CHAPTER 13
SHINC Runs
Almost one hour had passed since the start of SJ2.
As she sprinted along, silenced P90 in her hand, Llenn learned from her watch’s vibration that there were just thirty seconds to go until two o’clock. She craned her neck as she ran, looking for the nearest place to hide.
“Found it!”
There was a small divot in the ground that any regular person would not fit inside, but Llenn hit the deck and did a feetfirst baseball slide. The friction of the soft dirt slowed her down until she fit perfectly into the space.
If she craned her neck up to look around, she could see the top of the dome, the upper part of the hilly area, and the snowy mountain, all at about the same distance from her. There were no humans around, including Fukaziroh.
“It’s time, Llenn. Are you ready?” said her partner’s voice in her ear.
“I’m good. I found a spot to hide. We’re sticking to the plan!” Llenn replied. Then she repeated, “We’re sticking to the plan.”
The sixth scan arrived at two PM.
“Whoo-hoo! We survived a full hour!”
“Yeaaaaah!”
“Bravo!”
“Hell yeah! Oh, hell yeah!”
“Yes, we can!”
The five members of the All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers cheered and roared. They had barely moved from their starting location in the hills. The first battle had taught them that they didn’t need to abandon an advantageous position.
In the last hour, they’d stayed at the top of a hill with excellent vantage. When they saw an enemy team approaching, they backed up a bit.
“Not yet, not yet…,” they urged, making use of what little patience they had. “Almost there… Almost there…”
They waited until the enemy crested the hill and came into view, then started down the other side.
“Now! Fiiire!”
“Whoooo!” “Yahoooo!” “Ryaaaa!”
They leaned into it and unleashed a long-distance machine-gun assault from their useful spot. Since these were machine guns rather than precision sniper rifles, it took a lot of bullets to finish off an enemy team.
But in addition to plenty of bullets, they were also equipped with spare barrels to counteract the issues of overheating and friction. They knew as well as anyone that a machine gun without ammo and spare barrels was useless.
They’d blast the enemy squad to smithereens, then wait again. Another enemy, blast, wait—for an entire hour. They had beaten three teams, which was an unfathomable leap after their last result.
Now the sixth scan was coming in. It was a very slow one from the north again.
They hunkered down in the cramped spot atop the hill like they’d done all the other times, watching their device screens closely to check out their surroundings.
The northern edge of the hilly area was their current location. The massive wall loomed behind them, blocking all passage in that direction. Since no enemies would come from there, they only had to watch in three directions.
They peered at their screens, looking for the closest squad.
“Huh? What is this…? Is this a mistake?”
There was one team listed north of them. If they touched the dot, it displayed the name T-S. But that was completely impossible.
“Man, I think this scan is busted.”
“Yeah. There’s no way that’s true.”
There were two reasons they could be certain of this.
For one, the giant fortress wall was north of them, and the five hundred feet of space in between was a gentle slope, of which they could see the entire length. If someone was approaching the spot on the scan, the guys would have to see them, unless they were dealing with the Invisible Man. Some turned to the north to check, just in case. No one was there.
The other reason was that the team named T-S had been in the far northwest during the last scan—in the middle of the town. It was at least three miles from there to this spot. So they ran through the neighborhood and over the hills at over eighteen miles an hour without being seen? It was impossible.
“What the hell is this? A system error in the middle of a competition? Talk about a motivation killer!” groaned the guy with the Minimi.
The one with the M60E3 said, “The server’s a computer, too, so it’s not perfect. You know how a machine gun will break down unless you give it enough TLC? That’s why I sleep with a model M60E3 air gun at home. I put it on the chair next to me at breakfast, and it watches movies at my side on the couch” without any apparent hint of irony.
“Oh, cool!” “That makes sense.” “I admire that.” “Nice one.”
It was the kind of team that would accept that as an answer.
“For the other survivors… MMTM’s on the north side of the dome. That’s about a mile and a quarter away. They’re coming this way leaving the dome. That’ll be our next contact. The others are too far,” reported the one with the M240B.
“The third-place powerhouse from the last time… Can we even beat them?” wondered the man holding the Israeli Negev machine gun.
“We’re fine!” replied the FN MAG user with supreme confidence. “We studied the footage of the last one, right? The HK21 machine gun is scary, but that’s the only 7 mm gun. The others are just 5.56 mm assault rifles. In open terrain like this, we’ve got an overwhelming firepower advantage!”
As his teammates murmured in impressed agreement, he continued, “We’re gonna protect this spot and be winners! Shoot us with your arrows and cannons if you must!”
Just at that moment, red glowing damage effects appeared on his back, legs, shoulders, and head.
“Hebwoebe?” he said—a word that did not appear in any dictionary in the world—and died.
The other four didn’t have the time to process why it had happened, either.
They, too, took a cavalcade of bullets to the back, losing massive chunks of HP until they died, one by one.
“Huh? Wait—what—?” stammered the last one, with the Negev. At the time he was eliminated from SJ2, only twenty seconds had passed since the first shot.
The All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers were out.
The scan was still ongoing, so the surviving teams were watching the screen as the white dot turned to gray.
“Huh? Wow, the machine-gun dorks just got wiped out,” one of the MMTM members noted with annoyance.
The team was checking on the scan from the transition into the slopes of the hilly area, keeping an eye on the horizon in the meanwhile. The hills to the north featured team T-S closing in on ZEMAL, so they were clearly the culprits.
“How did those idiots not notice someone right behind them…? Just when they lasted long enough that we were going to grace them with our attention.”
“At that close of a distance, wouldn’t they have already been in combat when the scan started? And maybe it just wrapped up now.”
“Or was it…a mutual alliance that broke down in betrayal?”
Each member had his own ideas and questions, but it was the leader with the STM-556 who figured out the trick.
“Nope. You’re all wrong.”
“Aw, geez.”
The audience in the bar was well aware of what the trick was already.
The T-S versus ZEMAL battle scene—more of a massacre, really—played out in its entirety for them starting at two o’clock on the dot.
There were no system errors in Squad Jam. The six members of T-S were indeed just five hundred feet to the north of ZEMAL. But none of the five Machine-Gun Lovers realized something very crucial: that the scan did not account for height.
On the screens in the bar, the camera looked downward from an incredibly high angle, taller than even the walls. Atop said walls was a concrete walkway about five yards across, with walls around three feet tall to protect against falling off.
And there were six people pointing just their gun muzzles over that wall and firing down at a distance of five hundred feet and a height of two hundred feet.
They were sci-fi soldiers.
They wore dull-gray armor made of unknown material all over their bodies, without a single square inch of exposed skin. They were completely armored from head to torso to thigh to shin to toe, even on all their joints.
And on their off hands, they each equipped a shield, a rectangular armored plate fixed to their upper arm. That way, they naturally covered their hearts whenever they aimed their guns.
Of course, they also wore what looked like space helmets. They had tough face guards that covered their cheeks, and goggles as well, so there was no way to make out their faces. It was as close as you could get in GGO to being perfect future soldiers.
In order to tell themselves apart aside from size, each one had numbers in a special font on the back of the helmet and the shield, from 001 to 006. The matching logo on the rear of each helmet was an orca whale bursting out of the water, sharp teeth exposed.
Normally, they used optical guns, but in this case, they were making a rare exception for live-ammo guns. Even then, they had chosen ones with the most futuristic looks.
The machine gunner had a 5.56 mm HK GR9. It was known for having a very rounded design, even down to the scope.
Four had Steyr AUGs and SAR 21s. These were both bullpup assault rifles, meaning that the magazines were located behind the grip. That made the overall length of the gun shorter than usual, but the empty cartridges also flew right past the shooter’s face, so in order to properly use it, you had to prop it on your left side to fire.
One had the HK XM8, an assault rifle that never left the prototype stage. It had a very curved silhouette, too, almost like a fish.
While they were all decked out in wild sci-fi gear, the actual abilities and overall power of the team itself were nothing to write home about.
In fact, they had lost to another no-name team in the preliminary round but won a spot in the loser’s bracket. They had lost because the other team took advantage of their weakness: Their heavy gear kept their defensive levels high but made their movement very slow.
But one of the six had pointed to the walls right at the start of the game and had said, “Hey! Do you think…there’s a place where you can climb up there?” and that had changed their fate.
“Y’know, if you look at the map, the walls are just barely inside the lines…”
“Since the first ten minutes are the easiest, why don’t we spend the time looking for a place to go up?”
“Sounds good!”
So they stuck to the wall and continued investigating near it…
“Found it…”
…until they found a hidden door. One of the members pressing around on it saw part of the concrete-like wall open up. It was impossible to see from a distance, but once close enough, you could tell that there was a slight gap. It seemed there was a similar entrance about every hundred yards or so along the structure.
On the inside was a small, dimly lit room with a spiral staircase that led upward. Obviously, they wanted to keep going as far as they could, and they climbed until they reached the top of the wall. At two hundred feet up, they had an excellent vantage point.
“Whatta view, whatta view!” exclaimed one of the team members in the manner of the notorious thief Ishikawa Goemon as he looked out on the dome, fields, and town.
“Hang on a second! The game designers aren’t doing their jobs!” yelled another one, staring at the other side of the wall.
They all agreed that it was an affront to their sensibilities. Outside of the specially designated map was nothing but clouds and space of the same color, both above and below. In other words, on the assumption that none of the SJ2 players would actually see it, they didn’t bother to add any graphics outside of the walls.
But why could they reach the top of the wall, then? Was there some kind of communication lapse between the map designer who placed the stairs and the design chief?
No, they must have assumed that no one would be stupid enough to actually climb up there!
No, they decided that this surreal sight was a prize for the person who was bold enough to reach this place!
Their debate took them to all kinds of places that had nothing to do with the actual SJ2 happening around them.
“Hey! We’re not just playin’ around here, people!” They realized this as the first Satellite Scan approached. They’d climbed to the top of the wall, but what now?
From up above, they could shoot downward, but only if their targets were within their effective range of four hundred yards. Were they going to have foes coming into that very convenient circle at regular intervals?
They were split between wanting to go back down and fight in the normal terrain and wanting to stay up there to shoot whomever they could, then wait until the numbers were thinned out to go back down.
The “Let’s Go Down” faction argued that moving atop the castle wall involved too much distance and effort. The “Let’s Keep Going” faction had noticed something, however.
It was a distant game item. Through binoculars, they discovered six bicycles, arranged to facilitate speedier movement atop the walls. That convinced the “Let’s Go Down” faction.
They chose to move around atop the walls, striking and escaping from danger. They made for a rather surreal sight: all sci-fi space battle armor and exotic guns, riding around on typical neighborhood bikes along an extremely tall fortress wall.
For a while, they had no enemies to shoot and simply enjoyed a breezy bicycle ride with breathtaking views, until finally, they had the All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers in their sights. They won their first fight with a one-sided attack just an hour past the start of the event.
“They went on top of the wall. They were in the northwest corner ten minutes ago, so they must have some way of moving around real fast. The machine gunners didn’t know that, and they got ambushed from behind,” said MMTM’s team leader. His members nodded along.
Jake, the one with the HK21, said, “They’d be a bad team to square off with then, yeah? Once they duck, there’s no way to aim at them from below.”
It was a good question. The leader patted his grenade launcher.
“So we attack from above.”
Back at exactly two o’clock.
“Checking the scanner!” Llenn called out, staring at the screen as she hid in the hollow.
Elsewhere, Fukaziroh, Boss’s team, Pitohui’s team, and every other living thing focused on the sixth Satellite Scan.
Even the patrons at the bar.
The scan scrolled down slowly from the north, first showing T-S and ZEMAL—and the destruction of the latter.
With the scene itself on display in the bar, some lamented the loss of the Machine-Gun Lovers, who had put up quite a good fight by their standards.
“Awww.”
“Darn…”
“They really did their best.”
The results of the scan continued to develop on a map screen on the monitors. SJ2 was heading toward its final act. The only teams left at this point were either very tough or very lucky, or even both.
After this scan, each team would actively and forcefully proceed toward its closest opponent to engage in battle. There was little reason left to wait. The fighting would get fiercer and, like the last Squad Jam, should probably wrap up within about thirty minutes.
Thus, in order to follow the remaining teams and their locations, the audience in the bar studied the scan just as hard as the players in the event did.
As the scan moved south, powerhouse MMTM showed up at the start of the hilly area, more than a mile south of T-S. Since there was no other battle happening, the screen showed them, zooming in on the smile of their leader, who was patting his STM-556 grenade launcher.
“Looks like MMTM’s locked on to the sci-fi boys.”
“We’ll see who’s on top: the guys with more skill or the ones who are literally on top…,” murmured the spectators.
Llenn’s team, LF, was next. They were about a mile-plus to the northeast (upper right) of the dome. On the screen, a tiny girl in pink huddled in a dip in the ground, watching her terminal.
“Hmm… They went way northeast after leaving the dome… They tryin’ not to hit PM4?” someone wondered. Of course, no one had an answer. The camera pulled out slowly, making Llenn appear smaller and smaller. It was just damp ground without any grass around her and no other players.
“How come the grenade-launcher girl isn’t nearby?” someone asked out loud. Again, no one could answer.
The scan crept south across the map, until another dot appeared another mile-plus to the east of Llenn. The screens in the bar automatically showed the team name, so they knew it was KKHC. The dot was still moving, running to the northeast in the direction of the snowy mountain.
The monitor promptly switched to show a green-haired girl wearing a camo jacket with a realistic tree pattern. The camera angle showed only her back and head, from a close angle.
The shape of a black, crude rifle was visible behind her.
“Oh! The girl who survived didn’t resign yet!”
“The Blaser R93 Tactical 2? That’s a pretty neat gun to use.”
“Go on! Get your revenge!”
The audience could keenly remember how the rest of her team had been slaughtered, which invested them in her struggle.
“Yeah, but what can she do on her own…?”
“Plus…she’s running in the opposite direction, isn’t she?” someone else noted. They couldn’t see her feet, but the changing scenery behind her made it clear that she was running straight up the mountain, pushing farther away from any other team.
“She’s gonna run and hide until there’s just one other team left. Then she can snipe from the mountaintop.”
“I guess. There’s not much else you can do with just one member.”
Farther south, the scan showed the location of PM4—the team with M, the four masked men, and that dangerous woman. They were over a mile to the east of the dome, right around the entrance of the valley between the two mountains, north and south. It was a good two miles from Llenn’s location.
Then the image switched to the team of six from overhead. Short grass covered the ground. It was the greenest place on the map, excluding the jungle inside the dome. Little brooks caused swampy marshes here and there, like a natural park. It would have been beautiful if they weren’t reflecting a dull, reddish sky.
There was one building among all the green. It was a two-story log house about twenty-five feet tall and over one hundred and fifty feet across. Literal log houses couldn’t get all that big in construction, but this was a big one. It was very well preserved for a GGO building, with glass windows that were actually still intact. The exterior was rather fashionable, like a fancy hotel.
The four masked men were about a thousand feet away from the log house. They were spaced thirty feet apart, down at the edge of the brush, watching the vicinity and ready to shoot at a moment’s notice.
The short one with the bizarre UTS-15 shotgun looked through a large pair of binoculars.
The tall and thin one who acted as a mule stood to the left of the large fellow with the MG 3 machine gun, ready to feed the gun its linked-belt ammo.
In the middle of them all was M, watching his device in a crouch.
The M107A1 antimateriel rifle that had wreaked such havoc earlier was placed before him next to the M14 EBR. He could pick up either one if needed.
The five men were wearing camo, so they were extremely hard to see among all the green.
As for the woman, she was facing the other way behind M, still dressed in all her gear with her KTR-09, pressed flat against the grass. The huge backpack stuffed with M’s bulletproof shield was placed in front of her.
Her right hand was on the grip, her index finger extended, but the gun’s safety selector was disengaged for automatic fire. She was ready for battle. Her expression was fierce.
“Oh? I figured that chick would be kicking back in confidence… I didn’t expect this,” said someone in the bar.
But another person said, “She knows the remaining teams are all tough cookies. She can’t be lazy. A single stray bullet can kill you in this game.”
“Good point. The mighty can’t afford to let their guard down.”
Six squads were left, and the last one to appear was SHINC. They were in a field to the southeast of the dome. It was about a mile or so to the southwest from M on a straight line. The area around them was all fields with long sight lines, but even the M107A1 couldn’t cover that kind of distance.
The screen switched to the women. The Amazons had flattened down in the middle of the field in an outward circle to prepare for the scan, so they could see around them.
From the prior scan, they knew it was unlikely there would be any foes to their south or west, but they were smart enough to stay ready.
“Those girls had the truck last time around for speedy travel. They must be ready for enemy teams to do the same this time.”
“Don’t act like that was some impressive nugget of knowledge. We all knew that.”
“Well, it reminded me that we haven’t seen any vehicles this time.”
“Good point. Either they haven’t shown up, or nobody’s spotted them yet.”
“What do you mean? You didn’t see those eco-friendly bicycles?”
“Do those count?”
On the monitor, Boss was glaring at the map in a crouch. Her brow furrowed as she frowned, then furrowed even deeper. Her face shot up.
That glare was trained on PM4’s location. A wide-open space of farmland.
The slow scan finally came to a finish, and the dots vanished, both on the devices and in the bar. For the next nine minutes, the only way to detect enemy location was by the naked eye. The tactical decisions of where to go and what to do were up to the squads now.
The patrons at the pub had their fun offering predictions, but as the battle royale approached the climax, everyone was in agreement.
They all thought that MMTM’s excellent teamwork and their leader’s grenade launcher would easily help them beat the team atop the wall, T-S.
Llenn was avoiding a battle with PM4, so she would keep moving until the next scan. Since their team was just a duo, they would wait for the bigger squads to become fatigued and lose members.
The lone member of KKHC would keep running and not engage in any more battle. She would wait for the very last team before she found an opportunity to snipe.
SHINC and PM4 were going to clash in an open space at this rate. But they were both smart, so they would avoid going into the open, and they’d try to flank the other instead.
And none of the audience members had the slightest inkling that all those expectations would fail to come true.
After a full minute, the scan was over at last.
“Let’s do this, everyone! Get your heads in the game!” shouted Boss, tucking her device into her left shirt pocket.
“Daaa!” said Tohma, the black-haired beanie wearer with the Dragunov sniper rifle.
“Ushh!” grunted the red-haired, freckled mama with the PKM machine gun.
“Let’s go!” yelled Sophie the dwarf, prepping her ammo box nearby.
“Yes, Boss!” said the blond Anna, the other Dragunov sniper.
“Uh-huh!” murmured Tanya, the silver-haired fox with the Bizon.
Boss hoisted her silent Vintorez sniper rifle and said, “Okay! Target PM4! Commence Operation Snacks!”
In the bar, they saw SHINC start marching.
The six women put distance between one another and began to walk or trot at a decent clip. Rosa with her PKM was in the center with Sophie at her side, then the two snipers on either side of them, then Boss in the middle, then Tanya at the rear.
They knew their foe was far off, so they didn’t split into two teams, so one could move while the other took point. All six were moving as one. Toward…
“Huh?”
“Oh!”
Based on the locations of the dome and the snowy mountain on the screen, it was most definitely in the direction of PM4, their biggest enemy. They were heading straight across flat, clear land, with no cover or obstacles.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login