CHAPTER 5
Clarence and Shirley
12:30 PM.
Thirty minutes had already passed since the start of SJ3, and the third Satellite Scan was beginning.
“Dwah! I totally forgot about the ocean!” Fukaziroh yelped.
“So did I…,” Llenn added.
“Hey, I wonder if this freight car will float. Maybe not, since we already bored a couple holes in it,” commented Pitohui.
“Watch for more grenades, Fuka. The rest of us can check the map,” M said. The four of them were waiting for the moment to arrive as they hid in the empty freight car.
Llenn jumped inside just before 12:20, so that meant they’d been fighting from that spot as a team for exactly ten minutes. It was good that they hadn’t suffered any damage in that time, but they would need to move soon. The target, as always, was SHINC.
The third scan was the first that Llenn saw for herself. It began from the east end, the right side of the map. Bright-white dots and dull-gray dots appeared over the terrain of the map to indicate the location of surviving and eliminated teams. Touching a dot made the team’s name appear below it.
She decided to ignore the dead teams. She knew that SHINC was still alive and in it, though there was no direct evidence of that.
But she was correct. In an area on the right that looked like a big rocky boulder growth, a dot labeled SHINC glowed brilliantly. Scattered around it were dead gray dots.
No surprise there! Llenn raved to herself.
The hardy women of SHINC had fought off the alliance of smaller teams that attempted to do to them what had just happened to LPFM. Llenn also tapped the dot right along the water’s edge in a forest area to the upper right to confirm the presence of MMTM.
They, too, were surrounded by a number of gray dots. No doubt they’d been just as ruthless at dispatching their would-be attackers. You could really count on that team to put up a good fight.
But Llenn was too busy watching the map and praising her rivals to notice something.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!”
Pitohui suddenly burst into laughter, and she wondered why. Pitohui was the type of person who did spontaneously laugh for no good reason, but if it happened in the middle of the scan, there was probably a reason for that. Or at least, Llenn hoped that was the case.
“Pito, what’s up?” she asked.
“You’ll see soon. Once the scan gets to us,” she replied enigmatically.
Huh? What does that mean? Llenn wondered. She waited for it to get farther west to their own location. In just a few seconds, it was there, lighting up a dot just about in the center of the switchyard area.
She touched it, confirming that it belonged to them. So that told Llenn exactly where they were, but she also realized another, horrifying fact.
“Huh?”
When she saw the map just after the start of the event, the switchyard had covered quite a lot of ground across the southwest of the island. Even then, there had been a lot of space between the ends of the tracks and the ocean.
But now, that had been scraped away. In fact, part of the wide expanse of tracks was already intersecting with the shoreline.
In other words, the island was already that much smaller. They had covered a fair distance from the starting point, which was completely submerged by now.
On the northern edge of the map, over half the city was underwater. Some of the gray dots of dead teams were in the middle of the sea. Mysteriously, there was also a white dot over the water, indicating a living team, but that was surely because they’d been on top of a building and were now trapped there.
“The ocean…”
“Yeah, let’s see, we’ve covered about a mile to a mile and a quarter.”
“The ocean!” Llenn panicked, zooming in on their location.
That made it clear that the freight car they were hiding in now was only a few hundred yards from the southern shore. It was probably rushing closer even as she watched.
“Uh-oh, that’s not good! We don’t have inner tubes!”
Karen had taken swimming lessons with her siblings when she was small, but she’d never swam as Llenn, and it would obviously be impossible to swim with her gun and full gear on.
“Now, now, Llenn, calm down,” Pitohui said, clearly enjoying Llenn’s panic.
M said, calmly and rationally, “This area is flat and wide, so it’s going to fill in slow and shallow. It’s not going to cause much damage only coming up to our ankles. We just have to watch out for dips in the ground.”
Fukaziroh stared at the distant sky. “Ah yes, that’s no good. We can’t stay here long. It’s a shame to leave such a lovely home, with so much natural light… I suppose we’ll have to move to higher ground,” she lamented to a sun she couldn’t see.
The enemy wasn’t attacking for the moment, either because they were too busy checking out the scan or dealing with the onrushing sea, or because they didn’t have anyone left with a grenade launcher.
The scan was about to wrap up. At the very end, Llenn looked around their vicinity for more foes. They were so close the dots were practically stuck together, but at least she could get a direction. The teams Fukaziroh’s grenade bombardment damaged earlier were now to the northeast.
They’d moved a bit farther away, and there were one, two, three…six teams still alive. She could assume that few if any were still at full health, but there was no point in being sloppy. They didn’t know yet if they were dealing with just six players or a full thirty-six.
There was also another team moving toward the bunch from the north at the time the scan finished. It was 12:31.
“Okay, M. Give us orders,” Pitohui demanded of the team leader. She wasn’t coming up with any plans of her own. Llenn couldn’t tell if that was out of respect for their leader, or as a test, or both, or if she just didn’t want to bother using her brain.
M placed the terminal back in his pocket, picked up the backpack with the shield inside from its spot at his feet, and easily hauled it over his shoulder. “Prepare to move out.”
“Okeydoke. Where to?” Pitohui placed her KTR-09 in a sling. She was going to need both hands to get out of here first.
“Northeast. We’re plunging straight through where the enemies are now.”
“We are?” Llenn said, not sure if she’d misheard, or if she was right, and M was just losing it.
But M, as always, was just being M. “If we run east or north and get blocked off by the water, we’re done for. Instead, let’s choose what gives us the best chance at survival. If the other teams get in our way, we’ve got the skill to deal with them.”
“Ugh…”
He was right, and she understood why, but she wasn’t really into the idea. Not at all. She couldn’t help but grumble about it.
“Yep, that sounds best. Let’s do it,” Fukaziroh agreed easily. She lifted an MGL-140 in each hand, wrapping up her prep period.
“All right, fine…” Llenn gave up. There wasn’t any other way to do it. And in that case, there was no use wasting time. “Let’s hurry!” she told her teammates.
“No, wait,” said M, to her disbelief. “Not quite yet. We’re going to wait for when the waves hit this spot.”
The fourteen players hiding behind the other engines and cars were just as panicked about the ocean rushing in on them from what they saw on the scan map. It was especially alarming to the players who’d traveled outward from the center of the map, as they didn’t realize the island was in the process of sinking.
“Wha—?! I don’t believe it! We gotta get outta here!”
“Yeah… Fortunately, if we’re gonna run away from them, it’ll take us closer to the center.”
“I don’t want to drown.”
Some of the players were more inclined to run for safety, while others yearned for a chance to avenge their fallen squadmates.
“But if we run now, then the whole point of teaming up to take out one of the powerhouses will be lost. We ought to make beating Ell-Pee-Elf…argh! Beating Pitohui’s team should be our top priority. Let’s keep them stuck in place so they drown.”
“I’m fine with working together against them. But what’s the point of going down with them? It just makes things easier for the surviving teams after us.”
“Wait, wait. How will we fight when we’re recovering?”
That player was right. Several of them were still significantly damaged from Fukaziroh’s bombardment. They’d taken their med kit shots and were in the process of healing, of course, but they needed another two minutes for it to finish—even longer, for those who were gravely wounded.
“We can’t fight at full strength yet. What do we do if they start charging this way to avoid the ocean?”
“We shoot back! Lying in wait obviously gives us an advantage!”
“But they’ve got that speedy little girl, the grenade launchers, a genius sniper, and…”
“Why would you assume we’ll lose before you even try?! We still have the advantage in numbers!”
“Hey, dumbass, if that was all that mattered, we would have won earlier… C’mon, use your brain.”
“What, do you have some brilliant plan, then?!”
“I’m saying, we have to think about it! You do have a brain, don’t you?”
“What’d you say?!”
They got progressively more heated, sniping back and forth under the pressure. Then came a voice from the distance. “Excuse me! May we join you? We saw the red signal flare!”
“Oh? You heard that?”
“Yeah!”
“Great! You’re in!”
“Those must be the folks who were nearby on the scan!”
The alliance of fourteen set aside their ugly squabbling for the moment and rejoiced. Nothing like reinforcements to improve one’s mood.
“Over here, guys! Stay in cover behind the cars, so you don’t get shot from the southwest!”
“Got it! And don’t you shoot us, either!”
The men felt slightly better about their chances, believing that they were getting another six comrades. After a wait of about thirty seconds, they heard footsteps over gravel, and then their reinforcements arrived from underneath one of the train cars.
“Hiya! We’ll join you!” said a very handsome and breezy fellow who could have come out of a boy band. He wore all-black combat gear, top and bottom, and an equipment vest. Large, long magazine pouches lined his stomach.
His weapon was the AR-57, a weird chimera of the M16 and P90. In a holster on his right was the FN Five-Seven pistol. Both guns used the same bullets. A pouch on his left side held four hand grenades.
“Hiya…”
And there was also a tanned man in camo carrying an FA-MAS assault rifle. It was a French gun in the bullpup style, meaning that the magazine was loaded behind the grip and trigger.
That made the gun shorter overall and easier to control when firing bursts, so it was popular to use in GGO. The gun’s caliber was 5.56 mm, same as the M16. It was often nicknamed The Trumpet for its appearance.
The two sidled over to the fourteen and crouched. The handsome one smiled and said, “I’m Clarence. This is my teammate, Sam. We were also in SJ2, but this is probably the first time we’ve met any of you. A pleasure!”
“Thanks for coming! It’s…just the two of you?” they asked—an obvious question.
“Unfortunately!” Clarence answered. “But we’ll work hard for the cause!”
“Who got you? One of the distant powerhouse teams? Or did you get into a fight with some other random group?”
“Huh? No, it’s just the two of us. No one else could get the time off.”
“Oh…”
“Hey, you don’t have to look so disappointed! We’re gonna do our very best! Just fill us in on the situation!” Clarence exclaimed with a dazzling smile.
“…”
Sam never said a word.
The audience in the pub saw the arrival of Clarence and Sam—and the subsequent sitrep to bring them up to speed.
“Oh! That’s the guy who got beat up by Llenn in the dome last time and gave her all the ammo.”
“Ahhh, yeah, the handsome one. And that gift ended up saving Llenn,” recalled some of the audience members.
“If they’re just arriving now, they must’ve come from a long way away. Is he gonna fight Llenn for sure this time?”
“A revenge match! How exciting!”
Others were more excited to root for him. They did not realize that they were really rooting for her.
“I see… Wow, what a horrible map this time. I don’t want to drown,” was Clarence’s first reaction to the news. “But we’ve still got the advantage, right? We’re totally in this still!” she added with a refreshing smile.
Naturally, the men asked, “But how?”
“The space between the train cars around here is flat and has no cover, right? We’ll have plenty of chances to shoot at them. And there’s only four of them.”
“Yeah, we know. But they’re not four typical players.”
“True, but if you don’t mind me giving you some painful advice, you’re not making use of your numerical superiority. You were around the side of a train engine earlier? Why were you all in one place? I would have split us up into pairs and set up a net just within visible range of the black freight car. Then I wouldn’t move. The enemy has to move to get away from the waves, so you shoot them when they do. And if they start to push you aside, fall back and let the other teams attack from the sides,” Clarence said with great confidence.
The fourteen men seemed impressed. “Oh, yeah, I suppose.”
“That might work.”
They’d been so wrapped up in discussion over their mindset that they hadn’t come up with any tactical plans, so having a workable strategy was like a ray of hope and possibility shining through the gloom.
“Okay! It’s too early to give up!”
“Let’s go with that plan!”
“Yeah! And we can continue healing hit points while we’re waiting!”
As more of them offered encouragement for the plan, the group’s morale shot up. That was the old group mentality, for better or for worse.
“We’re gonna go with your plan, Clarence!”
“Yeah, go right ahead! I’m glad to hear it! Let us join you!”
And so the sixteen men—make that fifteen men and one woman—became one to defeat their powerful enemies.
Or at least, so it seemed.
“…”
There was one player who watched it happen through the round viewer of a pair of binoculars.
It was 12:35.
There had been a long period of following the switchyard without any battle or gunfire.
“So…what’s happening now…?”
The audience wasn’t bothered with any of the other battles going on. They awaited further developments here with bated breath.
On one of the screens, Team LPFM was shown inside of the train car. The four of them had been waiting in place ever since the last scan. The ocean was rushing up on their position.
Earlier, the camera had to be very high up to have a wide enough angle to capture both the freight car and the edge of the water, but now it was much closer. The sea was within a hundred yards of them.
Like floodwaters, the ocean crept up closer and closer. It was eerie without any waves, but because of the way the island was flooding, the “shore” was very shallow and long, so the waves were breaking long before they reached this point.
The team was aware that the water was approaching, of course. M got up several times and peered through the hole in the side wall to check on its status.
Another screen followed the state of the ambushers. The sixteen-member alliance, after the arrival of Clarence, had split into teams of two or three and spread out north and east of the black freight car. The cameras had been following them sneaking around.
Now each clump of them was hiding behind a group of cars, waiting for LPFM to emerge. The density of cars was loose, so their fan of coverage came at intervals of thirty to fifty yards. In the Warring States period of Japanese history, this was known as the “crane’s wing” formation, for its resemblance to the wide wingspan of those great birds.
There was about five hundred yards of space between them and the black freight car where LPFM lurked. That was more distance than the maximum range of Fukaziroh’s grenade launchers, with a few train cars to spare.
It was a stalemate.
It looked disadvantageous to LPFM, who were being approached by the sea to the south and west—and whose one way out to the northeast was blocked by enemies waiting for them.
“It looks bad for them…but LPFM’s tough, you know? Wouldn’t they just be able to force their way through a siege this shallow? Once they know where the ambush is, they can snipe and grenade ’em there, right?” said someone who knew the four of them had more sheer power than the others.
“But I do think this strategy of their enemies is going to work better than the last one. The difference in numbers is big. And the battlefield is flat and open. If they’re charging ahead and get shot from the flanks, big slow M is going down first, don’t you think? If one person dies, that’s a game changer, and it’ll push momentum away from them,” said another, who believed that the number of people and guns would prove decisive.
Wherever they fell on this spectrum of expectations, all the bar patrons had the same thought.
When will this fight start already? We wanna see the four-man favorites vs. the alliance of sheer numbers!
So they all watched the inert screens, attention focused, not wanting to miss a single moment of it.
And then, at 12:36, there was movement.
Four people left the black freight car as the seawater approached. A pink shrimp, a blond shrimp, a woman in black, and a huge man in camo.
“There they go!”
One of the people watching through a monocular from the roof of an engine promptly shot up a red signal flare to warn the others.
As soon as the red light rose into the leaden sky, there was a high-pitched gunshot, and the final battle of the switchyard had begun at last.
“Huuuuuh?”
“What was thaaat?”
“Excuse meeeee?” screeched the audience in the pub, bolting to their feet.
When treated to a tremendous shock, human beings tend to react one of two ways: to shout or to go silent.
“……”
Some of the audience paused with their half-drunk glasses in the air, unable to move.
In either case, the two sides were united in disbelief.
On the screen, the men surrounding LPFM in their siege formation were getting shot left and right.
In the back.
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha! This is fuuun!”
The AR-57 on Clarence’s right shoulder spat gunfire in a bright and energetic rhythm.
Like Llenn’s P90, it took advantage of a very high firing rate to emit a punchy snare drumroll of percussion. The empty cartridges shot downward out of the hole where the M16 would accept its magazine and bounced off of metal tracks and ties before they vanished.
Clarence was shooting at enemies within her sight. Just thirty feet away, in fact.
“Wait— Stop— You idio— Don’t—,” her victim shouted, waving his hands at her.
Clarence poured bullets into the man’s face without mercy or hesitation, only stopping when he was properly dead. Two bodies lay next to the wheel of the train car.
“And that’s one down! I mean, two in one down!” Clarence crowed, switching out another forty-round magazine. She still had ten rounds to go, but she switched it out anyway.
Then Sam, who was crouched behind her with smoke wafting from the barrel of the FA-MAS, offered a heartfelt “I’m sorry…”
The audience in the pub saw everything.
First, the red signal flare went up, then Clarence and Sam left their position on the far-right wing of the formation. They sprinted over to the adjacent group hiding behind a different car and, without warning or mercy, opened fire on them.
Once they’d killed them, Clarence and Sam began to switch out their ammo. When they were done, Clarence practically skipped along to the freight car next to that one. Sam followed behind her.
There were two more players there. They were just in the middle of affirming their excitement to shoot, having seen the signal that indicated LPFM had emerged from hiding.
“Oh, they don’t get it…,” someone in the crowd said. The men had no idea that a source of childish, mirthful murder was approaching them.
Clarence and Sam popped out from behind the car, AR-57 and FA-MAS firing in unison, spraying a hail of bullets onto their hapless victims. No character could survive full auto fire from two guns, from only twenty yards away, and at a rear angle.
Helpless, the men died and dropped out of SJ3, glowing bullet-wound effects on their faces and bodies. They probably never even knew who had shot them.
“Wha—?! What’s up with them?! They just shot people on their own side!” screamed a man in a beret, spittle flying from his lips.
Indeed, this was the very person who had secretly gone to all those teams to propose his plan for joining forces to defeat the toughest squads of all. He had, of course, passed a letter and some signal flares to Clarence and Sam’s team. Which was why he was so shocked that they would suddenly start firing on the other allied squads.
“I mean, they’re not on the same side,” someone else more rational said to the man in the beret, who was red-faced to the point of being purple.
“What?!”
“This is a battle royale. You can team up or split apart as you please. You can shoot your own teammates dead in this game, so why would anyone complain about shooting other teams that are your enemies from the start?”
“……”
The man in the beret scrunched up his face, unable to argue against that point.
To settle the matter, someone else then added, “Well, at least things are getting interesting!”
“This is exciting, huh, Sam?!”
“Uh, whatever you say!” Sam replied, practically in tears, as Clarence raced happily onward to the next target.
They burst past the next car, changed directions, and saw two men looking back at them. These ones were only twenty yards away. They were on alert due to the gunshots behind them, however. The famed Cold War muzzles of the M4A1 and AK-47 turned to the visitors, along with four suspicious eyes.
“Eep!” Sam shrieked, right as Clarence shouted, “Enemies to our flanks! They were waiting to ambush us! Already got four of us, and they’re catching up soon! Give us some backup!”
“…”
Sam just gave her a side-eye at the shameless lies from his teammate’s mouth.
“What…? Shit!”
“Which way are they coming from?!”
The two men took Clarence’s lie at face value, failing to parse the situation. The M4A1 and AK-47 drifted away from Clarence and Sam toward the freight car they’d just run around.
“From right here!” Clarence said as soon as the bullet lines stopped pointing at her. She opened fire with the AR-57 at ultra-close range.
“Gwah!”
The man with the AK-47 didn’t give up until the end, despite being riddled with bullets. He shifted to the left, trying to shield his comrade. Then he died from his wounds.
The man with the M4A1 didn’t get shot in the head or torso thanks to his teammate, but a bullet did go through his right arm, and the shock and numbness of it caused him to drop his weapon. “Gah!”
The M4A1 clattered loudly to the rails below. He scrambled to grab it with his left hand, but Clarence stomped down on the weapon first. “There we go!”
He looked up into Clarence’s handsome features and winning smile.
“Why did you betray us…?”
Bang.
Clarence shot him in the head.
“I dunno, it just seemed more fun this way!” she proclaimed with a grin.
* * *
Clarence and Sam had dispatched six of the original fourteen, and they weren’t done yet.
“I suppose they’ve figured it out by now, right? I mean, they’re not idiots.”
She was hiding on the west side of a freight car, switching out her magazine again.
“What are we doing now? What’s going to happen to us?” Sam wailed from behind her.
“Good question. No answers,” she said happily, without turning around. “You know, I’ve always wanted to perform one really huge act of betrayal.”
“So are you satisfied? Let’s get out of here, then! If we wait around too long, LPFM will show up!”
“Yeah, that’s probably the best idea, because we can’t beat them, but…it’s also no fun.”
“Dahhh! I can’t put up with this anymore! Forget it, I’m running away!”
“C’mon, don’t be that way. Just a bit longer. It’ll be tough on your own, don’t you see?”
“Why would I care about—?”
Buh-pamm.
Sam abruptly stopped speaking, drowned out by a muffled explosion.
“Hmm?” Clarence turned around to see Sam standing there with a glowing bullet effect on his chest.
“Wha…?” Sam had no idea what had happened and couldn’t see it for himself.
But Clarence could see the brilliant-red glow across his entire chest very clearly. Bullet holes in GGO were small as a general rule, usually no bigger than a clenched fist in size—but the damage across Sam’s chest was so wide, he might as well have been smacked with a log.
Sam’s body toppled slowly backward.
“Oh, crap!” Clarence ducked down next to him, where the DEAD tag had lit up, hovering over the body.
Byeum.
A bullet rocketed through the air where Clarence’s chest had just been, thudding into the gravel just a few yards away.
Bam! The rock there practically exploded into pieces. The sniper’s bullet had gone from north to south.
“Eek! So scary!” Clarence screamed, though with great delight.
“Huh? What the hell just…? Huh?”
The audience in the bar had a good view of it all. One of the two traitors had gotten shot, his chest lit up red. And the other one in the black combat gear had dropped to the ground in a hurry.
But just because they’d seen it happen didn’t mean they could process what it meant.
“Huh? Sniping?”
“From where?”
“Was that M?”
“No, that was from the opposite direction, right?”
They were as confused as Clarence was, if not more so. Fortunately, whoever was managing the live feed was considerate enough to make it clearer. The angle on the screen switched to a large, clear view of the sniper who had just shot at the two of them.
The player was wearing a gradiated gray-camo poncho and was standing atop the toppled control tower, the tallest altitude around. The sniper had a bolt-action rifle with a boxy body painted in a green-and-brown-camo pattern, with a large scope attached.
Beneath the player’s hood, two eyes sparkled—surrounded by brilliant-green hair.
“Oh, it’s her! The one who shot Pitohui last time!”
Shirley pulled the bolt with her right hand. It ejected the empty cartridge with tremendous speed and loaded the next one when she pushed it back forward. From her perfectly upright shooting position, she opened her mouth, canines flashing, to expel the breath from her lungs.
“Die…wild beasts…”
She certainly seemed to be enjoying the game.
“I wonder what Shirley’s up to now…?” said a young man in a tree-pattern jacket, standing amid a lengthy stretch of ruined city.
“Dunno. All I know is that she ain’t dead so far. Plus, it’s not like there’s anything we can do to control her now,” said another man in the same type of jacket, his hairline receded, from the midst of a forest.
Atop the fallen control tower of the switchyard, the muzzle of Shirley’s R93 Tactical 2 swept sideways and came to a crisp stop.
She was firing at a full stand and without any support for her gun. That was the least stable firing position, but the tip of the gun hardly wavered. It merely dipped up and down the slightest bit.
Shirley’s pale index finger, which extended bare from a glove that left only that part of her hand exposed, pulled on the trigger.
Holes on the sides of the muzzle emitted brief flames to lower the recoil of the gun firing. The bullet that emerged, wreathed in the heat of the air friction, crossed three hundred yards in a blink—and buried itself into the back of a crouching man.
“Guaaah!”
The man next to the locomotive screamed and toppled forward.
There were three others near him. They’d been hearing the gunshots corresponding to their “teammates” dying on the right for a while, but they never assumed that it was a case of betrayal, just LPFM on the attack, most likely.
So they were caught between rushing over to help or possibly staying in place in case LPFM came into view. All of a sudden, a bullet from out of the blue hit and killed one of them from behind.
He was wearing bulletproof plating on his chest and back. Although the bullet had struck his protective armor, it didn’t save his life. The shot left a gaping hole through the armor and his clothes, the glowing damage mark stretching practically from armpit to armpit.
“Huh?”
One of the men turned around, right as the next shot caught him in the chest. He had a new SCAR-H assault rifle, freshly purchased for SJ3, and was on sniping duty but dropped out of the event before he had a chance to fire a single shot with it.
“……”
The third man was unable to process the slaughter around him in time, standing stock-still and making himself a simple target.
The next shot homed in on the center of his body.
“Yikes… There goes another one…”
On the live feed, a huge bullet-hole effect appeared on the stomach of the third victim, who collapsed onto his back. Naturally, he was killed instantly. After the three seconds it took for his hit points to officially hit zero, the DEAD tag appeared over his body.
On another screen, Shirley was exchanging the magazine of her R93 Tactical 2, after she’d fired five shots to kill four players. When she was done, she pushed the bolt forward to load the next bullet. She remained standing atop the fallen control tower during that time.
Her attitude was bold, confident, even heroic. In fact, the poncho flapping behind her in the wind looked like a hero’s cape. She had the silhouette of a protagonist.
“Damn, that was rad!”
“I’m assuming she knows there’s no enemies around, and that being up high is a major sniping advantage.”
“Makes you wish there was some epic BGM playing now.”
“Go on! Shoot someone else!”
The crowd was eating it up. Meanwhile, someone who hadn’t watched SJ2 wondered, “What’s up with that gun…? That’s not an antimateriel rifle, is it?”
The effects of the gun were far too powerful to be a normal rifle, with the way that a single shot had spread such wide damage across the chest and stomach, being instantly fatal through bulletproof armor. If its caliber was the size of a large antimateriel rifle, those devastating effects might seem rational, but this gun looked too small for that.
“It’s just a typical Blaser R93 Tactical 2. Should be a 7.62 mm, if it’s the same one as in SJ2,” said one of the audience members who had seen it in action in SJ2. The reason for mentioning the caliber was that the R93 Tactical 2 was a highly adjustable gun with different barrels and ammo magazines.
“That’s what I thought. It’s too small to be antimateriel. But how does it have such ridiculous power, then?”
The question was met with a period of silence. Eventually, one of the hardest of hardcore gun fanatics in GGO, of whom there were many, answered, “This is just a guess, but…”
“And that guess is…?”
“I think that chick’s using explosive bullets.”
Nobody was as pumped up as Shirley was to appear in SJ3.
The woman who had gone into SJ2 thinking “Oh, I don’t wanna shoot anyone. I’m all about love and peace for all humankind” was no more. She had died in SJ2.
Now Shirley was a fearsome sniper with bloodlust flowing through her veins. In the video game, that is.
She had trained herself from the ground up in the two-plus months between events. Now she no longer held an ounce of hesitation about shooting anyone within GGO. It was “just a game” to her.
In order to get better at it and truly enjoy the game to the fullest, she had spent all her free time outside of work in GGO. She’d made her hobby her job, so there was nothing else taking up her attention; and she didn’t have a boyfriend, so she had plenty of time.
Shirley hunted monsters in GGO and aggressively engaged in PKing when she had the chance, to improve her own personal experience and the stats of her avatar.
Naturally, she wanted to improve her attacking power. She hadn’t forgotten the frustration of SJ2. There was no way she could wash that bad taste out of her mouth.
She had taken aim and hit Pitohui right in the head. And yet, that one shot didn’t succeed in eliminating all of her health. It hadn’t been lethal enough.
But neither did she have any intention of letting go of the R93 Tactical 2. The gun was essentially the same as the normal R93 hunting rifle she had a permit to use in real life (as Mai Kirishima, age twenty-four, resident of Hokkaido, working as a hunter and nature guide), aside from the stock.
The gun was her partner, having gotten her as far as it did in SJ2, and if she was going to appear in SJ3, there was no other gun she could fathom using. It had switchable barrels, so she had the option of going to a larger caliber. She could go from a .308 Winchester (7.62 × 51 mm NATO rounds) to a bigger .300 Winchester Magnum, or a .338 Lapua Magnum.
However, that would give it a different feel from the R93 she fired in real life and throw her off from the instincts she’d built up already. She had a natural feel for “how far this caliber will go before it drops off this much,” and that would be lost.
So in the search for a different answer, she arrived at the Bullet Customization skill.
GGO had a number of skills, or special abilities, that players could earn in exchange for experience points, and the Bullet Customization skill was something only people extremely good with their hands could make proper use of.
Shirley ramped up her Dexterity stat as high as she could before she earned the skill. Then she began to fashion more powerful bullets for herself.
As someone who made a living hunting in real life, Shirley naturally knew some things about ammunition. In fact, she knew more than your typical Japanese gun fanatic.
In the military, and within GGO, the primary type of ammunition was full metal jacket ammo. That referred to a lead bullet core surrounded in a tougher brass shell—in other words, “jacketed” in “full metal.” Often abbreviated to FMJ.
It was easy to recognize them on sight. They were the kind that shone golden, with a pointy end. They had high penetration power, making them ideal for shooting at targets hiding behind cover.
However, the ability to penetrate all the way through a struck target also meant not inflicting all of its potential power on the target as physical damage.
As a contrast to FMJ bullets, there were soft-point, or “jacketed soft-point” bullets, in which just the tip of the bullet was not covered in the stronger metal. These bullets left the softer lead exposed at the end, so even against softer targets, the material would push forward and deform into the organic flesh, expanding like a mushroom head, doing greater damage as it came to a stop.
They were once produced for use in war at a military factory in a place called Dum Dum in British colonial India, giving them the colloquial name of dumdum bullets.
Later, their use was banned in war for the reason of being inhumane and excessive. After that point, it became widely known that dumdum bullets were not to be used in armed conflict.
Then again, there were ways to alter FMJ bullets to inflict more damage on human flesh, and some would argue that humane or inhumane shouldn’t be an issue among weapons designed to kill in the first place.
Naturally, both now and in the past, soft-point bullets were used for hunting. When hunting, you needed to kill or immobilize the animal, preferably in one shot. Wild animals with a high tolerance for pain would simply run away if the bullet passed entirely through the body.
They have also been used by police, because they are both damaging to a criminal as well as better at limiting secondary damage that a bullet could still do if it passes through the target and continues onward.
Shirley had begun to work on customizing bullets in search of ever greater power. Her first attempt at soft-point bullets was relatively simple and easy. When she used them against monsters, she could tell that the damage had increased.
But that wasn’t enough for her.
“This…isn’t going to cut it…”
Her soft-body damage had risen, but the penetrative power against hard objects fell. That meant that if the target was equipped with a bulletproof vest or plate, or was wearing a helmet, the shot would actually be weaker.
She considered switching between FMJ and soft-point bullets according to need, but that would require her to go through the trouble of exchanging magazines.
And more importantly, it introduced a fatal flaw: a slight shift in bullet trajectory when changing between bullets. Different bullets had different weights, and that translated to different trajectories, even if that difference was subtle.
To a one-shot-kill sniper like Shirley, using the same bullet each time and being able to hit the same target each time was extremely important. If this weren’t Shirley, but some other random GGO player, switching ammo might not be a big deal at all.
The reason for this was, of course, the bullet circle.
It was like an automatic measuring tool for bullet trajectory. It input all relevant variables and calculated where a hypothetical bullet was going to land.
But Shirley (and her companions) did not use a bullet circle. She used her experience, the distance, elevation change, and wind to aim on her own, firing in the same motion that she touched the trigger.
If the bullet circle was a calculator, then Shirley and her fellow hunters were doing mental arithmetic. That also earned them the advantage of never giving their enemies a bullet line to dodge.
“There must be an almighty bullet out there… The perfect something…something…something…,” Shirley muttered to herself. Without an answer, she eventually decided, “Guess I’ll go kill someone…”
She went off to do some PKing. Maybe if she shot a few people dead, an idea would occur to her. In the game, of course.
On a peaceful weekend afternoon, Shirley hid on the top floor of a building in a ruined city and waited for prey to come along. Being alone and doing nothing for over two hours was very boring, but she’d learned a lot about patience by being a hunter in real life, so it was normal to her.
Then she spotted a group of five players looking satisfied after a hunting session. Luckily, they passed right below her, where she caught them within her scope.
Her aim was vertical—and adjacent to the building. That meant a close range where the bullet would not be very affected by the wind. Gravity wouldn’t have a negative effect, either—not when the target was in gravity’s path.
As she prepared to shoot each one of them in the head, Shirley spotted something through her zoomed-in scope. Blue plasma grenades, swaying on the back of one of the players.
She fired without hesitation, striking it and causing an explosion. A single bullet succeeded in turning all five of them into blue light together. It must have been quite unpleasant, going from a happy return trip to all of them dead without knowing what had happened.
And to Shirley, the blue explosion was a revelation.
From the window of the dessicated building, she shouted, “That’s it! I need to give the bullets explosive power!”
“Explosive bullets…? You can get those?!” mocked one of the audience members in the bar.
“Sure, you can. They’re not banned, y’know? What, you think the Geneva convention applies inside of GGO?”
“No, I mean, do they actually sell them?”
“They don’t—and I don’t believe you could conveniently excavate any, so she probably crafted ’em using the Bullet Customization skill. By trial and error.”
“You can do that?!”
“I would assume so. You saw what her bullets did to those guys.”
“Well… Yeah, I guess so…”
On the TV screen, Shirley went on the move. She slid down the steep angle of the toppled control tower and dropped the last ten feet to the ground when it went vertical. As she landed, she twisted and spun sideways, still holding her gun. It was an excellent redirection of force—otherwise, she might have suffered some fall damage from the jump. It was an agile and natural enough movement that it spoke to the player’s natural physical ability.
“Wow. Who is that chick?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“Wanna try to hit on her later?”
“You always act this way about women… Don’t you know that there’s no guarantee the real-life player looks like the avatar?”
“So that’s why you never get any girls.”
“What’d you say?!”
Fortunately for Shirley, she couldn’t hear that pointless conversation. Instead, she got back to her feet, held up the R93 Tactical 2 at her waist like a spear, and began to run at full speed.
The gray-camo poncho flapped in the wind as she ran, blending in well with the gravel and concrete around her.
“Is it safe?”
About that moment, Clarence popped her head up to peer around the freight car she was hiding behind, surrounded by four dead bodies. Then she rolled toward the nearest and safest location at the moment—behind the train car’s wheels.
Among the dead bodies, she looked at the only one of them she hadn’t killed herself—that being her teammate, Sam.
Moments ago, he’d had a huge glowing effect on his chest, but now there was a DEAD tag floating over him, and he was just another body with a peaceful look on his face.
“What kind of bullet was that? It sure packed a punch!” Clarence marveled. She had noticed it, too.
After all, it had inflicted huge damage through thick bulletproof armor that rarely ever allowed bullets to puncture through it. Naturally, she had her own armor in the chest and back of her equipment vest, in a futuristic, sci-fi, ultra-thin style. If she got hit in a vital organ like the lungs or heart, the armor ensured that it at least wouldn’t be a one-shot kill.
But somehow, this attack completely nullified that protection.
“Well, I don’t know what it is, but…”
Wondering about it wasn’t going to give her the answer. So the conclusion was simple.
“Guess I need to keep in mind that a single shot is gonna kill me. Yikes! So scary. War is hell, I tells ya. Good thing this one’s just for fun. Whoo-hoo!”
Fortunately, the camera did not capture the sight of Clarence’s happy smile as she hid behind the train wheel.
As someone in the bar correctly guessed, Shirley had crafted her own exploding bullets.
In other words, she packed the inside of the bullet with gunpowder and treated it in a way that would make it explode on contact.
In real life, this sort of process would required very high-precision metal-manufacturing machines and industrial processes, but GGO was just a game. All you needed was the right material and the command to “produce new bullets,” and the character’s Dexterity stat would do the rest automatically.
Shirley prepared the most destructive gunpowder she could acquire for her attempt at crafting. After a number of failures, she made it work. It was easier than she expected.
“I did it!” she rejoiced like a child, holding up her own homemade bullet.
The structure of the exploding bullet was not really that complicated. In fact, it was practically primitive.
It started as a pointed-tip FMJ, with the hollowed-out center featuring layers, from top to bottom, of high explosives (very sensitive and powerful gunpowder), then a small primer (the rear cap at the butt of the cartridge that lights up when struck), and lastly, a small striker (a firing pin that hits the primer, one of the most important parts of the gun). That was it.
Once the bullet was released, it would speed toward its target, spiraling rapidly, until the tip made contact. If it met something soft, it would burrow in farther, and if it was bulletproof plating, the nose of the bullet would flatten, spraying the contents out.
In either case, it would cause a massive drop of velocity in the bullet. Inertia would cause the striker inside the bullet to continue pushing forward, like people inside a train hurtling forward when the operator slams on the brakes.
The striker hits the primer, causing a tiny rupture that sets off the explosive, and—kaboom. The bullet itself explodes.
The force of the explosion would be limited due to the small amount of gunpowder inside a bullet, but she used the most powerful kind possible in the sci-fi world of GGO, so it was more than enough.
The first time Shirley test-shot one of her new bullets, it completely toppled the six-inch-wide tree. When she tried them out on monsters, they proved extremely powerful.
When hitting a living target, the bullet would explode quite deep inside the flesh, delivering plenty of power. Even a huge monster was one and done if she hit its brain.
And when she tried it out on monsters with tough external armor, as an analogue for human bulletproof armor, she found that it did more damage than she expected. She surmised that this was because the explosion on the surface added significant pressure that transmitted through the organic structure to deliver internal damage.
The bullets’ accuracy was perfectly serviceable, so she was able to snipe with as much precision as before.
Against a human target, the exploding bullets would do major damage no matter where they hit. In other words, she didn’t have to aim for the insta-kill spots like the brain or spine. She could just aim at the center of the body, the largest, widest part. That way, she could still deliver a fatal shot even if it didn’t line up perfectly.
So the explosive bullets seemed like all upside, no downside—except for one very glaring issue.
That would be the price.
Given that one had to buy their own bullets in GGO, the cost of daily ammunition was no joke. The reason that guns using well-known standard bullets like 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm NATO rounds were popular was because, pound for pound, those bullets were the cheapest to buy.
The price for Shirley’s handmade explosive rounds—given the cost of the raw materials like primer and explosive, the cost of refining and assembling the projectile into a complete bullet, and the frequency of failure—was actually more than fifty times as much as ordinary bullets.
Perhaps a better way to describe that would be to put it in terms of everyday items. “You might like a can of fruit juice, but would you buy one every day if it cost 6,500 yen each time?”
But Shirley did not think twice about it. She used the credits she earned with her period of intense training, and even threw in a little bit of real money as well, until she had amassed two hundred explosive bullets just for SJ3.
If every other team had a full six members, that would make a hundred and seventy-four enemies in total. If she hit each one of them with a single shot, she’d still have spare ammo left over. It wouldn’t go that easily, and she’d already missed one shot, but Shirley was having the time of her life as she raced through the switchyard.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
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