Sword Art Online Alternative – Gun Gale Online - Volume 4 - Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4 
The Great Freight Car Operation 
“They’re close! Still within the switchyard!” barked the leader of the burnt-red-camo team as he watched his terminal. 
This was the very team that had orchestrated the team-up to defeat Llenn in the dome last Squad Jam. He was still using the small AC-556F assault rifle. He seemed to like it quite a bit. 
“It really worked out, Team Leader!” said one of his teammates, with the same camo and gun, a huge smile on his face. 
“Yeah! You know what they say, third time’s the charm! C’mon, let’s go take down the toughest team in this game!” 
The audience in the pub watched their screens, enraptured. There were other battles going on now, but this was the only one worth watching. 
The results of the Satellite Scan appeared on their screens, too, so it was easy to grasp the situation. LPFM, considered the toughest of all groups in the event, was getting surrounded by an alliance of seven other squads. 
A short distance away, the burnt-red-camo team met up with another. They were competitors, of course, and could’ve chosen to fight, but with a common enemy nearby, they weren’t hostile to each other. Two more teams joined up, making a single united group of twenty-four soldiers. 
Once they had LPFM’s location from the scan, they hustled to spread sideways. The switchyard had few places to hide to begin with, and the attackers didn’t even bother with them now. 
Then another three teams caught up. That made seven in total, with forty-two soldiers. The patterns and gear of the alliance were truly diverse. 
Naturally, none of those teams were SHINC, MMTM, or T-S. They couldn’t have been there, in fact. 
And if anyone in the audience knew the players present, they would see that neither Clarence nor Shirley was present. All of the players were men. 
Forty-two was an incredible battalion. Even the combined group that Pitohui massacred in the mountains of SJ2 was only thirty-six strong. 
“I dunno… I’m startin’ to feel sorry for ’em…” 
“Gotta rise above the bullying.” 
“You don’t think the favorites are going down already, do you?” 
Anticipation rose higher and higher among the audience. But there was one crucial piece of information that they were missing. 
Because the live camera feed was not showing them how LPFM was huddling and hiding inside an empty freight car. 
Just past 12:22. 
“We’re coming within firing range of the scan location!” said a voice among the line of players. There were no intra-team communication devices, so they had to use good old-fashioned shouting. 
The forty-two players were slowly encroaching upon the coordinates that the Satellite Scan claimed was the location of LPFM just two minutes ago. They were less than nine hundred yards away. M could hit them with his M14 EBR at any point now. 
All of them were already aware that he could shoot without a bullet line. But they proceeded without hiding anyway, because their strategy was predicated upon the idea that one, two, or even more people were acceptable losses. 
If it was just one team of six, they might all get shot and killed before they closed the distance. But would that hold true for forty-two? 
What’s wrong? Why aren’t you shooting? Do your worst! they felt, though they didn’t demonstrate their boldness verbally. 
Naturally, they didn’t want their targets escaping around the sides, so the members at the far left and right wings used binoculars to keep a sharp eye out. Every now and then, calls went out like “Nothing wrong on the right!” or “No signs of escape on the left!” This was according to their plan. 
If there was a freight car along the way, they first checked around it, then on top. Someone would hoist themselves up to examine the roof. 
“Clear on top!” 
“Anyone you can see from up there?” 
“Nope, nothing.” 
“Good! Come on down.” 
Even with their overwhelming numbers, they stayed vigilant. The painful experience of SJ2 had taught them something. Some members of the group were the men whom Pitohui had blown up in that river. Some of those men had been shot in the dome by Llenn. 
The one thing that unified their experience? “We got sloppy because there were so many of us.” 
So they stayed tight, didn’t waste time with chatter, maintained constant vigilance, and crept forward slowly but surely. 
And though they didn’t realize it, they were within two hundred yards of the car in which LPFM were hiding. 
It is a fact of life—both real life and virtual life—that a gun battle begins abruptly. 
The sound of the first bullet fired instantly starts a merciless rapid drumbeat in most cases. 
So no one would have anticipated that this one would kick off with Pitohui cheerfully calling out “Well, well, well, hello! How is everyone?” 
When Pitohui popped her head over the lip of the freight car a hundred yards away and shouted “Well, well, well, hello! How is everyone?” not a single one of the forty-two men reacted in the proper way. 
The proper reaction would have been to instantly start shooting at her head, but none of them did so. One of them was even polite enough to nod his head and say “Oh, hi.” 
“I’m doing great! So long!” she said, then ducked her head back down again. 
“Huh?” 
“What?” 
There was a brief beat of confusion, until finally someone came back to their senses. 
“It’s that damn woman! Fiiiiiiire!” 
And so the burst of shooting started. 
Nearly forty men lifted their guns and began to fire, flattening themselves to the ground in anticipation of a counterattack or to stabilize their own aim, while some just stood in place. 
A variety of battle implements—assault rifles, machine guns, submachine guns, sniper rifles—opened fire at maximum capacity. The racket was deafening. It overlapped so heavily that there was no way to tell which gun was firing from where. The empty cartridges glittered golden as they were ejected, falling to the ground and vanishing into little polygonal effects. 
The bullets struck the black car, sending up huge showers of sparks. The way that the sparks bloomed from hundreds of shots made it look like a box of fireworks being fed into a campfire. 
Almost as loud as the gunfire itself was the high-pitched sound of metal screeching against metal. 
“And there it goes!” 
“So that’s where they were hiding!” 
In the pub, the audience eagerly watched the screens. There were other battles happening elsewhere at this moment, but this was clearly the biggest draw. 
A few seconds later, the sound of the firing diminished a little as the shooters burned through their initial magazines. Meanwhile, the men at the ends of the line began to slowly circle farther sideways. That was to keep from clumping up and making an easier target and also to surround the freight car better. 
Flanking the enemy was the basis of a gunfight. GGO players with enough experience also knew you didn’t form an entire circle, because then stray shots would hit your allies on the other side. 
“They’re way smarter this time.” 
“Your entire group getting slaughtered tends to teach you a lesson.” 
In the mountains and the dome of SJ2, they’d been too close together, which made it much easier to suffer damage as a group. They’d learned from that experience. 
“But what was that chick doing there?” someone asked. The screen gave them the answer. 
The men surrounding the train car unloaded on it with their guns, sending up another spray of sparks. And if there were that many sparks… 
“Oh, I get it… They’re not puncturing the metal.” 
It was evidence that the iron slabs that made up the sides of that car were extremely thick. The bullets all deflected off it, like an armored vehicle’s tough hide. 
“And that’s why they took shelter inside it.” 
“Dammit! It’s not working! The defense is too strong!” 
The shooters themselves could tell that none of their bullets were puncturing the metal car. It was simple to ascertain when you saw the shining tracer rounds hit the can and deflect off on a diagonal. 
“All units, cease fire!” 
More and more calls to stop firing echoed down the line, until the spotty gunfire came to a stop. 
With the devastating racket of the shooting giving way to abrupt silence, the sound of the wind filled the void, and the forty-two men finished fanning out around the freight car at a distance of about three to five hundred feet. 
Some of them squatted or decided to lie down, but most stayed on their feet with their guns at the ready, prepared to shoot as soon as the enemy raised its face over the side again or to charge when needed. 
The man in the burnt-red camo, who was also on his feet, peered at the car through binoculars. “Nobody shoot until you see their heads! We can’t puncture the freight car! And they can’t shoot us, either! So we’re going to approach slowly! Once we’re as close as we can be, I want everyone to throw grenades! Then we’ll climb up the sides together and blast the interior!” 
The men quickly realized that his orders were their best bet and the quickest way to get the job done. They called out acknowledgments with menacing force. 
“Yeah!” “Got it!” “Uh-huh!” “Roger that!” 
Fierce smiles adorned their features. Confident smiles that said We’re about to annihilate the favorites to win it all! 
The screens on the walls of the pub showed the men carefully approaching, guns at the ready. 
The car was sitting all by its lonesome, with no cover or obstacles within two hundred yards of it to aid in a potential escape. If Pitohui or her other teammates tried to run away, they would easily get shot. 
Not to mention that the snipers who had their sights trained on the edges of the car would open fire as soon as any of them popped their heads into view to make that escape. 
The camera angle switched to an overhead view. Directly overhead, in fact. 
Four players were visible within a rectangular space about seventy feet long and ten feet across. It was a wide-angle view to allow for visibility of the surrounding space, but it was easy to see who was inside. 
There was Pitohui, who had popped her head out earlier, little pink Llenn, the grenade girl, and huge, bulky M. The entire team was hidden within the freight car. 
And now they were being surrounded. Over forty figures crept closer and closer to the car along the edges of the screen. They were trapped like rats. 
“Damn…you think they dug their own grave…?” 
“Did they think they could hide well enough for it all to blow over?” the audience wondered, aghast. 
But one person, at least, was more skeptical. “No, no, wait. That doesn’t make sense! If they thought they were going to hide and wait, why did she pop her head out earlier?” 
“That’s a good point…but maybe the nerves and fear are going to their heads? I’ve heard people crack in battle all the time in real life.” 
“The chick who slaughtered all those people barehanded in SJ2? Suffering nerves and fear? You saw that battle in the log house, right? She’s not the kind of person who freaks out and panics…” 
He abruptly stopped, then murmured, “Log house…” 
Two seconds later, he said, “I—I got it… It’s…it’s a trap. She…she popped her head out on purpose, to let them know where she was and force them to shoot…” 
It was intriguing enough to capture the interest of some other viewers. 
“What did you figure out? Tell us!” 
“I could, but I bet we’re about to see the slaughter happen much sooner than I could actually explain it,” the man finished saying, right as the shooting started on the screen. 
The men standing around the freight car began to topple over, left and right. 
“There, see?” 
Rewinding time just a bit, Llenn said “Hey, Pito, why are you sticking your face over—? Aaah!” just before a tremendous rattle of sound drowned her out. 
The seventy-foot-long metal box was full of the sound of gunfire hitting the outsides: ga-ga-ga-gan-gan-ga-gan-ga-gan-ga-ga-gan-ga-ga-ga-gan-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-gan-gan-gan-gan-ga-gan-ga-gan. 
GGO was a virtual game with virtual sensations, so there was no sound that would rupture the eardrums, but regardless, it felt as though she was wearing a metal bucket on her head that several people were whaling upon. 
Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-gan-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-gan-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-gan-ga-gan-ga-gan-gan-gan-gan-gan-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga. 
It was so loud that she felt that no one could hear anything she said anyway, so Llenn gave up on demanding answers from Pitohui and shrank into a ball. 
Ga-ga-gan-gan-gan-gan-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga, gan-gan-ga-ga-ga, gan…gan. 
The clatter finally died down after a few seconds, then abruptly stopped. 
“Pito!” Llenn said, picking up where she left off, “Why did you stick your face out like that?!” 
“Huh? What, didn’t I tell you?” 
“No, you didn’t!” 
“When you shoot first, every human being gets that dopamine rush of knowing ‘I have the initiative,’ which fills them with happiness and elation.” 
“Huh? Happiness and elation are the same thing! And?” 
“So they get carried away and keep firing, and they completely forget about the trap they witnessed last time. As evidence of that, I present to you the fact that they’re still approaching. See?” 
Llenn stood up and saw it. 
“……Ah. I see.” 
Then M said, “Let’s do it. The signal will be when Llenn shoots.” 
Llenn pointed the muzzle of her P90 at an approaching man. When the bullet circle appeared over his upper half, she pulled the trigger. 
Trarararatt, went the quick burst from what sounded like a submachine gun. 
“Aguh?” 
A man toppled backward, bright-red bullet-hole effects all over his torso and face. 
One of the forty-two fell slowly onto the rails behind him. 
Bing. A marker reading DEAD appeared over his body. 
He was just over seventy-five meters from the freight car. 
“Huh?” 
The man who’d been just five meters behind him saw the whole thing happen before his eyes. Why…? He had no idea how his friend got shot. 
It was unthinkable that the enemy would have leaned a gun over the top of the car and shot them. He’d been focused on the car the entire time, and their alliance’s snipers were eagle-eyed on the lookout. The instant they tried anything, they would’ve been shot. 
For a moment, he thought that maybe one of their so-called allied teams had shot him in the back. But the bullet effects were on the other player’s front, so that was ruled out. He looked at the train car again. 
Huh? Why? 
Then he became aware that a number of red bullet lines were trained on him coming directly from the black box. 
“Aaah! They’re—” 
But several bullets came promptly flying at him, erasing their lines as they went, and embedded into his head and throat, killing him before he could complete his message to the others. 
The audience watching in the bar wasn’t able to process what was happening at first, either. All they saw were the men surrounding the freight car toppling over left and right. 
It was a very strange sight. Men who’d been so full of vigor and purpose moments ago, getting shot and dying just like that. 
One man saw his companions collapse around him and turned to run, only for a glowing mark to appear on the back of his head. Dead on impact. 
A man with an M16A2 assault rifle tried to fight back, shooting and producing sparks against the hull of the black car, but as soon as he’d emptied his thirty-round magazine, he was punctured with bullets in three places. 
A man who’d dropped to the ground to make a smaller target huddled between sets of rails, holding up his MP5 submachine gun in front of his head as a shield. Bullets hit the gun, which withstood three of them but wrenched loose from his grasp on the fourth. The fifth put a hole in his head. 
One by one, the number of DEAD tags around the black freight car grew. It was as though some dark aura exuding from the car was killing all those who approached it with black magic. 
“There, see?” 
“No, I can’t see! What the hell is happening?!” shouted one of the audience members who was getting tired of the cryptic hints. Right on cue, the angle on the screen shifted. 
Now it displayed the interior of the car. It was still an overhead shot, but much closer than before, so you could get a better idea of what was happening. 
Llenn was in the center of the screen, which was focused on the left edge of the train car interior. She was crouching low, quickly exchanging a magazine for her P90. 
The empty one dropped at her feet, and she pulled a fresh one out of her waist pouch and attached it to her gun. She pulled the lever to load the first bullet into the chamber. 
Then she slowly straightened up and pressed the muzzle of the gun to the wall of the freight car. With the gun still in her right hand, Llenn leaned her face right up to the wall and, a few seconds later, started firing. 
“Oh! I get it!” 
“Me too! So that’s it!” 
“Of course! That’s what they did!” 
At last, it all added up for the bar audience. If they had just remembered it sooner, it would have been a very easy mystery to solve. It was the very same trick they’d seen Pitohui pull off in SJ2 before. 
In other words… 
“She’s shooting through a hole they made!” 
In the battle of the log house in SJ2, the full six-member team of MMTM had been proceeding down the hallway toward the room where only Pitohui and M remained alive. Somehow, shots came through a thick log wall that shouldn’t have allowed any bullets to puncture through, instantly killing their member carrying a SCAR-L. 
They immediately understood why: Pitohui had used a lightsword that could cut through anything. 
“It’s exactly the same as the last time! They hide in a place where you can’t attack them, then poke a hole with the photon sword and attack through it!” 
“Exactly.” 
Pitohui was firing her gun on the screens in the bar. The tip of her KTR-09 extended just a little ways out from the wall of the train car. She had her eye pressed to the wall, where there was another hole about its size offering her a view to aim by. 
In real life, people couldn’t hope to shoot very accurately under such circumstances, but this was virtual. The bullet circle appeared within the shooter’s vision, and it didn’t particularly care how you were holding the gun. 
Pitohui was seeing a bullet circle that told her where the KTR-09 was going to shoot. She adjusted it to make sure it overlapped a human target out there. 
Blam, blam, blam. 
Three quick semi-auto shots from the KTR-09. 
On the monitor next to that one, the trio of shots appeared on a prone man’s forehead and back. Pitohui hadn’t wasted a single one of those shots. 
“Well done!” 
“Yeah, lady! Get ’em!” 
The audience members who’d been rooting for the alliance of men just moments ago were now cheering her on in the same breath. 
In the switchyard, however, the men went into a panic. 
“Holy shit! Pull baaaack!” someone screamed—right before he died. 
Little bullet-hole effects appeared on his head and body in succession, meaning that he’d probably fallen victim to Llenn’s P90. Compared to an assault rifle, the submachine gun did less damage per bullet, but over ten of the shots together would be enough to reduce his hit points to zero. 
The surviving men began to run. 
“Crap!” 
“Yeep!” 
“Gahh!” 
It was frightening for them to expose their backs to the enemy, but staying put just made them easy targets. The black freight car was like the castle of some wicked demon lord, spewing deadly miasma. They had to get away from it as soon as possible. 
At least let the guy next to me get shot instead, they prayed. 
“Aagh!” 
The unluckiest of them got shot in the back and fell, followed by more. 
“Goddammit!” 
One among them was a hero who refused to flee. 

When he realized that there wasn’t a single bullet line trained on his burnt-red-camo outfit at the moment, he decided to gamble. He charged straight for the freight car. 
He raced as fast as he could go, nimbly side-stepping at different intervals. On the way, he tossed aside his assault rifle, the Israeli Galil ARM. Instead, he thrust a hand into a waist pouch and pulled out a grenade, using his off hand to pull the safety and whirling his arm back to throw it the remaining twenty yards. 
“Gahk!” 
The next moment, a 7.62 mm bullet without a bullet line pierced his forehead. 
He had no idea that M’s hole, which had been carved high into the train car’s wall, was large enough to allow his scope to peer through it—and that he could snipe without needing the help of the bullet circle. 
He still tensed his arm to follow through with the throw in the second or two he had until his hit points drained out, but the next bullet cruelly pierced that arm. 
“Dammit!” 
The hand grenade fell to the ground next to where he toppled forward just before it exploded. The blast only provided a light rocking to the freight car, its shrapnel clattering harmlessly off the sides. 
“They’re withdrawing. Shoot as many as you can,” M commanded. 
“Like I needed your instruction!” Pitohui snarked back. “Here we go!” 
She peered through the hole with her right eye, adjusted her grip on the KTR-09, and fired again. One man went down, followed by another. 
On the far side of the car, Llenn was shooting the men in the back, too. “Ugh, I feel kinda bad about doing this. Sorry about that.” 
She was using a “finger-burst” technique, leaving the P90’s selector on full auto but tailoring the rate of her fire by pressing and releasing the trigger. 
One of those unfortunate souls took the brunt of her hail of fire on his back and head and was eliminated from SJ3. 
As the crowd in the pub suspected, it was Pitohui’s lightblade and its hole-creating ability that had allowed the three of them to defeat a force of over forty surrounding them. In the time between Llenn’s arrival and the enemy’s approach, Pitohui dextrously fashioned the holes for them, just at the right standing height and no larger than the minimum size necessary. 
When the initial hail of fire hit the freight car, they all went to lie down on the floor and even held the pieces of M’s split shield over their backs and heads, just in case. While it was unlikely, there was always the chance that a bullet might enter one of the holes and ricochet around the interior of the car. As it happened, not a single one did. 
Apparently, M had been in the practice of testing out shooting at various things he spotted in the wild to ascertain their potential defensive uses. That way, he would know if potential enemies could shoot through them—and if he could hide behind them in a pinch for shelter. 
Naturally, he had done the same with the railway vehicles. According to his tests, any locomotive with a diesel engine was, of course, perfectly good defense. Container cars would let bullets right through, aside from the frame. Tank cars offered good defense if they were loaded, but nothing if they were empty. 
And the roofless freight cars for hauling very heavy objects were extremely hardy. 
So in fact, M had sought out this exact type of car for them to hide in. But they couldn’t have the enemy spotting the group in the process of the search, so he needed a decoy to distract them. Naturally, speedy little attention-drawing Llenn was perfect for the role. 
Well, I suppose it was worth the cost of my peace of mind and a bit of my HP, she thought with a sigh as she eliminated yet another player from the event. She was being careful not to use up too much ammo in the process. 
Behind her, Fukaziroh stared up at the lead-colored sky and gave them a half-hearted “You got this, guys. Good job…” 
“Thirty down, in just seconds…,” muttered one of the watchers from the crowd. His voice was a complex tapestry of emotion, from admiration to fear to annoyance to praise. 
New to this iteration of the event were numbers on the live feed. In the bottom-right corner of the screen, it counted how many people had died in the currently unfolding battle. Indeed, it read thirty at the moment. 
There had been such enormously fatal battles in SJ2 that this was a helpful guide for viewers to follow. It reassured players that the game developers were dedicated to being flexible and considerate to the spectating experience. 
The camera on-screen switched to an aerial view that displayed many bodies strewn spectacularly around the black freight car with glowing DEAD signs hanging over them. 
It was quite an abattoir. And needless to say, all the bodies were outside the car. There were no casualties inside. The slaughter had been very one-sided. 
It was 12:26. The entire massacre of thirty players had happened in a little over two minutes. 
“Damn, that team is brutal…” 
“I mean, that’s what you expect the favorites to do, right? But it’s still not over yet.” 
“We’re not done yet!” shouted a man in burnt-red camo from behind a locomotive. He was about two hundred yards from the black train car, standing directly behind a yellow diesel engine that was rusting all over. 
It was completely off the tracks, and the wheels were embedded into the stone ground, so there was no concern about getting his feet shot off from here. It happened to be the closest bit of cover, so the men escaping from the horrible slaughter had rushed here for safety. 
There were twelve of them. They were from a variety of teams—meaning that none of the allied teams escaped with all six alive. Some of them were the only survivors from their original squad. 
None of the survivors were injured, but that was not a relief, just an ominous sign that every one of their comrades who got shot was now dead. 
“Not done yet…? Dude, we’re a wreck now… I’m the only one left on my team!” 
“We really showed our asses there… She popped her head out as a trap, to get us thinking about shooting and surrounding them. And they did the whole shoot-outta-the-hole thing last time… Can’t believe we didn’t consider that.” 
“We just can’t win.” 
A number of them were thoroughly deflated. They couldn’t see any possible hope for recovery ahead. 
But some warriors hadn’t given up yet. One of them, a man in body armor and a green jumpsuit, pulled a signal flare out of his pocket and shot it up. It was red, of course. 
The signal to gather more comrades rose into the leaden sky and began to float downward. The man who shot it cast the disposable handle aside and said, “We haven’t lost until all of us are dead! Don’t lose hope! They can’t increase their numbers, but we can!” 
He was right. Based on the scan earlier, there were at least two more teams in the vicinity. Optimistically, if they knew about the flares, there could be more reinforcements arriving within the next few minutes. 
That wish apparently found the ears of the god of Gun Gale Online. 
“Hey, y’all! We’re coming your way! Don’t shoot!” someone shouted from the distance. “Don’t shoot us! We’re getting closer!” 
The voice got louder and louder, until eventually another team came into view around another vehicle. 
“Yeaaah!” The twelve survivors were elated. Their hope was still alive—the cavalry had arrived. 
“Over here! LPFM is hiding in that black freight car over there! They’re shooting out of little holes! Don’t give them a clear glimpse of you!” shouted a man in burnt-red camo. 
“All right! We’re fine! We can get to you!” 
The players hurtled around the side of their train car and raced over. There were twelve in total—two teams, all men. 
That made twenty-four allied soldiers, instantly doubling their strength. The men who’d been downcast at losing so many comrades couldn’t have been happier now. They even exchanged warm handshakes with the new arrivals, when normally they would be deadly rivals. 
The two new squads were quite distinct from each other. One had a civilian style with jeans and non-camo jackets, while the other wore matching desert coloring. But despite their visual difference, they were alike in their desire to take down a mighty foe right at the start. 
“They’re all in that car! They’ll shoot right out of the holes they made! We can’t get any closer because our weapons can’t punch through the walls!” explained the man in the burnt-red camo, the leader of the survivors. 
“All right,” said the leader of the civilian team. “If only we’d caught up a bit sooner…” 
“But at least it’s not over yet. Let’s give ’em hell!” said the leader of the desert-camo team, waving his hand to bring up the menu. 
Before their eyes, a new weapon appeared and fit right into his hands. The other men’s eyes lit up like children outside a toy store. 
The crowd in the bar cheered at the sudden arrival, too. 
“You can do this!” 
It was a grenade launcher that the reinforcement in the desert camo brought forth. That was, of course, a gun that shot grenades very long distances. Because they were so powerful and thus rare, only a handful of players owned one. 
The man’s grenade launcher was the HK69A1 by Heckler & Koch. It was a break-action single-shot launcher with a contrasting round barrel and rectangular body. When the pipe stock was extended, it was about twenty-seven inches long. 
It was a single shot, meaning that it couldn’t fire consecutively the way Fukaziroh’s MGL-140s did, but it used the same 40 mm low-velocity grenades. 
“Land one inside the car, and you can wipe them out with one blast!” 
The audience was right. Grenades exploded and sent their shrapnel flying all around, and they were especially deadly in an enclosed space. 
If they could score one hit over the heads of the four inside the train car, they could pull off a stunning come-from-behind victory. 
“Yeah! Get ’em!” 
“We know you got this!” 
“Destroy the favorites!” 
Once again, the crowd in the bar had changed their preference for who should win. 
“I’ll shoot a couple from the tip of the locomotive. If any explode inside the car, rush them and clean up,” the man said as he prepared the HK69A1. 
He undid the lock, tilting the fat barrel forward as if it were bowing. Then he popped a grenade into the yawning hole, closed the barrel back into place, and cocked the hammer. 
“You got this!” “Blow ’em up!” “We believe in you!” the others cheered. 
He walked up to the end of the engine, got down on his belly, and crawled the last three feet to the edge. From there, he peered around the side and saw the black freight car. 
There was the fear that a sniper’s bullet might come roaring at him, but it turned out to be all right. Either they didn’t know he was there, or the angle wasn’t right to aim at him. 
“Okay, we’re good.” 
Behind him, one of his squadmates used a distance-measuring monocular—incidentally, the same that Llenn had—to spot for him. “Six hundred and fifty-three feet. Make it an even six sixty if you want to hit the back wall,” he reported. 
Grenade launchers shot in a parabolic arc, so hitting a target exactly from above required a very precise grasp of distance. The train car was only open on top. From this angle, it was perpendicular to them, so the projectile had to land within a range of about ten feet. Of course, a hit to the side might do damage to the steel wall, but that wasn’t ideal. 
“I want to finish them in one,” the man muttered, pressed the stock to his shoulder, and placed his finger on the trigger. The special grenade-launcher bullet circle appeared, visible only to him. It was a green circle at a forty-five-degree diagonal. Its current location was about twenty yards in front of the freight car. 
The HK69A1 had a metallic sight that stuck out at an angle, but there was no point in using it when the bullet circle was more accurate. 
He lifted the HK69A1’s wide muzzle higher and higher, pushing the bullet circle farther into the distance. He moved it very carefully, to keep it from drifting left or right, until it intersected perfectly with the train car. 
Pomp. The 40 mm grenade shot out with a surprisingly cute sound. 
“Got it!” the man shouted confidently. He was certain that it would land inside the open-roofed car. The little black dot flew through the air in a gentle parabola, passed its peak, and began to fall. 
It plummeted directly down toward the car—and did not hit it. 
The black smoke of its explosion expanded into the air about ten yards in front and twenty yards above the freight car. They heard the blast a split second later. 
It had exploded in the air before it could hit its target. 
“Wha…? Whyyyy?” 
“They shot it down…,” answered one of the audience members in the bar, but of course the shooter didn’t hear it. 
The crowd had a perfect view of the whole thing. They saw the grenade launch with perfect accuracy, arcing through the air. 
And they saw Pitohui’s smile as she cocked the M870 Breacher shotgun. She fired it only once. Over a hundred tiny pellets exploded from the muzzle of the shortened shotgun. In true shotgun fashion, they sprayed out in an array, lead projectiles like tiny silver dragées meant to hit birds and forest animals. 
They blasted out of the short barrel of the shotgun like a net, expanding toward the grenade. The shot pellets struck the end of the grenade, activating its pressure sensor and causing it to explode. 
“That’s crazy!” yelled a middle-aged-looking player in the crowd. There was no way that even a shotgun could succeed at coincidentally hitting the grenade’s fuse with those tiny pellets. 
Then a voice from the adjacent table said coolly, “Sure, in real life.” It belonged to a young man, but he sounded wise beyond his years. “Have you forgotten that we’re in a game? In old-school first-person shooter games, it was typical for you to be able to shoot down cannonballs, missiles, and grenades with a regular gun. Some people could do it intentionally, and sometimes it happened by accident. Sometimes you had grenades clonk off of each other in midair.” 

 

“Seriously…?” asked the man who looked older than he actually was to the man who actually was much older than he looked. 
“Absolutely. In fact, shooting down a thrown grenade in GGO is pretty easy to do. You don’t need me to explain why, do you?” 
“The bullet line…” 
“Exactly. The big arc is drawn out in a line for you, so you just aim right for the spot where it’s vanishing and fire. Very easy with a shotgun.” 
“Ah, I see… And she knew that might happen, which is why she carries around the Breacher…” 
“Probably. It also depends on timing. That part is largely up to your own courage. You can’t shoot too early or too late. She’s probably practiced it a bunch of times—knowing that if she messes up, her avatar will get blown to smithereens.” 
“Ooooh, that actually worked. First time trying it, and I pulled it off. Way to go, me! Gotta give myself a hand on that one!” Pitohui chattered, almost in the third person, as she ran her left hand down the fore grip of the M870 Breacher. 
The empty shell popped out of the right side of the gun, so that a new one could be loaded. She didn’t forget about the belt of shotgun shells draped down her chest. 
“Well done, Pito!” cheered Fukaziroh as she raised an MGL-140. Leftania was hanging from her shoulder sling, so she had both hands aiming Rightony at the moment. She pointed it at the sky. 
Naturally, if she fired it, the grenade would be landing outside the freight car. There was no way to see the circle at all. But Fukaziroh gently adjusted her aim anyway and yelled, “There we go!” 
It was her first time firing upon the enemy in SJ3—a furious, merciless sequence of six consecutive grenades. 
“How’d it go?” asked a man next to the locomotive, his face pointed toward the sky. 
He was looking at a sniper who’d climbed the side of the train, poked his face the tiniest bit above the canopy, and surveyed the distant freight car. It was the man with the M40A3 who’d hit Llenn earlier. 
If he said Bullseye! it would’ve been a sign to the rest of the twenty-plus men to charge in with their guns. But he did not. 
“No good! It exploded in the air in front of the car! What the hell…? Did they shoot it down?” he wondered. 
“Crap!” 
“Well, just hit them with the next one. As long as you know where they are, the grenade-shooting part is easy.” 
“Yeah. We’ve still got plenty of chances,” muttered the guy next to the engine, not seeming particularly concerned with the news. 
“Huh? Doesn’t that mean—?” noticed someone more clever than the others. 
Just then, red lines silently descended from the sky—right in front of the men hiding behind the locomotive. Six of them. 
Pom-pom-pom-pom-pom-pom. 
A cute series of distant blasts. 
“—Their grenades are coming over here next!” 
If they could aim at us with grenade launchers, we could do the same to them. It was all quite straightforward. 
Fukaziroh had been staring up at the sky throughout the battle, not because she was bored, or because she was engaging in photosynthesis, or because she was looking for dragonflies and butterflies. 
It was because she was expecting that the enemy would have a grenade launcher and aim at them from above. M ordered her to alert Pitohui at once if she ever saw a bullet line coming down at them. 
No line would appear from an enemy in an unknown location, but with the information from her teammates, Fukaziroh had enough of an idea of where they were. Thanks to seeing the bullet line, Pitohui was able to shoot the grenade down—but it also gave Fukaziroh the chance to learn exactly the direction and distance of the enemy. 
The only thing left to do was mount a ruthless counterattack. 
Fukaziroh fired six grenades in succession at the unseen enemy. She had a six-shooter grenade launcher. Was there any reason not to shoot them all? No, there wasn’t. 
The grenades swooped through the air and plummeted toward the locomotive. 
“Get ou—!” 
Boom. 
The first exploded as it landed right on top of the engine. The blast and shrapnel assaulted the torso of the sniper up there, cutting him in half. Llenn’s foot had been avenged. 
Boom. 
The second flew a bit farther and blew up in the midst of five men behind the locomotive preparing to charge. One grenade was all it took for the allies to be obliterated together. 
Boom. 
The third hit the back of a man who’d panicked after the first blast. His avatar shattered into tiny translucent shards, and they rained over his nearby teammates. 
Boom. 
The fourth burst next to the man reloading the HK69A1. He and his distance-measuring companion were knocked out of SJ3. 
Boom. 
The fifth luckily exploded on the top of the engine. No one suffered any damage. 
Boom. 
“Son of a bitch!” 
The sixth and final grenade blew up just behind the man in burnt-red camo who’d been calling the shots for the group. The blast was so strong that it rammed him directly into the train engine. 
“Awww…,” moaned one of the bar patrons. 
The six grenades exploded in succession, sprayed glowing-red damage effects everywhere. It had taken just three seconds from the first blast to the last one. 
That span of time was enough for the space behind the locomotive to turn into Hell. It may have been computer graphics, but the explosion was a brutal, gory vision, the damage that such weapons inflicted on the human form. 
Gray smoke surrounded the engine, obscuring everything. 
The number zero in the corner of the screen jumped back up again. 
“Was that all of them…?” 
Ultimately, it displayed 10. That attack had killed ten, under half of the total twenty-four. 
“Oh? That’s fewer than I expected.” 
“Yeah. I figured that would be twenty, easy.” 
“But I bet a lot are injured, too.” 
The wind was blowing the smoke clear of the locomotive. The aerial camera caught sight of many men scattering like baby spiders to the breeze. 
If they stayed there, more grenades might fall in. They needed to put distance between themselves and the enemy. That meant a quick retreat. 
The men raced away from the train in a sprint. Once they were about a hundred yards away from it, there were other cars and engines around. At last, they stopped behind cover, looking for places to hide from bullets. There were no follow-up shots coming from the freight car. 
Glowing damage effects were all over their bodies, indicating that they weren’t in top condition. Many of them jammed emergency med kits into their necks as soon as they had the time. 
It was now after 12:29. The third scan would be starting soon. 
“The ones who just ran away don’t really need to check it, I guess.” 
“Yeah. If they don’t do something about the four set up inside the freight car, there’s nowhere else for them to go.” 
“Couldn’t those four just hang out in that train car until the very end of SJ3? I mean, they can wipe out anyone who tries to attack them. It’s the perfect defensive fortress.” 
“Nah, they can’t do that.” 
“Why not?” 
“Why not? Dude…did you already forget?” 
“Ahhh, this is really an ideal position. Wish we could stay here forever. But that’s not gonna happen,” Pitohui chattered from inside the freight car. 
With her left hand, Llenn brought forth more ammo magazines from her inventory. She’d been shooting very economically, but the battles so far had already used up three (a hundred and fifty bullets), and she had nineteen left (nine hundred and fifty). 
As she stuffed the new magazines into her now-empty pouch, she said, “That’s right, Pito. Are you going to live in here until the end of SJ3?” 
Llenn’s reason for entering SJ3 was to fight against SHINC. Calling this picking on the weak would be a bit rude to the other teams, but they couldn’t just hang back in an advantageous location the whole time. 
“Aww, c’mon! Let’s just live here! When you’re here, you’re home!” said Fukaziroh, who had just finished reloading her MGL-140. 
But M had his Satellite Scanner out. “We can’t.” 
“Why not?” 
“How come?” 
“Llenn, Fuka, have you forgotten?” 
“Hmm?” “What?” 
The two girls were equally confused. Pitohui just shrugged her shoulders in frustration. 
“This place is going to be underwater before long.”