CHAPTER 12
There Is Still Time to Battle II
“Hoy!”
Pitohui swung her lightsword.
This was the one kind of sword that for some reason existed in the world of guns. It was a beam of light about three feet long that could cut through virtually any material. The strongest weapon imaginable—for a close-quarters fighter, that is.
Pitohui’s pale-blue blade sliced through the thick wires holding the rescue boats aloft as smoothly as though they were nothing but thin air. Severing the front wires caused the boat to lose balance and tip forward. After cutting the few still holding it up in the back, it fell.
“There we go, there we go! We’re closing up the entrances!”
She ran down the long deck, stopping and cutting as she went, dropping the rescue boats one after the other.
“Yo!”
On the other side of the ship, David, too, was cutting down the smaller boats off their wires. After dropping the third such boat to the ground below, his green-painted face split open to say “Next!”
He rushed to the adjacent boat, yelled “Raaah!” and simply sliced the thick crane frame that held the wires in the first place, rather than aiming at the smaller targets.
Moments earlier, Pitohui was saying “Let me show you. We use this!” and slapping the plastic yellow roof of one of the rescue boats that lined the exterior walking deck.
“Huh?”
“What?” said Eva and David simultaneously. The other three just stared at Pitohui coldly, indicating that they did not grasp her point and needed her to elaborate.
“You don’t get it?” she said. “It’s so simple! We drop these down the side of the ship to block the entrance holes! Once we knock down all these ones lining the side, that’ll eliminate a bunch of the places they can enter, right? And then all we have to do is protect the front and back!”
“That’s true…,” murmured Eva.
“I see. Okay, that makes sense,” added David. “But do we have time to go lowering each and every one? If there’s no power on board, we’ll have to use the manual winch.”
“Now, now, David. You need to fix that straightforward mind of yours. Who says we have to lower them the proper way?”
“Hey, shut up! So do you have a plan in mind?”
At last, Cole broke his silence to ask, “Blowing them up with our grenades, you mean?”
“Bzzzt! Wrong.”
Next, Ervin gave it a guess. “Cutting the wires by shooting them?”
“No way! But you’re close.”
Lastly, Tomtom hoisted up his FN MAG and said, “I got it! You want us to break the crane arms by shooting them with a machine gun! I can do that!”
“Knock it off!” Pitohui said, pushing the muzzle down. “Ugh! You’re all such pea-brained hotheads! Didn’t you watch the video of the last time? Didn’t you see my graceful close combat? In the log cabin!”
Her jaw hung open with disbelief. It was an expression she hardly ever made. Then she reached behind her back to pull out a lightsword from her pouch, the Muramasa F9. In its inactive state, it just looked like a piece of polished silver pipe.
“Ah, so you want to cut them down with that,” Eva said in realization. “It’ll be tough on your own, but good luck with that,” she added, abdicating all responsibility.
“Non-non-non! We don’t have time, so we need two people. I’ll take starboard; David takes port.”
“Wha—?!” David spluttered, stunned at being singled out. It was probably the biggest shock he’d experienced all day. “What the hell are you talking about, Pi—?”
“Come now, you don’t think you can hide it from me, do you? You’ve got a lightsword, too!”
“……”
“After I skewered you like a sardine last time, you were so frustrated that you cried into your pillow every night, didn’t you? You swore revenge, of course, so you paid through the nose to get one for yourself. So that if you got the chance, you could run me through with it!”
“……”
David said nothing.
“Is that true?” Ervin asked him.
“……”
After five seconds of silent trembling, David finally reached behind his back to pull out a gunmetal handle, extend its red blade, and shouted, “Port side!”
As the rescue boats dropped one after the other, M no longer had time to relax. “Llenn, Fuka, we’re going. Jump out when I shoot. Zigzag randomly every three seconds. Fuka, once you get within range, shoot a grenade. Just hit the ship and make them back off. Llenn can rush in first.”
At the very least, he wanted to attack the ship while the people dropping the boats were still busy with the task.
“R-roger that!”
“Roger!”
M crouched, took aim with the M14 EBR at the ship, which was within his effective range, and fired five times in quick succession.
Dam-dam-dam-dam-dam.
“Tah!”
“Let’s go!”
The two diminutive girls burst out of the grassy area where they were hiding.
“Did you hear that? It’s probably Llenn! Let’s go!”
Gunfire was audible in the distance.
“Okay!”
“Charge!”
“About time!”
SHINC went on the move. Rosa fired her PKM machine gun for about three seconds for good measure, to act as a signal to the other squads.
“They’re moving. Let’s go!”
“Not that we have much of a choice!”
“Lightning speed!”
“Let’s do it!”
MMTM’s five went on the move.
And ZEMAL and TOMS. Each squad began to rush for the ship from their waiting locations.
The trio from TOMS didn’t actually want to go in yet, because they were waiting for their comrade to do his dirty work, but if they waited around, they’d only drown, so they had little choice.
“Dammit!”
“Here they come!”
Ironically, it was Cole, the member from TOMS, who first spotted the oncoming attackers. He was on lookout duty on Pitohui’s orders; he’d used his incredible agility to rush up stairs and ladders to the top of the mast at the very pinnacle of the ship.
It was incredibly high, well above three hundred feet off the ground. There was a small lookout post with handrails just a handful of square feet in size, where he had a 360-degree view with his distance-measuring binoculars.
“Give me a report on location and features,” Pitohui ordered. She was still cutting down more of the boats.
“The pink shrimp’s on the fore starboard side. On the fore port side, the Amazons! Aft port looks like…MMTM, probably. That’s ZEMAL directly to aft, and the aft starboard side is my old team!”
He hated to make things more dangerous for his buddies, but if he lied here, he would lose any trust he’d built up, so Cole accurately reported what he saw.
“Thanks! Just like the scan said!” Pitohui replied.
It occurred to Cole that if she knew what the scan said, shouldn’t she also know where they were already? What was the point of him reporting to her?
Pitohui continued, “Now I know that the other teams aren’t allied against us yet.” It wasn’t clear if she had read Cole’s mind.
Ah, I see, he thought, ashamed of his lack of foresight. If multiple teams stormed the ship at once, that would require more bullets to shoot in different directions, giving each group a better chance of getting in. He should have realized that from the scan until now, the other squads might have teamed up and formed a truce until they could get on board.
That chick with the facial tattoos sure is smart, Cole thought. The potential opportunity to shoot such a powerful player in the back sent a thrill down his spine.
“I’m almost done here! How about you, Daveed?”
“You’re going too fast! I’m only halfway done! And don’t call me that!”
“Fine, fine, sorry. But if you don’t hurry up, your ex-teammates will kill you. They’re good at indoor combat, aren’t they?”
“I know that!”
On the right and left sides of the huge ship, Pitohui and David ran and swung their lightswords. They could hear the sound of gunfire directed at the ship, but neither bullet lines nor bullets were reaching their area yet.
“Rah-rah-rah-rah-raaah!”
Blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam!
Instead, they heard Tomtom’s FN MAG blasting like crazy. He was on the stern deck with his machine gun propped on a bipod, shooting at the team approaching from the north. At ZEMAL, his old haunt.
“Feel my machine-gun love, you guyyyys! And if your machine-gun love is stronger than mine, lemme have iiiiit!” he roared.
Unfortunately, the other members of Team BTRY had no choice but to listen to him scream.
As the man’s words came through his communications earpiece, Ervin thought, Yep…that guy’s crazy.
And the other one is crazy, too.
In fact, are all the people on the betrayers’ team crazy?
He was squatting on the deck, his XM8 resting snugly on the handrail in front of him. His current location was the fore starboard side of the ship, right before the helipad. The XM8’s silencer was off, and its muzzle pointed in the direction of LPFM.
T-S’s special helmets contained a distance readout. Ervin could also zoom in on his current image, so there was no need to pull it off to peer through binoculars if he wanted to see into the distance.
It seemed convenient, but it also meant that his ordinary vision was limited. So the helmet wasn’t an all-around upgrade in that sense.
With his visuals zoomed in, he could see a small pink dot zipping across a field of grass. The distance measurement indicated she was still outside the effective range of his gun. He wanted to wait until she was within 450 yards.
The very next moment, a bullet came flying the other way without a bullet line.
Grnk!
It struck Ervin’s head, clanked off with a few sparks and embedded into the ship exterior behind him to his left. A moment later, he heard the gunshot arrive.
The surprise of it all caused him to lose his balance and topple backward. “Whoa!”
But he did not lose any hit points.
Once M was within 750 yards of the ship, he stopped and sat flat on the ground. With his large backpack behind him for support, he placed the M14 EBR on top of his extended right knee and took careful aim at the man in the sci-fi armor.
The wind was completely still, so the bullet flew right where he aimed it. The shot hit the target in the head—but he bounced right back up, telling M that the bullet deflected. At this range, he couldn’t shoot through that armor.
“It’s tougher than I thought.”
He’d watched the footage of the last Squad Jam for research, but there weren’t any scenes of that team actually getting shot, so he didn’t know what kind of defensive power they had. Now he did.
Perhaps it would be possible to damage his opponent’s hit points by hitting the seams in the moving parts, like the back of the elbow and knee, but even M couldn’t aim at something like that from this distance.
In fact, no player could pull off such a feat. It was already incredible that M could hit a target in one shot without bullet-circle assistance from over two thousand feet.
So M chose not to attempt it again. He lifted his considerable size up to his feet and resumed running. Somewhere ahead of him, Llenn and Fukaziroh were even closer to the ship.
“The closest one at this point is the pink shrimp! Five hundred yards!”
“Gotcha! I’m on it!” Pitohui replied to Cole, putting away her lightsword. She brought the KTR-09 around to her front and looked for the color pink on the fore side of starboard.
As soon as her eyes caught sight of it, she fired. It was a merciless, fully automatic assault. The bolt shot back and forth, expelling empties. The sound of gunfire rattled the glass of the ship’s windows. It was only Pitohui’s incredible strength that kept the powerful recoil from throwing off her aim.
I can do it! I can get there! Geez, that thing is huge, though…
Despite her shock at the size of the massive cruise ship, Llenn felt a burst of confidence. It was about four hundred yards away now. She’d been running zigzags, so she’d actually run much farther than that, but at this point, she started to think that she might make it if she just hurtled down the last stretch directly to the ship.
The rescue boats had fallen already, which meant that the only holes she could reach were near the prow, but with her group coming in at an angle, that was the closest spot already, so it wasn’t a problem.
“We can do it! I’m gonna rush straight for it, M!” she called out.
Immediately, he replied, “Stop! Pito’s aiming at you!”
He was keeping watch from the rear. If he hadn’t said that, Llenn would have continued running straight forward.
And one of the hail of lines and bullets that proceeded would have pierced her body, without a doubt.
“Hyaaaaaa!”
Like a dog that suddenly spotted a more fearsome adversary, Llenn reacted to the arrival of the grass-sprayed bullets by spinning around on the spot, three whole times.
Fukaziroh saw her do it from the rear. “Ooh, that was cute.”
“The little pink one’s spinning around,” Cole reported.
“Okay! It’s all you now, Ervin. You don’t actually have to hit her. Just spray full auto in her general area. Use the bullet lines as cover to keep her at bay.”
“G-got it! I think I can handle that!”
“Good luck, then!” Pitohui said, swinging the KTR-09 back behind her and drawing her lightsword again. She resumed the process of knocking down the rescue boats.
With her encouragement, Ervin aimed his XM8 at the pink dot and began spraying bullets.
“Shit! I can’t get any closer!”
Llenn’s scheme was at a halt. There were still at least 450 yards to the ship. The red lines and the bullets that created them were flying fast and thick, and it was all she could do to avoid them.
Given the higher-pitched sound and the particular qualities of the ballistic arc, she could tell that the shots coming from near the prow of the ship belonged to a 5.56 mm assault rifle. They flew fast and curved, before dropping down at the very end.
If she got any closer, her chances of getting hit increased significantly. In the switchyard, it was easier to dodge because she could run in any direction, but it was harder now that she had to go one particular way.
The bullets were right at effective firing range, so now that her hit points were back to full, there might not be a concern about a one-hit kill—but if she fell and got picked off by a sniper, that would really suck.
“Fuka? Can you get a shot onto the ship?” she asked Fukaziroh, who was about fifty yards behind her.
“Hmm, it’s still a bit far. They’ll drop right in front of it. And the thing is, wasted ammo doesn’t really suit me.”
“Can you come up a bit farther, then? I really think you’re the kind of lady who shines at the front of the stage, Fuka!”
“I appreciate the attempt to flatter me, but that’s not happening. I’m not as fast as you, Llenn, so I could get shot before I get that chance to shine.”
“Ugh,” Llenn grunted, dodging bullets. She tried M next. “M, can you snipe that guy from where you are?”
“I already did.”
“Oh? And…?”
“He’s covered in armor. I hit him, but the bullets just bounce off.”
Oh, it’s them! Or one of them, I guess! Llenn thought.
“Oh, it’s them! Or one of them, I guess!” Fukaziroh said at the exact same moment. They were in perfect synchronization.
It was clear they still felt they had a score to settle.
Eighteen hundred feet to the ship.
M dropped down and got into sniping position again. With the scope at full zoom, the man in the sci-fi armor was much larger than before.
Blam-blam.
He fired two shots in quick succession. Sparks flew on the man’s right elbow and left arm.
“I tried some covering snipes. Will that make him back off?” he said to Llenn and Fukaziroh. If it freaked out the guy and got him to take cover, the girls would be able to rush closer, making their progress much easier.
But the shots still issued from the ship. The man was firmly in place along the edge of the ship deck. He continued firing, ignoring the shots his armor was taking.
“Guess not.”
As long as they don’t shoot my gun! Ervin thought, his heart jackhammering away in his chest.
He was sitting cross-legged at the rim of the ship, the end of the XM8’s body resting on the handrail, keeping his gun facing the enemy as best he could. That was to make his gun’s target as small as possible. With the shield on his left hand, it could guard against attacks from the side angle, too.
While there was armor all over his body, M’s 7.62 mm shots clanging off his frame and head were nothing short of pure horror. The armor blocked the bullet, but the impact still transferred through, and depending on the spot, it might register as a physical blow and lower his HP.
But if he put his body on the line and stuck this one out, he would be able to prevent the fearsome LPFM from getting closer to the ship.
And even if he was aligned with a different team at the moment, he was executing T-S’s battle style.
I’m the defending champion! Even if I got lucky through particular circumstances!
Ervin kept firing the XM8, even as it got overheated and smoke began to trickle out of the barrel.
“Okay, dropped them all off the starboard side!” Pitohui reported, turning off her lightsword and returning it to the pouch on her back. She took off running.
“Amazons coming from the left! Five hundred yards!” Cole told her.
“Got it! Coming to back up!”
She sprinted along the starboard deck toward the prow. After about a thousand feet, she crossed over through an interior hallway to the port side, back to the space just before the helipad.
Eva was there, but her Vintorez only had an effective range of about 450 yards, so she’d only be wasting bullets. Instead, she occasionally peeked out from the thick metal lip of the ship deck, wary of shots from Anna’s and Tohma’s Dragunovs.
“Hey, there! Not happy about shooting your friends?”
“That would be inaccurate.”
Pitohui slipped past Eva’s side to the wall, placed her KTR-09 atop it, and opened a merciless round of automatic gunfire.
The bullets showered down on the rest of SHINC, who were within about five hundred yards at this point.
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