CHAPTER 3
It Was an Island. And Then…
Llenn opened her eyes to see a shoreline.
The only things that filled her vision were majestic, roiling waves. They crashed heavily on fierce rocks about a hundred feet ahead. It looked like the Sea of Japan in winter.
The color of the water, whatever they would need to melt to get it this way, was a dull, poisonous-looking gray. The sky hanging above it was also gray, with a reddish tint.
The weather in SJ was poor once again. There was also wind blowing, at not inconsequential strength. It mostly buffeted her from the seaside, but every now and then it changed directions, just enough to stay uncertain.
“Ahhh…”
Llenn stood there, admiring the crashing waves like they belonged to some traditional enka ballad about loneliness, then turned away after a good five seconds. The land behind her was essentially flat and wide open. There was nothing but dirt ahead, without even any grass. The soil was dark brown.
In the distance, she could see a great number of little dot-like objects. They looked artificial, but they were too small for her to make them out at this range. As for what was beyond that, she couldn’t even see. The land lost profile, eventually blurring into the same dull sky color.
Characters in VR games had excellent eyesight by default, so this was clearly designed to be indistinct on purpose. If visual range was defined as how far one could see through the atmosphere, then it was currently at about a mile and a quarter.
Right next to her, Pitohui called out happily, “All right, let’s kill ’em!”
Naturally, her teammates were teleported very close by. Llenn craned her neck and saw the other three right there.
M was peering through the scope of his M14 EBR, checking the land for any sign of enemies. He’s cautious, all right, Llenn thought. There was no getting anything past him.
Fukaziroh, meanwhile, was throwing rocks into the ocean. She’s having fun, all right, Llenn thought. She was not getting anything past anyone.
“Okay, people! Gather round and let’s sit,” Pitohui called out, like a teacher on a field trip. They followed her lead and got down on the ground.
The slaughter of SJ3 was about to begin. Upon teleporting onto the map, all teams were placed at least a kilometer apart, or about six-tenths of a mile. Even that was within range of large-caliber long-distance sniper rifles, so you couldn’t be careless. It would be embarrassing if Llenn died right off the bat before she could actually fight Boss, her entire reason for entering.
It’s been so long since I was in battle, my instincts are rusty, she realized, once she noticed that she’d been staring dully out at the sea.
“Bring up the map, M,” Pitohui commanded.
In Squad Jam, the first ten minutes were always about getting your bearings before doing anything else. Some teams took the opportunity to just charge straight in, blasting away, but they did not last long. You had to cover the basics first.
“Roger that.” M touched his Satellite Scan terminal and brought up a floating map hologram about three feet to a side. They could all look at the map on their own devices individually, but it was easier to do this with the holo-map when no enemies were around.
So this was to be their battlefield. The rules of the event stated that this would be an arena exactly ten kilometers to a side, around six miles, but nothing else would be known until you were within the map.
SJ1 had been in a place surrounded by unnatural, sheer obstacles.
SJ2 had been surrounded by castle walls on all sides.
And this time…
“I just knew it’d be an island,” Pitohui said.
“What? Is this Bean Island? Is that why we’re packed together in pods?” Fukaziroh joked, which everyone considerately ignored. Peas came in pods.
The map displayed a square island. There was no name written anywhere. GGO cut down one’s hit points just for being in the water, so it was essentially impossible to cross the sea. Having a boat might make a difference, but surely none of those would be found on this map. In other words, the island was designed to offer no escape.
Llenn and her teammates examined the map closely. They needed to memorize the lay of the land as quickly and accurately as possible. Right after the start of the battle, the map displayed one’s own location for a brief time. That meant the only lit dot on the hologram was them.
“Right on the southwest edge of the island,” Pitohui said, pointing out the lower-left part of the map. The assumption was that north was always up on the map. For as close as the ocean was, it only made sense that they were right near the edge.
“Just like last time, it seems they’ve separated the powerhouse squads into the corners,” M noted, which Llenn recognized. In SJ2, she and Fukaziroh were in the northwest corner, SHINC was in the southwest, MMTM was in the northeast, and Pitohui’s team was in the southeast. Thanks to that, it had been quite a trek to finally cross paths with Pitohui.
“And we get to do it again…,” she muttered, feeling that familiar sense of disappointment.
“Now, now, Llenn, that just means we shoot ’em all and crush ’em all and kill ’em all along the way, y’know? Capisce?”
“Fuka’s right. When it comes to competition, you can’t start by beating yourself. You must think of yourself as God’s chosen unbeatable champion.”
Her two companions had been through countless video game battles before. They had the right frame of mind for this.
“All right,” Llenn said, getting her mind back into the game.
“Now, which way should we march?” Pitohui asked, pointing at the map. Her gloved finger started in the left corner and slid up to the right, toward a pattern there.
It looked like a bunch of long, thin lines, branching off and closing together. They spanned a forty-five-degree angle, from northwest to southeast. All told, the feature covered quite a lot of ground, over a mile wide and several miles long.
What the heck is it?
It probably corresponded to the dot-like objects Llenn saw initially, but she still couldn’t tell what it actually was. It could have been city streets, but they were all totally straight, with no cross streets, which didn’t make sense. Nobody would build roads like that.
“So…what is this?” she said at last, not arriving at an answer on her own.
“Um, no idea,” Fukaziroh said promptly. They might be able to glean more details if they zoomed in on the map, but M had the answer before that became necessary.
“It’s a switchyard.”
“Oh, duh! A swi-chard! I knew it… So what’s that?” said Fukaziroh, who clearly didn’t know. Llenn wasn’t familiar, either. She looked to him pleadingly. Tell us, Teacher!
M explained, “It’s a part of a railyard where trains and freight cars are switched around and sorted for their journey depending on the destination.”
“Ohhh.” “Ohhh.” Llenn and Fukaziroh spoke in unison.
“The lines on the map are the many parallel tracks that branch apart for sorting. The dots you saw in the distance are the freight cars. Some of them are coupled, many are sitting on their own, and some have come off the tracks and tipped over.
“Ah, I see…”
Llenn suddenly recalled a time that she had gone fighting monsters in a similar place, with lots of train cars sitting around. With that mental image of a switchyard in mind, she asked M the most important question of all: “So this place will have pretty good vantage, right?”
“Depends on the number of cars, but it should be wide open for the most part. Not a place you want to take your time strolling through.”
“I figured. But—,” Llenn started to say.
Pitohui cut her off. “That’s right. Given our starting position, we don’t have a choice but to go through here.”
She was right. The southwest part of the map was covered by the switchyard. If they were going to go anywhere else on the island, they’d need to cross a number of train tracks.
You don’t have to put us all the way in the corner, you know! Is this supposed to be a handicap?! I hate you! Llenn thought.
“As for what’s after that…” Pitohui pointed again. Above the switchyard, the north side of the island was covered by a grid pattern.
“Ohhh, I know this one! It’s a city!” Fukaziroh said.
The mile or so of land along the north coast of the island was a developed town. There were some fairly tall buildings among the stretch, so it seemed like a fairly big city.
There were green parks and blue ponds visible among the street grid, but it seemed to be mostly urban. There were even thicker roads among them—highways? The north shoreline was straight across, but with docks and other port facilities that jutted out here and there.
“Hmmm,” Llenn groaned.
A city was a battle environment that required technical skill and experience. There were many places to hide, and the range of battle tended to shorten considerably. You also had to keep an eye out for verticality, thanks to the great difference in height introduced by high-rise buildings. Danger lurked everywhere.
“Looks like we should get some very good urban combat here. Let’s go clockwise, then,” Pitohui said, circling her finger around to the east side of the island. That part looked green and fuzzy on the map, so Llenn could identify it at once.
“That’s a forest.”
If there were mountains, they’d have altitude contour lines—not to mention this was a three-dimensional hologram—so that meant this was an essentially flat forest.
Forests had poor visibility and poor terrain underfoot. They were unpleasant to fight in, too, for different reasons than the city.
“Let’s continue. Below that in the southeast corner…”
The map depicted a great volume of something sprouting up out of the ground at intervals of a hundred feet or so. It looked like a swarm of giant mushrooms, but that obviously couldn’t be the case.
So Fukaziroh was dead wrong when she said, “I got it! It’s a field of giant mushrooms!”
“If it’s a natural feature, it would be rocks, most likely. Overseas, I once saw some rocky outcroppings that had been worn down by wind and rain until they made towering formations. These were well over fifty feet tall,” M said. He was probably right.
Ah, I see. Llenn used her imagination. The wasteland where the final battle of SJ1 happened was similar in concept, but the rocks there were much smaller, and she could easily climb up them. These ones, not so much.
So they’d determined that the map included a switchyard, a city, a forest, and giant rocks, leaving only the center of the island.
“Huh? What the hell is this?” Pitohui snarled, her finger paused in the middle. It was the rare sound of true confusion from her.
A grassy hill was depicted in the center of the map.
The pale-green hill climbed gently, the closer to the center of the island you went. It made sense that the highest elevation was in the center of the island, so that wasn’t the strange part.
The peak of the hill couldn’t be very tall. Perhaps 150 feet or less. Overall, it was a very flat map.
No, what drew Pitohui’s skepticism was at the top of the hill, right smack in the center of the island. There was a rectangular space there colored black with the word UNKNOWN written on it.
“Huh? What the hell is this?” said Fukaziroh, echoing Pitohui.
“Unknown? So we don’t know what’s up there?” Llenn wondered.
“Oh, so that’s what it means,” said Fukaziroh, who almost certainly did not know what it meant.
This unrevealed area was about five hundred yards long and seventy yards wide, traveling directly north to south. Apparently, they wouldn’t be allowed to know what was there until they saw it for themselves.
“Can the people who are nearby right now see it?” Fukaziroh wondered.
M said, “I assume they’re intentionally hiding it, with mist or something like that. I suppose we could consider it a ‘black box’ of sorts. I would bet that they’ve all been placed at least a mile away from it.”
“Ah, that makes sense. But if we get there, and it really is just one giant black box, I’m gonna be pissed! I’m gonna blast it with grenades!”
“Do you think this might be the special rule?” Llenn wondered.
Pitohui answered, “That could be it, or it might be something else. It gets announced when there are six to eight teams left, right? Until then, it’s just a mystery to ponder.”
“I see,” Llenn said. There wasn’t much point to worrying about it yet. It was still far off, anyway.
“Is everyone ready? Good.” M turned off the map and went back to checking the horizon, just in case. Pitohui glanced at her wristwatch, and so did Llenn. It had just turned 12:05.
They’d wait here for another five minutes on high alert, check the initial Satellite Scan, then move carefully, taking enemy placement into account—or if they decided that was too dangerous, they would lie here in wait.
At least, if Llenn were the leader, that’s what she would do. But the leader of the squad this time was M. Once they had agreed to enter Squad Jam, the topic turned to who should be the leader, and sensing that Llenn wasn’t much in the mood, Pitohui settled the matter by executive decision.
What kind of tactics would M utilize? She’d follow the plan no matter what.
“Huh?! Whoa! Behind us, guys!” Fukaziroh yelped. It was rare to hear her so sincerely startled.
“Huh?” Llenn turned around in her crouch, toward the sea. “Dwaaaaaaah!”
It was a cry of true, unvarnished shock.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. Even a few blinks didn’t dispel what she was seeing.
“Huh? Wha—? Huhhhh?” she gaped, dumbfounded.
Before her eyes—the sea was rushing in.
The first time she looked, at the start of the game, the edge of the water had been a hundred feet away.
Now it was no more than thirty.
The waves were still choppy, but it was close enough that the spray might start reaching them. The sound was much louder, but they’d been too absorbed in the map to notice until now.
“Wh-wh-why?” Llenn stammered, but there was only one possible answer.
“Ha-ha-ha!” Pitohui burst out laughing. “Oh, no waaay! Ha-ha-ha! This map—this entire island—is sinking.”
“Eugh!”
So it was true. That was the only possible answer.
Earlier, Llenn had wondered why there would be a switchyard on such a small island. There was no point to the yard if the tracks had nowhere to go.
She’d told herself, “Well, it is a video game terrain map, so I guess you just sort of accept that some things will seem unnatural,” but now there seemed to actually be a proper reason behind it. This had once been part of a larger piece of land but was now sinking from some tectonic shift or other disaster, leaving only this island still above the waves.
“So the arena’s only going to get smaller and smaller,” Llenn said. Fukaziroh continued, “And the teams that survive will inevitably wind up in the center of the map…”
M added, “And it’s a flat map by design, so we’d all ultimately arrive at the black box, I suppose.”
My God! Llenn thought. She felt angry, in fact. That meant the powerhouse teams had the biggest disadvantage, being placed in the far corners! It was messed up.
But there was something about what Pitohui said that stuck in Llenn’s head, so she turned and asked, “Pito, who were you talking about when you said, ‘You’re bad’?”
Pitohui grinned. “That should be obvious! I mean the novelist who sponsored the event! I’m sure that he must have suggested this idea.”
“Ohhh, I get it now,” Llenn said. She meant the same novelist who sponsored SJ1. The person who had sent so many signed books to rot in Llenn’s closet. The one who was smirking and showing off for the camera on the program in the bar.
“After I beat him to the punch to pay for the last one, I bet he’s pretty pissed, huh?”
“Ohhh, I get— Wait, whaaat? You were the sponsor of SJ2, Pito?” Llenn gaped, completely forgetting about the encroaching sea for the moment.
Nearby, Fukaziroh gaped, too. “Whaaaat? You didn’t know?”
As the audience in the pub watched the live feed, eating and drinking and commenting freely and irresponsibly, a text scroll began running across the screen.
On monitors that didn’t have any battle to display, they ran aerial footage of the various areas of the map, showing them off like some kind of travel program.
This island sinks automatically, the text read. The pace of sinking will increase over time, until eventually, even the peak of the mountain at the center of the map will be submerged.
“Whoa! Whoever designed that is bad, man!”
“That’s terrible! Everyone on the outer edge is screwed!” the audience clamored, echoing Pitohui.
“But it does mean the powerhouse teams don’t get an easy ride!”
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” Boss laughed. Before her eyes, the sea rushed in toward her corner location. “Very good! They really lit a fire under our asses this time, ladies! We’ve got to charge our way to safety—throw caution to the wind!”
“Ah, so that’s what this is about,” smirked the leader of MMTM. Before his eyes, the sea rushed in toward his corner location. “Very good! Let’s make use of this, boys!”
“Whoa, whoa, wait! What is this?!” panicked the members of T-S. Before their eyes, the sea covered their feet at their corner location. “What are we supposed to do?! Hang on! This is messed up!”
“Well, that settles it. We’ll just have to move a bit at a time,” M said, getting up from a crouch. He peered through the scope of the M14 EBR at their surroundings.
If they waited in this spot another five minutes, they’d get a salty sea bath, so their only choice was to get moving.
“I’m worried about snipers, but with wind this strong, it’s very unlikely that a first shot from a long distance will actually hit us,” M wisely noted. If an enemy placed their finger on the trigger, a bullet line (or just a “line”) would show you the trajectory of the bullet. That was a bit of system assistance to make the game more fun and exciting, and if your reflexes were good enough, you could dodge incoming bullets with pretty consistent success.
But to preserve the advantage of the ambush, the first shot coming from an unknown location would never create a bullet line. It would be a proper sneak attack and totally undodgeable.
The other system tool, for the benefit of the shooter, was the bullet circle, which told you the potential hit zone for the shot. A finger on the trigger summoned a green circle that only the shooter could see—and the bullet would land somewhere within that circle.
The circle’s size was affected by the gun’s specs, shooter’s ability, distance, and other external factors, and it pulsed between its largest and smallest point in time with the beat of the shooter’s heart. Of course, you wanted to fire when it was at its smallest, but that wasn’t easy if you and the target were moving.
The effect of the wind was going to be greater than usual on aiming, too. The accuracy on long-distance sniping was going to drop precipitously. For now, they just had to trust that this would hold true as they moved across the map.
“Llenn will take point. Pito follows about twenty yards behind, with Fuka next to her. I’ll bring up the rear,” M said.
The point man was supposed to walk ahead of the team, scouting for enemies and occasionally drawing their fire. The rear guard was supposed to keep an eye on the territory behind the group.
So I get to start us off again, Llenn grumbled, but there wasn’t a better option. She was the fastest and smallest target of the group. That profile made her the ideal person to take the lead.
“Got it. Hang on, I’ll put on the poncho,” she said, waving her left hand. Of the ponchos she kept in her inventory, the best one seemed like the MultiCam pattern that Fukaziroh was currently wearing. She moved her hand toward the button.
But then M said, “No, stay the way you are.”
“Huh? But the pink will stand out,” Llenn said, scarcely believing her ears.
“That’s part of the plan,” he said. Well, there was no arguing with that.
Skeptical, Llenn closed her window without the poncho and began walking. There was nothing but flat land before her. In the distance, the train cars were just dots.
While it was very unlikely that she’d get abruptly shot from a distance, the probability wasn’t zero.
Ooooh, it’s scary. Don’t hit me, bullets. I hate snipers.
She walked onward, keenly aware of her fear, holding her P90 at the ready by her waist and being careful not to leave her squadmates behind.
After four nerve-rending minutes, M’s voice said “All units stop. Stay low” in her ear, right as the alarm went off on the wristwatch on her left arm.
It was thirty seconds after 12:09. Thirty seconds remaining to the first Satellite Scan.
They’d moved forward a few hundred yards onto solid earth. They’d escaped the pursuing ocean waves for now.
There were no enemies on the way here or at this location. The switchyard cars were closer and larger, to where she could make out their shapes. Although “closer” still meant a thousand feet away to the closest car.
The wind was still blowing. At times, it got strong enough that she could hear it whistling.
Llenn dropped flat onto the ground to make as small of a target as she could, resting with the P90 sideways. Then again, the gun’s effective range wasn’t much more than two hundred yards, so she couldn’t shoot at any distant enemies anyway.
The longer and heavier a gun, the farther it could shoot, and the lighter and more mobile, the shorter its range. That was one of those rules of gunfights that held true for the real world in addition to GGO.
“No enemies in sight. I’m the only one who needs to see the scan. Be ready to move at once.”
He received a chorus of affirmative responses.
The first scan of Squad Jam Number Three was about to begin.
Every ten minutes, one of the satellite relics of the past would cross overhead. It would call up the location of the team leader and the team’s name on the scan device’s map.
The only ways to avoid being shown were to dive underwater and suffer damage or to take shelter in a large natural feature like a cavern.
The amount of time for the scan to finish changed every time. Sometimes it only took a few seconds, and sometimes it could take over a minute. It would tell you where your enemies were, but the inverse was also true.
For the first scan, you pretty much always had thirty teams still alive. It was like the bell ringing to let the fighters know they could begin.
“All right, it’s time for the blood festival to begin. Let’s bathe in that red stuff. I’m gonna blow up a bunch of people I don’t have any problem with,” ranted Fukaziroh.
“Don’t kill all of them. I want a few, too,” said Pitohui, equally bloodthirsty. Only in the video game, of course.
If only SHINC were the sole opponent to fight, Llenn wished.
12:10.
The scan started up.
But Llenn couldn’t glance at her terminal map, so she had to trust M and wait for his report and instructions. Instead, she stayed on the ground, occasionally using her monocular to scan the vicinity. After about thirty impatient seconds, there was a sudden red flash in the distant sky.
“Huh?”
There was no sound, perhaps drowned out by the wind or just because it was too small. The shining red dot raced from the surface up into the sky in the distance, then stalled out and began to fall slowly, drifting in the wind.
“What the heck is that?” Fukaziroh wondered. Then there was another one. This one was much farther away than the first flash.
It appeared to be over the switchyard or maybe farther away. As hazy as the area was, it was hard to get a sense of distance, but the two glowing red lights were very clearly visible.
“Those are signal flares. With parachutes,” Pitohui explained. But why were they fired? Who shot them up?
M had the answer to that.
“It’s a signal to surround us.”
The audience was waiting for the shooting to start now that the first scan was over. The sudden arrival of the signal flares was startling to them.
“Ohhh?”
“What’s that?”
Flares weren’t uncommon in GGO. Small flare tubes were quite cheap in stores. They were about the size of glow sticks and activated by pulling a string on the end, which shot them high into the air, where they deployed little parachutes that allowed them to hang and fall slowly for visibility.
There were other colors, too: yellow, blue, purple, and white, in addition to red. Newbie squadrons without the cash to buy audio comms could use them for communication, and they could also be used in place of illumination flares in night combat.
What they couldn’t figure out was why the flares would go up now. It seemed like madness—who would alert other squads to their own location?
“What the hell are they doing?”
The moment she had finally cleared the reach of the bullet lines aiming at her from over her left shoulder, a new line appeared from the right, bullet whizzing past her along its course, right in front of her eyes and grazing her helmet.
“Aieeeee!”
And still, she ran.
Running as fast as she could was the safest option of all now.
“Doing good. You’re completely drawing all of their attention. We’re carrying out our actions in the meantime. Just hang in there a bit longer,” said M, the only member of the team who treated her with any consideration. Still, the situation was bad for her.
Chweeng.
She heard the sound of a grazing bullet loud and clear, just behind her ear.
As she ran, Llenn screamed, “I knew I shouldn’t have entered!”
But it was too late.
Four minutes earlier…
M’s scheme was clear, simple—and cruel.
In so many words, it was a “have Llenn run around as a decoy, thus allowing the other members to escape” plan.
“Just run, Llenn. Right into the switchyard, then around inside of it. They’ll focus on you. While you’re doing that, we’ll think of a counterplan and move to execute it.”
“What? What’ll happen to me?”
“Let’s pray for the best.”
No. Wait. Stop. She wished she could sit him down and lecture him for an hour.
But she couldn’t argue against the team leader’s orders. “Now go!”
“Dammit!”
She might not want to go, but she didn’t have a better option. Running around, it would have to be.
Times like this were when having a reasonable, cooperative personality really came around to bite you.
As she raced at top speed toward it, the switchyard came into full, clear view.
It was an exhaustingly huge area—a wide, flat space covered in gravel and concrete, with so many parallel sets of rails that it felt foolish to try to count them, and many, many freight cars abandoned here and there.
GGO was developed by an American company, so the environmental design was essentially American in style. Both the switchyard and the cars found in it were of a massive size that you wouldn’t ever see in Japan.
There were container cars with English letters on the side, tanker cars with black barrels on top, flat cars loaded up with logs, vehicle cars ferrying massive trucks, diesel locomotives with yellow paint peeling off, and so on.
She could even see the same cars scattered around, either a reuse of game assets or a natural occurrence.
There was a concrete tower several dozen yards tall, probably the switchyard control tower, toppled onto its side. The control room bulge at the very top had spectacularly flattened a cargo container below.
In the real world, places that had fallen out of human use almost always gave way to the spectacular rule of plants, but that was not the case here. Not a single blade of grass grew on the switchyard.
It wasn’t rare to see ruins without any plants in GGO. And it wasn’t because of the exorbitant cost of modeling and rendering all that complex flora—it was because the apocalyptic war that destroyed civilization had made the land barren of all plants. Supposedly.
“I’m almost at the switchyard, M. What now?” she asked through the comm unit. She was hoping to hear him instruct her to find somewhere to hide.
Instead, he said, “Just run around the yard. Do it any way you can that helps you avoid their shots, but don’t leave the area.”
“Ugh! You’ve got to be kidding me!”
She plunged onward at top speed, right as a swarm of bullet lines appeared from her left.
“Enemy attack!”
Three minutes later, Llenn was still running.
Back and forth, across the switchyard. Left and right and left and right.
If she ran away from where the bullet lines were coming, next the enemy would be right in front of her. If she changed angles to avoid them, another group would be on a forward diagonal.
They were quite far away, as Llenn could only see brief glimpses of their silhouettes, but if they were any clearer, she would’ve already been shot dead by this point.
Up above, a new signal flare was rising into the sky and drifting with the powerful wind. That meant more teams had arrived to take part in the scheme. The sound of distant tom-tom gunfire had been constant for minutes. No need to wonder who they were shooting at—it was her.
At this point in time, Llenn was a cat in the wide open, being chased by people with nets. The cat was much faster and wasn’t very likely to be hit by the “net” that was their gunfire, but more and more people were showing up, limiting her options for escape.
Llenn the cat had her own sharp teeth in the form of the P90, but she didn’t have much room for fighting back. Her best defense was her speed. She had to keep running, not letting her concentration lapse for a single moment.
GGO avatars did not experience physical fatigue. Theoretically, you could keep up a full sprint forever, but mental exhaustion from a player’s brain getting tired was a different matter. When nerves got fatigued after wild, extreme commands, they had a tendency to want to come to a stop, but this was a kind of torture that prevented her from doing even that.
Her only saving grace was the occasional train car. The hardy locomotives and freight cars carrying lumber would protect her from distant shots, so only when she darted behind them did she have a second or two of respite.
And then, sure enough, Llenn felt a numbness in her leg. “Ouch!” She jumped.
On the side of her boot was a red glowing line like a slash wound. It was the bullet-wound visual effect, signifying damage to her avatar.
The train engine was on wheels, so there was a space of a foot or more between the rails and the body of the vehicle. The bullet had hit her through that gap.
It wasn’t a lucky shot from a spray of bullets, but the work of a good sniper, most likely. She hadn’t heard a shot; they were using a sound suppressor.
Nope, can’t stop—gonna get shot!
She hit the ground again running and checked on her hit-point bar in the upper-left corner of her vision. She’d lost hit points from that one. It was the first time she’d taken damage in SJ without at least firing a shot of her own.
As soon as she thought she had outrun the bullet lines reaching for her back, another red line appeared from the right without a sound and then another from the left. She was running out of directions to go.
“Aaaah! It’s looking pretty bad now!” she wailed as she ran.
“Okay, come on back,” said M at last.
“So close!” lamented the audience in the bar, all at once.
They’d been so looking forward to Llenn’s inevitable demise, but once someone seemed to have her on the ropes, they couldn’t help but root for the underdog. They were very selfish people, when you got down to it. All audiences are.
Llenn got shot in the leg and raced off with superhuman speed, which the aerial camera began following from above. It captured a nice wide angle like drone photography, beautifully vivid, causing everyone watching to briefly forget that they were watching a violent battle in progress.
It was a sniper from the one of the allied teams who shot Llenn’s leg. In fact, it was caught directly on film.
He was dressed in the camo of an American marine, lying on the tracks, holding the marine’s bolt action sniper rifle, the Remington M40A3. A suppressor was attached to the tip of the gun. He used his backpack as a stand for the barrel.
There were no other players around him. He was acting separately from the rest of his team. They were blazing their assault rifles with abandon whenever they caught sight of Llenn, which was only driving her farther away and helping her escape, in fact.
They had the advantage in numbers, and their target was incredibly fast and small, so he suggested that they get closer first for better aim when they attacked, but each of his teammates didn’t care about anything but being the one to score the big kill—and didn’t listen.
So without a better choice, he stayed put, trusting his gut that Llenn would pass through his field of vision again. He bided his time, waiting for his chance.
It was a gamble, knowing that if Llenn wound up behind him, she could very well shoot him in the ass without much of a struggle. However, he won that bet.
Chased by another team, Llenn wound up right back in front of him, as he expected she would. She was so fast that he couldn’t really narrow down his aim while running, but as soon as he saw her stop behind the massive train engine, he took his shot.
The 7.62 mm bullet scraped along the ground—but it did not succeed in puncturing Llenn’s leg. Despite being from a range of only two hundred yards, a distance he almost always hit at, the bullet did not strike the middle of her leg. The bullet circle was larger than usual—an effect of the wind, no doubt.
If it had struck her leg dead center, the combination of short distance, slender leg, and 7.62 mm power might have torn it clean off.
If that happened, Llenn would suffer a lost-limb effect for about two minutes, leaving her only one leg to use. Then he could have called his friends over to make short work of her.
“Dammit!” the sniper screamed ruefully—up at the cloudy sky, rushing past with the force of the wind.
Llenn’s good luck was still active in SJ3.
“Okay, come on back,” M told her.
Her only possible follow-up was, “Um, wh-where to?”
She’d run and scrambled around too much. She had no idea where in the vast switchyard she was now. There were no obvious landmarks to distinguish the view, so she had no way of knowing which way she would find her teammates.
If only she could see the shore—but from her distance, it was still foggy, and she couldn’t make out that far. She couldn’t figure out directions, either, because the sky was cloudy enough that she couldn’t make out the position of the sun. The tracks had been at close to a forty-five-degree angle on the map, so she knew they traveled from northwest to southeast, but which was which, she couldn’t tell.
“Where am I now? I have no idea what my present location is, M! What address, what room number?!”
“You’re fine, calm down. I’m going to fire a signal directly above our location. Run in that direction. Keep your eyes on the sky,” M told her.
“A signal in the sky?” she repeated, dumbfounded.
She expected to see a signal flare of some color other than red, but if the wind blew it off course, that wouldn’t make for a very good marker, would it? She kept running, her eyes darting this way and that overhead.
Ahead and to the right, there was a blue orb.
It was a blue sphere—like how the Earth looked from space—that suddenly appeared and shone high in the sky.
Then it vanished, just like a firework.
One, and two, and…
There was an ear-rattling bang. Once again, like a firework.
Llenn had counted from the moment of the flash to the arrival of the sound and gauged the delay to be about two seconds.
In normal atmospheric conditions, the speed of sound was about 1,125 feet a second, meaning that she was 2,250 feet away from the signal. It was also up in the air, which meant the place from which it was shot was closer to her.
This calculation was a trick that her eldest brother had taught her during a fireworks show when she was a kid. The smug look on his face when he guessed the distance to the fireworks discharge site flashed into her mind, over ten years after the fact, in the midst of a virtual world. How about that.
When the blast sounded, the bullet lines disappeared. Startled, the enemy teams had gone on the defensive, taking their fingers off their triggers and going into hiding.
“Did you see it? Run in that direction as fast as you can go. There are no enemies around us for the moment.”
“I saw it! I got it!”
She changed direction as abruptly as a deflected pinball, heading for the direction that she saw the blue sphere. If the distance was under 2,250 feet, she should be able to clear it in less than a minute.
By coincidence, the angle took her directly along the tracks, which made it easier to follow. A toppled container car blocked her path along the way, but it was too much bother to go around it, so she jumped. “Hiyaaa!”
Her running speed was such that she bounded onto the upturned side of the car, ran a few steps along, then jumped even higher after that. “Yahoo!”
This was a game world. It was such a prodigious jump that if a gold coin had been floating in air, she would have caught it.
After crossing so much distance it almost seemed she was flying, Llenn landed on two feet in the gravel between train tracks and began running again. As she did so, something occurred to her.
That blue explosion had been a plasma grenade from one of Fukaziroh’s grenade launchers. She must have shot it straight up, where M could snipe it from below to set it off.
Impressed at his incredible aim for such a dangerous stunt, Llenn also felt bad that they’d used one of those valuable grenades just for a signal. Still, it was better than her dying. She would have inevitably been surrounded, cornered, and shot to death otherwise.
On she ran.
There was not a single bullet line in her vicinity. It seemed that she had escaped the enemy’s trap at last.
Finally, she had the peace of mind to check her wristwatch. It had just turned 12:19. Another scan would be starting in just one minute. She wanted to reunite with the team by then.
Thankfully, M seemed to read her mind. “I can see you from here, Llenn. Keep going straight,” his voice said in her ear.
“Where?”
She stared around as she ran, but she couldn’t see them. All she could see were the usual straight train tracks and the occasional freight car. She’d run across this area earlier; there were much fewer cars and engines on this side of the yard.
One black freight car rested up ahead of her. There wasn’t anything else for maybe a thousand feet around. It just sat there, all alone, atop the tracks.
It looked about twenty yards long and ten feet tall and wide. It was just a big ol’ square hunk of metal.
And it was from that box that Pitohui popped her head out and called, “Yoo-hoo, Llenn!”
“Hwuh?” Llenn had been assuming that it was just a box with a roof on top, like all the other cars.
“It’s flat on the inside, so just jump over the side!” Pitohui told her, retracting her head, so Llenn obliged.
“Taaa!” She sprinted and launched into a tremendous jump several yards in front of the train car. With Olympic long-jump world-record-setting distance, she shot over the top of the car and inside.
As advertised, it was flat on the bottom. Llenn swung her sling-supported gun around her back. When her feet landed on the metal bottom, she leaned backward to slow her forward slide. She held up her hands to stop herself before she body-slammed the far end of the car.
“Bwoooh!” she exhaled, turning around. Across the car interior—was that the right word without a ceiling?—she saw her teammates, looking hale and hearty. They had gathered at the front end of the car, antipicating that Llenn would soar safely over their heads that way.
“Nice Llennding!” Fukaziroh said, to save time.
“You did great out there.” Pitohui beamed.
As for M, who gave her the reckless order to charge ahead in the first place, the only thing he said was “Let’s transition to the next plan.” He could have spared a word of praise or two.
But Llenn just walked over to them and asked, “What is this?”
It looked just like a flat, rectangular space trapped inside black iron walls. It was absolutely empty.
Fukaziroh replied, “We’re inside an empty freight car. M found a nice one for us to use, and we snuck in here. We were able to do it because you were distracting all the other teams.”
Aha.
So that was why she’d been turned into a decoy. And it was indeed the perfect place to hide in the wide-open switchyard, where enemies could strike from any direction. As long as nobody climbed up and peered inside, they would never be spotted.
But that just raised the next question.
“So what will hiding in here help us do next? Do we hide until they give up?”
Pitohui had the answer to that one. “Oh, that won’t work. We’ve only got seconds until the scan.”
“Huh?”
Llenn glanced at her wristwatch—she was right. She hadn’t noticed the thirty-second warning buzz at all. M was already on standby, eyes on his terminal.
“Then they’re going to find out right away! They’re going to close in on us! Oh…I got it!” she said, struck with a sudden epiphany. “This car moves, doesn’t it?! We can get away inside it, chunka-chunka-chunka-chunk!”
Any vehicle found in GGO, including Squad Jam, could be operated. In SJ1, hovercrafts and trucks had played a major part, and there were armored four-wheel-drive vehicles in SJ2.
If M could move this train car, they could just race along the tracks. That would be faster than human legs, so they should be able to break right out of the ambush. And if they could do that, it was a straight shot to SHINC.
That had to be the plan. That made sense. In fact, it was brilliant. One for the ages. Bravo! Khorosho! Très bien! Llenn gave him a mental round of applause.
Finally, M said, “We can’t. The car alone has no engine. It won’t move, and it’s flat, so we can’t push it over.”
“Huh?” The mental applause abruptly stopped.
His eyes on the scan device, M reported, “There are more teams within a half mile of us now—five of them. Four more approaching from farther out. We’ll ignore any other teams for now, but SHINC is still alive.”
Llenn was grateful to know that SHINC was still doing well, but if there were now nine teams in their vicinity, that suggested their troubles were only just beginning.
“So if we can’t move, and there are lots of enemies closing in… Huh? Then what do we do?” she asked in a daze.
“No worries! We’re preparing now!” Pitohui said with a smile and wink so forceful Llenn could practically hear it.
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