CHAPTER 5
The All-Japan Machine-Gun Lovers’ Trap
Llenn had an image in mind.
She could easily envision the five members of ZEMAL, machine guns blazing, as they rushed the castle gate.
Then, the team of seven, who were every bit worthy of the title of toughest NPCs ever, would destroy them even faster than they did MMTM and SHINC.
So when they showed up bearing a large placard, she couldn’t help but shriek, “Huhhhhh?”
She could hardly believe what was happening on the screen. She could scarcely believe her own eyes, in fact.
“Wheh?”
“Nnn?”
“Wha—?!”
Fukaziroh, Pitohui, and M were just as startled, so it wasn’t their eyes playing tricks on them or a malfunction of the drone’s camera.
On the screen, at maximum zoom, the five were carrying not machine guns, but a large board. Comparing it to the size of their bodies, the board seemed to be about sixteen feet long and six feet tall.
It took every member of ZEMAL using both hands to lift the board. In other words, their machine guns and backpack ammo-loading systems were stored away in their inventory.
Llenn recognized the huge, faded-red placard. There was one of them right on the top of the ruined building they were hiding behind. It was part of what had once been a roof. More importantly, there was something written on the board. They had turned the huge roof board into a giant sign that they held up for the NPCs to see as they approached.
The fact that the letters were gray and very straight was a sign that they had used not paint, but duct tape to write them. There were two rows of words on the sign, which, between the overhead angle and the fact that they were moving, were very hard to read.
Llenn gave it a shot but gave up after three letters. “W, E, R…”
“What language is that?” Fukaziroh wondered, giving up without reading a single one.
“WE’RE NOT A HOSTILE TEAM! LET US GET INTO THE CASTLE!” Pitohui read fluently in English.
“Huhhh?” Llenn exclaimed, understanding its meaning.
“Ooh,” murmured Fukaziroh sagely. Then she asked again, “What language is that?”
“It’s English, obviously!” snapped Llenn, but she knew that Miyu was worse at English than any other school subject.
“Oh! Engleesh!”
M, the translation machine, helpfully converted it to Japanese for her. “It means We’re not your enemies; let us in the castle.”
“Ohhh,” she murmured. Then she let out a “Huhhh?” just like Llenn. “Are they crazy? What’s that about? Are they giving up?”
Pitohui happily replied, “Oh, hardly. They’re doing the old ‘pretend to be your friend so they can get inside and slaughter you’ trick. They’re hiding their guns in their inventory.”
“Is it…going to work?” Llenn asked.
“Mmm, probably not,” said Pitohui. “It’ll take a few seconds for them to pull out the guns and use them, so the other side will notice first. And besides—”
“They’re NPCs who aren’t controlled by human beings. They won’t even understand the words or point of the sign. They’ll think, Oh hey, an enemy and shoot them,” finished Fukaziroh.
“Yup! Too bad, since they clearly went to the trouble of writing in English, knowing the game’s made in America. I’m guessing they’ll get shot any moment now.”
On the screen, ZEMAL was within about one thousand feet of the castle. Then 750 feet. Still nothing. The men continued their march, holding up the giant placard.
“What the…?” Pitohui murmured.
“Pito, you were wrong!” pointed out Fukaziroh. “It looks like it’s gonna work after all!”
“Whaaat? What gives? What the hell’s going on?!”
For the first time in her life, Llenn felt like she was seeing honest confusion and trepidation from Pitohui. Back on the screen, ZEMAL was now within six hundred feet of the castle wall.
The two NPCs who shot SHINC were visible atop the wall. They had their guns at the ready, but they weren’t firing at ZEMAL.
“Dammit!” Pitohui hurled the tablet away.
“Aaah!” Llenn rushed off to pick it up, while Pitohui yelled, “M, hand me a gun!”
“!”
M was startled, but he moved quickly to obey her. He took his hand off the controller, pulled the M14 EBR off by its sling, and tossed it to Pitohui.
His toss and her catch made the heavy weapon look as light as could be. How much physical strength did those two have? The gun had to be at least thirteen pounds, and they made it look like a tennis racket.
“Whatcha gonna do, Pito?” Fukaziroh asked.
Pitohui answered through demonstration. She hopped atop the rubble they were hiding behind, crawled up near the top, and took aim with the M14 EBR in a truly exhausting-looking position. She was aiming for the castle walls, of course.
“What is she…?”
Before Llenn could figure it out, Pitohui fired. Blam! The heavy sound of a 7.62 mm gunshot rattled the area.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! A rhythmic five-shot sequence. The empty cartridges soared against the cloudy sky.
It was M’s gun, but knowing Pitohui, she probably thought, My guns are my guns. And M’s guns are my guns. So it wasn’t a surprise that she had mastery over the M14 EBR, too.
The half mile to the wall was just short enough that she could hit it with accuracy.
“Oh!” Llenn had the camera feed in her hands, and she saw two men hit the deck atop the wall. A series of smoke puffs from the bullets’ landing points rose about three feet away from them against the stone.
The gun’s owner would have had better skill than Pitohui, after all. M would have hit them on the first shot. Pitohui said, “They’re coming,” and slid back down the pile toward them.
Ga-ga-ga-ga-gak! Ga-ga-ga-gak! Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-gak!
A tremendous clatter of bullets hitting the mountain of rubble in front of them filled the air.
“Eep!” Llenn didn’t need to look at the screen to know what had happened. Somewhere in the castle, probably still in the spire, Vodka the machine gunner spotted Pitohui firing and quickly shot back.
Once again, the reaction speed was frightening, and the accuracy of the bullets was insane. Essentially, all the bullets hit the rubble, tearing away at the debris on its front. A scrap of wood that was torn loose flew over Llenn’s head.
Pitohui didn’t pull the trigger again, so the onslaught stopped there.
“Well?” she asked, peering at the screen.
“Well, what? Oh!” Llenn gasped. ZEMAL had tossed their giant sign aside and begun to flee toward the opposite side of the castle.
Fukaziroh noted, “Aha, so they thought they were getting shot and assumed that their bad joke of a strategy hadn’t worked. What cowards. They ought to have rushed the gates and tried to run inside, going ‘Help, help!’ Their strategies are always so sloppy.” She was talking down to them from the same height at which the drone was observing.
“Very good. Well, that’s that,” said Pitohui with satisfaction. That seemed to have been her goal; she was back to watching with her usual wicked smile.
ZEMAL ran as quickly as they could, without materializing their machine guns. Their backs made great targets as they fled—but not a single bullet flew after them.
Once every last member was well out of range of the castle, they abruptly changed course to the north and vanished into the deep, dark woods.
When the entire act had finished playing out, Llenn asked, “Pito, what were you trying to do…?”
“I just don’t want them to get the jump on us with a stupid plan like that one. So I pranked them a little,” Pitohui replied with a wink.
“…?”
Llenn didn’t quite buy that answer. She didn’t think Pitohui was the kind of person who would waste shots and give away their location to the enemy without good reason.
In the meantime, M said, “The battery’s running low. We’ll need to switch it out,” and he began to pilot the drone back. It couldn’t be too convenient, or it would unbalance the competition. A single flight could only last a few minutes, which was very short.
She heard the buzzing of propellers overhead, and the device slowly descended toward them. Llenn looked up at it with fondness and said, “Welcome back, Mr. Drone!”
“There has to be a better name than that,” Fukaziroh complained, so Llenn came up with an alternate.
“Welcome back, Miss Drone!”
“That’s the same thing!”
Llenn didn’t want to hear any complaints from the girl who called her launchers Rightony and Leftania, but she had to admit that she didn’t have a knack for names.
The drone slowly descended toward them until it was only fifteen feet above their heads, when— Bwoahcrack!!
Two of the four propellers on the device disintegrated in midair.
“Ah!” She recognized what had just happened.
The bwoah was the sound of a heavy bullet roaring closer. Given the distance and precision, it had to be that damn antimateriel rifle. The gunshot itself arrived later.
The bullet didn’t hit the body of the drone, but it passed through the propeller axis and destroyed the two propellers, front and back, on its right side. What happens when a multicopter hover drone suddenly loses all the lift on one side? The answer was playing out right before Llenn’s eyes.
The shock of the bullet’s impact instantly tipped the drone to the left, and the lift from the left-side propellers then flipped it over, causing it to plummet toward the ground, directly toward Llenn’s face.
“Taaa!”
Fwap!
The next moment, the body of the drone was nestled firmly between Llenn’s palms, sideways with the destroyed propellers at the bottom. She had caught it with the legendary two-handed blade-catching technique some attempted against the katana.
Llenn’s sheer reflexes, courage, and love had saved the life of Mr. Drone.
When its upturned left-side propellers stopped rotating, Llenn exhaled in relief. She placed the half-winged drone gently on the ground.
“Way to go, Llenn!” Fukaziroh cheered. “If you ever come to ALO, let’s try that with a sword!”
“No way,” Llenn snapped.
“Are you okay? You didn’t cut your hand on the propellers, did you?”
“No, somehow.”
She would have if the left side had fallen first. She might have failed to catch it and had it lacerate her face instead. The thought of what those high-speed propellers were capable of was too frightening to ponder.
Of course, it was only a game, so at worst, she would have lost a few hit points, nothing more. It would be better than being shot, in fact.
M examined the device, then looked up at her. “If we replace the propellers, it can fly again. Thank you, Llenn.”
“You’re welcome!”
“But we don’t have any spares at the moment.”
“Awww!”
So they didn’t lose the actual item that cost 110,000 real-world yen, but they had effectively lost their secret weapon of aerial sight for the rest of the game.
“I knew we might need some, but they don’t sell backup propellers yet.”
“S-so what do we do now?”
“There’s nothing we can do.” M swept his left arm to return the drone, controller, and tablet display to his inventory. They vanished instantly, leaving behind a momentary trace of their contours in little dots of light.
“But we learned a lot about the enemy. That was well worth it!” Pitohui chirped.
“Can we…even beat them?” Llenn couldn’t help but wonder. The enemy had tremendous weaponry that had destroyed MMTM and SHINC in seconds, and they were situated in a very advantageous location.
“This doesn’t seem like it was designed to be winnable,” she murmured.
Smack! Pitohui clapped her hands together. “All right! No feeling sorry for ourselves! No giving up before the end! Have you forgotten our team motto, Never Give Up?!”
“That was never our motto…”
“Well, it is now!”
“Oh…”
Pitohui turned to her partner and asked with a smile, “Have you come up with any plans, M?” M’s craglike face simply swung side to side in silence. “Okay, then! We’re going with my plan!”
“Ooh! What’s that?” Fukaziroh was all ears.
“We give up on the prize!”
“Oh?”
“We’re going to forget about winning the competition! Basically, there’s no way our team can win this on our own, right?”
M figured out her point. “Meaning that all the surviving teams should work together to take down the objective.”
“Exactly! So the first step is to win them over,” Pitohui said, jabbing a finger to the southwest.
“Who’s that?” Llenn wondered. She pulled her monocular out of her pocket and pressed it to her eye. “Ah!”
Hiding in the distance, about seven hundred yards away and watching them with great fear, was a group of players wearing full body armor.
She remembered them well. She could hardly forget.
That was Team T-S, the very group that so considerately killed her and the rest of her team in SJ2.
“Um… Hi, everyone…”
A group of soldiers wearing full body armor, face-concealing helmets, and shields on their off hands came over, as if out of a sci-fi story, answering their beckoning signal.
T-S was the champion of SJ2. A win was a win, no matter what form it took. They all went into the record book the same way. The team logo on their helmets was an orca whale sticking its face out of the water, fangs bared.
“Um, no one else wants to show their faces, so I’ll be the representative for the group…,” said one of the men, whose armor featured the number 002. Apparently, they were fine showing their orca faces, but not their people faces.
The speaker, however, had his helmet open from the jaw position backward. He was a timid-looking man named Ervin. He’d been on the betrayers’ team in SJ3, but despite his best efforts, Pitohui slaughtered the poor fellow in the end.
“Yoo-hoo! Ervin! Hi again!” called out Pitohui.
“Eep!” He flinched—but no one laughed at him for that. Once you’d been skewered from the throat to the back of the skull with a lightblade, no one could blame you for being a bit skittish in the presence of your past murderer.
“Hmm… What’s the call, then?” Huey asked, checking with his team.
“You’re the team leader,” Peter retorted.
“Yeah, that’s true. Hmm…”
This was the point where Llenn had a line prepared. “Pitohui said, ‘The alliance team won’t have many machine gunners, so you guys will steal the show. We can’t wait to see what you’re capable of.’”
“We’re in!”
Thankfully, they were very easily convinced.
Llenn turned on her comm and reported back to Pitohui. Then she turned it off again and resumed running.
“Message! Message!”
Llenn came across MMTM in the forest.
But it wasn’t an ordinary encounter. She knew they would be somewhere in the deep woods north of the castle but couldn’t find them at all, so she was running much slower than usual in an attempt to spot them.
“Yaaaah!”
Kenta, the G36K user, popped up from his hiding spot in the underbrush and leaped at Llenn.
“Hya!” He got her into a martial arts grapple at once, pushing her to the ground and locking her right arm outward. “Eep! Message! I’m here to talk!”
She nearly wound up with a knife through her throat.
“……Leader!” Kenta called out to David, lowering his combat knife. He had her left arm and knee pinned to the ground.
They were still well over half a mile to the castle walls, so David removed the branches and leaves on his head for cover and came over. The other members did not move. They were effectively invisible.
It was impressive and in character that they remained in place on vigilant watch without being told. They were clearly watching out for the NPC group either in full or a fraction acting as a smaller unit to come ranging out of the castle on the offensive.
Surrounded by green-camo paint, David’s eyes were bright and sharp. His grenade-launcher STM-556 was on his back. On his upper right arm was a patch bearing the team emblem of a skull with a knife in its mouth.
“What do you want?” he questioned Llenn, who was trapped on the ground under Kenta.
“Um, first, I want you to let me go…”
“Can’t do that. You’re too dangerous. We’re paying you a compliment.”
“Gee, thanks… I’m a messenger. I have a statement from Pito.”
“Oh yeah? From her…?” David’s eyes narrowed.
Now he’s gonna kill me! Dammit, Pito! Llenn thought. She’d seen the replay of what Pitohui did to him in both SJ2 and SJ3.
David was a fellow betrayer with Llenn during SJ3, but that was then, and this was now. There was nothing stopping them from shooting each other, so she couldn’t complain about anything they might do to her, short of harassment.
“Well? What is it?”
“Phew…”
It seemed that Llenn wasn’t going to lose one of her lives here. Yet.
When she was done explaining the situation, facedown in the dirt, David asked, “You knew a lot about our situation—how is that possible?”
This struck Llenn as a very keen deduction. He had a sharp mind. But Pitohui said that she was free to explain if needed, so Llenn admitted, “M got a drone, and we watched from above.”
“Oh!” David exclaimed. “Can you still use it?”
“Unfortunately, a sniping attack wrecked some propellers. Can’t do anything more with it now,” she told him.
He looked disappointed. “Then how do you intend to gather up the survivors and take down the castle?”
“I don’t know. She told me to run around and talk to everyone. If you don’t want to meet up in person, I’ll hook up our comms so she can talk to you.”
“And Pitohui didn’t consider that we might just decide to kill you?”
Llenn had no reason to hide, so she was truthful. “She mentioned that before I left. She told me to be ready for it.”
“And you still came?”
“Yup. I still have two lives. And I do owe one to Pito.”
“……”
David thought long and hard for about ten seconds.
“Patch me in.”
“Message! Message!”
Llenn was racing across the grassland of the eastern side now.
At her height, the tall grass came up to her stomach. It was hard to see when everything was green around her. Off in the distance, the castle was faintly visible, but she wanted to believe they wouldn’t shoot at her from there.
“Oh, hey, it’s Llenn. Get down,” she heard Tanya’s voice say, so she obeyed. There was a sound of rustling grass all around her. SHINC was in the area.
A face with silver hair and fox eyes popped out of the undergrowth. She had grass wrapped all over her head and back for camouflage.
“Aaah!” Llenn freaked out momentarily, seeing only the disembodied face.
“Ya-ha!”
“Where’s Boss? I’ve got a message from Pito.”
“Okay. Follow me.”
They quickly scrambled on hands and knees through the grass for a few dozen yards until they reached the other five members, who were arrayed in a circle for maximum alertness. The six-foot PTRD-41 antitank rifle was propped up on a bipod right in the middle of the group.
“Oh, good. It didn’t get busted! Well, I guess the part where you died wasn’t good…”
“Oh? How did you know about that?” Boss asked, for good reason, so Llenn had to explain again.
“Hmmm… It hurts to lose the drone.” Boss’s comment echoed David’s. “And you’ve got a winning plan, even without it?”
“Well, I…don’t know…” Llenn had to admit her ignorance, just like she did earlier.
She could reset the comm and ask Pitohui for answers, but her teammate might be telling David about it now—or more likely, placating him—and she didn’t want to interrupt if that was the case.
Instead, she asked them something she hadn’t had the chance to ask MMTM earlier: “Did you see any other teams?” Pitohui told her to ask that, in fact, but things had gone so fast with ZEMAL, and so thorny with MMTM, that she hadn’t been able to bring it up.
Boss said, “No, we haven’t. But there’s no guarantee that there aren’t others. Bring up the map.”
Oh, right, I could’ve done that. Llenn turned on her map, nice and small, right in front of her eyes.
There was the circle that showed where they’d respawn. It was about a mile and a quarter from the castle, so it matched the distance that her teammates were located—or hiding.
“Well, doesn’t look like anyone else is behind,” Llenn said, turning off the map.
“Hrmm…,” Boss murmured, crossing her arms.
Llenn waited in silence. She felt surprisingly nervous about the answer. Eventually, Boss glanced at her watch and said, “We’ve still got over an hour. I suppose we can hear you out.”
It was 8:50.
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