CHAPTER 16
Memento Mori
2:13 PM.
In the bar, the screens showed an aerial view of the log house.
It was a two-story building about 150 feet across the facade, thirty to fifty feet from front to back, and twenty-five feet tall. The walls and roof were built with astonishingly large logs. Each looked to be over two feet in diameter.
Thinner logs were cut to make the gabled roof, which sported four brick chimneys. There were four balconies in a line on the south face of the second floor.
Around the log house was a pleasant lawn, and there were even a number of gravel walkways leading out from the eastern side. Little streams trailed alongside the paths, widening into ponds here and there.
But as the camera approached, something rather mysterious came into view. There was actually a copious amount of steam rising from the streams and ponds.
Someone in the audience noticed and wondered, “What is that? Hot springs?”
“Bwa-ha-ha. Well, it ain’t gonna be that!” Someone else laughed.
At that precise moment, one of the ponds erupted with water. A fountain nearly two feet wide and seventy feet tall burst upward, spraying water and steam all around for ten seconds before it abruptly ended.
The crowd was stunned. Eventually, someone commented, “Uh… If only it were a hot spring. That’s a geyser. Those things that shoot heated underground reservoir water out at regular intervals.”
“Ohhh! So the reason there’s actual plants around that area is because of the thermal energy and the presence of water.”
“I’m guessing that the log house is actually meant to be a hotel for geyser tourists. And the number of chimneys makes sense, too. There are as many rooms as chimneys on the second floor.”
The crowd was rather observant, it had to be said.
“Bellhop, see the M party to their room!”
On the screen, PM4 was just arriving at the building. The small man with the boxy UTS-15 shotgun on his shoulder went to the front door, in the center of the building. He did a quick check for traps, then pulled on the large door. It wasn’t locked.
M was next, still carrying the woman in his arms, followed by the tall man who put the weapons into his inventory, and lastly, the large man with the MG 3 with a silencer. There were no enemy attacks as they filed in.
“They’re all in the log house,” Tohma reported. Boss passed on the message to Llenn again.
“Got it!” Llenn said. Boss passed that back to the surviving members of SHINC: Tanya, Tohma, and Rosa. They didn’t attack, but both LF and SHINC had a handle on what PM4 was doing.
Llenn and Fukaziroh were about a third of a mile north of the log house. They were lying flat on the grass, spaced about ten yards apart. Llenn was wearing her green camo poncho again, to keep from being spotted and sniped at.
Boss and her team were on the opposite side, a third of a mile south of the log house, where they could see the entrance. Aside from Tohma, who was on her knees, the rest were on the ground to protect against M’s deadly lineless sniping.
Llenn used her monocular to observe the north exterior of the structure in great detail. From here to the building, the land was basically flat, covered with grass about knee-high. There were no obstacles, impediments, or cover.
The log house was built on a concrete foundation about four inches thick. There was no large entryway on the north side, just side doors on each end. This side of the building seemed to be a straight hallway on both floors, with small windows set at regular intervals. By the standards of GGO, it was a remarkably well-kept building. Not a single window was broken.
The lights didn’t seem to be on inside, but the windows didn’t have curtains, so it was probably bright enough already.
In her ear, Llenn heard Boss say, “Like we planned, we’re going to put on full-bore covering fire. Just wait for us to get to a better distance and position. I’ll send a signal.”
Llenn gave her an affirmative and relayed the message to Fukaziroh.
Oh, geez… Thank you so much, she thought. The members of SHINC were surely crawling forward at great risk for her sake at this very moment.
While the location may have changed, the plan was the same. While SHINC fought fiercely from the south, Llenn would approach from the north and somehow find a way to defeat Pitohui.
But this time, Llenn had to charge into that building.
The issue was where to enter.
The log house’s windows were very small and set into tough, thick wood frames. They looked like the type that pulled upward, rather than sliding to the side.
The idea to get a running start and break through the window, like she did in the very first battle, was probably a valid one, but it was too likely to end in failure. She could envision herself bouncing off the window frame or colliding with the logs because she got the angle wrong.
That left only the side doors at the corners of the building.
“I’m going in the door on the west edge of the building. Don’t shoot that way,” Llenn told Boss and Fukaziroh, waiting for their acknowledgment.
There was no more smoke screen to be had; she would need to sprint straight for the building. If anyone in PM4 foresaw their plan and set up in wait, she’d be running right into a hail of gunfire.
“Whew…,” she exhaled, squeezing the P90 under her poncho and looking resolute.
Through her comm unit, she heard Fukaziroh reassure her from ten yards to her right. “Relax, relax. You got this,” she said. “You’re still the lucky girl, Llenn. That sniper took Pito all the way down, so she’s easier to beat, and now that you’ll be fighting indoors, there’s no imbalance in range between their rifles and P-chan. Being tiny and fast is a huge advantage indoors. Now you just have to charge in safely! Go on, then! Get in there!”
Llenn stared ahead. “All right… Thank you for everything, Fuka. I mean it. Thanks for coming this far with me,” she said to her trusty partner.
“You bet. It’s the final battle. Go give it everything you’ve got. Finish Pito off.”
Llenn took her eyes off the log house and glanced over to Fukaziroh on her right.
Pitohui had told her so many times that when you were on a lookout, you should never make unnecessary eye contact. It was absolutely forbidden—but this one time, before her big charge, she wanted to see her partner’s smile.
Yes! I can do this! she was about to say, as soon as she could see Fuka.
“Huh?”
But then she saw, past the grass and Fukaziroh, a long stretch of brown land.
And off in the distance, a dust cloud rising.
At first she thought it was just a whirlwind. It simply looked too big to be real. You couldn’t kick up that kind of dust from one or two—or six—people running together.
It took three seconds for her to realize her mistake.
“Ah!”
As it grew larger and larger, she could see that the source of the rising dust was cresting the horizon and approaching.
Three vehicles were racing side by side across the dry earth.
When she saw the boxy silhouettes of four-wheel-drive vehicles, Llenn shouted, “From the west! A caravan, a car, a van!” She was so agitated that the message slipped away from her.
“Bwa-ha!” Fukaziroh snorted.
“Whaaaat?” Boss reacted belatedly, taken aback by the corny wordplay. But when she tilted her head to look in the indicated direction, she too saw the rising dust.
At about the same time, Tohma lifted her upper half just a bit and turned the scope of her Dragunov, which had been trained on the windows of the log house, toward the western horizon.
“Cars! Three off-road vehicles! They’re coming this way—I mean, toward the log house!” she reported. Just then, a bullet from a second-story window of the building struck her in the right shoulder.
“Kyah!” she shrieked adorably, lying down flat.
There hadn’t been any line at all, which meant it must’ve been M. The elite sniper’s legend still lived. He could fire instantly at any visible body part and hit it, too.
“Dammit!” Boss swore to both parties.
“Now we’re cookin’!”
In the bar, the screens showed a trio of 4WD vehicles kicking up a dust storm as they drove.
They were vehicles well-known for their transport use in the American military: Humvees. Sand yellow in color, fifteen feet long, seven feet wide, boxy and flat in shape.
The Humvee’s large tires and high suspension gave them a distinctively high minimum ground clearance. They could drive over terrible conditions without worrying about contact with the underside of the body.
There were many different types of Humvees; the ones on the screen were M1114s used by the US Army, covered with thick armor. There was a round opening in the roof with a rack for an M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun and armor sheeting to protect the gunner. It was also surrounded by bulletproof glass, so you could survey the surroundings without exposing yourself to danger.
Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to give players extra weapons, so there were no M2s on these vehicles.
The three Humvees formed a diagonal line, spaced apart by twenty yards, roaring over the dusty earth and sending up plumes of dirt. The aerial camera view made it look like either an off-road rally or a commercial for a new car.
You couldn’t personally own a vehicle, so like the hovercraft and trucks the last time around, someone had to have found these on the map.
The glass reflected enough light to hide the occupants, but it was pretty easy to imagine which team was driving them. There were only two other surviving teams at this point.
“It has to be them!”
“Let’s go, boys! We’re going to neutralize that log house!” shouted the leader of MMTM, the team that raised hell on the hovercrafts last time, as he sat in the passenger seat of one of the Humvees.
He was a long-term GGO player who had been active in the community since its early days. As was mentioned in the pub, he’d been in a squadron with Pitohui back in those days.
He never cheated on GGO. He stayed faithful to his game and avatar, until he had the skill to reach the final match of the Bullet of Bullets tournament, which decided the game’s strongest player.
Now he was excited about fighting alongside his teammates in Squad Jam. With a boyish smile, he exulted, “This fight is the real final battle for this competition! So don’t hold back! Ammo, courage, life—don’t waste an ounce of any of it!”
“Ah-haaaaa! It’s you guys agaaain! Get the hell outta heeeeere!” bellowed Llenn at the three Humvees, a true scream from the soul. It did not stop their advance.
When she spotted them, they were still over half a mile from the log house, but that gap was closing rapidly.
Then the shooting started.
Deep, heavy consecutive fire from a distance—that was Rosa’s PKM. It was on the far side of the log house.
She saw the glass break on a west-facing window upstairs as bullets flew out from it. She hardly heard any sound from that one, for some reason, but the series of glowing tracers made it clear that this was a machine gun, too.
PM4’s machine gunner was set up toward the back of the room to hide the sight of the muzzle and flashes. He started blazing at the Humvees at full strength.
“Oof…”
If Llenn had charged to the western door as she’d planned, the shooter would have spotted her, and she’d need to weave her way through that gunfire. So in that sense, perhaps the cars had actually saved her? That was a complicated feeling to have.
Llenn took out her monocular and turned it to the approaching Humvees.
Please! Take ’em out! she wished, hoping the two machine guns would mercilessly punch those vehicles full of holes. If they did, she could start her mad sprint immediately afterward.
Through the little magnified circle, she could make out the cars’ details much better.
“Huh?”
The bullets that landed on the vehicles’ bodies merely created sparks and did nothing to slow down the Humvees as they continued their approach. Llenn recalled how Pitohui had told her that car exteriors and glass windows were very flimsy and couldn’t actually stop a bullet.
“No fair!” she yelled, completely forgetting that MMTM had lamented the same thing about her own team the last time.
“Dammit…,” groaned Boss, staring through her binoculars from the other side of the log house.
She didn’t know a lot about military vehicles, but she knew enough to tell that those four-wheel-drive armored vehicles weren’t going to blink at some measly 7.62 mm machine-gun fire. If only they still had the anti-tank rifle, they’d give those damn things a show.
But there was no point lamenting it now.
Tohma gave herself a med kit after M’s shot took her health down a third, then she aimed her Dragunov sideways at the Humvees. “Why, you—!”
“No. Don’t shoot,” Boss warned. “You too, Rosa. You’re just wasting your bullets, sadly. Get yourself ready to shoot them when they leave their cars, and watch out for M’s sniping.”
The booming PKM immediately went quiet.
Tanya’s weapon couldn’t even reach that far. “So what are we going to do? At this rate, they’re going to raid that log house. Based on what we saw in the video of the last Squad Jam, MMTM is really good at indoor combat! If they manage to beat PM4…”
She didn’t finish that sentence, but everyone understood what she meant.
All of Llenn’s hard work would be for nothing. Boss didn’t say it out loud, because the other girl would hear, but she did wonder, Does this mean Llenn was the unlucky girl this time around?
“Go, go, go! Bust into the place!” cheered the crowd in the bar, which tended to side with whichever team was doing the most attacking at any one time.
“Crush all three teams in one go!”
“Show us the kind of men you are!”
They were all pulling for MMTM now.
As if the excitement from the bar was somehow reaching them, MMTM’s mad burst continued.
“That’s LF on the left and SHINC on the right, but you can ignore them now! There’s less pushback from them, so we’re busting into the log house! We know PM4 is licking its wounds!” the leader explained.
Based on the locations from the last scan, they were definitely taking refuge in the log house, which would give them a big advantage.
The fact that they were fighting back with only a single machine gun said that their combat ability had taken a major hit. There were no guarantees on the battlefield, but whenever you made a decision, it was always wiser to assume the higher probability outcome as your base assumption.
“I’ll shoot a grenade through the upstairs window before we go! No need for fire support. Keep your heads inside! After that, it’s our bread and butter: indoor combat! We’ll clean the place out!” the leader ordered. His comrades chirped back.
A pair rode in each vehicle. Driving in the left Humvee was a man with an Italian ARX160 assault rifle. His name was Bold. He had the darkest skin and the most fit physique of the team. Add in his short dreads, and you had the most exotic member of the team.
He was the only member whom Llenn had killed in the previous Squad Jam. Naturally, he was fuming for a chance to get his revenge.
In the passenger seat next to him was a guy with a German G36K. His name was Lux, and he was the biggest gun freak on the team, as well as the one who got knocked off the hovercraft and drowned at the bottom of the lake last time.
He was of average height and build, not particularly notable in any way, but just for fun, he wore sunglasses with a single connected lens this time around. It couldn’t be “too sunny” in GGO, so sunglasses weren’t necessary at all. He was just trying to be cool.
The middle Humvee was the one the team leader was sitting in. Driving that vehicle was a man named Summon, who used a Belgian-made SCAR-L assault rifle. His avatar was the buffest of them all, and it made his gun look tiny. But he was also the newest member of the squadron—and the weakest character. For that reason, he was sometimes charged with being Jake’s ammo carrier.
The driver of the last vehicle was the other G36K guy, Kenta. He wasn’t very tall, with short-cut black hair, and along with his name, his avatar looked Japanese. But his avatar name didn’t come from his real name or anything like that. It was actually derived from his favorite fast-food fried chicken.
They liked to call him Chicken as a nickname, but in fact, he was a bold fellow who regularly charged into dangerous locations.
And seated in the back, rather than in the passenger seat, was Jake, the team’s only machine gunner and de facto second-in-command. He was very thin and didn’t seem strong on first glance, but that was the magic of the avatar system. In fact, he had the highest strength stat of the team.
MMTM’s main trade was 5.56 mm assault rifles, so Jake’s HK21 7.62 mm machine gun was valuable firepower. His HK21 also had a variable scope. It was the rare kind of machine gun with semi-auto fire, so that meant he also filled the role of the team’s only long-range shooter.
He stayed in the back seat, preparing to use the roof mount to fire. On the other hand, it was difficult to do so when the high speed over a rough surface meant it was all he could do to keep his balance without a seat belt, so that he didn’t smash into anything.
“Eep!”
Based on the experience last time, they had learned that if you survived for a certain length of time, vehicles would start appearing to make traveling to other targets easier. So MMTM had kept their eyes open at all times for vehicles, even while on the move.
At last, they found what they were looking for.
Around 2:03, after they had raced through the hilly region to attack T-S, they spotted an object covered by a camo-pattern sheet at the bottom of one of the little valleys. They descended the slope and pulled off the cover to reveal three sparkling treasures.
The leader made an immediate decision: They would leave the retreating enemy atop the fortress walls behind and use this new mobility tool to lead a surprise attack on the three big teams. Beating the teams already in combat was how they would win.
They circled counterclockwise around the dome; at the 2:10 scan, identified the place where the three teams were engaged in a major battle; and took off at top speed to catch them.
Under her camo poncho, Llenn watched the vehicles racing along from her right to her left, dust flying behind them, and gnashed her teeth. “Dammit…”
Head down at her side, Fukaziroh added with frustration, “If only we were a bit closer…I’d blow up the ground right under their feet.”
The three cars were about to pass just a third of a mile in front of them. Neither of their weapons was going to reach that far.
If only it were just a thousand feet, Fukaziroh could have blasted them with twelve straight grenades. It might not have hit the vehicle body, but it might’ve succeeded in knocking a tire off.
Llenn was seized by an urge to run full tilt and attack the three Humvees, but she knew it would only get her killed. “Ugh…”
If one of them hit her, she was light enough that it might just knock her clean over those towering walls.
“M, Pito, run away!” she shouted, practically praying for the people she was swearing to destroy just moments ago.
The Humvees approached the log house for about six hundred feet. The machine gun firing from the second-floor window scored a number of hits on its armored body, creating quite a show of sparks, but eventually fell silent. Either it was out of ammo or overheated, or the shooter just gave it up because it was pointless.
Only in the last five hundred feet did the three vehicles finally slow down. The center one slowed down the quickest. From the armor-protected roof enclosure, a grenade shot forth.
“Ah!” “Whoa!”
As Llenn and Fukaziroh watched, the little black dot disappeared into the open window with admirable aim. A beat later, it exploded. Window glass and the frame itself blew outward and fell to the ground.
There was no way to tell how big the room behind it was, but if the PM4 machine gunner was still in there, he would’ve taken major damage.
The Humvees approached the entrance on the west side of the log house and stopped right next to one another. Frustratingly, they were even excellent drivers.
Promptly, the men exited the cars. They wore blocky patterns of green camo. That was indeed MMTM’s look, as Boss had explained.
There was another sound of PKM gunfire, and a Humvee burst with sparks.
Quickly and carefully, one of the men approached the door and opened it, one man watched the upstairs window, and the remaining four slid right into the log house as though pulled by suction.
One of the two remaining men patted the other on the shoulder and passed by him, and then the last one went inside, too.
It took just seconds from when they stopped the cars next to the building. Not a single one of Rosa’s shots hit them.
“What are those guys, a SWAT team?!”
“They just slipped right in there.”
“That was too easy…”
The audience in the bar was stunned.
“Didn’t you see the video of the last one? Their battle inside the spaceship was like a model demonstration of interior combat. They eliminated blind spots, never stopped moving, and cleared out sectors one after the other,” explained one person, just as the camera switched to inside the log house.
It was placed above the entranceway, looking down the hallway of the first floor. It was much dimmer than outside, but not enough that it was hard to see anything.
The men of MMTM made their way down the hallway with its wooden floor and thick log walls. They held their rifles in compact positions and filed into a room directly on their right, one after the other.
The time was two fifteen.
“They got inside…”
M’s craggy face was etched with panic and frustration. He was in one of the guest rooms on the second floor of the building.
It was quite spacious, over thirty feet to a side. Along the walls were four sturdy-looking beds with wooden frames. There was also a heater in the corner near the window, as well as a closet and a sofa. Part of the room was a kitchen. Like all aspects of the building, it was beautifully preserved. It was practically ready to host guests even now.
This room was the one just to the east of the staircase in the center of the building. On the wall consisting of bare logs, there hung a large frame, containing a map of Geyser Park. It was an introduction of the area with all the grass and water to the east of the building, including how deep each pond was, how often each geyser erupted, and how high the plume would go—all in English, of course.
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