CHAPTER 8
Reason to Fight
Llenn was in the waiting room for the second time today.
“Yesssss!”
Most of all, she was grateful she was able to die. She thrust her arms into the air, all alone, and bellowed victoriously.
If the other guy wasn’t going to kill her, she’d commit suicide on her own—with the power of her legs. All that focus on her speed had paid off. It was the first time she’d ever attempted it—and it worked.
On the other hand, the fear of running into the wall herself was a different kind of terror from jumping out into live gunfire, but it wasn’t enough to make her hesitate.
You couldn’t get much more “video game” than dying and respawning just to get out of a sticky situation.
“Thank God this is just a game. I could never do that in real life,” Llenn murmured to herself, not that this needed to be pointed out. She looked at her feet. “Oh, you guys are here, too! Awesome.”
She reached down and picked up P-chan and Kni-chan off the floor.
Was Jacob back there in the castle staring at Llenn’s body—at least for the next three minutes—in disbelief? Or would he promptly lose interest in her and rush off to protect the south wall with his companions?
“Well…it doesn’t matter either way.”
Llenn had no idea what an NPC thought about. They were created by humans but thought differently—they only seemed human in the way they acted. Perhaps they were too smart to be human.
More importantly, she wanted to tell Pitohui and the others about the NPCs’ strange insights—and the imminent increase in defense at the south wall. Alas, there was nothing she could do from this dark, empty space.
She checked her watch. It was after 9:54. The countdown to her respawning continued right before her eyes, 150, 149, 148…
Dammit… That’s too long! she thought, clenching her jaw.
She would get back to the field of battle at 9:57. That would leave her with three minutes left to play.
The real question was where she would respawn. How wide was the respawning circle at this point?
Fukaziroh was outside the castle to the northwest to serve as a bombardier, so if the circle was close to her, that would be perfect. She could rush back through the north gate and hit the enemy from behind as they tried to defend the south side.
But if any player was farther back than that, it meant that much more ground to cover and time to waste. SHINC’s Anna and Tohma were providing backup sniping, so she might wind up a few hundred yards farther away from the walls.
Ugh…
Llenn was helpless for now. All she could do was watch the number count down.
145, 144, 143, 142…
“Nice one, Llenn!”
Pitohui saw that her companion had wiped out all her own hit points, and her tattooed cheeks broke into a smile. When Pitohui smiled like this, it was pure and infectious.
“So she took herself out? Excellent,” said M, who was her walking shield.
“Heh. That’s a woman who knows what she’s doing…,” gloated Fukaziroh from her perch at the edge of the forest. You could practically see the look on her face.
Pitohui, M, MMTM, ZEMAL, T-S, SHINC—basically all survivors except for Anna and Tohma—were next to the castle wall. The south gate, which had looked so far away, was very clear now, as was the six feet of rubble piled up in the large open gateway.
The question for all the players on the south side now was how to conquer this narrow gate. They had less than six minutes left to either wipe out the five remaining enemies in the castle or find the poison gas warhead that was somewhere inside.
Both options didn’t leave a lot of time for mucking around outside the castle walls.
There was one thing Pitohui hadn’t forgotten about, however: The distance of the revival point was the distance of the farthest living player from the castle.
“Eva, bring our two backup players as close as possible. I want Llenn to come back as close as we can get her,” she said to Boss through the comm.
“Got it,” said Boss. She gave orders to Anna and Tohma to proceed forward as fast as they could.
She even told them they could leave the antitank rifle behind, if that would help. The two put the ammo in their inventory, then shouldered their Dragunov rifles and started running.
The first bunch to reach the south castle gate were four members of MMTM, David included.
“There we go!”
They’d already suffered a terrible fate at the northern gate, so they weren’t going to be caught careless this time. David and Lux took a position on the right side of the gateway, with Summon and Jake on the other side, the team stopping just short of the way through.
“Summon! Mirror!”
“Got it.”
The towering Summon produced an extendable metal rod, on the end of which was a mirror about the size of a paperback. He put his back against the wall to steady himself, then slowly reached out with it, high in the gateway. The mirror was meant to give them a peek into the courtyard over the six-foot-high pile of rubble…
Zwing— Crack!
A single bullet pulverized the mirror.
“Tsk!” David clicked his tongue. The enemy’s awareness and accuracy were frightful.
Based on the heavy power of the bullet, it was probably a sniper’s shot from Hassan’s SCAR-H from inside the castle. There was over three hundred feet of space between the walls and the castle itself, but at that range, he was going to hit them with pinpoint accuracy. If he’d stuck his face out instead of the mirror, he would have been shot through the eye and killed.
“Don’t stand in the gateway! You’ll die!” David shouted with a wave of his arm, not to his teammates, but to others like T-S and ZEMAL who were approaching the wall now. They hastily split to the side. Pitohui and M weren’t a concern in that regard, because they weren’t stupid enough to make that mistake in the first place.
“We’ll go in!” said Ervin, he of the 002 helmet, with the rest of his teammates behind him.
“Good idea!” David agreed. He wasn’t going to argue with another team offering to take the brunt of the attention.
They could take a 7.62 mm shot without dying. They could stand on the rubble, or run over it, and take shots at the castle. And if the opponent ducked out of trouble for even a moment, that could be enough to break through.
Or perhaps…
As T-S crawled toward the gate on hands and knees to hide themselves behind the pile of rubble, David silently gave hand signals to Summon on the other side of the gate. He opened his hand and pointed four fingers at the castle. His teammates nodded.
It meant If T-S gets blown up by a mine, we go in next. In other words, they were using T-S as sacrificial lambs.
Pitohui saw David’s gesture from about a hundred feet away, farther down the wall to the left of the gate.
“……”
She said nothing.
T-S finished preparing, right in front of the gate rubble.
“Go!”
At 001’s orders, they stood up at once and began to climb the mountain of junk.
As soon as their heads appeared over the top— Zwip! Clank!
A bullet rocketed off a helmet, creating sparks everywhere.
“Gah!”
001’s head took a jolt, but he continued climbing up the rubble, got out his gun, and started returning fire. The other five repeated his movements and began firing at once.
The air was filled with noise again. The four in the castle fired at them ceaselessly, the team at the gate shooting back in equal measure. A bullet that been deflected off T-S ricocheted again off the side of the gate and shot back.
Bshap!
“Aaah!”
It took a nasty angle back toward Jake and kicked up dirt right near his feet.
T-S’s defensive power was for real. They took dozens of shots, each one like a solid blow to the gut.
“Guh!”
“Yaaah!”
But despite the occasional loss of balance, they crossed the top of the mountain of junk and began to descend the other side. A few of them took shots to their guns, which then stopped working. They tossed their beloved weapons aside and kept moving forward, raising the shields on their nondominant arms and proceeding onward in a side stance to reduce their profile.
ZEMAL’s Tomtom watched the six of them spraying sparks as they pushed onward from ten yards away, on an angle from the gate. “Holy shit, man.”
Shinohara had his M60E3 pointed up to watch out for the turrets over the wall, just in case. “I would go for one of those, if it wouldn’t put me over the carrying limit,” he admitted.
If you were carrying a heavy machine gun with tons of ammunition, there wouldn’t be capacity left over for that armor. If you brought a set, it would make you as slow as a turtle.
“What, you’d quit using a machine gun?”
“You want me to die?”
That’s simply who they were.
The T-S member in the lead, deflecting the storm of bullets raining upon him, finished descending the gate and set foot inside the castle grounds at last.
If this spot was like the interior of the northern gate, there would be explosives planted here. They were aware of that, of course, but they were prepared—mentally, if not physically.
“I’ll go!” Ervin volunteered, going into a run as soon as he was on flat ground. That meant he was rushing ahead alone toward the castle, but that was the point.
If there were mines that were going to explode, then he was the only one who would die—and no one else. He would be the sacrifice to protect the other five.
Ervin became a star in the sky.
The ground exploded directly between his feet, the upward force hurtling him high into the air. He splattered heavily onto the cobblestone path.
Even a person wearing full body armor couldn’t withstand shock of this magnitude. The total damage to Ervin’s body surpassed his hit points.
Bing. The sign reading DEAD appeared over his body.
“Now!”
The other five rushed through, fanning out in their advance toward the castle.
Cylindrical objects flew toward them. The end of each was smoothly pointed, like a plastic bottle, while the rear ends were tapered and featured metal plates like arrow fletching.
They roared toward the group, fire shooting from the back—and hit T-S.
005 took one directly in the stomach, and the resulting explosion blasted through his armor, body, and even the back armor piece, leaving a small hole all the way through his midsection. He was killed instantly.
The second projectile exploded on the ground between 004 and 006. They were tossed to each side, smashing headfirst against the sides of the gate. Their necks were broken.
“Huh?” “What?”
001 and 003 could only watch as their teammates were tossed aside right before their eyes. The next blast blew them backward.
“Gyaiii!” “Dwoofh!”
They hurtled back over the wall, arms and legs flying loose, and died.
The team had anticipated one blast from a land mine, but they hadn’t counted on three consecutive explosions that tossed them aside like scrap.
“Wha—?!”
“Whoa!”
David and his MMTM teammates had been about to use their sacrifice to mount their own charge and were completely taken aback.
Shwaaaaa!
A cylindrical, flaming projectile hurtled right past their eyes at tremendous speed. It went by in a blink, but the sight burned itself into David’s retinas.
“RPGs!” he shouted, looking to his left. The rocket’s flaming exhaust was visible, meaning it continued to accelerate into the distance. The Doppler effect made the roar lower in pitch.
The rocket fire rotated smoothly, pushing the projectile onward, until it abruptly exploded in midair a third of a mile away.
Anna and Tohma were rushing forward about sixty feet away from the blast at the time.
“Bwaaah!” “Eek!”
The burst of air and shrapnel knocked them off their feet, tumbling. They took enough damage to remove about 40 percent of their hit points.
Anna rolled until she wound up staring up at the sky, her eyes swirling.
“Wh…what just…?”
“RPGs! Here comes another!” shouted David, spinning around and fleeing away from the gate. Lux nearby and Summon and Jake on the other side of the gateway similarly booked it out of there.
After seeing the massacre inside the gate and hearing David’s shout, Boss started to flee, too. Rosa and Sophie sprang into motion at the same time.
“What? What happened?”
“What’s an RPG?”
“Isn’t that what this game is?”
“Right? Why all the fuss?”
The four ZEMAL members, startled by the blasts but otherwise not fleeing, were gathering around the castle gate and preparing to bolt inside after MMTM. But the next moment, rubble burst out from the open gateway.
No weapons actually shot rubble and stone, so that meant it was from an explosion. Something blew up on the other side of the pile of junk, tossing the loose material away from the castle.
“Huh?”
ZEMAL came to a stop, startled by the sound and rubble. Then a second tube-shaped projectile landed right in front of them.
“Huh?”
Too quick for any of them to process, the object exploded, spraying fine pellets in every direction and killing all four of them at once.
Fifty yards from the wall, crouched behind M for safety, Pitohui gleefully commented, “Ooh, scary! That was an RPG-7!”
While the abbreviation is the same for role-playing game, this was something entirely different. It was a Soviet-developed rocket-propelled grenade or, as it was originally known in Russian, a handheld antitank grenade launcher.
In short, it was an antitank missile.
A rocket warhead was attached to the end of the tubelike projectile. It was fired with gunpowder like a cannon, and the warhead would ignite once in the air. Then it flew, accelerating as it went, and exploded as soon as it hit something.
The launcher wasn’t single use; it could be fired again and again as long as you kept loading projectiles into it. This was probably the most powerful weapon that a single person could carry and operate.
It was cheap, easy to use, powerful, and if it landed in the right spot, it could incapacitate any tank in one blow. A very dangerous weapon to face.
Of course, there were weaknesses. The trajectory of the rocket could be affected by the wind, so aiming long distances was difficult. The rear propulsion was so fierce that it was easy for enemies to spot where you were firing from.
On the plus side, you didn’t need to use it against tanks, either. It was effective against normal armored vehicles, helicopters—and people.
There were many kinds of rockets to use, too, so if you had a variety of them, you could pick and choose as the situation required. The one that put a hole in the T-S member was a high-explosive antitank (HEAT) warhead designed to puncture thick armor with a shaped explosive that boosted the flow of force into a single direction.
The ones shot after that were normal explosive warheads—very powerful ones.
The last was an antipersonnel warhead designed to destroy people, rather than vehicles. It didn’t come on a rocket; it was simply fired like a cannonball that exploded on impact.
RPG-7s and other portable rocket launchers were almost too powerful when used in personnel-based combat, so they hadn’t been introduced in GGO, and most expected they would never be available within the game. This development came as a surprise.
“Mmm, I want one! I wanna shoot one!” Pitohui bubbled, eyes sparkling like a child’s.
M was calm and reserved, in contrast. “It might only happen this one time.”
“Then I want to steal one from them!”
“Goddammit!” swore David, turning back now that he was safely out of blast range. Now he understood what happened less than a minute earlier.
He let T-S rush in first, allowing them to take the brunt of whatever land mine setup the enemy had, and was preparing to charge through after that happened, when the enemy NPCs launched a series of RPG-7s at them.
They had perfectly anticipated that T-S—armored soldiers whom normal bullets couldn’t hurt—would go through the gateway first and had the rockets on call in case activating the mine wasn’t enough.
They must have had a whole line of RPG-7s all set up and ready to shoot up there. These NPCs were very smart.
Now they were looking at certain rocket fire if they even approached the gate. It was like the entrance to hell. The situation was even worse than before, and they’d lost a significant number of people with which to attack.
The surviving members outside the south gate now were M and Pitohui, who were crouched at the side of the wall; David’s team of four survivors; and the last two of MMTM, Kenta and Bold, having come back at the same time.
“Made it!”
“Whew!”
There was also ZEMAL’s Peter, who was returning to the front only to find that the rest of his team was now dead.
Lastly, there were three members of SHINC, excluding Tohma and Anna, who were running up from about three hundred yards away.
The time was now 9:56.
“Did you see this coming, Pitohui?” demanded David, half-vengeful and half-sardonic.
“Hardly! Who would expect them to have RPGs?”
“Dammit! What do we do now?”
“Well, I was thinking…”
“Spit it out; don’t hold back!”
“Was this playtest designed to prevent us from winning from the very start?”
“Could be! It’s completely unfair!” David ranted. He was clearly upset. Then he asked a question he already knew the answer to: “Wanna surrender, then?”
“Hell, no! This is trouble, though. T-S and the machine gunners aren’t gonna revive in time.”
They’d be back by 9:59, but that wasn’t enough time for them to be of any use in the fight.
“No, I suppose not. Should we make a break for the east and west gates and rush inside?”
“I considered that, but if they block us with mines and RPGs, we’re out of options. We’re already short on manpower as it is.”
Through her comm, Boss chimed in. “Should we send one or two per team in on a suicide mission?”
Pitohui and David understood what she was getting at immediately. They were meant to take a bullet or an RPG blast and die. David shook his head, though. “It won’t work… You can defend against a bullet with a shield, but a rocket warhead is a different story entirely. And even if it did work out…”
Say the first wave was taken out by the RPGs, and the next fell to a bullet, and the group after that made it into the castle grounds safely. Even if successful, you’d have to close a hundred yards with nothing more than empty moat-like ponds for cover.
“It’s not enough! We’re still completely outgunned.”
Even angry, David was rational. He was able to consider the deaths of his allies as dispassionately as if they were chess or shogi pieces on a board.
“What about the blond grenadier?” he asked.
“Fuka? She can shoot the castle, but it won’t do any good against the people inside.”
“Does she have smoke or plasma grenades?”
“No. They’re expensive. Do you think a poor little lady like me can afford to buy those things every time out?” Fukaziroh retorted.
“Was that supposed to be a joke?”
Just when it seemed like they were out of options, M’s quiet voice was the only sound on the battlefield. “We should use it, Pitohui.”
Pitohui looked down at his face as he swiveled around to face her—and she threw a fit. “What?! No! No!”
But M’s expression didn’t change. “We’re going to lose at this rate.”
“Llenn’s going to respawn any moment now and rush through the north gate!”
“Even if that works, she’ll only kill one or two at best. Wiping out all five would be very tough. In any case, we’d lose.”
“But—but everyone’s watching…”
“Why did you spend all that money to buy it, then? You were seen buying it anyway, so the word’s going to get out soon enough. Perhaps all of Glocken already knows.”
“Ugh…”
Based on their conversation, everyone could tell that Pitohui was in possession of something. That would also help to explain why she’d gone into this battle less equipped than ever before.
The survivors stared right at Pitohui.
“Oh, fine! Enough already!” Pitohui shouted. For good measure, she kicked M right in the face.
“Augh!” He toppled backward.
Pitohui waved her left hand, said “All right, all right! I’ll do it!” and ordered her menu to produce the weapon she had tucked away in her inventory.
9:57.
“I’m back! Good, I’m in the forest!”
“Yo, Llenn the Third.”
When Llenn returned to the forest, Fukaziroh was right there waiting for her. She was waiting at the end of the forest, grenade launchers resting on the ground at her sides, legs splayed out. She looked bored.
“Hey, Number Three, did you shrink a little?”
“Maybe I did. How are things looking?”
* * *
An ejected empty cartridge rattled around on top of the wall. It collided with the first one and clinked away. They disintegrated with little graphical effects, one after the other.
Atop the western part of the castle wall, R93 Tactical 2 bolt-action sniper rifle in her hands, Shirley snarled, “Damn! So he wasn’t the last one…”
Nearby, Clarence peered through small but powerful binoculars.
“Hmm, too bad,” she said. As a stream of players pushed through the south gate—MMTM, SHINC, Pitohui, and M—she added, “Hey, why don’t you shoot them, instead? You got all your ducks in a row.”
Clarence and Shirley.
These two women were also part of the playtest and on the same team. They didn’t bother to reach out to their old teammates.
After their stunning mutual kills in SJ3, they talked in the pub post-death and traded contact info, eventually meeting up later on to hang out and hunt monsters together. They had no reason to turn down an opportunity like this.
As usual, Shirley wore a green-camo jacket with realistic tree patterns. Clarence wore an all-black outfit with a vest, just like in SJ2 and SJ3.
But when the game started, and they saw the map and the castle, they quickly came to a conclusion: Even with three lives each, there was no way the two could conquer that base together.
Instead, they hid in the forest—employing every type of camouflage they could—and lay low when MMTM crawled past them on hands and knees, when Llenn’s group moved right by on their way to rush forward, and when Fukaziroh sat around waiting for the call to move out.
Every time Clarence got the urge to lift her AR-57, the gun that used the same magazine as Llenn’s, saying, “Ugh, I wanna kill someone,” Shirley had to glare at her and warn, “Don’t—or I’ll kill you.”
“I gotta say, you’re really patient. Have you been upping your perseverance stat this whole time, Shirley?”
“It’s basically my job.”
“Oh? What’s your job? You promised you were gonna tell me sometime, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. One of these days.”
They had to wait over an hour and a half. When their first and final chance arrived, they didn’t miss it.
The big charge from the south of the castle was a huge distraction. While it was going on, the two left the forest, crawled through the grassland, and reached the northeast castle wall. They didn’t go through the gate where the mines were placed, of course. They’d seen MMTM get wiped out.
Instead, Shirley produced a rope and grappling hook and threw it over the wall a good sixty feet up. While everyone else was preoccupied with the explosions on the other side of the castle, the two climbed up the rope onto the top of the wall, then proceeded to crawl again. Their continued advance behind the cover of the ramparts was very slow going and very boring.
As they crawled, they chattered away freely.
“This is boooring. I’m so booored. My elbows hurt.”
“Shut up, or I’ll push you off.”
“I just wanna shoot people. I wanna shine. I wanna kill everyone.”
“Shut up, or I’ll push you off.”
They went halfway around the entire wall, counterclockwise, until the south gate was within view. They quietly witnessed the trading of rockets, drawing a grin from Clarence.
“What’s going on over there? It’s like a war scene.”
“Perfect timing.” Without getting up, Shirley aimed her R93 Tactical 2. She pointed it toward the castle. “Show yourself. I’ll take you out in one shot.”
“Then I’ll be your spotter. Where’s my thanks?”
“Thanks. And if you spot badly, I’ll kill you.”
And once she had blown Rock to pieces, and Clarence said, “Why don’t you shoot them, instead? You got all your ducks in a row,” Shirley engaged the safety on the R93 Tactical 2.
Then she turned to the other woman, neither smiling nor angry, and informed her, “I’m a deer hunter. I don’t shoot ducks.”
For the second time today, Llenn made a huge leap into the castle grounds. It was the kind of jump that should end on the head of a mushroom-shaped monster.
This time, she heard raucous gunfire coming from the south side. The castle was before her, and she could see the smoke of battle rising from the other side behind it.
A hundred yards directly ahead of her was the entrance where she’d eliminated Cain earlier. Two men were emerging from it at this very moment.
One wore glasses: Doc.
The other was the man who refused to kill her earlier: Jacob.
Neither held a gun. Their assault rifles were hanging from their shoulders by their sling straps. Instead, what they carried together was a wood box about three feet long and a foot and a half in height and width. It must have been heavy, because they were carrying the object out of the castle by handles on either end with both hands.
There was no version of Llenn too stupid to understand what this was: the poison gas warhead, their objective. They were taking it out in this direction to keep it away from the attackers invading from the south.
She wasn’t going to let this chance pass her by.
“I don’t think soooo!” she bellowed, still on the run. She turned the fangs of her P90 on the two men, who were shocked to see the tiny pink person suddenly blazing toward them with astonishing speed.
For an instant, she couldn’t decide whether to shoot Doc or Jacob, but she felt like she saw the lenses of the glasses reflect light for a split second, and that was enough for her to shift to her right toward Doc.
She held the gun at her waist as she ran, placed the bullet circle only she could see over his body, and immediately pulled the trigger.
Brrraaaaaa, the P90 roared, putting about twenty tiny holes in Doc’s body. He toppled over, and Jacob hurried to draw the M4A1 from his back. With neither man holding it, the wooden box fell to the cobblestones and broke. She could see what looked like a mortar shell roll onto the stone.
In the meantime, Jacob grabbed the M4A1 and pointed it at Llenn—and the two shot simultaneously.
Llenn’s five bullets hit Jacob’s gun and sling, ripping them from his hands and tossing them ten feet away.
Jacob’s shot hit the magazine at the top of Llenn’s P90. It broke through the plastic case, spilling out ammunition that she would have fired otherwise.
“Gah!”
Llenn didn’t stop running. She yanked the sling off her shoulder, tossed the P90 aside, and hurtled the last hundred feet toward Jacob.
The NPC who had previously chosen not to kill her seemed more than happy to oblige this time around. She saw him draw a pistol from his right hip.
Get there in time!
She pulled the black combat knife out from behind her back as she rushed toward Jacob and his rising gun barrel.
Bang!
He fired, right as she leaped into the air. The bullet ricocheted off the stone behind where she’d been standing.
Her jump was angled perfectly. She landed both feet directly on Jacob’s chest, and the momentum was enough to knock the large man backward.
“Gah!”
Jacob fell onto his back, and Llenn rolled over him, doing three somersaults and stopping with her hands against the castle side as she stood up. Then she turned and leaped onto her fallen opponent in a single move, thrusting the knife at his neck.
Zwoop.
Jacob spun with surprising agility for his size, and the blade hit only dry cobblestone. By the time Llenn’s face tilted up, Jacob was standing over her, .45-caliber pistol pointed directly at her.
“Ugh!”
He was so close that evasion wasn’t even an option in her mind. On pure instinct, Llenn reached out and stabbed. The tip of the knife, held in reverse in her left hand, stuck into that .45-inch hole.
“Ah!”
Jacob and Llenn were connected through their weapons. It had been an impulse move on Llenn’s part, and now she couldn’t help but think, Um, what’s happening here…?
Could the pistol fire with a knife tip stuck in its muzzle? She didn’t know; no one ever told her. Maybe the force of the bullet would easily tear the knife out. Maybe it would break Llenn’s fingers.
But it was still better than having a bullet hole in her head.
Jacob did not fire the gun. He looked down at her from above, his face framed by his beard and bandages. He appeared to be frozen with fear.
“Why…?” he said abruptly. It was the same time-lagged speech, while the program translated English into Japanese. “Why do you…fight?”
Llenn’s mind nearly went blank from the shock of this question. Why would he ask something like that in the middle of the game? She had no idea what was going through these cutting-edge NPCs’ heads.
However, it was human nature to want to answer a question asked of you. That had to be what he was banking on. If so, tally up yet another frightfully advanced feature of the AI.
Llenn’s mind spun at high speed, ideas floating through it one after the other. Because that’s what kind of game this is. Because you’re the final enemy. Because there’s no time left. They were all such obvious answers.
But ultimately, she came to the conclusion that none of them were appropriate singular answers on their own. Her brain stopped her mouth from responding.
Why am I playing GGO today?
What am I looking for?
What’s the reason I keep up with this virtual life-and-death competition?
She arrived at one very simple answer.
The most appropriate answer of all.
So she gave voice to that answer.
“Because it’s fun!” declared the tiny girl, beaming. She had no idea how the NPC took this.
She rotated to her left, pulling the knife from the muzzle of the pistol. She thought she was going to be shot. She was ready for it. Bring it on—mutual death was fine.
When Llenn caught Jacob’s face in her sights again, his mouth dangled open, and his eyes were wide and lifeless. The pistol did not follow her. It pointed at nothing and did not fire.
The man might as well have been deactivated, switched off. Her knife edge ran across his neck so fast it was invisible.
“Gfhk!” Jacob gasped.
“It was too shallow!” Llenn realized.
If he was still vocalizing, that meant he was still alive. The one blow hadn’t been fatal.
Falling to his knees, Jacob put his left hand against his throat.
Llenn placed her right hand against the base of the knife so she could attack again and finish him off this time.
They were now at the same eye level. At the very end, he said something most unlike an NPC.
“This is wrong… I want…to stop…”
Well, not on my watch.
“No!” Llenn said in English. A tear ran down from his left eye shortly before she jammed the knife deep into it.
This time, it sank all the way in.
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