Sword Art Online Alternative – Gun Gale Online - Volume 5 - Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8 
What SHINC Was Doing 
July 5th, 2026. 
12:03 PM. 
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” Boss let out a tremendous belly laugh. 
She stared down the approaching sea at the southeast corner of the island. 
“Very good! We’ve got a fire lit under our asses, ladies! We’re gonna charge straight through all this nonsense: No stopping! No mercy!” 
When the game started three minutes earlier, SHINC was on the shoreline of the island’s southeast corner. 
According to the unwritten rule established in SJ2, the toughest teams were spread to the four corners. So they were at a great distance from the previous champions, T-S, as well as MMTM and Llenn’s team. 
A wasteland of huge rock pillars lay around them. The structures were between fifty and seventy feet tall, and fifteen feet across, sprouting up across the landscape at intervals of a hundred feet or two. 
As M suspected, this eerie series of formations, which looked like a gang of monstrous mushrooms, was a bit of natural art created through rain erosion. The water pounded softer earth, and only the spots where a different vein of tougher rock was on top remained, until they stood like towers. 
The ground layer beneath them was hard rock, and it was essentially flat, so there was no place to hide except behind the towers. But since SHINC knew that no team would be within exactly one kilometer at the start of the game, they were safe for now—and the field of rocks kept them hidden from long-distance attacks. The six members of their team warily eyed the land around them and picked out a good spot to watch the 12:10 Satellite Scan come in. 
But after only the first minute, Tanya, the small and agile point person, cried out, “Hey! The sea! The sea’s creeping up on us!” 
She had noticed the special nature of the map: that either the island was sinking or the sea was rising—and that the available space would shrink over time. 
Implicitly understanding the intentions of the designer, Boss let out a belly laugh and immediately changed plans. 
“Oh?” 
The crowd watching the event on the monitors in the pub noticed quickly that SHINC was engaging in a bold new strategy. 
Everyone, participants and audience alike, knew that there was no need to go on the offensive in the first ten minutes. So it was widely expected that the fighting would only commence once the initial Satellite Scan at 12:10 was over. 
The crowd was taking it easy. They ate and drank, chatting with their friends about who they expected to win it all. When the large monitors hanging from the ceiling showed SHINC had burst into top speed, they were stunned. 
“Huh? They started charging outta nowhere.” 
“What? It just started!” 
On the screen, little Tanya with her Bizon submachine gun was leading the charge, with all six of them at a full sprint. 
“What’s going on? What are they thinking?” 
“Are they desperate because they noticed the tide coming in?” 
“The top contenders? No way.” 
As they watched, mystified and slightly nervous, the members of SHINC began traveling from one rock pillar to the next, guns held at the waist, with the sea on their left. They sped along smoothly, without hesitation. 
Tanya was far faster than the others, so at times, she would stop to check the area while she waited for the rest to catch up, but they kept moving without any breaks. 
After two minutes and change, the clock on the side of the monitor display showed that it was 12:05, and the women came to an abrupt stop. They’d run several hundred yards at least, going by what Tanya mouthed on the screen—there wasn’t any audio. 
Instantly, the group hid behind the pillars, except for Anna, the rear guard, who started a laborious climb up the rock before her. She was free climbing without any ropes, a rather treacherous activity, as the handholds weren’t exactly big. Her agility was impressive. 
“That’s wild. I bet she’s got to have some kind of Climbing skill,” one of the audience members said with great confidence, but he was wrong. It was not a character skill, but a player skill—specifically, that of Moe Annaka, Anna’s player. She’d been forced to take part in her parents’ hobby of bouldering from a young age. 
In fact, all of Team SHINC, not just Moe, were young athletes. 
They exercised and performed athletic feats every single day, so unlike the out-of-shape gamers who only played heroes and warriors online, their fundamental physical coordination was rock-solid. 
Anna quickly hauled herself upward, her blond hair and Dragunov rifle swaying with each movement. When she had finished climbing the five-story-tall rock, an easy task for her, she arranged her body so that she was lying down flat on its top. She shrugged the Dragunov off her back and to the right, then took out a pair of binoculars and began to search. 
Within five seconds, Anna muttered something and switched to her rifle. 
Without getting up, she took aim and fired the first shot of SJ3. 
“Whyyyy meee?” groaned the first casualty of SJ3 as he departed the mortal plane. Despite the fierce wind, Anna emerged victorious. 
Her very first shot hit him in the chest. The second one went through his forehead. The unlucky insta-kill. 
The man’s muscular body fell smack against the rocky earth, sending up the smallest of dust clouds. His upright Mohawk was now flat on the ground. 
Naturally, his teammates jumped up in alarm. They stood fifteen feet away, looking around cautiously. 
“Huh? What? Hey? Why?” 
“Is this a joke?” 
“Get down!” someone shouted. Ducking for cover was about all they could do. 
Their displayed team tag was BKA. They were a squadron that often played Gun Gale Online together, and their team’s chief characteristic—or concept, or theme—was postapocalyptic. 
There was a famous old movie about violent roving gangs in a post-nuclear collapse, roaring and raucous—as well as a famous old kung-fu manga inspired by that film series. This group was dedicated to re-creating that way of life in the game, and it started with their outfits. 
Some wore tattered leather jackets with heavy protective patches, some wore no shirts and painted their bare skin odd colors, some (like the one who just died) styled their hair in punk Mohawks, and some smeared intimidating face paint on their cheeks. 
Their guns, too, were chosen to be as dated and as primitive as possible, all of them from the 1970s or older. They even customized the guns with mud and grime and broken parts, in some cases even combining multiple guns into a new chimera firearm. The AK-47 of the dead Mohawk man featured a trowel handle for a stock, for example. 
They took their “madness to the maximum” in pursuit of the aesthetic. If there were group pictures of each squad in SJ3, they might come out on top in terms of sheer visual impact. 
As a matter of fact, this team of fearsome wasteland warriors, designed to make children everywhere cry, was actually made up of friendly kindergarten teachers, local firefighters, and cram school teachers popular with middle school girls. 
“Oh, the poor things…” 
The members of BKA received nothing but glances of pity from the audience in the pub. It was easy to envision them all dying in short order on the live feed. 
Once Anna had spotted them and abruptly taken out the first one, her follow-up semiauto sniping forced the rest to either hit the dirt or hide behind a nearby pillar. 
And once they did, the rest of the women were merciless. 
With her high vantage point, Anna could report to the other members of the team on the location of the enemy. She also knew that no other squads were nearby. 
There was only one thing to do: wipe them out. 
Silver-haired Tanya shot forward like the wind, flanking the enemy team from the right. Her gun soon found a topless macho man hiding behind a rock pillar. He was no more than a hundred feet away. He had his head down, fearful of being sniped, and didn’t even see her. 
But Tanya didn’t shoot him right away. She kept her aim steady and waited, speaking to her teammates through her communication device. Ten seconds later, the roar of a PKM machine gun started up. The heavy percussion of its fire echoed powerfully through the dry environment. 
A merciless storm of bullets descended upon the hiding spot of the postapocalyptic team between the pillars of rock. A number of them took hits, but it wasn’t enough to be fatal, so all five survivors took off running. 
An ironclad rule of battle in GGO was that if the enemy had a bead on you, and you knew your position was exposed, you had to run away at full speed. Tucking your tail between your legs wasn’t a shameful act. As long as you still had hit points left, you could recover and fight again. 
But sadly for them, they could not hear the voice of the audience member, who could see the situation quite clearly, say “Oh, don’t run that way.” 
The five men sprouted damage effects all over their bodies like flowers, visual indicators of being shot, and toppled over one after the other. These bullets had come from Tanya’s Bizon, which was trained on them all along, and from Boss’s Vintorez as she caught up. 
They shot down the five fleeing men as if this were easy target practice. 
It wouldn’t be until after the first team to get knocked out of SJ3 had a chance to see the recorded footage that they would realize the initial PKM fire was only meant to lure them into a trap. 
By 12:09, SHINC had already knocked out one competitor before the first scan even started. 
“Those chicks are crazy.” 
“They’re definitely not the sweet type…,” the audience in the pub declared in a mixture of admiration and intimidation. 
“I’ll watch the scan! Everyone keep an eye out!” Boss commanded, her voice crisp and clear. The other women formed a circle. Not an inward-facing one, but a deadly outward circle with eyes alert and guns at the ready. 
The five of them kept a 360-degree watch on the world of pillars around them. It was possible that another squad nearby knew they were here from only the sound, before any Satellite Scan entered into it. 
Each member was lying down on the dirt at least fifteen feet from her nearest partner, to ensure they couldn’t all be blown up with a single grenade. Each of them held her own gun at the ready, except for Sophie, who was in charge of hauling. 
Only Boss looked at her Satellite Scan terminal. 
12:10. 
The first Satellite Scan of the third Squad Jam had begun. 
“Everyone head north-northeast! One thousand yards!” Boss commanded ten seconds later, stashing her device back in her pocket. The women leaped to their feet and resumed sprinting. 
Not a single one of the group was slacking off. They were precise, disciplined, and focused. 
But the scan was still ongoing. That meant Boss gave her orders knowing full well that all the other teams would see the way they were moving across the map as it happened. Still, her teammates followed her words with absolute trust. 
Without warning, a yellow flare shot up into the sky in the direction the six women raced. 
“Wh-what…?” Boss stammered, eyes wide. But she soon broke into a wild grin and roared, “Yes! So that’s the strategy! Perfect! They’ll be the next target! Let’s go kill ’em all!” 
“See, that’s a signal that they’re all going to gang up on the tougher teams,” said an audience member wearing a beret. As the crowd watched Llenn’s squad on the monitors, the spectator started to launch into a cocky speech about how the groups were going to team up, but he didn’t get far. 
“Whoa, they’re already rushing off for the next one?!” shouted the audience for SHINC’s footage. They didn’t particularly care to hear about the meaning of the yellow flare. 
Not when the next battle was on. 
“They’re already charging us!” 
“I don’t believe it!” the men practically shrieked, tossing aside their terminals and picking up their guns. They pointed them in a south-southwest direction. 
Both carried large MG 2504 machine guns, which were a good four feet long. 
Another member had a Sorpressa A2 sniper rifle, which stood out for having such a huge, powerful scope that its slim barrel looked like the attachment, not the other way around. 
The other three used G991K assault rifles, more compact at about three feet long. 
If the names didn’t sound familiar, that was for good reason: They were all fictional optical guns. 
“Fire! Full assault!” 
The guns began emitting not the percussive sounds of gunfire blasts, but crisp energy emissions that more resembled the chittering of birds. 
A viewer of SJ2 might have recognized the team on the screen who had just begun shooting. They were the team who took up a position in the train station in the town at the northwest part of the map. 
Their team tag was RGB. 
It looked at a glance like a red-green-blue abbreviation, but no. It stood for Ray Gun Boys. 
Between the jeans, the full-body camo, and the sci-fi-style work uniforms, the members were decked out in a wide variety of clothing, but they had one very strict policy when it came to weapons. 
As the ray gun name suggested, every member in the squadron used one of the fictional optical guns of GGO. They were futuristic weapons said to have come back with humanity on a spaceship, while the live-ammo guns were either relics of Earth’s past or re-created from design documents. 
Optical guns fired projectiles of light supplied by energy packs. Setting aside how they actually worked, they were quite excellent weapons, with many advantages. 
For one thing, the guns themselves were light, so there was less concern about weight limits and movement limits. The MG 2504 was an excellent example; it was the size of a regular machine gun, but it weighed nearly half as much, at barely ten pounds. Other optical guns would be about two-thirds the weight of their counterparts. 
Also, its user could fire a great many shots from a single energy pack. The exact number depended on the capacity of the pack and the power of a single shot, so it all depended on the energy cost of the gun, but even small pistols could hold a hundred per pack. Most machine guns could shoot nearly a thousand times in succession before needing a fresh one. 
On top of that, while live bullets were subject to the forces of wind and gravity, an optical gun had much higher precision for long-range sniping, and because every shot glowed with light, it was easy to adjust future shots to correct your aim. 
But naturally, the disadvantages were equally severe: 
They were less powerful in poor weather conditions like rain and fog. 
The gun fanatics who played GGO didn’t really enjoy the fictional designs. 
The lack of recoil helped firing accuracy, but it also made the shooting feedback feel underwhelming. Some people said it was like shooting air guns. 
But the biggest drawback of all was that their power could be significantly curtailed in player-on-player combat with an anti-optical defense field—an item that everyone owned. 
They were fully effective on monsters in the wilderness, however, so the expert players of GGO learned to switch around their usage effectively as the situation required. 
Naturally, in a pure PvP situation like Squad Jam, it made no sense to use optical guns, but Team RGB went out of their way to incorporate them. 
“We’re gonna show everyone the beauty of optical guns! Soon enough you’ll all be copying us!” 
“The price of these guns is gonna go up. Should we buy stock in optical gun makers?” 
“Who cares if they’re worse? Overcoming that handicap is what will make us truly shine! As bright as our bullets!” they crowed. 
When they took part in SJ2, as those viewers might again recall, they lasted as long as it took Fukaziroh to bombard them with grenades and lost without doing anything notable. 
Now they were in SJ3. And as the man in the beret at the bar had explained to them, they fired up a yellow flare as soon as the first scan came in. 
“Why are they charging right for us?!” 
Not realizing that it was only calling the bloodthirsty Amazons of Team SHINC down upon them. 
“Already onto the next battle? The tempo’s too fast!” 
“Who cares? It means we don’t get bored watching!” cheered the crowd. 
Displayed on the monitor, Team RGB began shooting. They’d brought tons of energy packs with them and were firing as though running out of ammo was the last worry on their minds. 
Six optical muzzles flashed. They sprayed light as generously as water from a hose. 
The shots were yellow, light green, and orange. Players could customize the color at will, so this particular team chose to coordinate by gun type: yellow for machine gun, green for assault rifle, and orange for sniper rifle. 
The exit velocity of a light round upon leaving the gun was essentially the same as a live bullet, but it did not lose velocity from air resistance. Instead, the amount of damage inflicted decreased with distance. 
The glowing shots blazed between the towers of rock until they reached the midst of SHINC, about two thousand feet away—where a number of them hit their targets. 
On the screen, the audience saw several glowing-yellow trails heading straight for Boss’s sizable body as she ran head-on. 

Splish! Splish! 
The shining lights shrank and crumbled right before they got to her, with little splashing sounds. 
“Wow, that didn’t do any damage at all…” 
“Well, not at that range,” the audience lamented. 
That was the power of the anti-optical defense field, a must-have item for every GGO player. It created an invisible cocoon around any person who equipped it, minimizing the power of the optical rounds, no matter the angle. 
Its defensive power depended on the distance of the shot but given that SHINC was at least seven hundred yards away, the numerical damage the bullets inflicted was miniscule. 
“We can do it! We’re hitting ’em! Keep shooting!” 
Even still, the men of RGB were fired up. 
“Yeah!” 
“Let’s do it!” 
“You bet!” 
The sight of tricolor laser fire stretching into the distance was a beautiful one. There’d be no fireworks show like this with real guns without exclusively using tracer rounds that lit up to show their trajectory. 
“We shot off the flare! If we just hold out in this spot, others will come to help!” 
They weren’t simply trigger-happy idiots. There was a formula for victory in mind. SHINC’s abrupt charge came as a shock to them, but they trusted that their position was solid and would lead them to triumph. 
When other teams saw SHINC’s location on the scan and then the yellow flare in the sky, they would rush over to join the fight. The members of RBG could see no downside to this plan. 
They merely had to hold out and survive for a few minutes until help arrived. Fortunately for them, they used optical guns with little concern over ammo. They didn’t need to knock out their opponent at this distance; they just needed to keep them at bay. 
Even with the defensive fields, the damage inflicted would rise as they got closer, so SHINC wasn’t simply going to charge blindly at them. They might run away instead, but if that happened, RGB could just wait for the other squads to show up before going after them. 
In other words, they were intentionally creating a stalemate situation that was to their own benefit. 
“We can do this! Fire, fire, fiiiire!” 
“Roger thaaaat!” 
Their smiles shone as brightly as their laser rounds. 
The shower of optical rounds descended upon Boss, erasing their red bullet lines as they went, but—splish, splish—she ignored them entirely. It was damaging her hit point total, but not enough to care about at this point. 
She took her time walking from side to side, peering through binoculars, counting “One, two, three…four, five, six!” 
The points she was counting were brighter than the bullets or the lines—they were the sources of the shining light projectiles themselves. In other words, around the pillars in between, she could see every last member of the enemy squad. 
Boss lowered the binoculars with a smile that needed to be kept as far from any children as possible. She ordered her companions, “Bring out the fang, girls!” 
“Exchanging pack!” called out one of the RGB members to his teammates. They’d been firing so fast and frequently that even the optical gun’s ammo was running out. 
“You got it!” a teammate replied. No matter what kind of gun players used, the team’s overall firepower lowered when they were out of ammo, so a part of teamwork was letting the others know when that was going to happen. 
With a live-ammo gun, people called out something like “Reloading!” but since this was an optical gun, they said “Exchanging!” 
The man pressed a button in the middle of the machine gun resting in front of him. A thick box about the size of a phone book plopped out of the bottom. It was dark gray and made of a strange material that seemed like both metal and plastic. That was the energy pack. 
Energy packs could be recharged at stores, so people didn’t discard one without a good reason out in the wilderness, but in Squad Jam, it didn’t matter. Once the event was over, any item a player dropped, as long as it wasn’t broken, automatically returned to their inventory. Even regular ammunition was subject to this rule. 
The man pulled a fresh pack out of a pouch on his left side and jammed it into the top of the machine gun. It slid in smoothly and locked into place. With a pleasing little whirr, the digital indicator on the top of the gun lit up and showed nine hundred shots left. The ease of reloading was one of the benefits of optical guns. 
“The optical age is upon us!” the man crowed, like some kind of forward-thinking pioneer, and he pointed the muzzle at SHINC again. “Raaaaah!” 
The moment he started to unleash a withering storm of fully automatic laser fire was also the moment his head came off, and he died. 
In the instant of death, the player’s avatar froze in place, so his grip on the machine gun was intact, leaving it firing on its own. Two seconds later, his headless body toppled backward, pulling the gun upward to shoot directly into the sky. 
“What’s up? You hunting birds now, dude?” joked one of his teammates when he noticed the change in aim. The man was on the ground in firing position with an assault rifle, and he briefly stopped shooting and glanced over long enough to scream “Fwaaieieaiah!” 
All he saw was the headless body of his buddy, shooting wildly up into the sky. 
The next moment, a massive projectile split his rifle in two, continued to his chest, and burst through the back end. 
“Two down. Nice work, keep going,” Boss said, peering through her binoculars as she stood boldly, feet planted shoulder-width apart. An optical round splished in front of her, and she ignored the fraction of a percent of damage it did to her. 
A few yards to her side sat Sophie, the squat, dwarflike woman. In a cross-legged pose, she was practically another rock on the ground. And over the left shoulder of that rock rested a huge metal pipe. 
The nearly four-foot pipe had its own grip and stock, which black-haired Tohma kept propped against her own shoulder. 
“They’re already using that?!” 
“Here comes the Degtyaryov!” roared the gun freaks in the crowd—that described nearly all GGO players, though. 
This gun was SHINC’s horrific secret weapon from the last event: the PTRD-41 anti-tank rifle, high school girls’ gymnastics team special. 
The PTRD-41 was the greatest possible offensive weapon, which SHINC cleared an ultra-difficult quest to obtain, all for the purpose of destroying M’s shield in SJ2. Naturally, they’d brought it into SJ3 as well. 
A 14.5 mm barrel, a stunningly long and heavy gun, at over six feet in length and thirty-five pounds. Naturally, it was completely obnoxious to carry around, too. 
Like last time, Sophie kept her PKM machine gun and ammo in her inventory and only brought them out when she needed to use them, to ensure that she could use this anti-tank gun whenever convenient. 
The downside was that if Sophie died in combat, no one else could use it. So the team prioritized her survival most of all, even over Boss’s. 
It was up to the black-haired Tohma, the best shot on the team, to actually fire the rifle. In SJ1, she had succeeded in hitting tiny Llenn with her first shot from six hundred yards away, using a Dragunov that was hardly the best among sniper rifles when it came to accuracy. 
Tohma kept the gun on Sophie’s shoulder as a base as she quickly jammed the next huge bullet into the middle of the rifle. She slammed the long, thick bolt forward, after the force of the shot had launched it back, and pulled it down to lock it in. 
With the reloading complete, Tohma jammed one knee to the ground, pressed her eye to the scope, and fine-tuned her aim. 
In the meantime, RGB’s optical rounds were flying at the two of them, but from the angles caught by the live feed, they weren’t intimidated by that—if anything, they were smiling. 
Someone in the crowd noted, “No, wait…the Amazons have the advantage! They just have to aim at where all the bright light is coming from.” 
“Ooh, good point!” 
Indeed, that was Boss’s strategy. Because the optical guns were shooting projectiles of light itself, it was unavoidable that the muzzle flash from the guns would be very noticeable. She had picked out that particular spot to stop because she was able to see six different sources of flashing at once. If they set up the PTRD-41 there, they could shoot at any one of the enemy soldiers. 
Tohma fired for a third time, the blast echoing all the way to the interior of the distant pub. A two-ounce slug of metal rocketed forward at three times the speed of sound, tearing through the backdrop of laser beams toward the blinking lights that were their source. 
“Don’t hold back! Keep shoot—” 
Those were the last words of the third member of RGB to die. 
Tohma’s bullet line was visible against his body, but he was so absorbed in the light show of his own machine gun that he failed to notice it. And so another member fell. 
“No way… Are you kidding me…?” 
In fact, make that two. 
The bullet blasted through the man, obliterating him from left breast to shoulder, and continued onward to hit the neck of the man passing behind him in a crouch. 
The second man’s hit points shot downward with the glowing bullet-wound effect on the right side of his neck. Since the carotid artery was in the neck, even a small bullet could be fatal if it struck the right spot. 
“Huh? W-wait…” 
He lifted his hands to press against his neck, but that was not going to help a ruptured artery. The game system determined that he had lost too much blood and changed his status to dead. 
The man toppled backward like a log, and a marker reading DEAD appeared over his corpse. 
“Dammit!” 
“Is anyone showing up yet?” 
The two surviving members of RGB crouched behind one of the rock towers, continuing to shoot and harass their attackers. They held out for most of another minute, until one of them took a shot from the PTRD-41 that was so powerful, it broke through his rock cover to hit him and destroyed his assault rifle in the process. 
“Gahk!” 
But he wasn’t giving up yet. He boldly leaped up to grab a weapon left behind by one of his dead teammates. 
“Gah!” 
But Anna’s Dragunov bullets hit him in the leg, then the stomach, then the head. His SJ3 run was over. 
The last member continued to fight. 
“C’mon! Come get some if you dare, bitches!” he swore, moving quickly and erratically to avoid being sniped. He shot his machine gun from the waist until he needed to switch packs, then started up again, until— 
“Here I am.” 
Tanya was suddenly right in his vicinity, having raced unseen from rock to rock toward his position. 
“Huh? No way… You’re so close! Blugh!” 
She put over twenty 9 mm bullets into his back and killed him. 
It was after 12:13 at that moment. From start to finish, the battle had taken no more than three minutes. 
“No enemies in sight! Now, to loot the bodies,” said Tanya after she briefly surveyed the horizon. She reached for the man’s corpse. 
On the monitor, the crowd watched the silver-haired woman searching the brand-new body. 
“Huh? What’s she doing?” one man asked, stunned. “Is she taking the optical guns? I mean, I guess you can do that until the end of the event.” 
“I heard they stole their defeated opponents’ comms in SJ2 and used them to communicate with Llenn—or something. Maybe they’ll do the same thing again.” 
“Do you think they’re setting up a grenade booby trap to catch anyone who might be thinking of the same idea? That way, if someone tries to loot the body, it’ll explode!” 
“Or maybe she’s just molesting his body because she can’t get any male attention in real life…” 
The crowd had a variety of rather imaginative answers, but the footage quickly made it clear that every last one of them was wrong. 
Tanya stood up, stepped away from the man’s body, and promptly fired a yellow flare signal upward. 
“Ohhh!” shouted a man who’d been listening to the speech of the fellow in the red beret earlier. His recognition of the flare strategy made him so excited that he spilled most of his drink. 
“What? What’s that mean?” 
“Yeah, what’s the deal with the flares?” the other audience members asked, turning to him. 
The first man explained what he’d just learned about the flares: They were a gathering signal for the weaker teams to congregate around in order to fight the main contenders. The yellow flares were meant to indicate the presence of SHINC. 
“Oh! So that’s what it means!” 
“Wow, that’s pretty clever…” 
And of course, the people enthusiastic enough about GGO to congregate and watch this event were also smart enough to intuit what Tanya was doing by pulling the flare off a dead man to shoot it. 
“I did it! There’s lots of them left, too!” Tanya chirped into the comm. Behind the rock pillar, Boss smiled to herself. She had a frightening face, but once she smiled, it became apparent that—actually, her smile was frightening, too. 
Behind her, four teammates watched the area warily, including Sophie, who was hauling the PTRD-41. They were the eyes of predators looking for the next throat to rip open. 
“Okay, the next flare will go up in thirty seconds. Shoot that from about five hundred yards to the east of us.” 
“Thirty seconds! Five hundred east! Roger that!” 
Boss was only giving orders to Tanya, but it was enough for the other four to know their instructions, too. Without another word, they headed east with guns at the ready. 
From that point on, SHINC thoroughly dismantled each enemy squad who came for them. 
They shot up the flares they stole, luring in enemies who thought Hey, let’s go team up with that group to beat SHINC! and ambushed them. 
When the unwitting teams showed up, no idea that the flares were stolen, they thought Huh? Where are our comrades? 
When they found only Tanya, their enemy, they would yell “After her! Finish her off!” then engage in a fierce pursuit when she ran away. 
“Aaaagh!” 
Only to be slaughtered in an instant by the other four members who were lying in wait for Tanya to return. 
During the Satellite Scans at 12:20 and 12:30, Boss stood alone in a location a few hundred yards from the rest of the team. The other five members would set up a trap around the location of the flare gun, then ambush the next group of naïve enemies, beating them handily. 
Not a single one of the squads that SHINC dispatched ever succeeded in meeting up with any of their comrades in the plan. 
Among the defeated squads was one featuring the man from SJ2 who made the most of his experience by providing his own running commentary. The rest of his team died first, leaving only him hanging by a thread with several bullet wounds. 
“Shot in the right hand! Now the left! That’s my leg! Fell down! Numb from shock! Big bad shot!” he blurted out, like it was freestyle rapping. The sight was so curious that SHINC briefly stopped shooting at him. 
When they ripped his Type 89 gun away, his hit points were nearly gone. He lay faceup on the ground; there was nothing left for him to do but die. 
“Oh, this is that commentary guy. We all watched your video from the last one for research.” 
“Are you recording right now, too? I hope that when we see this, it’ll be after we’ve won,” said Tohma and Anna, the two beautiful snipers. 
“Thanks for the views! Tell everyone to like and subscribe!” he said pleasantly. 
Once she had confirmed the others were dead, Tanya walked up and pointed her Strizh at the man’s face. “Sadly, your valiant battle ends here. I’ll give you the mercy of a swift end. Do you have any last words?” 
“Yes!” he said. To the three women present and the entire audience watching, he shouted words that truly came from his heart. 
“Before I die! I would be very happy if, just once, I got to touch some boobs!” 
Blam-kaboom-kabam-blam-blam-blam-blam! 
The video of several fierce-looking women all blushing as they mercilessly blasted him with their guns eventually went on to rack up considerable views, but that would all come after the end of SJ3.