, in competition.”
All that Llenn could say in response was “I owe you.”
She took out the Satellite Scan terminal. Her watch had finished buzzing to warn her of the upcoming signal, and it was now exactly fifty minutes past the hour. She decided to stay down while she checked the scan, rather than sit up. It was a slow one, coming up from the southwest.
“Fly faster! You call yourself a satellite?! You don’t have to deal with wind resistance!” she scolded it pointlessly. “There we go!”
It showed Team PM4 still alive in the southeast portion of the map. Nearby were seven gray dots.
“Oh… Thank goodness,” she said, clutching the device to her chest like she’d just gotten a message from her sweetheart. The possibility remained that their only current survivor was M, the leader, but Llenn believed that Pitohui was still alive. She knew M and Pito could do it. They had defeated seven teams at once.
“That’s…scary, though. Now I have to find a way to beat them…”
The boss of Team SHINC glared at her own device while her squadmates watched the jungle closely.
“That’s a bunch down at once! Ten whole teams in the last ten minutes!” she announced happily.
Seven of those teams were the alliance that Pitohui’s squad had eliminated. The other three were singlehandedly dispatched by Llenn, with the exception of MMTM’s kill shot on Clarence.
That left seven surviving squads.
Llenn and SHINC were in the dome. MMTM had retreated quickly and were now moving at top speed on the north exterior. There was Pitohui’s PM4, of course. And as for the other three…
There was a marker reading KKHC east of the dome, between the two mountains. She didn’t recognize that name. In the northern hilly terrain was ZEMAL, the Machine-Gun Lovers, still alive. They were doing well this time.
The last one was named T-S, and they were located very far away in the northwest, practically against the wall of the map.
Fukaziroh reloaded both her grenade launchers with normal ammo and stood. She looked up at the very large woman with the Vintorez silenced sniper rifle. The little blond girl grinned and said, “Hey, you big lug! You must be the boss. I’m Fukaziroh, but you can call me Fuka out of affection. Nice to meet you!”
“Why, pardon me for not introducing myself earlier, you sassy little blond child. You can call me Eva or Boss, whichever you like. And thanks. Whatever the details are, Llenn wouldn’t have been able to compete in SJ2 if it wasn’t for you.”
“No need to thank me. We can have a proper introduction after this whole thing is over.”
Fukaziroh had heard all about the real identities of the other team from Karen, but she knew that mentioning that inside the game would just make things awkward. When Boss grunted and nodded, Fuka added, “Thank you so much for helping us out of that pinch! I’ll make it up to you later with a direct delivery of lethal grenades.”
Then she side-eyed Llenn, who was putting away the Satellite Scan terminal. “Hey, Llenn! I’m holding this she-beast back with my scintillating conversational skills! Now’s your chance! Grab the ammo!”
“Thanks, I will!”
Llenn bounded to her feet with the strength of a grasshopper and raced over to Clarence’s body. At last, she had the magazines she needed: fifty rounds each of P90/AR-57 ammunition.
“Eight, nine, ten…”
Twelve in all. Six hundred shots!
“Oh, yes… ‘You got new ammo magazines’!”
She’d brought 800 rounds into the event, and she was down to 450 now. What a boost this would be. Llenn could practically cry, she was so happy. A triumphant little fanfare played in her mind.
Now she had 1,050 shots on hand. She was even better equipped than she’d been going into Squad Jam. Llenn happily stuck six of the magazines into her hip pouches and put the rest into her virtual inventory.
“Thank you… You really helped me out,” she said to Clarence’s dead body. He—no, she—was faceup with arms outstretched, face frozen in a blissful expression.
Llenn remembered that she’d lost 20 percent of her hit points. Deciding that it was better to take the excess healing in order to reduce the risk of an instant kill, she used the emergency medical kit on her wrist. Her body was briefly enveloped in light, then her HP bar flickered to indicate an ongoing state of healing. It would take 180 seconds, three full minutes, for the process to complete.
She walked back to Fukaziroh and Boss and looked up at the large woman. “Thanks for saving me, Boss,” she said, with a bow.
“You’re welcome,” Boss replied happily. “Well, since it’s been long enough, shall we have a real fight now? We could do it here or find another place. Anywhere we can be sure other teams won’t interfere—”
“Sorry, now’s not the best time,” Llenn interrupted, to Boss’s surprise.
“Huh? Why not? You said the next time we met, we’d compete for—”
“I’m sorry… I just…can’t…tell you why…”
Llenn grimaced. She didn’t want to get those poor high schoolers involved in some kind of ugly real-world situation.
But then Fukaziroh said, “Well, Llenn has to beat Pitohui, or something bad’s gonna happen. If Pitohui dies without winning SJ2, she’s gonna die in real life, too. And Llenn’s the only one who can stop her.”
“Wha—?!” Llenn yelped, her mouth as puckered as a fresh-boiled octopus.
“You’re rivals, right?” Fukaziroh said. “C’mon, let’s have some faith in them.”
There was no other battle happening at this time, so the virtual cameras were following the conversation. The audience couldn’t hear the words, but they could see Llenn and Fuka and the members of SHINC huddling up for a serious talk while there were no other enemies around.
“What’s going on? They started talking out of coincidence—you think they’re gonna team up next?”
“Well, Llenn was whispering something into the ear of the last person earlier.”
“That was thanks for receiving his ammo, right?”
“I thought…Llenn might actually have kissed him on the cheek…”
“When you dedicate yourself to being that much of a perv, it’s almost admirable…”
In the wake of all that blistering, white-knuckle combat, the bar was in a daze. Some were ordering fresh dishes to replenish their hunger. Following the ten-minute waiting period, more and more dead players from SJ2 were returning to the bar, too.
“Those stupid Amazons! If they don’t win now, I’m gonna make sure they pay for it!” snarled a sniper with an SSG 69.
“You can do it, Llenn! I wanna see you win again!” cheered a guy from the team of optical-gun shooters from the train station who had fallen in battle to Llenn and Fukaziroh.
The carefree mood lasted for a good two minutes, and then Llenn bowed deeply on the screen. Was she thanking them for saving her team?
Then Boss reached out to Llenn. Big Boss and her big hand enveloped little Llenn’s small one. They clasped them in a firm handshake. With the stark difference in their sizes, it made for an odd image.
“Oh, I guess they settled up. What’s gonna happen now? Think they’ll fight it out?”
But to that fellow’s disappointment, there was no battle. The two teams waved and went their separate ways. The Amazons went south, and Llenn’s duo went east through the jungle. Soon the screens were showing nothing but a scene of inert dead bodies lying in the chaotic midst of tamped-down grass.
“I thought they were gonna join up. Guess they’re just going off to do their own things,” said a man chugging a beer. “Not that that team would ever join forces with another,” he added.
Back in time for the 1:50 scan, M reported, “Llenn’s team is still alive. They’re in the dome. Three dead teams around them. SHINC is nearby, so maybe they teamed up.”
“That’s my girl!” Pitohui beamed as the scan concluded.
“Seven surviving squads. MMTM went north of the dome. ZEMAL’s in the hill area, T-S in the northwest. Closest to us now is the team in the valley. KKHC. We’ll go down the slope and beat them,” M said in his usual officious tone.
“Roger that. Off to take a hike, then,” Pitohui drawled.
“…”
The other four men maintained their silence and descended the mountain, heading northwest—toward the area with all the blue.
Pitohui’s team’s next target, the squad named KKHC, was watching the fifth scan come in from a small patch of woods.
Like Shirley, the four men on the team had outfits that looked like real tree patterns—but their personal appearances were wildly different.
One was a cool-looking middle-aged man with a receding hairline. He was the team leader, just because he looked a bit older than the rest.
One was a black man, which was a fairly common sight in GGO.
One was a tall white man with golden hair.
And the last was small with black hair and looked just like a typical Japanese person.
The team of five (including Shirley) learned that just about all their nearby foes were gone. They used their comms to talk.
“This is wild. That contender team, PM4? They wiped out seven whole teams in ten minutes, with just the six of them… I can’t even imagine how they did that,” the leader marveled.
“What do we do now? If we keep running and hiding like this, we might not lose, but we’re not gonna win, either.”
“Agreed. Should we make our move, Leader? Just remember, the closest enemy is none other than PM4.”
“I can’t see us beating them…,” remarked the other three men in turn. As usual, Shirley maintained her silence.
Suddenly, the squad leader said, “Hey, guys, I’ve got an idea. Just hear me out. I think we might be able to ‘win’ this thing.”
From 1:50 to 1:55, the mood in the bar continued to be muted and lackadaisical.
“No battles…”
“I’m fine with that. When it’s just nonstop action, even I get tired out.”
Some of the audience members were taking advantage of the lull to relax after the last ten minutes of absolute bedlam.
Without anything else to show, the camera followed teams on the move. Llenn and Fukaziroh had passed through the jungle and out of the dome. Now they were on the east end, at the three-o’clock position.
At the same time, SHINC was leaving the dome, watching their surroundings carefully. They were straight to the south, essentially in the same spot as where they entered.
Then the camera showed another team. It was four men and a woman, running through a farm field broken up by a little brook. Everyone watching noticed something was wrong. They couldn’t help but notice.
“What the hell?” someone asked, speaking for the rest of the crowd. “Why aren’t they carrying guns?”
“Hostiles. Five. One thousand yards. Running this way,” said M as he looked through his binoculars. Crouched nearby were three masked men carrying their guns—and one man without anything in his hands.
Lastly, there was Pitohui, who joked, “Five peas in a pod. And what peashooters are our peas shooting?”
They had descended the mountain and were now in a varied area crowded with flat farmland and little bunches of woods and brush. The roof of the massive dome was visible in the distance.
M had his M14 EBR hanging around his neck on a sling and a huge backpack over his shoulders, watching through the binoculars apart from the rest of the team.
“They don’t have anything,” he replied.
“Huh?”
Three minutes later, the five had run at a full sprint to stand before Pitohui.
It was Team KKHC. Four men and one woman, all wearing the same boots and brown pants and jackets with a camo pattern that resembled realistic trees—yet with no weapons in their hands.
The live camera filmed the interaction, even though there was no fighting.
On one side were Pitohui, M, and the three masked men set up to fire their guns at the drop of a hat. On the other was a man from the five-man squad who appeared to be their leader, doing all the talking.
Though the contents of the conversation were unknown, the audience in the bar had an idea about it.
“Ahhh, I get it.”
“They’re making a proposal for the endgame.”
They assumed that the five-man team was suggesting PM4 join forces with them.
“I’m surprised the chick with the ponytail didn’t just waste them all when they approached.”
“She was probably interested in hearing what they had to say.”
“So even a demoness can understand words, huh? By the way, I just have to ask—do you really love jerky, or what?”
“Hmm. I don’t think it’s necessary to fight alongside one another for now. Plus, we’re trying to win this event. If we join up with you, and we end up being the final two teams left, what then? Do we just start shooting at one another, right then and there?” Pitohui asked the five, and in particular, their older-looking leader.
“Honestly, we’re willing to resign and hand you the championship in that moment. This is a squad decision.”
“My goodness. So you didn’t sign up for SJ2 with the intent of trying to win?”
“That’s right. We’re just testing ourselves. As a matter of fact, we’re a squadron of hunters who use guns in real life.”
“Ooooh. That’s interesting.”
It was a safe bet that anyone who willingly talked about their real-life details in a VR game just wanted to brag. Pitohui’s engagement with that statement prompted the squad leader to tell her lots of stuff.
Everyone in their squadron was a hunter living in Hokkaido. They had hunting licenses in real life, so they normally used the game to practice and then went into the great outdoors in the fall and winter.
“So we’re pretty confident in our marksmanship. We’ve got good aim without having to rely on any dumb old bullet line. In fact, we sniped three guys earlier without them noticing us. I bet you folks can’t even imagine being able to snipe long-distance without a bullet line to help you,” he said, proud in ways both good and bad.
“Why, I’m amazed,” Pitohui lied. Neither M nor the masked men said a word.
Then the leader bragged about how high-spec the rifles were that they had stashed away and how excellent the aim of his teammates was.
“So we can snipe and back you guys up. It’ll give you an overwhelming advantage in battle. What do you say? Think of it like hiring mercenaries. Why don’t we go and be champions and runners-up?” he suggested.
“I understand your proposal,” Pitohui said. “At first glance, it’s not a bad deal.”
“Okay. And?”
“But I’m afraid I have to turn you down. When I put this squad together, I had an idea in mind. I thought, ‘If I lose with this lineup, then I’ve really failed.’”
“I see… That’s too bad. Well, I can’t force you, if that’s the case,” murmured the leader of the team of hunters. “Tell you what. Let’s make a clean break of it. We’ll go vanish into that overgrowth over there,” he said, pointing to a group of trees over two hundred feet to the northwest. “After that, we won’t make contact until the next scan. We’ll swear on our pride as gun-owning hunters.”
“Okay. Then we’ll stay here until we can’t see you anymore,” Pitohui replied. She turned to M and the masked men who’d been watching the horizon and said, “You all heard that. No shooting. A real man keeps his word.”
They grunted brief acknowledgments.
“They’re true warriors. Well, best of luck to us both,” the leader said, then turned on his heel and started walking. The three men who looked worried at the turn of events followed after him, as did the green-haired girl.
Pitohui watched them go, and at about a hundred feet, she waved her left hand. “Is that far enough?”
She picked through her menu and selected an automatic pistol called a Springfield XDM. The XDM floated in the air until Pitohui grabbed it with her other hand. She extended her arm—and in the next instant, she yanked back the elbow of the arm holding the gun with tremendous speed.
It was so fast, it practically left an afterimage. The inertia of the motion pulled the slide of the XDM back. It sprang back forward, loading a .40-caliber pistol bullet into the chamber.
This was the kind of one-handed pistol reloading that only real tough guys could do in real life. To pull it off in GGO required a huge strength stat.
“Shall I start with the one on the left?” Pitohui wondered, lazily pointing the gun at the back of the tall man on the left end of the line. She fired with one hand.
“Huh?” wondered the audience watching the slack scene play out.
“Huh?” wondered the man who got shot at the same moment.
“Whoopsie, not quite.”
Pitohui’s first shot only hit the man in his left shoulder. She took closer aim this time and fired the XDM. The second shot sank directly into the back of the blond man’s head. It was a good enough shot that even a weak pistol hit was lethal.
Naturally, the other four turned around in shock. “Wait, wha…?”
They saw Pitohui clutching a fist to her chest and aiming a black pistol with her other hand, and a bullet line extending in their direction.
Pow.
This time it was a black-haired man who was the target. He took a bullet to the collar.
Pow. Pow. Pow.
The first one didn’t kill him, so next came the cheek and eye and forehead.
The team leader watched his second comrade’s HP bar plummet as the man himself toppled to the ground.
“Hey! What in the world are you doing?! You promised!” he bellowed. A bullet entered his wide-open mouth. “Glrrk!”
The inside of his mouth glowed with the bullet-wound effect, and he fell backward.
With her gun aimed in one hand, Pitohui gloated at the dying opponent and said, “Well, I’m not a man!”
“This is like target practice.”
“Looks more like an execution to me,” muttered some men, watching the not-even-a-battle on the monitors. Three men were dead in seconds, leaving only one man and a woman. Once the second member had fallen, the survivors wised up and started sprinting for safety.
“No time to pull their guns out of the inventory, I guess…”
It wasn’t clear what weapons they had, but it would take a good ten seconds for them to produce the guns, load them, then aim and fire back; flight was the only option in this situation.
There was another crisp pow, and the fleeing man’s left leg lit up with a bullet effect. He stumbled forward and suffered a second shot, this one hitting him on the fingers of his left hand.
“…”
Shirley watched her fallen companion in silence.
“Run!” he urged, but she did not. Instead, she rushed to the fallen man, crouched, then got down on the ground. She went to lie down on top of the man—who was about her same size—so that her back was resting on his stomach. Then she grabbed his thighs and bolted to her feet, carrying him behind her as she ran.
“Ooooh!”
Pitohui was still firing away one-handed, until the target got a distance of forty yards away, at which point she added a steadying hand for better accuracy.
She spread her feet apart perpendicular to the target, holding her arms in front for balance…
Pow.
The bullet was perfectly accurate. It landed in the spine of the man Shirley was carrying. It took two seconds for his HP to drop, and then a tag reading DEAD appeared over him with a little chiming sound.
But Shirley kept running with him.
“Oh dear.” Pitohui kept firing the XDM.
It produced a series of pops, emptying golden cartridges to the right. The shots flew with unerring accuracy, but they hit only the man’s corpse.
“That bitch! That bitch! That bitch!”
Nobody in SJ2 had wanted to participate less than Shirley.
Her name in real life was Mai Kirishima. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman in Hokkaido making a living as a nature guide and hunter. However, unlike Karen, she was not born and raised there; she hailed from the heart of Tokyo.
Ever since she was a child, it had been Mai’s dream to have a job involving nature. So she enjoyed outdoor activities like camping and mountain climbing, and she even practiced some horseback riding. She’d been an active teenager, preferring to spend time outdoors rather than dress up.
When she got into college, she joined an outdoors club that participated in all kinds of activities. On the recommendation of an older girl, she got a shotgun license and a hunting license and started hunting right at the minimum age of twenty.
After college, Mai’s hopes came true, and she found a job as a nature guide in Hokkaido. She got to help show tourists and mountain climbers the great outdoors. That was her job in the spring, summer, and fall. When tourism dried up in the winter, she switched to hunting Yezo sika deer for fun and profit.
In 2018, eight years ago, the laws on guns and weapons were reformed, relaxing the requirements to own a rifle from “at least ten years of continual shotgun ownership” to just three years. Because the deer population had exploded recently, leading to increased damages, the government needed more hunters with powerful rifles to help curb their numbers.
With increased interest in wild game and an improved public image of hunters, this helped bring fresh blood into the aging hunting population, including more women. In fact, the term hunting girl had become commonplace.
Mai got more and more experienced with age. In the first three years with her shotgun, then the one and change with a rifle, she had bagged a number of deer.
When they had the time, Mai and her hunting companions traveled by car or foot or skis in search of targets to take down and prepare. Once they had some quality deer meat, they could sell that to high-end restaurants in the big cities that served more exotic game.
It was in the midst of this fulfilling time in her life that one of her hunting partners brought up the topic of VR games and GGO last summer, in 2025. VR was practically the same as the real thing, he’d said, and they had realistic models of real-life guns in there.
You could practice shooting in the game, and aside from the 3,000-yen monthly connection fee, it didn’t cost extra, and there were no shooting accidents. In America, they actually used it as a method to practice hunting—though the targets were monsters instead of animals.
There were even clay shooting ranges in GGO, so you could shoot discs if you wanted or even do classic bird shooting with a shotgun.
So the younger hunters, who had less resistance to the idea of picking up an online VR game, began checking out GGO. Within just two weeks, they had even formed their own squadron abbreviated KKHC, for Kita no Kuni Hunter’s Club, named after their “northern country” home.
As more of the younger folks started it up and recommended it, Mai eventually got roped into GGO, too. Naturally, it was her first VR game. She’d never even played a regular video game before, and she wasn’t too keen on the idea.
Mai’s avatar was Shirley, a well-endowed woman with green hair. That was a nickname that a friend in middle school had given her once. It started by changing the mai character she spelled her name with from “dance” to another mai that meant “rice,” which by free association turned into shari, the word for vinegary sushi rice. From there, the vowels were extended into the Japanese pronunciation of the name Shirley. She was embarrassed to be called by the name in public back then, but she had no such problem in this alternate-dimension world.
As for GGO itself, Mai had to admit that it was useful when it came to practicing your shooting. In Japan, the only places you could shoot your gun were at shooting ranges or in hunting areas. Also, the distances at shooting ranges were fixed, so you couldn’t go closer or farther away.
On top of that, you were only licensed individually to your specific gun. It was absolutely forbidden to shoot another person’s gun. The law even stated that you couldn’t “test-shoot” a gun, the way you could test-drive a car before you bought it.
But in GGO, you could shoot any gun anywhere you wanted. Real guns and bullets were re-created in exacting detail, so you could test all kinds of things, without any fear of accidents or injuries. Therefore, it worked well as a way to shoot a wide variety of guns and practice firing from different positions and different distances.
GGO’s special “busybody” assistance tool, the bullet circle, was both good and bad, but as long as you didn’t touch the trigger until you were going to shoot, it didn’t matter. The hunters eventually picked up the knack of firing without the tool.
In the game, animals like deer, bears, and wild pigs showed up as zombie-like monsters. Their actions were very similar to the real-life animals, so even chasing and shooting them in the game was a beneficial way to practice hunting. You just couldn’t eat these ones.
So Shirley and her friends got better at shooting and hunting in GGO. They—or she alone—would choose terrain that most resembled their local Hokkaido and go hunt monsters there. These would be hilly areas, forests, and snowy mountains. Sometimes they would walk long distances, and sometimes they would wear skis to track and hunt their prey.
In this year’s winter season, she felt the benefit of all that practice.
In order to produce the tastiest sika deer meat, you need a one-hit kill shot on the head or neck, where there is little edible meat. This is called a clean kill.
Compared to pampered human beings, wild animals have a far greater resistance to pain, and they will desperately run for safety even after being shot. The increased circulation decreases the quality of the meat and, in a worst-case scenario, might leave nothing that can actually be used after death.
Also, bullet wounds in the guts will cause damage that splatters various bodily liquids around and contaminates the meat, leaving it inedible.
Of course, shooting through the head or neck is far more difficult than hitting the body. The hunter’s rule is “Don’t shoot unless you’re sure you can hit it,” and that often means not taking a shot that is lined up and ready.
In the latest hunting season, they found that their clean-kill rate was far higher than before. It was clear that practicing in a virtual reality setting had a considerable effect on the outcome. Mai was grateful that she had started GGO and realized she shouldn’t be so picky and judgmental about things.
All until one of her companions texted NOW THAT THE HUNTING SEASON IS OVER, EVERYBODY WANNA TRY OUT THIS EVENT CALLED SQUAD JAM?
Until that point, they had studiously avoided any kind of man-on-man combat in GGO. Their reason for playing was to practice hunting and shooting, and given that they actually owned real guns that could easily kill people, the act of intentionally attacking another person was a huge taboo.
GGO was designed to get players to kill one another, but simply by never attacking anyone, they were able to avoid just about all PvP combat. If another player or squadron attacked them during a hunt, they just ran away, simple as that. If they couldn’t get away, they stashed their weapons in inventory space to protect them against the random-drop penalty for dying, then logged out on the spot.
In GGO, if a player logged out anywhere outside the safety of town, their body stayed put for some time, and if it got killed, they’d lose some valuable experience—from the avatar only, though. But since they were doing this for player experience, that wasn’t a problem for them at all.
They would just say “I bet that attacking team feels really disappointed right about now” and laugh it off.
But despite having successfully done it this way the entire time, now they were embarking on the insane choice of proactively entering a team battle royale event against other players.
Mai was utterly annoyed by the idea and assumed that her squadmates would never go along with it.
“Sounds fun! Let’s do it!”
“I’ve been wondering if we’ve got what it takes for the real thing.”
“I’m in! What about you, Shirley?”
To her surprise, out of the group that had the time for it, she was the only one who didn’t show any enthusiasm for taking part. She suppressed her anger and typed a very calm and polite response that expressed her concerns about the SJ2 question.
Instead, she got an aggravatingly patronizing response: “Really? That’s what you’re worried about? This is just for fun—you don’t have to take it seriously. A game’s just a game. If anything, I think it would do you good to participate in this, just to make it clear where the boundaries are between real life and a game.”
She thought she might burst a capillary in her brain. Mai actually considered cutting off all ties with them, but they were both valuable companions in real life and her seniors, with ample experience and knowledge. And in even more practical terms, it wouldn’t be easy to cut them off and lose the valuable winter income she received by hunting as a group.
“C’mon, join up! We’ll have five if you’re in, Shirley! Four’s just not enough!”
“We’ll buy you a bowl of ramen with extra pork!”
“And throw in an extra piece of your favorite cake, too!”
She’d been planning to skip out by faking illness or making up some other errand to do, but the cheerful, happy-go-lucky way her partners begged her to go overrode her own concerns, and she had no choice in the end but to reluctantly agree.
But secretly, she swore to herself, I’m going to make up a dumb reason for not firing a single shot, and I’ll drag them down with me!
If she simply said “I’ve never shot a person before, so I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger,” they wouldn’t realize she was actually sabotaging the team.
The day of the prelims arrived, much to her chagrin. Shirley and her four friends did not have combat gear, so they went in their usual virtual hunting outfits.
Upon calm consideration, it seemed ludicrous that they, with no combat experience at all, would have a chance at beating any other team that signed up for a competition like this. So Shirley expected they would get easily defeated in the preliminary round. Once they got thrashed, her friends would see the light and never be interested in a PvP event again.
But instead, their opponent engaged in a most incredible and unfathomable course of action.
All six from the other squad charged at them, bellowing and holding up photon swords—those sci-fi blades made only of supercharged light. And Shirley’s team was made up of people who were “only” good at firing their guns. And fire they did, using their practiced technique of avoiding a bullet circle and giving their foes no bullet lines to dodge.
The unfortunate squadron of swashbucklers lay dead on the ground after exactly six shots, all pierced through the chest. Shirley could not for the life of her understand why they chose to use lightswords and charged in full view of their opponents’ guns.
In any case, their team made it through the preliminary round. Now Shirley had to participate in the big event—so she decided to be as useless as she could here, too.
She didn’t fire a shot in the first battle and even exposed herself to harm by pretending to search for the enemy, hoping she’d get shot so she could leave early. But nobody shot at her.
For some reason, none of the enemy squads approached them after that, either. As they stayed in place, waiting to snipe from cover, they missed ample opportunities for battle, until there were just seven teams left.
Then their squad leader suggested teaming up with one of the contenders and made contact with them, only to be turned down.
“That bitch! That bitch! That bitch!”
The tattooed woman named Pitohui had shot at their backs. During her escape, Shirley had heard the sound of a bullet at supersonic speed whiz past her ear for the very first time. She ran like the wind through the weaving red bullet lines, grappling with the terror of possibly being shot at any moment.
Shirley didn’t know how long she’d been running anymore. The next thing she knew, she was facing nothing but a snowy mountain ahead.
“…”
She’d picked up her squadmate, intending to save him, but now he was nowhere to be seen behind her. She couldn’t even remember dropping him.
On her right, she could see an enormous dome; on the left was a rocky, wooded mountain; and stretching onward through the grassland between them were her footprints. She looked to the upper left and checked on their hit points. All four of her teammates were dead, including the one she’d thought she’d saved, and now the leader symbol was on her name. It seemed like a miracle that she hadn’t suffered any damage at all.
“…”
Shirley sat down out of sheer mental fatigue. The ground around her was damp with snowmelt, and her butt squelched as it landed.
“That bitch!” she snarled, gnashing her teeth hard enough that anyone present would have heard it. Her rear and hands were all muddy now.
“…”
Then the tension drained from her face, and she looked at the sky. The wind had stopped. The clouds were still, weighing heavily just overhead.
“Ahhh, forget it… Now that I’m the leader, I can just resign and put this whole stupid event behind me for good. I’ll just tell them, ‘You all died, so I figured it was a lost cause…’ And I’ll be able to get through it without firing a single bullet, just like I wanted…”
She lifted her muddy left hand and swiped at the air. A game window appeared, popping up an item list for quickest access. Shirley started to push it aside so she could reach the button to resign—when a particular graphic and string of text caught her eye.
“…”
It was a picture of a creepy-looking rifle, with a large scope and a stock that looked like it was broken in the middle. Like some kind of mutated fish that lived in polluted waters.
Below the image, the text read BLASER R93 TACTICAL 2.
It was a high-precision German sniper rifle that used 7.62 × 51 mm rounds. It differed from the normal R93 hunting model that Mai used only in that its stock had been modified for better sniping. The normal model didn’t exist in GGO, so she chose this one to be her weapon, since it essentially fired the same way.
It also had power.
The power to stop any animal, no matter how tough, if it struck the right spot.
The power to help even a weaker woman like herself defeat a much larger opponent.
“…”
All she had to do was summon the resign command and hit the YES button, but Shirley’s fingers stopped, hovering in midair.
“Her,” she muttered with utter loathing. “That woman… She’s…not human. She’s a pest—a beast that only causes harm…”
She touched not the RESIGN button but the R93 Tactical 2. Light gathered in the middle of the air and began to form the shape of the rifle.
“Ah!” Shirley gasped, smacking her own cheeks. The mud on her hands splattered against her pale skin, and she wiped it across the bridge of her nose with one swipe. Then she reached for the rifle hanging in the air and clutched it to her chest.
“That pest…”
She pulled the bolt handle back and forward again. The straight-pull action, a notable characteristic of the gun, made a sound that suggested smooth, high-quality precision.
“…will be exterminated.”
The first round was loaded into the chamber from the magazine.
With a bestial look, the woman with mud streaked across her face smiled and exposed her teeth. “I’ll finish off my prey with a single shot.”
She got to her feet and returned the way she’d come, taking her own footprints back.
“…”
But then she stopped.
Shirley slung the R93 Tactical 2 over her shoulder and glanced at the watch on her left wrist.
1:59. One minute until the next scan.
She turned around on her heels and took off running at full speed in the opposite direction of Pitohui, toward the snowy mountain.
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