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

EPILOGUE I 
After the Battle 
Pling-a-ling! Dun-duh-duh-daaa! 
A completely inappropriate victory fanfare played, and a message danced in the air. 
Congratulations!! Winner: LPFM! Clear time: 01:59:57. 
It was the same message she’d seen twice before in Squad Jam. 
According to the time, Llenn had finished it with a mere three seconds remaining. She hadn’t had time to check her watch once she started rushing in, and now she let out a long, heavy sigh to relax the tension. 
“Whewww…” 
She glanced down at her feet and saw the bearded man, knife stuck in his eye, with the DEAD tag floating over his head. 
“You were tough. Though I suppose that compliment should go to the one who created you,” she said, grabbing the knife. “You need to give this back now.” 
She tugged on it, but it didn’t want to come out. 
Upsy-daisy. There we go… But the knife still did not come out. Argh! 
She put all her weight and leverage into her grip, and the blade was yanked free at last, sending her tumbling, legs flying in the air. 
If this were real life, the eye would still be attached, but this was GGO. The knife was as clean and perfect as if it were brand-new. 
She was picking up the P90 she tossed aside when Pitohui’s voice said in her ear, “You did it, Llenn.” 
“I did it! Where are you?” 
“Everyone’s outside the south gate. Come quick. You too, Fuka.” 
“But the poison gas warhead is on the ground right next to me.” 
“Oh, who cares about that?” 
“Good point.” 
“You could even set it off if you wanted to.” 
“No, that would be messed up. Hang on, I’m coming now,” Llenn said, breaking into a run. 
Leaving behind two bodies and a warhead. 
The playtest was over, but it seemed they’d be staying on the map a little while longer. At least, until she pressed YES on the prompt in the corner of her vision asking if she wanted to return to Glocken. 
Her weapons were locked from use, however. A sign indicating as much appeared when she held the grip of the P90. Llenn put it and her knife in virtual storage and walked back empty-handed. 
Now that the courtyard was safe, she could take her time admiring the scenery that had been too dangerous to examine before. She saw Rock’s body next to the castle, a large cylindrical weapon tucked under his right arm. 
At last, she saw her allies. 
Pitohui, M, MMTM, SHINC, and ZEMAL. T-S, too. 
It looked like those who had died in the last three minutes were back, as were the players who’d died all three times. Everyone who had been present when Pitohui explained her plan was back together. 
The group seemed to be in a congenial mood, congratulations and compliments traveling in every direction. It felt like a big party, in fact. 
“Oh! It’s the return of the woman of the match herself! The one who eliminated the last two!” 
Pitohui beckoned Llenn over with her hand. When the others recognized who it was, they all welcomed her back. 
“You did it!” 
“Congrats!” 
“I knew you could do it!” 
Tanya, Anna, Tohma—the members of SHINC hurled congratulations her way. 
The largest of them all looked down on Llenn with kind eyes and said, “We’ll have our fight some other time. Well done.” Their duel would simply need to wait. 
“Thanks. Next time. If there’s another Squad Jam, maybe. And if not, then out in the wilderness somewhere,” Llenn said firmly. 
Pitohui’s eyes glinted dangerously, but Llenn pretended not to see it. 
MMTM watched her with 70 percent admiration and 30 percent frustration. David told her, “You did well.” 
“Thanks.” 
“I’d like to fight you in earnest next time.” 
“Ha-ha-ha. If the opportunity arises…,” Llenn said, though her heart wasn’t in it. If there was a next time, it belonged only to SHINC. 
As for ZEMAL, they appeared to be getting grilled by Sophie and Rosa, probably about that backpack ammo-feeding system. The conversation seemed to be very enthusiastic. 
“Okeydoke, congrats-grats, ulations-lations,” jabbered Fukaziroh, returning her weapons to item storage and strolling back to the group with her hands tucked behind her chest plate. “Way to go, Llenn. As expected from our resident Angel of Death. Three of those kills were yours, weren’t they?” 
“Hi, Fuka. Technically, I suppose so.” 
“Oh, so humble. So Japanese. I bet you got a ton of experience points, too, didn’tcha?” 
“Maybe.” 
“Gimme some.” 
“…How?” 
While Fukaziroh pestered Llenn, Pitohui and M stood aside from the rest of the group and crouched next to the castle to examine one of the bodies. 
It was Roy, the black avatar whose fight with David ended in a double death. The bullet had hit him in the head, but he was whole now, although not moving. There was no countdown, since he was just an NPC. His body would remain, apparently. 
Pitohui lifted his right arm, then his left. 
“What are you doing?” M asked suspiciously. 
She showed him Roy’s hand at the end of his thick left arm. “Look.” 
The hand was missing the tip of its middle finger and the entire pinky. Since there was no damage effect visible, that meant it wasn’t a wound suffered in this battle but was either the result of a previous fight or a birth defect. 
“……” 
M looked at it with surprise. Pitohui lowered the man’s arm without a word. Then she picked up the M4A1 rifle lying nearby and laid it on top of him, covering the hand. 
“There we go!” 
She got to her feet, spun on her heel, and trotted toward Llenn and the other players, leaving M behind. 
“Hey, guys, we oughtta wrap this up now. Anyone feel like partying at a bar back in Glocken? All participants are welcome to join!” 
Immediately, Fukaziroh asked, “On you, Pito?” 
“Hmm, I guess I walked into that one, huh? It was my idea, after all. So yeah… M will pay!” 
“Then I’m in! And so is Llenn! You’ve got some thoughts, don’t you?” 
“Yeah, sure.” 
As the representative of MMTM, David said, “We appreciate the offer, but we’ll pass. The next time we meet, we’re enemies.” 
“Oh? We still are now, aren’t we? But…fine, if you insist. Good job today. You were an excellent team worth using in my strategy.” 
“We’ll crush you next time. You could even bring that bazooka if you want. So long—and the same to everyone else,” he said, addressing the group. The six of them swung their left arms, turning into outlines of shining light and disappearing from the scene. 
“What about you girls? Want a drink?” Pitohui asked SHINC. 
Boss replied, “We appreciate your offer, too, but it’s late. We’ll be ducking out now.” 
“Too bad.” 
“This was fun. Let’s do it again sometime. Let’s meet up under fire.” 
And the six brave and mighty women—who were secretly teenage girls—left the game before their families could scold them for playing games too late at night. 
“What about you?” Pitohui asked ZEMAL. 
Tomtom replied, “If anything, we’re hoping you could let M there join our team.” 
“Can’t do that. He owes me money, and it’s going to take him three hundred years to pay it all off.” 
“Damn, that’s a shame. M, if you’re ever looking to sell that MG 42 for a little extra cash, let me know first. We’re gonna go do our own thing now.” 
“Oh, you are? Well, see ya.” 
The machine-gun superfans vanished. The only ones outside the castle now were Llenn’s group of four and the six sci-fi soldiers. 
“I’d ask what your plans are, but…” 
Ervin said, “Well, it would be odd if I was the only one going, since I’m the only one who’s shown my face… So we’ll head our own way. Thank you for your cooperation.” 
“No, thank you. Just make sure you bring straws next time.” 
The members of T-S bowed, a tiny gesture for such large, bulky figures, and then they vanished. Now it was only the four of them left in front of the castle. 
“Dang, Pito, nobody wants to hang out with you! You’re not gonna empty out M’s wallet at this rate!” Fukaziroh said, legitimately angry. “Well, I guess Llenn and I will have to drink for everyone else.” 
“You will?” 
“I’m going to reserve a booth then, okay? Should I put us down for four? It doesn’t have to be all-you-can-drink, since you’re paying,” said Fukaziroh, making a gesture like she was holding a smartphone in her hand. 
The truth was, though, that in all VR games, not just GGO, if there were too many people in a given space, the system could simply create an additional layer for the space and phase the overflow players into it. It would never truly be packed to capacity. 
“Hang on. We can invite two more.” 
Two more? Fukaziroh and Llenn shared a look of confusion. Pitohui swiped with her left arm. Her M9-A1 bazooka appeared again. 
“Oh?” 
“That’s huge!” 
Llenn and Fukaziroh hadn’t seen it yet. 
“Here, take it.” Pitohui put the five-foot-plus-long, three-inch-wide object in M’s hands. “Point it over there.” 
She indicated a spot over the northwest part of the castle wall. Then she walked around behind him and stuck her face into the hole where the rocket was meant to be loaded. “Hey! You two! Let’s go out for drinks!” 
That was undoubtedly the first time anyone in GGO had ever used a bazooka as a megaphone. Probably hadn’t happened many times in real life, either. 
The trick worked, because two people stood up from the ramparts of the wall and answered with different gestures. 
Shirley held her R93 Tactical 2 sideways in one hand, high over her head. 
Clarence held out her hands and shrugged her shoulders. 
Then they both flashed and vanished from the wall. 
“Well, we got stood up. Put us down for four then, Fuka.” 
“You got it.” 
Llenn had been in Squad Jam and watched the replays, so she could tell right away who the two were, even from a distance. “When did they get there?” she asked. 
“Dunno. But they killed one of them, so I’m grateful,” Pitohui replied. “Now, shall we go grab some drinks?” 
She waved her left hand, and the bazooka on M’s shoulder vanished. With the weight off, he said, “All right. I’ll teleport the entire team back to Glocken, then.” He waved his left hand to call up the menu. 
“How did it feel to fight for the first time in a while, Llenn?” 
“Huh? Oh!” Llenn didn’t expect to be called upon. She recalled that Jacob had asked her a similar question only a few minutes ago. “It was fun!” 
“Good! That’s the whole point. Well, if there’s another Squad Jam…” 
“This was more fun than Squad Jam! We all got to work together and beat a really tough enemy we couldn’t handle on our own! We should come together as Team LPFM to do little games and ordinary quests like this in the future!” 
“Slow down, Llenn… Why don’t we discuss that at the bar?” 
“Awww!” 
Her wail was the last sound before the four vanished from the castle courtyard. 

 

EPILOGUE II 
One Summer Day 
The next thing I knew, there I was. 
A cold stone structure, rife with mold. I could see a tall, dark, and barren ceiling above. 
“Whoa! You awake? Hey, Doc!” said a familiar voice. My head hurt. My thoughts were woozy and disconnected. 
Then a thick, burly face that I’d grown to rely on leaned into view. “Okay, you’re all right. I thought you were just gonna be passed out the whole time!” said the voice, exposing perfect white teeth. 
It was Roy. 
It had been a long time since I’d seen him dressed in fatigues and a bulletproof helmet. 
 
I’ve never once regretted enlisting to fight for my country. 
Once I was in the army, I strove to be the best soldier I could possibly be. I underwent grueling training that made me sick to remember, endured the sadistic grins and insults of my drill instructor, and became a soldier of my country—one of the chosen few, in fact. 
I was part of a team for twelve years, a team whose very name I could never disclose. During that period, I went to war many times when my country demanded it. When one mission abroad ended, I went to another country. I took part in operations that weren’t even in war zones. Operations that were always off record. 
I killed many people. With guns, with explosives, even with knives. 
I suppose you could chalk it up to my harsh training, or perhaps you could say I had an innate talent for it. Maybe it was both. I eliminated many enemies. I had the ability to do so. 
Thanks to that, I didn’t have to see as many of my teammates die as I could have. In fact, it never once happened under my watch. 
Others in my unit died in the midst of fierce fighting. Nearly ten perished in a helicopter crash once. 
But I never lost any of the guys I fought alongside or led into battle. I took part in a number of operations, and I got my entire team back out alive in every case. That was the one thing I was proudest of. 
Roy, a reliable partner in combat for years, shed the only blood we ever lost, and it was because he was careless enough to accidentally shoot himself in the hand. 
It was a story we’d always been able to laugh about. 
He’d wave around his mutilated hand and say “Goddammit, there goes my chance at an Academy Award! I’ll never be able to hold an Oscar!” He’d been an actor before he enlisted, and that always got a laugh. 
Once I sensed that I was reaching my physical limit, I quit the special unit and the military altogether. I went back to my hometown to take on a normal job. 
Thanks to the good economy, I had plenty of options. I jumped around from job to job on a whim, but I never suffered on account of that. 
I even got married and had kids. I thought I’d live out my life as a proud patriot, good husband, good father, and the owner of a typical, happy life. I truly believed that. 
I never suspected for a moment that my body and mind might be going completely haywire. 
So when my old war buddy invited me to do an unspecified job with him, I went along without thinking much about it. I would be an employee of a “private security company,” providing protection to a critical facility in a foreign country with an unstable political situation. 
It wasn’t a job that could be carried out by just anyone. Plus, I knew I could do it well. 
My wife was furiously against it. 
I told her that it would make life easier for us, that it would pay much better than anything before—but she went so far as to threaten divorce in our argument. In the end, I got my way. 
Over and over, I told her, I’ll be fine; nothing to worry about. I’ve been in far more dangerous battles and come back alive every time. 
I traveled to that foreign nation, and I returned safely. 
It was a two-month stint, and things got hairy a couple times in that span. 
They shot at our convoy from a distance and hurled mortars into the ground. One of the new recruits from the destination country who was in training as a part of the mission fucked up, and his machine gun backfired. Spontaneous battles arose from time to time, either to protect the oil refinery or to protect the truck convoy transporting weapons. 
I made it through every challenge successfully and returned home a much richer man. I didn’t suffer a single scratch. 
It was fun. 
Back home, I stopped working cheap jobs. 
Instead, I regularly left the country to do lucrative missions. I didn’t know where any of them were located. They were all places where you’d get stopped if you tried to cross the border. 
In each country, I would take part in a few battles. Some were fierce, and some ended quickly. Every single time, I came home unhurt. 
I’d be overseas for two or three months at a time, then go back home to be with my family for a month before shipping out to perform another job. 
My wife stopped giving me a hard time about it. She did an incredible job raising our daughters. 
To my shock, the person who put up the biggest fight against my new lifestyle was none other than Roy. 
Like me, after he quit the military, he worked all over the world as a “security officer,” and made himself very desirable to a number of companies. We even worked together on a few jobs. 
But one day, out of the blue, he swore to himself that he would never do this again and even recommended that I retire for good. 
“C’mon, Jake… You know you’re the best damn soldier I’ve ever met. But haven’t you had enough? Why do you need to keep leaping headfirst into danger just for work? You might actually die this time.” 
No, I’ll be fine. 
I can still fight. 
I won’t die. 
I’ll come back alive from any battle. 
Just like I always have. 
 
The next thing I knew, there I was. 
It had been a long time since I saw him dressed in fatigues and wearing a bulletproof helmet. 
A man with glasses was wrapping a bandage around my head. 
“Ah, I see. You were lucky, Jacob,” he said sociably, but I didn’t recognize him. Who was that? 
More importantly, where was I, and what were Roy and I doing here? 
“Oh, you’ve got some memory damage. I don’t blame you—not after a blow to the head like that. You’ll need a proper scan when you get back home.” 
What did that mean? Roy answered that question for me. 
“Dammit! So you really lost your memory? Come on, man, you gotta snap out of it! We’re in the middle of a job!” he said. 
I really didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. 
When is it? Where am I? What am I doing? 
“……” 
Roy gave me the pitying look you’d reserve for an unfortunate child and filled me in on everything. 
Our team—whoever else that included—was in Eastern Europe, performing an important job. We secured a Russian-made nuclear warhead in this abandoned castle and had to protect it for the next two hours, until our chopper arrived. 
Eastern Europe? Nuclear warhead? 
Roy showed me the video camera footage. He was always the one recording everything for posterity, going back to our days working together. 
On the little camera screen, I saw myself. There I was, in some room, announcing the plan the way I always did. 
I was describing an operation to seek out a nuclear warhead to a bunch of men I didn’t recognize, aside from Roy. They were listening to me intently. On another video, we were riding on a Russian-made helicopter that belonged to this nation’s military, on the move to the operation site. In yet another video, we were proceeding warily through a forest. 
I couldn’t believe it, but neither could I doubt it. 

That was me in those videos, doing what I always did. 
That meant I’d screwed up worse than ever before: I’d been injured in the midst of a job and lost my memory of it happening. 
“No, it’s gone well up to this point. Though you probably won’t agree with that,” Roy said. Then he filled me in on something that wasn’t clear in the videos. 
We’d been recruited and flown out to this country for the sake of this job. “A Russian nuclear warhead was being transported to a disposal site when it went missing,” they said. 
It was vague and hard to believe, but the point of our mission was to reach our objective and confirm the item for ourselves—and it was true. A team of seven of us eliminated impediments and succeeded at infiltrating this castle. Then we found the nuclear warhead. 
In the midst of battle, a piece of shrapnel hit my helmet hard enough to knock me out. But I didn’t die. I had a headache, a bloody wound, and a few minutes of unconsciousness, plus some memory confusion. 
“You’re a true force of nature, Jacob. You’re unkillable.” 
I know. 
“The chopper gets here in two hours. We need your help to last until then. Now get up!” 
The little castle we had to protect for two hours was surrounded by the dead. 
They were the bodies of anti-government militiamen and civilians who took part in the battle against us. They were stacked dozens high, in the surrounding flatlands, meadows, and forest. 
It had been years since I saw such a stunning battlefield. It got my blood pumping. 
“And we’ve got all the weapons we could ever want!” 
The men named Cain and Hassan showed me the pile of arms near the entrance to the castle. This was a stronghold of the local anti-government rebels. They had tons of guns, ammo, explosives, and RPG-7s. 
The man named Vodka had a machine gun, and the man named Rock took a powerful antimateriel rifle. 
On the videos, we were already familiar with each other, but I’d forgotten everything. Still, they obeyed my orders. They were good, reliable soldiers. 
“I’m not a soldier by trade. So don’t expect too much out of me,” said Doc. He wasn’t actually a doctor; he was a nuclear physicist and expert in nuclear weapons. 
He showed me the wooden box with the warhead inside and told me some useful information: that the weapon wasn’t going to explode in this state, but there was no telling what might happen to it if someone else got their hands on it. 
Then he said, “You’re the leader, okay? So lead!” 
My headache cleared up much faster than I expected. 
Once my mind was at ease, my work instincts returned. I memorized the layout of the castle, determined positions for the team, and gave orders. I set the sniper and machine gunner on spires to watch the surrounding area and had the other members flexibly change locations as needed. 
As it turned out, aside from Doc, the other members of my team were just as skilled as Roy. They understood how I meant to protect the castle with a small team and carried out my plan exactly the way I intended. 
Then the battle started. 
From what Roy said, these were anti-government militias and ordinary armed civilians who’d been swept up in their rhetoric. The fools were converging on the castle, hoping to steal the warhead and claim the glory for themselves. 
We spared no effort in reducing them to a bloody mess. We had the advantage of position. It was very easy to stop them, with the way they charged us in small groups without any real strategy, over and over. 
When they flew that toylike drone over the castle, it proved annoyingly difficult to shoot down, but Roy downplayed the failure. “It’s not like they can actually see inside. And they should know the exterior pretty well, right? I mean, it’s their castle.” 
We piled up as much rubble as we could in the gates, the only way into the castle courtyard, and placed mines behind them. Everyone who attempted to get in too close, we blew up. 
I watched the men who fell into our trap get blown to bloody bits, and I thought nothing of it. 
The bodies strewn around the castle grew in number. 
When I saw the people approaching in suits of armor, it stopped seeming like real life. 
What museum did they get that stuff out of? Six men wearing medieval suits of plate armor came pushing their way into the castle. 
They deflected our 5.56 mm bullets—but eventually Rock’s antimateriel rifle made short work of them and killed them all. We left them among the bodies littering the exterior of the castle. I was getting bored of keeping count. 
The one group that threw me for a loop had men carrying a sign saying WE’RE NOT A HOSTILE TEAM! 
They could have been suicide troopers strapped with explosives, of course, but their appearance didn’t seem to indicate that. And it was strange that they didn’t have any weapons on them. 
Based on experiences from my military days of having difficulty identifying friend from foe, I couldn’t make a snap judgment. In places where we thought there would only be enemies, it wasn’t that rare for armed groups to become allies instead. Sometimes you ended up fighting them without realizing you had the same goals. 
But as soon as another group of enemies started the shooting, the would-be allies fled, so we never found out if it was an honest offer or not. 
One very loud, busy hour after I regained consciousness, the world around the castle quieted down all of a sudden. It seemed like the enemies were running low on numbers. 
Everyone hoped that the remainder of the time would simply run out without incident. But at the same time, I knew that no matter how many times they came, we could fight them off. I never dropped my guard. The scariest thing of all in battle was a bit of downtime causing the adrenaline to wear off and your concentration to lapse. 
I kept giving orders over the radio. The team was probably getting sick of me. 
When the helicopter was twenty minutes away, the enemy made their move. 
They attacked the south gate of the castle. They had bulletproof shields—probably tore the metal off an armored car of some kind—and they advanced on the castle in single-file lines. 
It was a primitive but effective strategy. They could deflect our bullets, so there was no way for us to keep them from advancing. 
But once they got close enough, we could start punching through that defense, and they got within RPG range. 
We can handle them. No problem. The chopper will get here soon. 
We weren’t going to panic—or, I wasn’t going to panic. 
Not until two of my men died. 
Three incredibly fast enemies surprised us by breaking through the north gate. 
We’d placed mines at all the gates and set them up so that the lookout could set them off at the right time. It never occurred to me that someone might be able to evade those defenses and get past. 
We beat two of them in battle, but Cain and Vodka died in the skirmish. When I heard that two of my subordinates were dead, I couldn’t believe my ears. I thought Roy was joking. For a moment, I couldn’t tell where I was anymore. 
Then things got worse. Up in the spire, Rock’s excellent, critical antimateriel rifle got shot and destroyed. With less vigilance from the high point, the enemies on the south side started a charge. Grenades struck the side of the castle and shook the stone structure. 
“We’re getting pushed back. What do we do now?” asked Hassan from the defensive perimeter. I elected to pull it back from the walls into the castle building. We couldn’t thin ourselves out on the walls and lose more men. I told them to evacuate to the safety of the castle and protect the defensive gate with explosives and RPGs. 
There was one other thing we needed to do. There was one last enemy who’d gotten inside the castle. We looked for her, and we eventually found her. 
She was just a girl. She charged at us with a P90 submachine gun, but we caught her. She was a tiny little girl who looked no older than my own daughter who was in elementary school. 
I’d seen enough child soldiers in my time that it wasn’t a surprise anymore. A ten-year-old could learn to use a Kalashnikov pistol. But what kind of group would send a girl this age in on a suicide run? The thought made me furious. 
The chopper would arrive in a few minutes—a helicopter armed with machine guns and rockets. They’d wipe out the enemy outside the walls in no time. 
I wanted to take this girl back alive, so I could get information out of her. For that reason, I didn’t kill her, even after she started struggling. 
And yet—never before in my life had I seen someone commit suicide by ramming their head into a wall. 
The girl raced at a full sprint toward the wall and collided into it headfirst. The sound of her neck snapping was sickeningly loud. The girl’s face pointed a direction it wasn’t meant to go. It knocked the wind out of her lungs, sent her limbs twitching and flopping, and she died with her eyes open. 
For the first time in my life, I vomited on the battlefield. 
“It’s all right, Jake. Calm down. The south gate’s plenty safe. Ha-ha! Blew ’em up with an RPG!” Roy said over the radio. I felt the horrible headache and nausea return. 
“Hang in there, sir! You’re our CO!” yelled Doc as he came into the room. The weak-willed man had somehow become a warrior. “Let’s move the warhead into the north courtyard to be safe. No enemies there. That way the heli can pick it up as soon as it gets here!” 
But what will happen to Roy and the others, fighting on the south side? 
“We’ll just have to have faith.” 
The warhead was too heavy for us to carry it out of the long hallway where it was stored. 
“Roy’s down! I repeat, Roy is dead,” said Rock’s voice in my ear. That made the warhead feel even heavier. 
Until that point in time, I never believed those words could exist together. 
“They got inside! I’ll use the rockets!” 
“What about Hassan?” Doc asked. 
“Didn’t I mention him already? He blew up with the RPG ammo! But we can still hold ’em off! Hurry, the chopper’s almost here!” 
That was the last thing Rock ever said. 
Dead. Dead. All dead. 
My men were dead. Roy was dead. 
And at last, the thought occurred to me. 
The very first time I’d ever thought it in my entire life. 
Am I…going to die, too? 
No, I’m not going to die. 
I haven’t died yet, and it won’t happen here. 
Fifty seconds until the heli arrives. 
I won’t die. 
Doc and I exited into the empty northern part of the castle yard. 
“Ah!” 
That was the last word Doc uttered before he died. 
Then I fired the M4A1 at the attacker and saw the person shooting back at me—the girl I just watched die. 
No…that’s impossible. 
She was lying dead in the castle. 
It had to be someone else, a very similar person with the same clothes and weapons. Perhaps her sister? 
Whether for revenge or some other reason, her rage was tremendous. I’d never seen such an unpleasant creature before in my life. 
Her little body lunged at me, kicked me over, and plunged a knife at me. When the tip of it stuck into the end of my pistol, I reacted with curiosity. I asked her, “Why do you fight?” 
“Because it’s fun!” the girl said with a smile. 
Oh, she’s me. 
She was me, unable to pull myself away from the thrill of battle, finding life in a place of peace to be stifling. 
The girl pulled the knife out, twisting herself around and plunging toward me. She was an abomination. 
The knife slashed my neck, and I pressed down on it to stop the flow of hot, wet blood. 
“This is wrong… I want…to stop…,” I said. I was saying it to myself. 
It’s wrong. This isn’t the ending I wanted. I don’t want to live like this. 
“No!” said the girl. 
Then she jammed the knife directly into my eye. 
Its narrow blade grew thick, turning my vision entirely black. 
 
“Yo, Jake. How you feeling?” 
A brown face was looking down at me, backed by a white ceiling. It was Roy, waving his hand with the mutilated fingers. 
I was in a hospital. It looked just like a hospital back home, clean and comfortable and pristine. Roy was wearing a T-shirt of his favorite baseball team, sitting in the chair next to the hospital bed. 
“You remember it?” 
I remember it all. Clear as day. 
“What happened?” 
You died. You died in the battle at that castle. 
“Okay. And what happened to you at the end?” 
I fought with a girl dressed in pink. She stabbed me in the eye and killed me. 
“That’s right. Incredible,” said another voice. I hadn’t realized there was another person in the room until then. 
I looked over and saw Doc on the other side of the bed. There was the bespectacled face I’d seen shot and killed moments earlier. But now he was wearing a white doctor’s coat. He was an actual doctor now. 
I reached up to the left side of my neck, not certain what I would find; the skin turned out to be whole. There were no bandages. No pain, of course. 
Doc leaned closer to me, the angle of his glasses catching the room lights and hiding his eyes. “Mr. Emerson, do you know,” he said, “what a full-dive virtual reality machine is?” 
I hadn’t played a video game since I was a kid, so of course I had no idea what he was talking about. I only used the bare minimum of Internet necessary to live in the modern era. 
It took a long time and a lot of explanation from Doc for it to make sense to me. According to him, it was a machine that could shut out my actual organic sensory signals, send its own signal to my brain, and essentially replace reality with its own dream version. 
I didn’t even know such a thing existed. 
“The sensations created by the device are completely identical to those of real life.” 
Meaning what? 
“You’re taking too long to get to the point, Doctor.” 
“Look, I can’t break it down for him any simpler than this.” 
“Fine, fine. Listen, Jake, I’ll give you the good news and the bad news, all in the same sentence.” 
What’s that? 
“This isn’t heaven.” 
It was a dream? 
The battle, my comrades dying, even the girl? 
It was a dream someone forced me to have, and nothing more? 
“That’s right—now you’ve got it. Think about it. Wasn’t it odd? Going to that mysterious Eastern European country? The nuclear warhead? The convenient memory loss? The waves of enemies? The radios not working? The helicopter that wasn’t going to show up for exactly two hours? Well, apparently they came up with that scenario because sometimes the big lies are easier to swallow than the little ones,” said Roy. It all added up. 
The whole thing had been weird. But when you’re dreaming, everything feels real, no matter how absurd it is. I’d certainly experienced that feeling plenty of times in my life. 
“And it all worked out, right? My whole plot was perfect,” Doc bragged. 
Then why? What was the point? 
“Before I answer that, I just have one more question. And answer it honestly, friend.” 
What is it, friend? 
“Do you want to go back to work? Do you want to go to that dreamlike place again?” 
None of it was real. 
I’d been having a dream forced upon me by the device that Doc called a Medicu-whatever. And the person who hired him to do that, of course— 
“It was Liza. She came crying to me for help. You know why, don’t you?” Roy said. He was talking about my wife. 
Her image floated vaguely into my head, then the memory became firmer and clearer in time. 
She told me I had to get an examination as a requirement for our new health insurance. The first thing I needed was an endoscopy, apparently. So I went to the hospital and got down on the bed. They said it was painless with an anaesthetic, so I signed off on it. 
That all happened half a day ago—this morning. 
“I was a willing participant, of course,” said Roy. He’d been hired to make the whole thing more believable to me. 
He entered the same dream using a different machine and acted out fighting alongside me in battle. Doc was also in the same world, in more of an observational role. His job was to rewrite the script if he deemed it necessary. 
The others—Cain, Rock, Vodka, Hassan—were former soldiers themselves and had received similar “treatment” to keep them from wanting to return to battle in the past. In their case, apparently, it wasn’t quite as dramatic as my treatment and had been intended to ease their trauma bit by bit through gradual virtual experiences. 
“But we knew a cheap round of shock therapy wasn’t going to work on you,” Roy said with a shrug. 
Out of the many full-dive virtual reality games in existence, they’d chosen the one that was the most realistic to modern-day combat, modeling real guns and their effects. I’d never heard the name, and it didn’t mean enough for me to commit it to memory. 
The scenario called for me to die in battle, no matter what. 
If that little girl hadn’t killed me, one of the other members, perhaps even Roy, would have turned out to not have died. Then he’d have betrayed me unexpectedly and killed me in some cruel and cowardly manner. 
“But you’re tough, pal. It’s how you survived through every battlefield, including civilian life—with your brains, your balls, and your good luck. And without getting hurt or losing any of your teammates. You’re a gambler who just kept winning. Because you never lost, you stopped thinking twice about risking your own life. You didn’t understand what phenomenal risks you were taking. You couldn’t imagine yourself losing anymore,” said Roy. I listened to him speak without interrupting. His ever-lucky gambler analogy was right on the mark. 
Doc asked, “What do you think? Do you want to go back into combat?” 
“You asked him that earlier, Doc.” 
“I know. But Mr. Emerson didn’t actually give an answer.” 
“C’mon. Do you really need to hear it out loud?” 
“I do. Remember, I need to hear him say it so I can have it on record.” 
“Ugh! Stickler doctors, man…” 
No! I told them. 
It was the same thing that girl said to me. 
I turned to Doc. What was with that girl, the terrifying opponent I fought at the end? 
“Oh, that?” Doc said, lifting his glasses with a flourish. “It was the most powerful NPC I could create, an artificial intelligence designed to be our combat opponent.” 
What’s an NPC? 
“Ah, I may need to go over some more basic concepts first…” 
“We’re going to keep you here tonight, Mr. Emerson, to observe your progress. Don’t worry, you’ll have a private room, a comfortable bed, and good food—it’ll be like you’re at a hotel. Your wife and daughters will visit you this evening,” Doc assured me, before he finally left me alone with my combat buddy. 
Finally, I can say what I’ve been wanting to get off my chest. I’m damn glad you’re not dead, man. I’ll be able to brag for the rest of my life that I never lost a man in combat. 
“That’s right. You’re really somethin’, Jake. I already knew that, though. We can drink to that when we’re old men.” 
So the entire time in that dream, you were just playacting? 
“That’s right. That was my job.” 
You really had me fooled, you sumbitch. 
Roy wiggled his four-fingered hand. “Worthy of an Oscar, right?” 
One summer day, 
I returned to the battlefield. 
In fact, I was sent there. 
That was when I learned a valuable lesson. 
That no one should make the battlefield their home. 
Home is where family is, where a normal life awaits. 
That gambling is not the most important activity in existence. 
What’s most important is to live life to the fullest. 
I had never realized these things, 
and so I died on the battlefield. 
On that day, 
I was able to return to my normal life. 
But never will I forget the events that took place one summer day. 
The End