CHAPTER 17
The Demon Returns
The sound of the exploding plasma grenade that would put M at eternal rest came from outside the window.
“Huh?”
Even with his eyes closed, he could see the hit point gauge in the corner of his view. His was green. Pitohui’s was also green.
Then M opened his eyelids.
“Hang on—what exactly are you doing? Is this a double suicide? Where are we? Is this the play Love Suicides at Sonezaki? Is this the song ‘Roppongi Suicide’? No, we’re in GGO!”
It was the avatar of the woman he loved, glaring at him.
Pitohui was sitting up in the bed, her arm stretching out of the window.
M figured it out. She had regained consciousness and hurled the plasma grenade out the open window, and it had exploded down on the ground outside.
“Ohhh!” M exclaimed, eyes wide and tears of joy streaking down his cheeks.
“You moron!” Pitohui swung a fist at him.
“Augh!” She hit his left cheek.
“You clown!”
“Gmff!” A backhand caught his other cheek.
“You dipshit!”
“Gahk!” She drove a palm blow right into his chest. His large body hurtled backward, and he fell, rattling the floor.
“I was having a really nice dream, you know!” Pitohui protested, hopping out of the bed and standing before M. “You little—!”
She pressed her foot to M’s crotch and jammed it down hard.
“Gauuugagagagagaggg!” he shrieked, flopping his heavy limbs like he was being electrocuted. “Gugugugagagagaaah!”
“I never said you could kill me!”
“Gagagagagagah!”
Fortunately—very fortunately—this scene was not broadcast on camera, either.
A few seconds later, Pitohui had taken her foot off M and picked up her KTR-09 from where it was left next to the bed.
“Just the two of us, huh? Enemies?” she asked.
“MMTM. Downstairs. They’re coming right up here soon,” M said, totally straight-faced. He stood up and drew the HK45 from his thigh holster. Nothing about his manly demeanor now suggested the kind of pained writhing he was doing seconds ago.
“So let’s kill ’em all!” Pitohui grinned. She reached behind her back, opening the top of a pouch back there and sticking her hand inside.
M asked, “What made it a ‘really nice dream’?”
Pitohui withdrew her hand from the pouch. “A dream where I was in Sword Art Online when it was deadly, going wild with my sword alongside my hearty fellows from the beta test!”
Pale light glinted off her vicious smile.
MMTM flowed up to the second floor and charged directly into the room just to the left, on the western side of the building. That was where the tall man had brought the beds from, so they suspected they would find the remaining PM4 members there.
But the spacious guest room was empty.
Jake stayed in the hallway, training his machine gun on the eastern end, while the rest went into the adjacent room.
Clear!
This one was also empty. The room was trashed because of the grenade their leader threw inside, but there were no bodies. There was no place to hide, either. The masterless MG 3 machine gun sat silent.
In that case…
The leader made a simple hand signal.
“We’re going into the rooms on the east side of the building.”
The bar, in fact, did see this part playing out.
Six men, their center of gravity low, proceeding down a hallway no more than seven feet wide, doing their best not to make noise.
GGO players did their best not to walk along the wall. This was because of deflections. When a bullet hit a wall at an angle, it generally flattened out and continued along the wall.
So MMTM continued down the center of the hallway in a single-file line. They understood and expected that if an enemy came out shooting, the man in the lead was likely to get shot. If anything, his body would be a shield to protect his team. The people behind him would eliminate the enemy.
Just two rooms remaining.
M and the woman would be in one of the two.
On the six went, without sound or words.
They wove their way around the hole in the floor where the enemy soldier had died and fallen earlier, adjusting their guns so they were all pointing at slightly different angles.
Taking point was the quickest member of the team, the non-chicken Kenta with his G36K.
Next was Lux, the man with sunglasses and the same gun.
The black man with the ARX160, Bold.
Beefy Summon with the SCAR-L.
Then the handsome team leader with a short-barrel model STM-556.
Lastly, skinny Jake brought up the rear a bit later, to watch their six.
It was close to twenty-five feet from the stairs to the first room’s door on the right side. The walls were round logs on either side.
Like deflections, the other big thing to be careful of in an indoor gun battle was wall penetration. As the name suggested, this was when bullets pierced right through walls and doors to hit you. In other words, a sudden attack from an invisible enemy.
It was possible to detect enemies on the other side of a wall in GGO with an item like a sonar sensor—or certain character skills that acted in a similar way. And there was always a good old trusty hunch.
But this effect was impossible if the player couldn’t reach their target, whether they knew their location or not. This depended on factors like the size of the bullet, the type of obstacle in the way, the width of the wall, and so on.
Rifle bullets had fearsome penetrative power and would easily tear through the walls of typical wooden homes, the same way that Jake had killed the guy upstairs through the floorboards.
But now there were huge logs over two feet thick on either side of MMTM.
It wasn’t completely impossible for any weapon short of an antimateriel rifle to break through that thick layer of wood, but it was very unlikely. Even if an attacker somehow succeeded at it, the bullet’s power would be greatly reduced and totally incapable of killing them.
In that sense, they only had to worry about either end of the hallway and attacks from the windows, making it a relatively safe trip.
Or at least, it should have been.
When Kenta had just three steps to go to reach the door, there was a ferocious burst of gunfire in the hallway.
Just ahead of him, the team leader saw Summon’s right flank light up with gunshot visual effects.
“Grnnf!”
His large body twisted to the right. There was a bigger flash of light, and the reinforced plastic stock of his SCAR-L split loudly. The bullet destroyed the stock and continued on to the person holding it.
His health promptly began to plummet. Once you’d seen this happen often enough, it was clear that this was the sign of an instant kill.
“Right! From the wall!” the leader shouted, breaking the silence. But even he didn’t know what had happened. It was an attack from the room, yes. But how had so many bullets split the thick logs and maintained their power?
Were the logs like movie props, fake and flimsy? Is that how they could be penetrated like this?
“Take this!”
Bold was ahead of Summon in their line. He turned to the wall and blasted at it with his ARX160, sending chips and shards flying. It clearly wasn’t punching through.
“Knock it off!” the leader commanded, right as the enemy’s fire ceased.
Summon, who had taken a ludicrous number of bullets to the gut, groaned “Sheeeit” and collapsed to the ground, landing right on his left shoulder insignia patch of a skull with a knife in its teeth. The DEAD sign appeared over his body.
At this point, the leader knew they needed to get into the room as quickly as possible to take out the two hiding in there.
As if to prove his point, the door in front of Kenta burst with holes. There were several shots all at once, which meant it was a shotgun from inside the room. There were three such blasts in quick succession.
“Tch!”
If Kenta had been one step, or even a half step closer, he would have been punched full of lead, too. He pulled back, yanking his G36K away. It was too dangerous to stand any closer.
At that moment, MMTM’s signature flowing movement came to a stop.
Bold ceased shooting and backed against the wall, leaning over to peer at the spot where his teammate had been shot. He quietly reported what he saw to his squad.
“It’s a hole!”
Damn, they got us good! the leader of MMTM swore silently, realizing what a simple but effective trap they’d fallen into.
PM4 predicted that they would pass down the hallway, so while the masked men were dealing with the enemy, the others had bored a small hole through the thin part where log met log. It wasn’t clear what method they had used. They couldn’t have had the time to do it with bullets, so perhaps there was a powerful electric drill inside the room. That plasma grenade explosion outside may have even been meant to hide the sound of it.
Bold kept his back pressed to the wall next to the hole and stuck the muzzle of his ARX160 into the hole. If they shot now, it would only hit the gun. He pulled the trigger and started firing.
It stopped after just two shots.
“Gah…?”
He froze, his face trapped in a mixture of anguish and confusion.
Then the leader—and everyone else aside from Kenta, who was staring at the door—saw something bizarre.
Bold, his back against the wall, his right eye wide open and glowing blue.
The light grew stronger, slowly jutting outward in a cylindrical shape. It stuck an inch out from his eye socket and came to a stop.
“Gaaaaaaaaaah!”
Bold’s face began to twitch and spasm. He released his gun, and the ARX160 hung there, muzzle stuck in the hole, part of the wall now.
The leader’s readout made it clear that Bold’s HP was dropping rapidly.
Oh… Shit… That’s what it is!
He was too slow to realize. This time he could only curse his own failure—there was no time left for admiring the enemy’s handiwork.
He had forgotten about a weapon that was easily capable of penetrating both a two-foot-wide log and a person’s head next to it. He just didn’t recall it because there was no reason that he would ever use one.
Even though in the recent third BoB tournament, some totally unfamiliar new player had caused such a stir with one.
It was an ultra-powerful, ultra-close-range weapon that did not exist in the real world.
A weapon that created a three-foot blade of light that severed anything it contacted.
A blade in a world of guns: the photon sword.
Bold passed away, and his legs lost their rigidity.
The photon sword slid out, and the ghostly pale light vanished from the hallway. The body crumpled to the floor.
The next moment, a bright circle was drawn into the wall. A circle about five feet across, in one single movement. Right in front of Kenta, at the front of the line…
“Watch out!” the leader shouted, just as the circle of wall attacked Kenta. The large, circular block of wood shot outward into the hall with tremendous force.
“Hwooah!”
It flattened Kenta against the far wall. Then an utterly ordinary hand grenade came flying out of the new hole. It landed on top of Kenta, who was trapped between the wall and the circle, and exploded.
Kenta’s upper half from chest upward burst out, pieces of him flying and sending glowing red polygons all over the hallway. The circular chunk of wooden wall split apart from the blast and crumbled.
A number of shrapnel pieces from the grenade struck Lux, who was closest. The force of the blast knocked his sunglasses clean off.
“Dammit!”
He didn’t cower away from the damage—he started firing the G36K he had propped against his shoulder, shooting directly into the room through the newly created hole. The team leader followed, aiming his gun at the hole, which was ten feet away at an angle, and firing while sidestepping to get a more direct shot.
At this point, their only option was to approach the hole, shooting periodically, and plunge through it to finish off the enemy. Better to at least charge in first and fight where they could see the other team, rather than continue to be ambushed like this.
From low in the hole, something rolled into the hallway.
It was black and round, like a small watermelon.
A huge plasma grenade, colloquially called a grand grenade.
A part of it was flickering, the signal that the activation button had already been pressed.
“Aaah!” “Wha—?!”
Lux and the leader yelped simultaneously. They stopped firing.
Are they idiots?! Do they intend to die along with us?!
He wondered whether PM4 had lost their wits. Plasma grenades were already overpowered enough in a cramped setting. And now they were hurling a grand grenade, with three times that power?
However many seconds the timer was set to, when it went off, it would destroy not only them, but whoever threw it on the other side of the hole.
Then it all clicked.
Oh…no, of course… They would do this. The madwoman Pitohui certainly would…
She wouldn’t think twice about dying in order to kill the enemy before her. He’d seen her do it multiple times back when he first started playing GGO.
She’s going to destroy herself and take us down with her! Dammit!
MMTM’s leader turned away, knowing that it was already too late. In doing so, he saw Lux cast aside his gun and throw himself on top of the grand grenade at his feet.
“So you don’t know, do you? Do you? That the Muramasa F9 has this handy feature!”
Her right thumb rolled a dial near the top of the grip to the left. The extended blade of light vanished, meaning they were grappling over a simple metal tube less than a foot long.
“Huh?”
He had no idea what she was intending to do. Then that bright bluish-white light reflected off his eyes again, brighter and richer than before.
Pitohui’s thumb turned the dial farther left, much slower this time.
“Wha…?”
Then he saw it.
From out of the cheap little tube held trapped between her hands, the same light was appearing from the hole on the opposite end.
Stretching and stretching, bit by bit, toward his own face.
“Wha—?! N-no… You can’t mean—?!”
This photon sword could extend its blade from the top or bottom of the handle. When that feature finally sank into his mind, all the hairs on his body stood on end.
“You’d better look out… It’s going to stretch more… Long…longer…longest…”
With each little twist of the dial, the blade inched out a tiny bit farther. If he tried to loosen his grip slightly, she would do the same in response, maintaining the precise angle of the photon sword.
“You… You madwoman!”
“Oh, stop it. I understand myself better than anyone else.”
“Do you find this fun? You monster!”
“I seem to recall someone asking me that earlier. Of course it’s fun! It’s the best! Are you enjoying this life-and-death battle? Well, are ya?”
All the while, the blade grew and grew…
“Pitohuiiiii!”
“That’s my name! Don’t—wear—it—out!”
The tip of the glowing blade touched his forehead.
“Gaaah!”
It made a nasty slurping sound as it burrowed into his head.
“Gwagagagaaaagagagagagagah!”
He was under such mental anguish that his face distorted to the point that his two eyes formed totally separate shapes.
“Sorry, what was that? I can only speak Japanese and English. You understand me?”
“Beeedophuuuuiiiiigh!” he screamed with the last of his life, the light corroding his brain. Suddenly, the strength left his arms, and they dangled at his sides.
“Oh no you don’t! No dying yet!” yelled Pitohui. She left the photon sword stuck a few inches into his head and grabbed his shirt with her left hand. “Yaaaaah!”
She charged forward with him. His back slammed into Jake, who had finally just gotten back to his feet.
“Now—it’s—over!”
She turned the dial to its maximum level.
With a fierce growl, the Muramasa F9 blazed out to its full length of over three feet long.
“Gahk!”
It went completely through the team leader’s skull and plunged through the left eye of Jake behind him.
From before MMTM’s charge at the final room to the moment the last two died, there was no other battle happening, so the entire confrontation was streamed on the screens in the bar.
Starting from the shooting of MMTM through the wall as they approached, the gruesome conclusion of the fight was less than two minutes later.
At first, the crowd was delighted with the outburst of combat and cheered lustily. It quieted down considerably about the time that Pitohui chopped off the fallen man’s head, and by the end, it was absolutely silent.
“Ugh.” The moment that MMTM was done for good, with the two men stuck together on the end of the same photon sword, someone commented, “You know those sardines they package by skewering them all through the eyes? Yeah, not gonna eat any of those for a while.”
“…”
There was one other person who witnessed Pitohui’s demonic rampage in silence, feeling more conflicted about it than anyone else.
It was the very girl who had entered SJ2 for the purpose of saving Pitohui—Llenn.
From a third of a mile away from the log house, she kept herself pressed down in a slight dip in the flat plain, hiding herself under a camo poncho, peering through her monocular.
“Oh… Yeah, they’re fighting in there…”
From the moment MMTM charged in, she had been relaying the status of the battle, as much as she could tell through the windows, to Fukaziroh nearby and to Boss on the other side of the log house.
“Okay, they’re at the stairs. There are two masked men upstairs— Oh, I think one just got shot!” she said.
“An explosion on the stairs! Was that a suicide attack? Self-detonation? But there are still six in MMTM…,” she said.
“Wow, the masked guy attacked them with a bed! And another bed! Whoa! The machine gunner’s running around below! He’s getting shot! He’s dead…,” she narrated, and so on in that manner.
At the point that the beds got mentioned, even Boss had to ask, “Is that supposed to be the name of a gun?”
Eventually, the six MMTM men, essentially unharmed, reached the room where Pitohui was likely to be hiding.
“Run away, run away, Pito, run away, just run away!” she muttered, more prayer than description, which wasn’t much help to the two girls listening to her.
But in a way, what she saw next was even more horrifying.
The members of MMTM were slaughtered one after the other, with hardly a chance to strike back. She could only watch through the monocular at the sight of Pitohui carving them up with her blade of light.
“Ummm, Llenn? What’s up? Did you fall asleep?”
“What’s going on, Llenn? What’s happening?”
But she couldn’t even respond to them. All she could do was stare.
The last two men were skewered through the head, and when the will-o’-the-wisp blue light vanished, they toppled to the floor.
“Eep!” She returned to her senses.
“What is it?” “Uh, Llenn?”
“Th-they got wiped out… Pito did all of them in…by herself…,” Llenn reported. Then she let her innermost feelings slip out. “Great. And I have to beat that…”
All of a sudden, her left wrist shook.
“Hyaaaaa!”
She mistakenly thought that someone had grabbed it—and briefly had a vision of Pitohui, a hallucination that the woman popped out of the ground and seized her wrist, grinning wickedly. Her heart leaped into her throat, and it was such a shock that the safety features of the AmuSphere nearly pulled her back to reality.
But when she looked again, heart pounding, it was just the watch on the inside of her wrist, telling her it was time for the scan.
2:20.
The eighth Satellite Scan of SJ2 was about to begin.
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