CHAPTER 17
Duel
“What are you trying to doooooooooooooooooo?!”
It was a scream encompassing all of Fukaziroh’s soul.
Her reaction was only natural. Moments ago, Llenn made it look like she was going for Pitohui, and as soon as Pitohui vanished, she challenged Fukaziroh to a duel instead.
“Is this all a joke to you?!”
It was no wonder she was furious. Fukaziroh stomped through the courtyard, shield in hand. That way, she could defend against any shots—but Llenn did not shoot. She just stood, hands on her hips, at the top of the hill five hundred feet away.
She didn’t run away when Fukaziroh approached. In fact, she even took a few steps down the slope closer to the other girl.
“Grrr…”
Fukaziroh’s pace naturally got faster. Soon they were barely two hundred feet apart.
“What’s going on? If Pitohui came back now, she could easily shoot Llenn, right?” said one of the audience members. It was the most natural suspicion about the way Llenn and Fukaziroh were approaching each other.
“Probably, but if she beat her that way, you know she wouldn’t be satisfied with it at all,” said a voice with great authority from the back.
“What do you mean? How do you know that, huh?” demanded the first man, turning around.
“Because I was just fighting with her moments ago,” said a smiling David, his camo face paint washed off.
“Good point!” said the man.
What now, Pito? What should I do?
Fukaziroh had answered the provocation and marched forward toward her opponent—a choice she now regretted.
Llenn was waiting for her at the stern of the ship 150 feet away, outlined against the gray sky. Her arm was down; the P90 was pointed at the ground. The way she stood there, silent and calm and confident, was like an ancient hero on some mural.
It would be easy for Pitohui to snipe and kill Llenn now. For one thing, she left the courtyard to pretend to go after Eva, to create such an opportunity.
But a victory not from simply “exploiting an opportunity,” but “shooting from the shadows at an enemy who wants a one-on-one fight” was not what Pitohui desired at that moment in time.
And that was a fact Llenn had in mind when she engaged in this action.
“Youuuu! You evil bitch!” Fukaziroh couldn’t help but scream.
She couldn’t shoot Llenn now. Until Pitohui came back, she’d have to bear this situation with a merciful heart as deep as the sea. She also had to find a way to tag-team the fight to ensure that Pitohui and Llenn were the ones in the duel. That was the obligation she owed her teammate.
And what did she get for it? Llenn taunting her with “What’s wrong, Fuka?! Is Rightony enjoying a nice little nap?! I bet he is; he’d love a long sleep in a locker! He’s just a naptime gun! A big, fat gun that needs an afternoon nappy-nap!”
Fukaziroh couldn’t shoot back with her gun, but she could with her mouth. “Don’t give me that crap! You have no eye for beauty! And I don’t wanna hear any jokes about naps from the girl who fell asleep during class and got taunted by the stupid teacher who said ‘I guess sleeping makes you grow’!”
Bringing up the taboo of real-life details was crossing a line, but Llenn didn’t falter.
“Says the girl who ditched that class all the time and had to beg and weep for a passing mark, clutching the teacher’s ankles!”
“I can’t help it that I was on so many dates! It’s the tragedy of a girl in demand! And you—”
“You tripped and completely spilled your Indian takeout everywhere! Ha-ha, klutz!”
“Hey! It was my turn to insult you!”
“You gladly ate half my curry with tears of gratitude in your eyes, you starving orphan!”
“That’s—”
“You forgot your gross granny bra in the changing room on the school field trip, and the hotel called the school about it, and they had to do an announcement over the loudspeaker, you dumpy-bra owner!”
“But—”
“When we had a party to cheer you up after getting dumped, you said ‘I’m all about girls now. Yuri is the beautiful future,’ and the very next day, you got rejected by another dude, you professional rejectee!”
“No—! I—! Argh! Goddammit, that’s enough! Sorry, Pito, I’m going to kill her myself!”
Fukaziroh cast aside the shield in her left hand.
“I’d like to see you try!”
Llenn lifted the P90.
Bullet lines traded places, fixing on their small targets.
They fired together.
The P90’s 5.7 × 28 mm bullets, traveling over two thousand feet a second, and the 40 mm grenade, at 250 feet per second—you didn’t need a calculator to know which would hit its target first if they were fired at the same time.
“Gahk!”
A storm of bullets left Fukaziroh’s entire side glowing red. But Llenn just had to turn sideways to evade the direct path of the grenade. The explosive hit the floor of the deck and detonated about ten yards behind her. Llenn kept firing the whole time.
Fukaziroh’s body lit up with more and more damage effects. It seemed like they were focused mostly around her left arm—and then she understood.
Aha! She’s going after Leftania!
Leftania still had two plasma grenades loaded, and Llenn was trying to blow it up. That was why she had chosen this distance to fight—and not any closer.
Fukaziroh might not go down easy from bullets alone, but an induced explosion of grenades would do the trick in one shot.
What a nasty strategy! Fukaziroh twisted and exposed her right side to Llenn. A hail of bullets enveloped her, with one hitting her right in the head.
“Gahk!”
Her little body hurtled backward, and her helmet hit the floor loudly.
Gonk.
Suddenly, the courtyard was quiet.
“Whew…”
Llenn removed the depleted magazine of the P90 and moved to extract a new one from her pouch.
“Secret Technique: Playing Dead!”
Fukaziroh suddenly bounced back up as if on springs and brandished the MGL-140 in her left hand, which was supposed to be smarting from getting shot.
A big, fat line extended from its big, fat muzzle right into Llenn’s stomach. When the grenade shot out, following the line, it was easy to distinguish its appearance: a bold blue color in opposition to the red line.
A plasma grenade.
At this angle, even if she jumped out of the way, it was going to explode on the ground behind her—well within blast radius.
She couldn’t avoid it.
She couldn’t withstand it.
So what could she do?
She could only do this.
And if she could only do this, then the choice was simple.
The place was easy: atop the fat line.
All that mattered was the timing.
Like Pitohui did with the shotgun in the switchyard, as long as your timing was good, you could pull it off.
Llenn dropped backward—and kicked up as hard as she could with her right foot.
The tip of her boot caught the side of the grenade, away from the fuse, replacing its flight vector with her kick vector and sending the explosive grenade up and to the side.
It eventually whistled over to the side of the outdoor stage at the stern of the ship and exploded into a glowing blue ball. The stage was already in bad condition, and now it was a total wreck.
“No way!” Fukaziroh’s jaw dropped to the floor. She was certain she was going to see Llenn evaporated.
“Now that’s more like it! That’s the Llenn I know! She’s still mine, Fuka! I’m the only one who can challenge her—and the only one who will kill her! And eat her!” raved Pitohui’s excited voice in Fukaziroh’s ear. Apparently, she’d witnessed the whole exchange.
“Uhhh, yeah. You go ahead. She’s all yours…,” Fukaziroh muttered, crawling away from the scene with less than half of her hit points remaining. “Like I can deal with a monster like that.”
The crowd watching in the bar had but one comment on their lips.
“She kicked it…”
“She kicked it…”
“She kicked it…”
“She kicked it…”
“She kicked it…”
So did David, who stood imposingly with his arms crossed.
“She kicked it…”
When Fukaziroh fled from the courtyard, Pitohui leaped out to take her place from around the side of a storefront.
“Lleeeeennnnn!”
She didn’t have that cumbersome shield anymore. Both hands were wrapped around the KTR-09, steadied against her right shoulder, and firing as she ran.
“Eeyaa!”
This time, Llenn could not kick the bullets out of the way. She ducked down and backed away, barely managing to crawl down the tiers of seats at the outdoor stage.
The 7.62 mm bullets that roared past at Mach speed and smashed into everything around her seemed to personify Pitohui’s rage and joy.
“Oh, crap! Oh, crap! Oh, craaap!”
Llenn slid down the rows as she yanked a new magazine out, slammed it into the P90, and pulled the charging handle.
Now she was ready to fight back—but she couldn’t stick her head out when any of the bullets flying overhead would be an instant kill. That was the power of the seventy-five-round drum magazine.
Fukaziroh watched as Pitohui ran closer to Llenn, shooting and smiling like she had just spotted her lover at the train station.
“Hrmf!” Then she noticed a large figure with braided hair leaning out from a deck up above. A woman with the figure of a gorilla was on the top deck of cabins on the port side, an oddly designed sniper rifle in her hands. She was meant to be a decoy, but with Llenn in trouble, she had changed tactics to set up and aim at Pitohui.
“Up above, Pito!”
“Haaaa!”
Pitohui twisted around to dodge the bullet line from Boss’s shot, pointed the KTR-09 at the source of the line, and shot three times in a single instant. Her reflexes were astonishing.
The bullets hit Boss on the arm and leg as though they were pulled by gravity. The third one struck the Vintorez’s silencer, creating sparks and knocking it out of her hands. The gun fell in the fore direction, thudding on one of the balconies below.
“Whoo! Nice shooting!” Fukaziroh cheered.
“You monster!” Boss shouted at the same moment.
“Fukaaaa? You can get rid of Eva now,” said Pitohui, turning her attention back to Llenn.
“You bet! With pleasure!”
Fukaziroh pointed Leftania at the spot where Boss had been a moment before. That would fire a plasma grenade. The distance was about forty yards, so the fuse would activate. As long as she hit the cabins, it should blow Boss and her foothold sky-high.
Therefore, she dropped her aim a bit, to make sure she didn’t accidentally send it into the sky.
Boss peered over the side of the deck as she pulled the Strizh from her waist.
“Ugh!”
When she saw the huge bullet line pointing directly below her, stemming from Fukaziroh’s left hand, she realized it would be impossible to prevent a plasma grenade from coming.
If she did nothing, it would hit the underside of the deck below her feet, putting her right in the middle of a blue surge of plasma over sixty feet across. And if she turned around to run, the result would be no different. She couldn’t move over thirty feet in just two or three seconds.
“No, wait… I can!”
She placed a heavy foot on the top rung of the railing.
“Yaaah!”
Fukaziroh fired her final plasma grenade.
“Rrraaah!”
Boss soared through the air.
She had put her foot on top of the handrail and launched herself with all the considerable leg strength she possessed.
Naturally, she wasn’t jumping to anything, just setting herself up for a hundred-foot fall into the courtyard below, but the acceleration of gravity was faster than her running speed by far.
“Are you serious?!” Fukaziroh screamed. Boss jumped right past her perfect grenade shot in midair. If it landed on the deck and exploded, it wouldn’t kill Boss now.
But she would die on impact.
Yep. Splattered all over the ground.
Fukaziroh rested easy. Boss’s jump wasn’t going to span the thirty yards it would take to reach her in the center of the courtyard. She wasn’t going to pull off some wild, acrobatic body blow from the height of several stories.
All she had to do was stand there and watch as her foe’s body smashed flat against the cobblestones of the courtyard.
Farewell, my opponent, Fukaziroh saluted silently, following the enemy’s majestic arc.
The world seemed to move in slow motion.
A pale explosion flickered and cast a glow of light against the far building that reflected back to illuminate the falling enemy.
The woman fell upside down through the air, her two braids swaying.
Two eyes staring.
Two arms holding pistols. Pointed right at her.
A gun attack as she fell.
Are you kidding? That’s not going to hit me!
I want you to sit down and take notes. If you can’t do that in midair, at least listen. See, shooting while in midair is incredibly difficult. If it was that easy to hit targets as you fall, I wouldn’t be having such a hard time of things. Do you get me? I bet you don’t!
As Fukaziroh went patronizingly on and on inside her mind, a 9 mm bullet flew at her forehead and buried itself into her brain.
“Beh?”
Her helmet was an inch too short to block it.
“Heh!”
Having shot a single bullet in the midst of her fall, Boss slammed grin first into the courtyard, denting in the tiles several inches.
As the grenade explosion dissipated, two DEAD signs appeared at the exact same time.
Brilliant!
M had witnessed the whole thing play out.
“Yaaaaah!”
“Urgh!”
Pitohui and Llenn continued their battle, oblivious to the fact that their partners had just died. This did nothing to overturn Llenn’s disadvantage, however.
The storm of incoming bullets prevented her from coming up, so she was still crouched beside the seats of the outdoor theater.
Dammit, can I go yet? Now? What about now?
Llenn prayed that her strategy would be a successful one.
She couldn’t see Pitohui, but she could tell her general location from the gunfire. She was very close. Less than a hundred feet, surely, and getting closer.
Sixty feet to go.
Still coming…?
Thirty feet.
She’s still coming… Am I going to die here…?
Llenn clutched the P90.
And the whole time, P-chan didn’t speak a single word.
The moment arrived for both those on and off the ship.
As the crowd watched on the monitors—the ship stood up.
It had been running full steam ahead, even cut down to 1,100 feet in size, but now the entire cut-off portion was submerged, jolting it downward.
The ship was no longer tilting; now it was standing. From the stern, the belly of the ship was now coming into view.
Massive screw propellers were exposed to the air. They were twenty-five feet long, attached to three hanging azimuth thruster pods. Before they had been churning against seawater, but now they carved only air.
With the loss of propulsion, the ship’s speed dropped, but it did not improve the angle. It continued to tilt further, with the first three hundred feet or so under the water now. It was like seeing some enormous beast lift its rear end up into the air.
“Oh… I’m glad I’m not on that ship…,” the audience murmured in horror.
“Aaaaah!”
Of the three living people on that ship, the sole man felt himself slipping off the deck, lunged for the handrail right before him, but came up just inches short.
“Shit!”
His last-ditch effort was to hurl his gun, which hung in front of his body from its sling. The stock of the M14 EBR caught on the railing, briefly stopping his falling speed. M made use of that moment to reach out and grab the vertical post of the railing, which was now horizontal, owing to the ship’s angle.
“Whew…” He exhaled one second before the bar creaked and broke at a spot where it was rusted through. “Aaaaaaaah!”
M’s massive form began to plummet. The sling came loose from his head on the way, his gun slipping away from him. He fell about thirty feet, upside down, and landed on his back on a large bench built into the deck.
“Gagrbk!”
The impact was strong enough to cause damage. In real life, it would have broken his spine and ribs. In the game, half of his hit points dropped—but it did stop his fall.
M craned his neck and looked to the fore of the ship—which at this moment was down.
“……”
Over six hundred feet below, the gray sea had opened its churning, foaming mouth to swallow the vertical length of the ship. A little stick as puny as a piece of trash fell, spinning, toward the water. That was his gun.
There were abrupt bursts of air from the sides of the ship directly above the waterline. With the influx of so much water into the ship interior, the air trapped inside became pressurized and had no nowhere to go, until the side windows proved to have the most give and shattered outward.
Only 625 feet remained of There Is Still Time above the sea, now more of a tower than a ship.
There were only minutes until the entire SJ3 arena was gone.
Even less than a minute, perhaps.
“Here we goooo!” Llenn screamed, grabbing the leg of a chair near where she was crouching.
“Ugh!” Pitohui stopped firing, placed the KTR-09 against her shoulder, and rushed for all she was worth up the slope of the courtyard, which was growing steeper by the moment.
“Tah!”
She leaped at the end, stretching out both arms—and succeeded in catching her fingertips on the lip of the first row of seating in the outdoor theater, the last actual space in the entire courtyard.
With her feet dangling below her and tears of joy in her eyes, Pitohui shouted, “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! We did it, Llenn! We did it!”
Sink this ship.
That was Pitohui’s desire and her goal.
It was why she didn’t shut the interior waterproof walls, ran it at full speed, and slammed it into the building in order to wipe out the enemy team.
But the preposterously huge craft was far, far tougher than Pitohui could have imagined or wished for. It stayed strong, refusing to go down without a fight. It almost seemed to be holding the wrath of the dead passengers of its past—and of Clara.
She’d pretty much given up on the idea of sinking it before SJ3 ended, but Llenn had really come through in a pinch with that plasma grenade fireworks show.
With Pitohui’s efforts and Llenn’s finisher, the ship was soon to sink to the bottom of the sea.
“I’m so glad we were on the same page! You really are everything I thought you were, Llenn!” Pitohui raved, pulling herself up to the lip and peering over it.
“……”
There she saw Llenn, standing on the back of a seat that faced up into the sky, silently pointing the P90 at her.
She saw her eyes.
“Ah, you really are my Grim Reaper, Llenn.”
Once Pitohui finished saying the words, Llenn placed her finger on the trigger.
A bullet line appeared, stopping right on Pitohui’s forehead.
Then Llenn fired the gun.
There was no hesitation whatsoever.
Pitohui’s body dropped without a sound.
She passed right by tile floor of the courtyard, which was now essentially a vertical wall, plunging toward the sea feetfirst.
“Gaaah!”
The hands that had let go of the lip just before she could get shot now grabbed the KTR-09 hanging off her shoulder by its sling and pressed its muzzle against the tile floor—wall—whipping past her face.
Zgakgakgakgakgakgakgak! She shot it directly into the surface.
The sparks from the muzzle lit the tile wall as the bullets opened holes in it, until eventually— Chunk!
After however many shots, the muzzle actually stuck into the hole it had created and jammed there. Pitohui pressed her feet into the tile surface using the stuck KTR-09 as a wedge. The force of her boots cracked the tile, but her vertical movement stopped.
Pitohui slowly began to walk toward Llenn.
“……”
“Anything you want to say at the end?”
“……”
“Then let’s begin.”
As she saw Pitohui approaching, wings outstretched, Llenn thought, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
She was speaking to the black combat knife she brought out in front of her body.
I’m sorry, Knife. You have to die to protect me.
In response, the knife said, “All is well. I wouldst gladly give mine life for the noble goal of ensuring your survival, good Llenn.” Its voice was calm and measured. “Just one humble request. Would you be so good as to give me a name before the end?”
Llenn said, “Thank you. And good-bye…Kni-chan.”
When they were fifteen feet apart, Llenn bounded up to her feet and swung her right arm.
It was similar to a slash from low to high—but her palm was open. The knife flew right at Pitohui’s face.
“Shaaa!”
Pitohui swung her left sword at the knife in midair and melted it into a hunk of metal. The knife that Llenn kept on her belt since SJ2, that had come in handy on many occasions, was dead.
She crossed the last few steps between them and raised her right arm high.
“Good-bye, Llenn.”
With the quickest speed she’d exhibited yet, she swung down at Llenn’s left shoulder.
Pitohui’s long arm descended toward little Llenn.
With her advantage in agility, Llenn had time to put her hand to her side and bring it forward again. Then she twisted, ducked under Pitohui’s diagonal slash, and moved again.
“H…uh?”
Pitohui’s right hand had vanished from the wrist.
The gloved hand holding the lightblade flew off, slid down the rear slope of the ship, and plunged into the sea.
“Huh?”
Why did my hand get cut off?
Even as her mind grappled with questions, Pitohui’s left arm was on the move. She swung sideways toward Llenn, who was rushing around her right side.
But before her arm could pass the front of her body, Llenn’s little pink form was leaping upon her.
“Gaaah!” A dull pain ran through her left shoulder, numbing the entire arm below it.
Pitohui toppled backward with the force of the jump, and before her back slammed into the ground, she saw what was sunken deep into her shoulder.
A small, angular combat knife.
A weapon that Llenn did not own.
“H-how?” she gasped without thinking.
Llenn provided the answer herself, holding the knife in as she rested atop Pitohui’s body. “I got it from Boss! My teammate! I had it hidden in my empty magazine pouch the whole time!”
“Of course! Brilliantly done!” Pitohui yelled. With the other woman on top of her, she managed to twist the wrist of her numbed hand enough to rotate the lightsword against her own legs.
The long blade of light sliced cleanly through Llenn’s shins and Pitohui’s knees right below them, as smooth as butter.
Four feet tumbled away, and Llenn and Pitohui screamed together.
“Gah!” “Aaagh!”
Their hit points dropped all at once.
Llenn’s stopped at about 25 percent.
Including the loss of her right hand and the dagger in her shoulder, Pitohui had fallen to 40 percent.
“Just one more…”
Pitohui attempted to swing her blade one last time.
Grrck. Llenn twisted the knife in her shoulder, wrenching it with all her strength.
“Aaagh!”
More damage to Pitohui’s shoulder. Instead of numbness, there was agony running through her left arm, and the lightblade simply fell, doing nothing more than grazing the spots that had already been severed the first time.
Legless Llenn straddled legless, one-handed Pitohui. “This time, I’ll stab you in the face! And win!”
She squeezed the knife in order to pull it out of Pitohui’s shoulder, but she felt a hand close around her tiny wrist. Pitohui’s left hand had let go of its weapon and was now pinching Llenn’s wrist like a vise.
She also brought her handless right arm over and used her elbow to trap Llenn’s arm.
“Wha—?”
“There, I’ve got you now…”
“Arrgh!”
“I can’t believe you came to me, Llenn… How proactive of you… I love it!”
“Daaaaah!”
No matter how much Llenn struggled, she couldn’t match Pitohui in terms of strength. Not only could she not move her arms, the clamp on her right wrist was so powerful that she was actually taking damage from it.
Llenn’s face was directly across from Pitohui’s. Without being able to move her torso, she couldn’t even bend down to bite at the other woman’s neck.
Mixed in with the rushing of the propellers’ rotation was the sound of air bursting from the sides of the ship as it approached water, a sign that even their floating position had scant time left above the waves.
“You’re incredible, Llenn… This is the Llenn I was afraid of… It’s an honor to fight you. Now that we’re here, locked together in this embrace, shall we drown as one?” Pitohui said, her face twisted with joy, inches away.
“No! I’m not into the romantic-double-suicide thing! I’m gonna kill you and win!”
“Oh? How?”
Llenn had neither weapons nor mobility. “Remember what you said before? ‘The one who uses their head in battle wins!’”
She leaned her head back as far as it could go—the only part of her body that was mobile.
“Taaa!”
She swung her own head down. Like a hammer—with superhuman speed.
Crunch!
The collision of Llenn’s forehead against Pitohui’s sounded nothing like two biological creatures making contact.
“Gahk!” Pitohui shrieked over the sound.
Llenn’s forehead glowed with the red color of damage suffered, but Pitohui was red on both her forehead and the back of her head. Because she was pinned against the hull of the ship, the impact caused double damage from smashing the back of her skull against hard metal.
“More! More! More!”
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! Crunk-crunk-crunk-crunk-crunk-unk-unk-unk-unk-unk!
The head-butts started as hammer smashes, but with more and more fantastical speed, they transitioned into a woodpecker’s rhythm. With Pitohui’s powerful grip holding her in place, Llenn’s light body couldn’t float away with the speed of her jackhammering.
“Gah, gah, ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga, ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga!”
Pitohui’s grunting turned into a drumroll as the light covering her head grew brighter and brighter. On the left edge of her vision, her HP bar was slowly trickling away. But the damage of the impacts alone was not enough to kill her. She still had over 30 percent of her health remaining.
The real problem of head damage went beyond the numbers, however. It was the same thing in VR that posed a problem in real life—concussions.
A brain shaken badly enough could suffer damage both temporary and permanent.
“Ha!”
So after many, many head-butts, Llenn drew from Pitohui, and the latter’s grip had loosened to the point that she easily slipped away. With both hands free again, Llenn practically flipped backward to get away from Pitohui.
The knife, however, was still stuck in Pitohui’s left shoulder. And when Llenn tried to stand up, the lack of anything below the shin caused her to tumble.
“Gaaaah!”
So she had to crawl with her arms. Her hands scrabbled across the metal hull until she reached Pitohui’s legs and grabbed them where they glowed from being severed.
“Ll…enn… You really…want me…to…die…by…drown…ing…? You…coward…,” grunted Pitohui, who was having trouble speaking from the effect of the physical damage to her brain.
“No, Pito. That would be an insult to you, to the warrior who fought to get to this point.”
“Ex…actly… Ah, it finally feels, like my head, is clear… In a moment, I’ll get up…and be able to kill you. I can fight…with one hand…”
“Hey, Pito.”
“What is it, Llenn…?”
“Before that— Die.”
And Llenn used all the strength she possessed to push Pitohui down the side.
Only the audience in the pub actually witnessed the end of Pitohui’s run.
When Llenn pushed her, she slid down the rear side of the ship until the angle was too sharp, and then she was tossed into the air and went plummeting toward the water. In an instant before she hit the surface, her body intersected with the path of a churning propeller, obliterating her into a million pieces.
The result was a red mist in the air.
Moments later, the ship sank so that the propellers were under the water, too.
Once back in water, the madly spinning propulsion systems functioned as they were meant to, pushing the ship forward—deeper into the ocean. The last hundred or so feet of the ship above the water sank as though on fast forward. The end of the majestic cruise ship was quite abrupt.
When the ship was no longer visible, only huge bubbles remained.
Inside one of them floated a small pink speck.
Huh? I guess it’s not over yet…
Llenn was still conscious, floating on the water. For as rough and choppy as the ocean had been, now it was as still and peaceful as a mirror.
Without any legs, she could barely swim, but with all of her gear lost, this was as light as Llenn had ever been, so she did not sink under the surface. But being in full-body contact with the seawater meant she was visibly losing health by the moment. Her current state was maybe 5 percent.
Is there someone else who survived…?
Pitohui had been dropped on the propeller, so she definitely couldn’t be alive.
“Must be M, then,” she murmured, resigned. There was nothing to be done at this point. She was going to die within the next twenty seconds. “I wonder if he found a boat to ride in.”
“No, there were no boats,” said a voice behind her.
“Hweh?” Before she could even turn around, something pulled her up into the air. “Uh, whaaa—?”
“Don’t struggle, or you’ll fall.”
Once she was completely out of the water, her hit points stopped dropping at just 2 percent. Though she couldn’t see anything but the dull-gray sky, she had an idea of the situation: M was holding her up out of the water while treading. His leg strength was phenomenal.
“H-hey, M! Damage! Damage!”
“Yeah, I’ll run out soon. I’m glad I made it in time.”
“But…the championship!”
“I don’t care which team wins. Even Pito said it: This part is my duty. Thank you, Llenn.”
“Huh? What did I do to deserve thanks? It’s the other way around, M! It’s because I couldn’t be clear and direct that Pitohui jerked us around and kept me from properly joining the betrayers’ team!”
“That was Pito’s fault,” he said. It was a decisive statement, brooking no argument.
“Then…then I don’t get it. What am I being thanked for?”
“Thank you for taking the fight against Pito seriously.”
The next moment, Llenn’s body fell into the water. Her face went under the surface.
“Pwah!”
When she breached the water again, she could see a message up in the gray sky.
Congratulations!! Winner: BTRY!
M was nowhere to be found.
Llenn was floating all alone in the wide, empty ocean.
Time of game: one hour and fifty-nine minutes.
Third Squad Jam: complete.
Winning team: BTRY.
Total shots fired: 68,029.
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