CHAPTER 1
Before the Battle Begins
July 31st, 2026 (Friday) 3:07 PM
“Commencing the very first How Do We Make Karen Kohiruimaki Understand How Strong She Is? Committee!” called out a girl with braided hair and a light summer girls’ school uniform, raising her hand in a room somewhere in Tokyo.
Five other young girls wearing the same uniform cheered and applauded with petite hands.
“Yeaaah!”
“Yaaay!”
“Commence, commence!”
The five were seated around a low, round table resting atop a white rug. Six glasses of iced tea sat on the table, their surfaces sweating with condensation, as well as a variety of plates topped with snacks and treats of all kinds. They seemed to have just about everything you could possibly buy at the supermarket, in fact.
It was a midsummer day with delightful weather. Bright sunlight poured through the lace curtains drawn across the large window, and the air conditioner on the ceiling was doing its best to keep up.
“Now, as the team captain, I will take it upon myself to be the master of ceremonies for this committee,” said the girl with the black braids, sitting down and reaching for a chocolate-cream sandwich cookie.
Her name was Saki Nitobe. She was a senior at a renowned all-girls high school affiliated with a women’s university. She was also the captain of the gymnastics team. She was less than five feet tall, but so were all the other girls. They were all teeny-tiny.
Saki lifted the cookie to her mouth, braids swaying, and told her gymnastics teammates, “Karen called me the other day. She said she ‘wanted to be strong, too.’”
The others listened to her intently, snacking away. On Saki’s right was Kana Fujisawa. She was a confident girl with straight hair down to her shoulders. As another senior, she was the team’s vice-captain and Saki’s best friend and right-hand gal.
“What do you make of this, people?” Saki asked, sounding like a gruff old commander.
“Simply preposterous,” replied Kana, once she’d finished off a marshmallow filled with pineapple jelly.
“And why is that?”
“It will take a while to explain. Is that all right?”
“Take all the time you need.”
“She’s already very strong. Explanation over.”
“That was fast!” snapped the girl with short hair sitting across the table from Kana. Her hair was cut about as short as a girl could go, in fact, and her features were handsome enough that she could pass as a boy if she wanted. Her name was Risa Kusunoki, and she was a junior and a member of the team. She kept her comment brief so she could pop five round little egg biscuits into her mouth.
“That sounds quite like Karen,” said the sweet, slow voice of the girl seated next to Risa. Her long black hair was tied into a ponytail, and she was rather reserved. She was a junior, like Risa, and her name was Moe Annaka.
Moe reached for the curry-flavored potato chips and began to loudly crunch on them.
Saki grunted and nodded. “That’s right. Karen is already very strong, but she says she wants to be stronger! But that’s not because she’s some stoic warrior ever in search of greater inner strength—it’s an admission of her inner insecurity, a sign that she believes she’s still a weakling!”
She smacked the table, shaking the plates of treats.
“We must somehow convince Karen that she’s already plenty strong enough!” the committee chairwoman ranted, her voice filling with fervor, but she was really just repeating the same thing she’d been saying for the last few minutes and hadn’t moved the discussion any further than that. The only thing that had changed was the amount of food on the table.
Another pale hand reached out to further deplete the snack supply. This one belonged to the only blond member of the group. It was her natural hair color, of course, flowing to her shoulders and framing her eyes, which had been blue since birth.
Milana Sidorova was a Russian resident of Japan and the third junior of the group. She grabbed her favorite snack from the table, dried sheets of pickled kelp. Before she popped a piece into her mouth, she said, “But if we try really hard and end up killing her, she’s going to think that she’s weak, after all.”
It was, admittedly, a very violent-sounding suggestion. But it emerged in conversation so casually because she wasn’t talking about actually killing a person.
The shared understanding among the girls was that they were talking about a full-dive virtual reality game, something that engaged all five senses vividly and absolutely. Specifically, they were referring to the game Gun Gale Online, which the whole gymnastics team and Karen played together.
Next to Milana, a girl was trying to eat a traditional mochi rice cake that had been coated in soy flour and drizzled with syrup, carefully trying to avoid exhaling through her nose and blowing the flour off the treat. She lifted the mochi on a toothpick and popped it into her mouth.
“Mmm, that’s so sweet,” she gushed with pure bliss. That was Shiori Noguchi. Her black hair was fashioned into a bob, making her look like a traditional Japanese doll. She was a senior.
“Ah. What do you think, Shiori? To clarify, I am not asking about the mochi,” Saki asked.
“Um, well,” Shiori murmured, chewing and swallowing before she answered. “I think that doing our best to defeat Karen—or Llenn, in game terms—and helping her realize that she’s strong already aren’t as contradictory as they seem. After all, we’re pretty tough ourselves, and Karen knows that. So if we really beat on Llenn and defeat her, that’s fine, and if we’re not up to the task, and she wins, that’s fine, too. But I do want to win.”
It was a headstrong statement from the soft-looking girl.
Saki smacked her knee. “Yes! That’s the opinion I was looking for!”
“So you’re saying…,” Kana followed up as she swallowed a grape-flavored fruit snack, “…the high school gymnastics team should continue to treat Llenn like our eternal rival?”
“Indeed!”
“I can’t wait! I wanna have a real fight with her again!” said Risa, the tomboy. She reached for a red bean pancake.
Saki nodded to herself with satisfaction and turned around.
“Do you see just how seriously we’re taking this very major problem?” she said to the person whose room they were snacking in.
Seated upon the bed—as she’d been instructed—through the large doorway adjacent to the living room was all six feet of a young woman: Karen Kohiruimaki.
The only response she could come up with was an awkward “Umm…”
At the time that Karen and the gymnastics team were having a little junk food party, other people were doing various things all over Japan.
For example, a petite singer-songwriter by the name of Elza Kanzaki was helping out a young man named Goushi Asougi—
“Don’t you know any other way to strengthen your abs? Huh?!”
“Urgh!”
—by pummeling his powerful, tight stomach with her fists.
They were in a spacious room of her private apartment, somewhere in Tokyo, dressed in matching athletic shorts and running shirts as they worked up a sweat.
Elza was already dripping wet, but she didn’t let up on the stomach punches. She was wearing simple gloves to protect her fists.
For his part, Goushi stood proud, hands on his hips, abs tensed. He did not budge when punched. He clearly had a very firm core, not limited to abs.
“Here we go! One, two, one, two!”
“Urgh! Urgh!”
For the puncher, it was boxercise. For the punchee, it was abdominal training.
At first glance, it looked like a wholesome bit of physical activity.
“You want more? You want me to punch you lower?”
“Yes, lower! Punch me lower!”
But, in fact, it was not wholesome at all.
Then there was a college student named Miyu Shinohara, who stood outside a large train station smack in the middle of the cool northern island of Hokkaido, waiting for a date.
“God, it’s so hot this year… Has global warming finally decided to finish us off? Or is this the famous ‘Hokkaido-killing summer’…?”
She was wearing a frilly pastel dress with her hair styled in a reserved fashion, like a fancy, demure young lady—but if anything, she was the type who could kill without warning. She wore contact lenses today instead of her usual glasses.
And there was sweat glistening on her forehead.
Yes, the large thermometer readout outside the station was displaying a very high number for this region of Japan. In fact, it was nearly at the top of what it could display.
“Ugh, dammit, I got here too early. But if I retreat into the station, he’ll know I was keeping cool in the shade… And I don’t want to message him and be like Hey, I’m inside,” Miyu grumbled out loud, taking advantage of the fact that no one was around to hear. “A woman’s got to have patience!” she scolded herself, choosing to smugly wait in the sweltering outside heat.
It was her first date with a boy from another college whom she met at a mixer a few days earlier and had really enjoyed his company.
But over the next few hours, they would mutually decide “This person sucks!” and go their separate (still-single) ways.
For instance, there was a GGO player with an avatar named David, who arrived at the front door of a home, bowed his head low, and shouted “Pardon me!”
He was in a residential neighborhood of Narita, in Chiba Prefecture. At the peak of summer weather, it was significantly hotter than Hokkaido. The ringing of the cicadas was overwhelming.
The man was dressed in the short-sleeved uniform of a major shipping company. He trotted back to the electric truck bearing the company’s logo, which was parked on the narrow street.
He was in his midthirties, with short hair and a firm physique; he resembled a judo athlete. His thick arms, tanned from a career spent delivering packages, snapped the seatbelt quickly into place.
He pressed a button next to the steering wheel to start up the vehicle and glanced at the cabin’s monitor to see where his next delivery would take him. He moved the stick into gear and put pressure on the pedal, engaging the truck’s quiet electric motor.
It was quiet to the point of being dangerous, in fact, so a piteous little warning sound started up to alert any nearby pedestrians to the truck’s presence.
As he drove carefully down the tight road, he muttered, “Lovely weather. When the sun’s out like this, it really makes you wanna shoot some guns. I’ll kill her this time…”
He was referring to GGO, of course, and the woman he meant to kill was none other than Pitohui, who had inflicted a bitter fate upon him in the last two Squad Jams.
What he didn’t think about, however, was that the truck’s recorder picked up the sound of him talking about shooting people, and when his supervisor performed a surprise safety audit a few days later, he had to make a very awkward excuse for his statement.
In another case, look to a scene in the city of Ito in Shizuoka.
“Bye-bye, Sensei!”
“Be careful on the way home, now. And watch out for heatstroke; it’s very hot in the sun.”
A high school girl in a typical uniform waved energetically at a man who beamed and waved back at her. He was in his late twenties, with an unexciting haircut and a delicate face. The silver-rimmed glasses and relaxed suit gave him an overall intellectual appearance.
They were in a small cram school located inside an office building, shortly after the daytime session of the college entrance exam summer curriculum, and his final student was on her way out the door.
“Good lesson today, sir. Would you like to take a break before the evening session? I can put on some tea and grab the snacks.”
He turned around to see a petite young woman right behind him. She was the new part-time assistant at the school and around twenty years old. When not on the job, she was a college student.
The look she gave him was direct and enraptured. Between that and the way she got much closer than necessary to speak to him, she wasn’t making any attempt to hide her I-want-you attitude.
You would have to be an extremely dense man to fail to recognize the young woman’s interest.
“Thank you. But I’d like to finish grading some tests first, so I’ll wait on the tea until I’ve finished with that,” the man said, extremely densely, using the same pleasant smile and neutrally polite tone he used with everyone else.
“Oh… I see…,” she said, deflated. Without noticing how she retreated in disappointment, the man sat behind his office desk and began to grade English tests.
In 2026, many cram schools used tablet computers to conduct tests, but here they still used old-fashioned paper. He promptly began to mark up the sheets with brilliant efficiency. With industrial-equipment precision and tremendous concentration, he finished grading about fifty sheets—multiple classes’ worth—in a manner of minutes.
He tapped the stack of papers to straighten them out, placed them in file folders for the separate classes, and sat back to sigh. Then he retrieved his smartphone from his desk drawer. He had stored it away on silent mode to prevent himself from being distracted at work, so when he finally turned his screen back on, the message notification came as a surprise.
The message itself was very simple: I GOT THE THING.
“!”
But that alone was enough for the man to clench his other hand into a fist. Wrinkles appeared on his handsome face, and he closed his eyes and beamed.
Moments later, the part-timer swept into his office bearing a steaming mug of tea like a newlywed wife and asked brightly, “Did you get some good news?”
She simply wanted some kind of conversation starter—she was ready to leap at that opportunity, no matter how he answered. But the man calmly put his smartphone back in the drawer and said, “Ah…pardon me. I got a text, but it doesn’t have anything to do with work. I shouldn’t have been checking during office hours. But thank you for the tea.”
He reached for the mug and took a sip, saying nothing about the taste, whether it was good or bad. He had all but ignored the young woman, who clearly wanted to find something to talk about, now that they were alone together.
“……I’ll…just go clean up,” she said, crestfallen. He did not watch her go. When she went back to the classroom, he took his smartphone out again and checked the screen, smiling as he looked at the message, which came through the smartphone app for Gun Gale Online.
The man’s name was Shuuya Shinohara, and he was a member of the team of machine-gun fans scattered across Japan known as ZEMAL, the All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers.
Finally, there was a writer in his fifties, living in Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo, posting short messages to a social media site designed for that very purpose, exposing his shame to the entire world.
UGH, I CAN’T WRITE MY NOVEL! I’M SO SLEEPY! CAN I GO TO SLEEP NOW? CAN I?
His work desk was a total mess, covered in manga, magazines, and model air guns, as well as his one actual work tool, a computer. The man leaned back in his tall chair, closed his eyes, and tried to nap.
His computer beeped to inform him of an incoming e-mail.
“What? I haven’t finished the book yet,” he muttered, sleepy-eyed, clicking on his mail program. It produced a rather long e-mail in English. A second later, the message was automatically translated into perfect Japanese. Life sure was convenient these days.
He scanned it dully, then suddenly lurched into an upright position.
“I’m in!”
It seemed he wasn’t that tired, after all.
Four days later, on Tuesday, August 4th, Karen returned home to Hokkaido in the grips of its summer heat wave. Two days after her at-home junk-food party with the gymnastics team, she hopped on a plane and returned home for the first time since spring vacation.
There, she met up with her still-local best friend, Miyu Shinohara, who claimed to be “running this town,” and the two went to the nearest diner, a place they’d visited many times back in high school, to chat and catch up.
“No worries. I got two at home. And one, I just bought. It doesn’t even smell yet.”
“Wait…what…?”
By their very design, it was impossible for one person to use two AmuSpheres at once, so Karen was initially confused.
“Oh!”
Five seconds later, she understood. With great sympathy, she said, “It was the one for your missing boyfriend… I get it… You wanted to play with him… RIP…”
“Nobody likes a smart-ass.”
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