Sword Art Online Alternative – Gun Gale Online - Volume 6 - Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3 
Respawn 
Llenn ran and ran. 
She raced faster than anyone across the damp earth. 
It was a graceful sprint beyond anything the human body could achieve. 
By the time the dirt, kicked up by her boots, flew through the air and back to the ground, she had covered a considerable distance. Viewed from the side, it looked more like the dirt had risen on its own. In a world without wind, she was the cause of the biggest gusts around. 
As she sprinted, Llenn looked to the right and left with her overwhelming agility, checking for human figures in the distance or behind rocks. 
She reached a large rock, came to an abnormally abrupt stop to hide behind it, and spun around, surveying her surroundings with both her eyes and her gun muzzle. 
Once she had determined that the area was safe, she used her communication device to tell her teammates, “Clear!” 
Dozens of yards behind her, Pitohui, Fukaziroh, and M followed, one at a time, and took shelter behind rocks one or two behind Llenn’s. There was only one person moving at any given moment; the other three watched and waited in the meantime. 
As the rear guard, M never failed to check their six. If an experienced team spotted an enemy on the move, they’d surely let them pass only to ambush them from behind. 
Once everyone had finished moving forward, Llenn picked out the next rock she wanted to reach. The compass was always out and set to zero, so she was looking directly north—well, if not exactly north, then as close to it as possible. 
I’m running to that one next, Llenn told herself, drawing back her foot to bolt forward. 
“Don’t move!” M hissed. “Enemy! Far off to the right!” 
“Ah!” Llenn circled around the left side of the boulder on instinct. Already found some?! And I wasn’t the one who spotted them! 
A shiver ran itching up her spine, and she clenched the P90. That was a bad thing for aiming, so she focused on relaxing her grip. Just in case, she glanced to the west behind her, but she could see no enemies. 
“Distance, slightly under a quarter of a mile away. I caught a glimpse; I think they saw us, too. No movement since first sighting,” M stated briefly. 
It felt like the calm before the storm. 
Though Llenn couldn’t see him, she was certain that he was looking around through the scope of his M14 EBR. If he had an open shot, he would be firing 7.62 × 51 mm bullets at them. 
Who is it? What team? 
Llenn waited for M’s report. She wasn’t foolish enough to peer around for herself—though she did have the monocular she’d been using in Squad Jam tournaments. She hoped that it was SHINC, but she didn’t expect to be that lucky. 
The map was smaller, but if they were already running across another team, there had to be many event participants. The likelihood of running smack into SHINC was low. Very low. 
So when M said, “I see ’em. Green camo, long hair. It’s an Amazon,” she thought she misheard him. Or that she was dreaming. 
“Ooh! Yeah!” Llenn shrieked, hoisting up her P90 and shivering with excitement. 
Boom! 
A bullet fired from a Dragunov sniper rifle missed her side by barely a foot. 
“Eep!” 
“Llenn, be careful,” warned Pitohui at the same time the distant gunshot arrived. That was one order from Pito that Llenn was more than happy to follow. 
She’d been very confident that she was safe because she was behind the rock. That was sloppy of her. Depending on the positioning and angle of the other team’s location, she could have easily been exposed and shot. 
“They’re all spread out. Be careful of the entire eastern direction,” M advised. Llenn obeyed and moved farther to the center of the rock’s cover and got down as far she could on the ground. 
It was great that SHINC was nearby but losing by getting sniped was such an embarrassing way to go out. She didn’t want to die until she’d at least seen the whites of Boss’s eyes. 
“Can you tell where they are, M? I’ll aim at ’em,” suggested Fukaziroh. Her weapons were grenade launchers. Because she could deliver that explosive payload on a parabola, she could attack enemies behind cover. But a quarter of a mile was about the limit of her range. 
“Nope, can’t. When we start moving, follow behind Pito. I’ll have you take the rear guard.” 
“Okeydoke.” 
Then he issued orders for the rest of the group. “Pito, Llenn, and I will advance at the same time. Keep the intervals to about one rock’s worth.” 
The two women replied simultaneously. 
“Okay.” 
“Got it.” 
After teaming up with M for so long, Llenn was starting to understand his strategy as soon as he gave instructions. Even in a gunfight, the closer you were, the better accuracy and more power your gun would have. And the P90’s effective range (a close enough distance to aim, hit, and incapacitate a target) was barely over two hundred yards. She was at a disadvantage here. 
But compared to SHINC’s six, this attacking group only had three. They were outnumbered and outgunned. So instead, the idea was to stick close—but not so close that the entire group could easily be wiped out in a single attack—and approach the enemy as a three-man cell. 
Of course, once they caught sight of the enemy, it would be an all-out brawl. If SHINC was spread out wide enough, there was the possibility that their members could be picked off in one-on-one battles. 
Once he knew they were on board with the plan, M ordered, “Go!” 
Llenn and Pitohui sped out from their hiding places together, sprinting with all the speed and burst they possessed. Llenn expected to get shot, but no bullets flew at her. 
GGO closely resembled reality, but it was still a game. For the purposes of game balance and fun factor, there was a player-assistance feature called a “bullet line” that indicated the path of an incoming bullet. 
It was a bright-red line that was visible to any player being aimed at and to those players around them. If Llenn saw it, she was going to evade with a quick sidestep, but she saw no light. 
Pitohui arrived at the adjacent boulder a few moments later. She slid in fast, holding her sling-carried HK416C down with one hand to keep it from bouncing. 
Sliding wasn’t typically a good idea in battle, because it made it harder to transition into the next action after that. She probably just thought it would look cool. 
Pitohui followed up by saying, “This would suggest the enemy isn’t going to shoot at us.” 
“I see,” said M. “I’ll come after you now.” 
His much larger form rushed forward to the space behind a different rock. Still there was no firing coming from SHINC. 
“What does this mean?” asked Fukaziroh through the comm, all the way from the back. 
Pitohui replied, “It means they’ll let us have a serious shootout. Otherwise, we’d be taking potshots from a distance and ultimately end up both deciding it’s not worth it—and withdrawing.” 
Llenn added happily, “They’re thinking, Let’s get close enough to see each other’s faces before we fight!” 
“Exactly.” 
“Oookay, gotcha. I guess Boss is a real samurai, huh?” 
Oh, yay! Llenn thought, her heart skipping a beat. Boss wanted an all-out, close-range firefight; one that was vivid and satisfying. 
Part of it, of course, was that the range of Boss’s silenced sniper rifle, the Vintorez, and the speedy attacker Tanya’s Bizon were both shorter than their teammates’ PKM machine gun and Dragunov sniper. 
But with their machine gun, two sniper rifles, and the PTRD-41 antitank rifle available if needed, SHINC was a very good long-distance team. If they wanted only to win the fight, they could have started shooting by now. 
“Ahhh, good ol’ Boss!” 
It took a real man to approach head-on and wait to do battle. Or a real woman, in Boss’s case. 
“Let’s do it! M, Pito, once we get as close as possible, I’ll rush in! Back me up!” 
“Oh no! Llenn, you can’t… You can’t rush off to your death!” lamented Pitohui, going back to the well of hammy acting. 
“If I die in a duel with Boss, at least I’ll die with a smile on my face,” Llenn said with the utmost sincerity. 
This sentiment was strictly limited to the game, of course. 
Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. 
If there was a streamed broadcast of this event, like Squad Jam, aerial camera footage of the scene would probably contain those sound effects. 
Llenn and company were moving forward in small bursts, from rock to rock, thirty feet at a time. 
There was no doubt that their enemy lay ahead. They hadn’t fired once since then, but she could tell. There were glimpses of distant green along the way. The flickers were small, but they were people. They had guns. They were coming this way. 
“It’s so quiet. Should I let one fly by accident?” asked Fukaziroh, who was making her way up from the rear. 
“No,” came Llenn’s immediate reply. 
They’d advanced quite a distance by traveling along the rocks; a hundred yards at least. If SHINC had been advancing at around the same pace, there would be roughly 150 yards between them at most. That was a distance Llenn could close in the blink of an eye, given that her speed made the Olympic world record for sprinting look like child’s play. 
In recognition of that, M said, “Next one, Llenn.” That meant she was given the green light the next time they moved forward. Llenn would draw the enemy’s attention and rile them up, while Pitohui and M formed a two-man backup cell. 
“Roger that!” 
It was her long-awaited match against SHINC. Llenn thought about when she faced off against them at the end of the very first Squad Jam. 
She’d split off from M and rushed across the wilderness, unsure of what she should be doing. It was a charge she didn’t expect to survive, and yet, she found one bold path to victory after another. 
In fact, the way these boulders were scattered about on flat ground was very similar to that battleground. She could probably go with the same strategy. And this time, she had three very powerful allies she could count on. 
Let’s do this! 
She felt adrenaline surging through her brain, putting her in maximum overdrive. 
P-chan’s full weight rested in her hands. Small stones flying at a rate of fifteen per second—at the speed of sound—became her fangs and claws. Llenn had never once doubted P-chan’s ability. 
Her only other weapon was her tempered speed. She would take full advantage of the fleet feet that had gotten her this far. SHINC lay just ahead, waiting for her. 
I’m so glad I decided on this game, she thought. 
With one final breath to calm her nerves, she waited the few seconds remaining until M’s order. 
“Go now!” M said, right at the exact same time that Fukaziroh said, “Wait, enemies behind!” 
“Okay, here I goooo— Wait, what?” 
Llenn darted out only two steps before she stopped short. The world lit up. 
Red lines—in the sky, on the ground, on the rocks, many, dozens, all at once. One even on her own body. 
Bullet lines! 
Like any GGO player, Llenn hated the sensation. Her body reacted on its own, throwing her out of the way. At the same time, she bellowed, “From behiiind?!” 
They were coming from the rear, not the front. In other words, these weren’t bullets from SHINC’s guns, but some other foe. 
What idiots would be dumb enough to get in the way of my long-awaited face-off with Boss?! 
“Hey, we’re getting outta here—or at least I am!” Fukaziroh jabbered, right as the gunshots started. 
Dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dram-dram-blam-bwut-bwut-boom-boom-kablam-kadoom-dut-dut-dut-kablam-whomp-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut! 
The roar of incoming gunshots was overwhelming. Adding to the clamor was the whoosh of bullets cutting through the air around them, the phut! phut! of them hitting soil, and the gak! chernk! of them striking rocks. 
Llenn jumped behind the rock she’d been using as shelter a moment earlier. This specific sound was one she’d heard before. It had been a part of that unforgettable first Squad Jam, when she was hiding at the edge of the forest. 
“Machine guns!” 
It was the sound of several machine guns simultaneously blasting away at her position. Each gun gleefully roared at the maximum fire rate—no concern whatsoever for wasted shots. 
“Dammit!” Llenn howled. The rock she had her back to was trembling slightly as it was subjected to the bullet hell. There had been a team in Squad Jam that liked to employ obnoxious tactics such as this. The team was certainly memorable if nothing else. 
“Not you again, All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers!” she screamed. She’d just been thinking of her fight against SHINC in SJ1, but now all she could remember was how they’d shot at her relentlessly. 
At the start of Squad Jam, they were the first enemy team she encountered, when leaving the forest going into the city. They had shot at her like crazy; it had been a hailstorm of bullets. If it weren’t for the thick tree trunks she’d taken cover behind, she would have died ten times over. 
“Whoa! What the hell?!” yelped Fukaziroh. She appeared a few seconds later, having leaped behind the rock to join Llenn in her hiding spot. Her shoulders and side were glowing red, a sign of bullet damage. 
All in-game damage was visually represented by this light. If a limb got blown off, the stump would simply glow red. No blood, no gore, no problem. 
It looked like she’d taken three hits on the run. She’d lost about 40 percent of her HP. The fact that she’d taken three bullets and only lost 40 percent was a sign of Fukaziroh’s toughness. Llenn would’ve easily been in the red. 
“Ah, dammit!” cursed Fukaziroh, using one of her emergency healing kits right away. Her body glowed, and her hit points began to recover. 
The drumroll of machine-gun fire continued endlessly. ZEMAL couldn’t be aiming specifically at them, but the fact that occasional bullets hit the rock they were hiding behind was scary enough. 
Since that team was peerless in ammo storage and continuous shooting ability, Llenn’s group couldn’t even poke their heads or hands out from behind the rock, much less attempt covering fire to force the other guys to back off. 
Judging by the sound, ZEMAL had to be around two to three hundred yards off. They were located behind the team’s previous position, fanned out to the west. 
Incensed at being shot, Fukaziroh fumed, “I’m gonna fire a few grenades and light ’em up, ’kay? I dunno if they’ll connect, but that should at least freak ’em out a bit!” She lifted the MGL-140 in her right hand. 
M told her, “Go ahead. At the sound of the blast, we all withdraw to the south.” 
Going east would put them in SHINC’s sights, and there was nothing but machine-gun fire to the west. There was still the possibility—however slight—of another team to the north. Running away put a bitter taste in Llenn’s mouth, but they had no other choice. 
“Gahhh!” Llenn was frustrated that her fight with SHINC had been so spectacularly interrupted. All she could do was howl about it. 
“Here we go!” 
Fukaziroh unloaded six angry shots: pomp-pomp-pomp-pomp-pomp-pomp. The grenades soared off into the sky. 
A few seconds later came a quick series of explosions: bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-boom. 
The machine-gun sounds immediately came to a stop. The best-case scenario would be if the blasts had wiped them out, but that was most likely wishful thinking. The blasts had probably only startled them for a moment. 
“Go now!” 
It was enough of a distraction for Llenn’s team to escape, though. Llenn let Fukaziroh rush out first, then followed behind. “Dammit! So much for my fight with Boss!” 
She let her anger drive her legs and didn’t notice at first that she had passed not only Fukaziroh, but also Pitohui and M. 
Behind her, ZEMAL had recovered from their surprise and resumed firing. She began to hear the sound of bullets whizzing overhead again. They were the kind of people who were more afraid of not shooting their machine guns than of dying. So getting shot was never their primary concern. They were idiots—but that made them fearsome foes to be pitted against. 
Llenn found a large boulder in the direction she was running. She could tell it was one she’d used earlier, because it was bigger than those around it. She leaped behind it for cover before anyone else on her team. 
And then she hit something. 
“Bwubh!” 
Llenn bounced off a soft wall and rolled onto the ground, finally sprawling on her back to face the sky. She tilted her head and saw someone standing ten feet away. 
“Yo!” 
It was Boss. 
The massive, muscular, pig-tailed woman always made for an imposing sight—in this world, gorillas were confused for her. She wore her usual camo fatigues and combat vest, Vintorez in hand. It was her meaty thigh that Llenn had bumped into. 
“Hey,” said Llenn reflexively. “Huhhh?” Then her eyes and mouth gaped and hung there, very foolishly. 
With great pains, she finally put two and two together. SHINC had been spread out much farther than she had realized, and Boss was coming around to the south to sneak up on them from behind—until Llenn herself had run into her, literally. 
Oh. I’m dead. RIP. Watashi wa mou shindeiru. 
She knew it was coming. The fall had knocked the aim of her P90 askew, while Boss’s Vintorez was swinging with her line of sight, directly at her. 
But rather than open fire, Boss opened her mouth to speak. 
“That was wild, wasn’t it? Here, calm down.” 
“Hwoh?” 
“I’m not going to shoot you here; that wouldn’t be any fun. Everyone, listen up. Llenn just ran into me. Don’t shoot the other three as they pass by, either,” she commanded the rest of her team. 
Then she approached Llenn and extended an arm like a log. Llenn grabbed her hand and let the other woman pull her upright. “Got it! First, let’s do something about those machine gunners!” 
Members of ZEMAL were firing indiscriminately in the distance, as though they’d suffocate if they weren’t shooting their guns. 
“Momentary cease-fire, huh?” 
Pitohui came racing through the hail of machine-gun fire to the rock where Llenn and Boss were hiding. After overhearing Llenn’s comments in her earpiece earlier, she could tell that, at the very least, Boss had no plans of shooting her for the moment. 
At the same time, M and Fukaziroh were greeted behind another rock by the fox-eyed, silver-haired Tanya. “Heya!” 
In SJ3, Tanya and M had engaged in an all-out brawl, complete with choking and grappling. 
“Yo,” said M, who knew that greetings were the bedrock of proper communication. 
“So what do we do now?” asked Fukaziroh, revolving her MGL-140’s magazine to eject the empty cartridges to the left. They clattered to the ground. 
Now if she wound the springs to charge them, simply pulling the trigger would rotate the revolver and allow her to fire grenades consecutively. Lastly, she pulled more ammo out of her backpack to reload another half dozen. 
“There’s not much we can do,” M said as bullet lines appeared over their heads and vanished as the bullets themselves flew past. 
Tanya added, “First, we beat those guys.” 
“Together!” 
Wu and Yue in the same boat. 
This was a saying based on ancient China, in which the opposing nations of Wu and Yue were trapped on the same boat, forced to work together to keep it from capsizing in the storm. In practical use, the saying meant working with an enemy temporarily. It could also simply mean being stuck in the same situation, but in its original context it referred to cooperation. 
Llenn’s team and SHINC were Wu and Yue in this situation. 
Before they could engage in their own fight, they had to eliminate these impossibly inconsiderate machine gunners who forced their way in between them with considerable firepower. 
“What should we do, M?” Llenn asked. Boss heard her say it, and that meant it got picked up by her comm and sent to her teammates, too. 
In the meantime, bullets were zipping and whizzing past. They were shooting as thoroughly as sweeping them with brooms. The location of where the sound was coming from was uniform, indicating that they had barely moved from their original firing location, if at all. 
M replied, “How can they all keep firing for so long? They haven’t stopped to switch out ammo at all, this entire time.” 
That was a good question, Llenn thought. She repeated it to Boss. They needed to share strategic information. 
This raised the possibility of another enemy aside from ZEMAL. Boss asked her teammates, “Does anyone have a visual on them?” 
Tohma the sniper said she would try to get one. She was a tall, beautiful woman with a green knit hat over her black hair. Her real-life player was Milana, the pretty, petite Russian girl. Tohma was farthest back of all of SHINC; she poked her gun and face around the side of her rock, watching for bullet lines. 
When she spotted the flash of machine guns at a distance of about 440 yards, she set her scope to maximum zoom. If she wanted to take aim and snipe, she could—but she instead concluded her reconnaissance and ducked back behind cover. 
“Five enemies, machine guns only. They all have some kind of metal rail attached to their left side,” she reported. 
SHINC’s machine gunner, the stout, red-haired Rosa, instantly knew what that meant. 
“Oh! They’re doing that thing!” 
“Not that!” Boss scowled in response. 
“Not what?” Llenn wondered instantaneously. 
“The backpack-feeding system,” Boss explained. “They’re wearing huge backpacks with ammo feeders that go into the gun. They can shoot five hundred, even a thousand bullets in a row.” 
“Are you kidding?! That’s not fair!” Llenn fumed. She was spoiled, though, because the carrying capacity of her fifty-round magazine was already twenty more than a typical pack of assault rifle ammo. 
When she relayed that info to M, he said, “Got it. So those are in GGO, too? And they’ve all got them? That’s a pain.” The entire time, bullet lines and their bullets continued to fly over their heads. 
Normally, portable machine guns used ammo belts that strung a hundred to a hundred and fifty bullets together. If they got any longer, whether hanging off to the left or contained in an ammo box beneath the gun, it made movement more difficult. 
So the solution to that problem was the backpack-feeding system. A huge box packed with ammo hung from the shooter’s back, attached to the gun by a flexible metal rail. 
Normal firing rate for a machine gun was eight to ten shots per second, so by basic calculation that meant it could be fired for a maximum of one hundred seconds consecutively. That would be while holding the trigger down, so if you were firing in bursts, it could last minutes instead. 
And there were five all at once, so it was no wonder the bullets were coming in an unceasing shower of hot lead. 
“Boy, these guys are a real pain in the ass,” said Pitohui, who was lounging behind the rock. “So how about we ignore them and slip away?” 

“No way!” “We have to fight!” shouted Boss and Llenn simultaneously. 
“Ha-ha-ha. In that case, I guess I’ll fight them with you. Just a little light exercise before breakfast. M?” Pitohui said, throwing it to him. 
“I know. I’m thinking. Llenn, connect your earpiece to everyone else for the time being.” 
She did as instructed and altered the settings of the device so that rather than only communicating to the team, it went through Boss to the rest of SHINC as well. Now, until one of the two cut it off, all ten players would be able to share information. 
Llenn’s first statement to the combined group was “Let’s destroy those obnoxious jerks for getting in the way!” 
A few seconds later, M had put the plan together in his mind. He then said, “Sorry, Pito, but I need you to kill yourself.” 
“Aw, shucks. Oh well,” she said, pointing the suppressor end of the HK416C into her own mouth. Since it was flipped around, she used the thumb of her extended right hand to pull the trigger. 
Shhp-puh-puh! 
The sound was considerably muffled. Right before Llenn’s eyes, Pitohui put three 5.56 mm bullets into her own mouth. They penetrated her brain through the upper jaw and exited the back of her head. It meant instant death, even for an immortal being like Pitohui. 
Her hit point bar instantly fell to zero. Pitohui was dead. 
Her body flopped over on the spot and remained there as an indestructible object. The icon reading DEAD popped into existence over it, with a countdown below it that went 179, 178, 177… 
“Wh…what?” Llenn gaped, baffled. But Boss understood its meaning at once. She gave orders to a distant teammate. 
“Tanya, you too. Don’t get left behind.” 
“Hya-haaaaaaa!” 
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” 
“Yaaaaaaaah!” 
Smiles and empty cartridges sparkled beneath the leaden sky. 
The men fired the hell out of their machine guns. 
Five, each perched on a rock of his own, his machine gun steadied on a bipod, firing bullets like they were going out of business. 
Dut-dut-dut-dut, dut-dam-dut-dam-dam-dam. Trat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. 
Five men, located all across the islands of Japan, brought together by the intensity of their love for machine guns. They were the All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers. 
Their acronym tag for Squad Jam was ZEMAL, based on their Japanese title, Zen-Nippon Machine-Gun Lovers. There was no correct way to pronounce this, because it was an abbreviation, but most people said “zee-mall.” 
Their registered leader was the big, tough Huey, who had his brown hair slicked back. He used the American military machine gun M240B. 
The man with the longer black hair held down with a headband like a certain famous action-movie protagonist was Shinohara, the M60E3 guy. 
The one with the bandanna who was chosen for the betrayers’ team in SJ3 was Tomtom. His favorite gun was the famous FN MAG, the original model for the M240B. 
All three used powerful 7.62 × 51 mm rounds. This was the same ammo M’s M14 EBR used, and they were effective for about nine hundred yards. They had good penetration and destructive power, too; in short, they packed a serious punch. 
The other two used guns that took 5.56 × 45 mm rounds, which were less powerful but lighter, so they could carry more overall. These were the bullets that the M16 assault rifle and the Japan Self-Defense Force’s Type 89 used. 
One of the two was Max, and he had the most widely used of this type of machine gun, the Minimi Mk2 model. He stood out from the team because his avatar was brawny and dark-skinned and sported a fade hairstyle. 
The last one was Peter. He kept tape over the bridge of his nose and was the smallest member of the team. His machine gun was the Israeli Negev, a rare gun in the world of GGO. 
The five had made great advances in the third Squad Jam. 
They’d gone from a (sorry to say) joke of a team to a powerhouse that couldn’t be ignored. 
Ever since SJ3, their uniform was a green fleece jacket bearing their logo on the right breast—an ammo belt fashioned into an infinity symbol. 
They didn’t wear utility belts or vests. No pistol sidearms or knives. Absolutely no helmets or defensive armor. All of their carrying limit was spent on machine guns and ammo. 
Until now, their style had been to wear large backpacks and keep all their ammo belts and boxes in there. But this time was different. 
Now they had the backpack-feeder system that was tormenting the two other teams. The message that Shinohara, the cram school teacher, received was about this very item. Max and Tomtom had taken down a powerful monster in the wilderness and looted the plans for the item, which the crafty Peter had managed to create. 
On each member’s back was a large metal box resting in a frame, much like external frame packs for hiking. They might have looked like merchants carrying general supplies in the olden days, but these were filled with ammo belts and nothing else. 
A metal rail stretched from the top left edge of each box, reaching around the body with a decent amount of slack before it hooked into the left side aperture of the gun. Then the bullets rattled along the rail, pulled by the feeding mechanism into the gun. 
“Cease fire!” 
“Cease fiiire!” “Cease!” “Eyy!” “Cease!” 
Their targets were completely out of sight, so even the trigger-happy gunners had to stop firing temporarily. Those who were able to switch in fresh barrels took the opportunity to do so. It was useful to have spares around, because so much consecutive shooting caused overheating and reduced accuracy. 
Swapping out machine-gun barrels was surprisingly simple, in fact—just unlock them and remove the barrel, handle and all. An experienced person could do it in seconds. 
They didn’t forget to retrieve more ammo belts from their inventories, either. They operated the menus and materialized the ammo, which automatically appeared in their backpacks, linked to the previous belts. Real life could never be so convenient. 
Now ZEMAL was ready to fire a few hundred more shots. 
“Hey! Machine gunners!” hailed a distant voice. 
Somehow, all of ZEMAL heard M loud and clear. 
“Huh? What the…? Hold your fire, guys,” said Huey. 
The five men watched, machine guns at the ready, as a man emerged from behind a rock with his hands raised. He was about a hundred yards away. 
That was a distance they could certainly hit him at. 
M didn’t have a gun—or his shield. He walked out from the rock with his empty hands high. With all the lung power he had, he shouted, “I want to talk! Can you hear me?” 
Since there was no wind to drown out his voice, the five were able to understand him perfectly. 
“Hey, what do you think?” 
“Shoot him?” 
“Should we? We could kill him right now.” 
“Or should we hear him out?” 
“Hmm. What if we shoot him, then hear him out?” 
The five were a bit conflicted. Huey acted as the mouthpiece of the group in responding to M. He pulled the M240B away from his cheek and sat up a bit. In a voice as loud as M’s, he replied, “What do you want? Who are you?” 
ZEMAL watched the video replays of Squad Jam, but they didn’t have any interest in the names of other players. They only watched to see themselves looking awesome. 
M replied, “I am M! The leader of Team LPFM! I’ve come to negotiate the end of this meaningless conflict!” 
“How come?” 
“This isn’t Squad Jam! I don’t think there’s any need to fight like this right at the start!” 
“Yeah, maybe you’ve got a point! But it’s a player’s right to choose whether to shoot or not, isn’t it?” 
“Yes, that’s true! Well, we can do it that way!” M admitted, so easily that it caught Huey and the others off guard. 
“Uh, okay, we’re gonna shoot, then!” said Huey. “By the way, do you like machine guns?” 
M answered him with a smirk. It was very rare to see M smile. “Yes, I love them! I don’t use it often, but I do own one!” 
“Oh? What kind?!” He took the bait. They really did love their machine guns. 
M replied, “An MG 42!” 
“What?!” Huey went wide-eyed. 
“No way!” “Are you kidding?!” “Hyao!” “Whoo!” 
The others all perked up their ears at that. They were too easy. 
The MG 42 was a brilliant machine gun used by the Germans in World War II. It could fire an astonishing 1,200 rounds per minute, twenty bullets per second, with a high-speed rattle that was known and feared by the nickname Hitler’s buzz saw. 
In the world of GGO, the MG 42 was a fairly rare gun. Its 7.92 × 57 mm Mauser rounds were uncommon and pricey, too. It wasn’t the sort of gun you hauled out in any situation where you might lose it. A collector’s item meant for the shooting range, one might say. 
But that just made it all the more enticing to ZEMAL. 
“Hey! M, or whatever your name is! How much ya want for it?” Tomtom asked, already in haggling mode. 
“No, wait! I want it! I’ll give you my summer bonus!” said Shinohara, inadvertently revealing that he was an office worker. 
“Say, what if we held an auction, just between us?” suggested Max. 
“It’s the only way. Let’s do it,” concluded Peter. 
“Whoa, whoa, hang on, everybody! You got it all wrong! Use your heads!” snapped Huey, asserting his leadership and bringing reason back to the situation. “Obviously, the best plan of action is to recruit him to our team, duh!” 
At no point did they spare a thought for M’s opinion. 
“Agreed.” “No objections.” “Yup.” “That’s it.” 
They reached a team consensus, again, without any consideration for M’s opinion. 
“All right, then! M, or whatever your name is, as a fellow lover of the machine-gun arts, why don’t you come and fight on our side?” 
“No, I can’t do that. The talks have broken down, I suppose. Do we have no other choice but to fight, then?” 
“I suppose not… We’ll talk about the MG 42 later. But for now…” 
Gunfire punctuated the rest of his sentence. 
Five machine guns burst into life at once, sending a hail of bullets toward M’s location—but he anticipated it coming and had rushed back behind the rock for safety. It was very close, but he made it barely in time without taking a single shot. 
“Now give me some suppressing fire,” said M. 
“You got it,” said a “teammate” in the back. 
Rosa, SHINC’s gunner, unloaded with her PKM machine gun from atop a rock, spraying bullets into the vicinity of ZEMAL. The bullets thundered out of the barrel, flying at supersonic speed from east to west. Tracer rounds created the occasional stream of light in the midst of them. 
But ZEMAL’s reaction was quick and their counterattack powerful. 
“Enemy machine gun!” 
“That sounds like a PKM!” 
“Let’s beat ’em!” 
“Roger!” 
All five guns trained on Rosa’s location, where the bullet lines aimed at them were coming from, and they opened fire. Now the stream of light was going the other way, from west to east—at five times the density. 
“Hya!” 
If Rosa had been 0.2 seconds slower to pull back, she would have been riddled with bullets. 
In the meantime, M was free to act again. He leaped out from behind the rock. “Hrmf!” 
Before Tomtom could react and swing the muzzle toward him, M sped over to the next rock and hid, stomping heavily the whole while. 
“What’s wrong? He’s not gonna shoot at us? What a waste!” Peter lamented. This was a situation where you needed to charge, even if it meant going out in a blaze of glory. What better way to die than with the honor of the machine gun’s beautiful bullets? What a letdown that he wouldn’t do that for them. 
“They don’t want to fight!” 
“I’m not surprised. They’re poor lost souls, loathed by the god of machine guns.” 
“That’s right. They’re forsaken,” said Max and Shinohara, suddenly full of pity. Their devotion to machine guns was approaching cult status. 
“All right! C’mon, let’s fight!” said Huey to the raucous responses of the other four. 
They hopped down from their boulders and held their guns at the waist. If the others weren’t coming to them, they would charge instead. 
Their plan was both simple and dynamic. 
With their machine guns in firing position and capable of shooting for a long time without stopping, the five would enter an A formation and rush the enemy. If they saw anything hostile, they would open fire and continue moving toward the target. You might call it a steamroller strategy. 
If the other side fired back, who cares? Ten times as many bullets in the other direction would sort that out. It was an offense akin to a mad, charging bull. 
If this scene were being shown in a bar, like Squad Jam, the audience would be making bets at this point: Who would win—ZEMAL or the combination of LPFM and SHINC? 
Someone would’ve claimed that ZEMAL would win with this advance. Five machine guns would be enough to overpower the enemy in a place with relatively good visibility, rocks notwithstanding. 
Someone else would say that if Fukaziroh’s grenades were used effectively, they’d be able to push back ZEMAL. 
Another person would’ve realized it was eerie that SHINC wasn’t attacking harder. 
“All right—let’s move!” said Huey. 
With that order, ZEMAL took off running. They bolted out from behind the rocks, made an arrowhead formation, and rushed for the place where they saw M run last. 
“Go!” 
Five men started hustling. They passed one rock, running after M. 
“There he is!” 
Shinohara spotted M from behind, fleeing at a distance of over 150 yards. He shot with the M60E3, and the other four followed his lead. 
The beams of light chased after M, but once again, they failed to hit him, just as he ducked behind a distant boulder. The tracers deflected off the rock and shot high into the air. 
But they didn’t stop shooting. If they kept firing now, they could get to the rock where he was hiding and circle around the sides to trap him. 
“That’s it! Push, push, push!” 
“Yeaaah!” 
“Raaah!” 
And right when ZEMAL thought they had M dead to rights—the charge of five turned into seven. 
At the ends of the A formation, two more people arrived behind the group. But ZEMAL didn’t look back—or even feel the need to look behind them—so they never noticed their “new” members. 
“Sorry, boys.” 
“I feel bad about this.” 
The two newcomers’ HK416C and Bizon were trained right at the men running ahead of them. 
Shhp-puh-puh. Shhp-puh-puh-puh-puh. 
With the suppressors on, the gunshots were so quiet that they were completely inaudible underneath the tremendous clatter of the roaring machine guns. 
Max and Peter, the two in the rear, took a few shots to the back of the head and died instantly. They fell forward, still firing. 
While their hit points were in the process of dropping, Tomtom and Shinohara suffered the same headshot fate and toppled over. 
The last target was Huey, who was leading the team. 
“He’s all yours.” 
“Oh, no, you take him.” 
“Well, if you insist.” 
The assassins argued over who should have the honor. Soon, Huey fell victim to a bullet from an HK416C. 
“Wow… They really did it…” 
Llenn stood over the five dead men, still clutching their machine guns, timers counting down over their bodies. 

 

“I wish I could have gotten one of them! Anyway, once they come back, then it’s my turn,” claimed Fukaziroh. 
“Is everyone else all right?” wondered Tanya, switching in a new fifty-three-round cylindrical magazine for the Bizon. 
“Thanks to you,” M said. 
M’s plan was quite simple, in fact. 
It was also a strategy that would be completely impossible in real life. And in Squad Jam, for that matter. 
In essence, he just needed Pitohui to commit suicide, then come back to life three minutes later. When she revived back at the ring on the map, she approached ZEMAL from the rear this time. 
M bought them time by talking to the other team and allowed the dialogue to transition back into combat at the right time. When ZEMAL resumed shooting, they stopped paying attention to their six. 
Boss picked up on the strategy the moment M asked Pito to kill herself, and just to be sure—and to be fair in sacrificing one of their team’s lives, too—she ordered Tanya to off herself, too. Tanya used her Strizh 9 mm automatic pistol to shoot herself and respawned in the same spot as Pitohui, a few seconds behind her. 
The two ran the long way around, snuck up behind ZEMAL—and in the end, it was easier than target practice. 
“I have to say, the things M and Pito come up with are scary,” opined Llenn. 
“This coming from the girl who turned me into mincemeat with a cruise-ship propeller?” Pitohui shot back. She gazed down at the bodies of ZEMAL, still in the respawn countdown. “These guys have really gotten tougher, haven’t they?” 
It was honest praise for an enemy team. “For such a crude strategy, they can really make themselves a nuisance. If they were any smarter, we would’ve had a real fight on our hands,” she added. 
Llenn had to agree. If even a single one had been assigned to rear guard duty, they wouldn’t have been slaughtered this way by Pitohui and Tanya. 
“Well, all of that aside, what should we do now? Regroup and resume our battle?” 
“Oh…!” Llenn gasped. How could I forget?! You idiot! She was shocked and disappointed in herself for not keeping the most important thing in mind. 
“No, let’s not,” said Boss, tapping a hand to her ear. That severed the connection in the comm she had hooked up to Llenn. Her voice was only audible through normal means now. 
“That’s a good point. I wouldn’t want these guys bothering us again while we’re getting our fight set back up.” 
ZEMAL’s recovery countdown was under sixty seconds now. Based on the map, the ring was farther out than the white dot, which meant that at least one team was farther away from the center than they were, but it was no fun thinking of ZEMAL catching up. 
Boss said, “Plus, I’m curious about what this base is like and what the ‘most powerful NPCs ever’ are all about. We can check that out and beat most of them before we fight. Can’t we, Llenn?” 
“Yeah. I’m fine with that. Thanks, Boss.” 
“Don’t mention it. Well, everyone, we’ll meet across enemy lines—or in hell,” she said, leading the other five Amazons in a sprint to the east. They were going to adjust their route and head for the goal now. 
Fukaziroh’s hit points were back to full. “All right, shall we get going, too?” she asked, hoisting the MGL-140s onto her shoulders. That was how she preferred to run with them. 
M said, “Okay. But no one-by-one advance this time. We’ll rush it.” 
“How come?” Fukaziroh asked. 
“Because after all that ruckus we caused, no other teams showed up. I can think of two possible reasons for this. One is that there are actually only a few teams taking part to begin with. The other is that the teams are putting their focus on the goal instead. It could even be both.” 
“So we just have to hurry…,” Llenn murmured to herself. If they didn’t pick up the pace, SHINC and the other teams might clean up all the NPC fighting before them, and then the game would be over. 
“Okay, M, let’s hurry! I’ll rush out and do some recon first!” she cried boldly. 
It would be dangerous to rush ahead first, of course, but with her speed, she’d managed to survive even through enemy fire. At the start of SJ3, she’d been chased around by so many enemy squads, and it had all worked out in the end, hadn’t it? 
“All right. You’re on reconnaissance.” 
“You got it!” Llenn said, full of confidence. 
It would not take very long at all for her to completely regret her suggestion.