CHAPTER 10
Dogfight
“Aaagh!”
Llenn nearly fell off several times.
The speedy black trike did not have a backrest on the rear seat. The taillight was right behind the edge of the cushion. Then it fell away, down to the cover over the wide rear tire.
Pitohui had played a number of VR games. She’d surely tried some of the driving ones that Fukaziroh was used to playing.
So it was no surprise that she had total mastery of this strange vehicle and was happily humming away as she drove it. She was very good at it—and very aggressive.
When they first started moving, the acceleration pushed Llenn’s body backward, nearly throwing her off. As they continued onward, the centrifugal force did its best to hurl her away with each wild yank of the handlebars to avoid some obstacle on the road. It was easy for Pitohui; she just had to lean her body on the inside of the turn.
“Pito! Please tell me before you turn! I’m gonna fall off!”
“That’s a lot to ask, actually. Do your best to hang on. You have to feel which way we’re about to turn with your body. Your reaction speed is good enough, guaranteed. Oh, and don’t grab on to me—it’ll make it harder to steer. If you want to hug me, it’s going to come with a kiss and a trip to bed, got that?”
“Ugh…”
She would do that.
Llenn gave up on getting help and used her free left hand to grab tight to the tandem bars on either side of the rear seat. That would be her only lifeline.
They were racing down the highway at a terrifying speed of nearly ninety miles an hour. The air around them was a buffeting gale.
To put it into more familiar terms with Japanese reporting on storms, the wind speed they were feeling was about ninety miles an hour. That was a typhoon-level speed, but those were usually measured in gust terms. This was a constant force.
The roaring against her ears was tremendous, and there would have been no way to hold a conversation without the comms in their ears.
“Hey, Llenn! If you fall off, you gotta run on your own two feet! Heh-heh-heh.” Fukaziroh smirked from M’s trike, which was racing along about a hundred feet away from them on a diagonal.
It was easy for her to be cocky. In addition to being large, M also had the shield-holding backpack, so they couldn’t ride two seats like normal. Fukaziroh had to sit in front of him instead.
The handlebars were in front of her, and M’s thick, rugged arms and thighs blocked her on the sides, so she was quite secure, with the ability to withstand both the acceleration and the horizontal g-force.
Because Fukaziroh’s backpack was stuffed full of grenades and pressing against M’s stomach, he had to sit farther back. Most of his butt was on the rear seat cushion.
This trike had the acceleration on the right handle, like a motorcycle, with a button on the left-hand side to shift semiautomatic gears, so there was no clutch or shift pedal. The brake pedal was on the right side, and it applied to all three tires.
According to M, these vehicles were supposed to have a cruise control feature that allowed you to set the acceleration at a fixed value so that you could drive hands-free, but the game wasn’t modeling that feature here. It was either too dangerous or too convenient. In whatever case, the answer was a mystery.
Pitohui and M needed both hands to control the acceleration and gear changer, so it was basically impossible for them to perform accurate shooting, as it required two hands as well. If only they could, it would look awesome—like archers on horseback.
So Pitohui’s rifle was resting before her, and M’s was in a sling over his back. Naturally, only Llenn and Fukaziroh had the option of attacking while they rode, which meant they alone could look at the scan.
The terrifying high-speed rush finally subsided, and the two trikes made it to the airport. The road went straight into the inner part of the U-shaped terminal. There was a sizable aboveground garage in view. The route would eventually take them to the entrance to the departure and arrival lobbies.
But they weren’t here to take a flight for a vacation, or pick up a returning friend or family member, so that was not their destination.
Instead, they turned off the road and drove through the busted gate in a brazen act of airport trespassing. This was a place that only airplanes should go—a stunningly wide and open stretch of flat ground and runways.
The few spots not covered by pavement revealed packed, dark earth, so really, they could drive the trikes anywhere they wanted. Nearly four square miles of flat space was theirs to traverse. The trikes were like little boats crossing the open sea.
The clock hit 1:10.
As the trike slowed to a slightly more manageable fifty miles an hour, Llenn slipped the P90 behind her back and used her now free hand to check her Satellite Scanner.
The allied team containing SHINC hadn’t moved, so she ignored them for now and watched for the nearest foe.
“MMTM is moving! They’re coming this way! North-northwest, a bit under two miles! Fast!”
“There we go! See, Daveed is so easy to understand!”
“How fast are they going, Llenn?” M asked, so Llenn zoomed in on the map until only the two of them were displayed. The dots’ movement speed increased quite a bit, so she could tell the other one was just a tad faster.
“Faster than us!”
“Motorcycles?” M wondered.
“No, I bet they’re using these. The same trikes,” said Pitohui, patting the fuel tank with her left hand. “Too hard to shoot while riding a motorcycle. You have to tilt the body to turn, and if you lose balance, you wipe out. They wouldn’t choose bikes to fight here. Neither would I. There were more trikes to the north. They got them way earlier than us and used them to shorten their movement distance without anyone noticing.”
“I see…” “I see!” said Llenn and Fukaziroh in succession.
Pitohui turned the handlebars to the left a bit, pointing the trike toward MMTM. A moment later, M followed her lead.
“We’re going to fight without stopping, got that? The instant you stop, you’ll get surrounded and shot. We shoot at each other on the move. It’s like an airplane dogfight. Are our gunners ready?”
With an MGL-140 in each hand, Fukaziroh immediately replied, “You bet!” like a hyped-up seller at a fish market. Their bulky round bodies rested atop the trike’s fuel tank. Now the trike was a gunship with a pair of fore grenade cannons.
Llenn put the Satellite Scan terminal in her chest pocket, swung the P90 back around to her hands, and made sure that the safety switch was set to full auto.
“Whew. Ready!” she said to pump herself up, but her doubts still remained. “The problem is, I can hardly see around Pito, so I can’t shoot forward…”
All she’d been looking at for the past few minutes was the combat vest on Pitohui’s back, the pouch where she kept her lightswords, and the ponytail that kept smacking Llenn’s nose as it whipped about in the wind.
This was an impossible situation for her to be the gunner. Fortunately, Pitohui was filled with benevolent advice.
“I know. Just turn yourself around and sit backward.”
“Okay…… Wait, what?!”
“Hurry, hurry! They’re about to come into view!”
“N-ngh…”
Reluctantly, Llenn released her left hand and grabbed Pitohui’s back, then rose to a half-standing position over the seat. Her legs trembled with fear. If the trike took a hard turn now, she’d fly right off it.
Slowly and hesitantly, Llenn managed to turn her body until she was facing backward.
“Eep…”
Naturally, this brought a much greater field of view, as the scenery zoomed away from her.
Llenn was used to rushing around at high speeds on her own two feet, so background imagery rushing past her was nothing new. But seeing it happen in reverse was very new, and the novelty of it frightened her.
She’d had her feet on the tandem steps before, but with her body turned around, that was no longer possible. They had to dangle unsupported. She squeezed the seat with her thighs and held on tighter with her left hand.
Llenn was terrified at the notion of falling off. Since there was no seat belt here, she considered using a length of rope to tie her belt to Pitohui’s, but then she realized, No, that won’t work. If I fall off, I’ll get dragged as I become a bloody pulp…
Llenn imagined herself clanging around on the ground along with a bunch of empty cans hanging from the bumper of a car with a sign reading JUST MARRIED! on the back. She decided it was better to fall off entirely than be dragged over asphalt until she died.
“Tallyho!” cried Fukaziroh. That was an old traditional call to indicate that prey had been sighted on a foxhunt, and it was used in a modern context by fighter pilots when they spotted an enemy.
Llenn was facing backward, so she couldn’t see anything yet, but it was surely a sign that MMTM was visible on the horizon of the flat runway.
“They are on the same trikes. I see six,” M helpfully added. MMTM was riding one person to a trike.
“I don’t need to tell you, do I, M?”
“Nope. One strike and then withdraw. Fire each grenade carefully, Fuka. We don’t have time for a steady reload. Shoot all twelve. We can’t expect accuracy to the sides with lobbed grenades, so only shoot straight ahead.”
“You got it! Straight ahead? I’m your gal! That’s the only way I know how to live!”
“Llenn, you aim at anyone who tries to swing behind us. Don’t skimp on the bullets.”
“R-roger that!”
“And don’t spend all your time regretfully looking behind you into the past, okay…?” Fukaziroh teased.
“This has nothing to do with my way of life! And I don’t actually spend my time focused on the past!” Llenn snapped back at Fukaziroh. Then she remembered something more important, and she asked her teammates, “If they’re each riding one to the same vehicles, won’t they be faster than us…?”
Pitohui answered, “Yep. But they need to drive and shoot at the same time, so they’ll be busier than us.”
“I see…”
In her mind, Llenn tried to simulate an encounter between an enemy with greater numbers but less efficiency and their own squad, with fewer numbers but clearer roles for each person. It didn’t give her any answers.
“So who has the advantage?” she blurted out.
“Who knows?! You gotta do it and see what happens! My guess is, the advantage goes to whoever fights to the end without giving up,” said Pitohui optimistically.
“That makes sense! All right! Let’s do this, P-chan!”
The audience watching from the pub stared at the aerial footage.
On the main monitor, formations of two and six vehicles were rapidly racing toward each other on a sea of asphalt. They were on opposite sides of the screen, so as they approached, the image zoomed in.
Six trikes, identical to the ones LPFM was riding, formed a horizontal line at an interval of about twenty yards each, covering the spacious grounds.
For now, the members of MMTM did not have weapons in hand. Their assault rifles, sniper rifles, and machine guns were hanging from slings and resting on their laps, and both hands were on the bars. They were focused on driving.
Not surprisingly, they’d found the trikes in shipping containers over ten minutes ago. That gave them a bit of time to practice riding them and get the feel of their handling. Then they waited, ready to hop on and rush any foes who ventured onto the airport.
David figured that if LPFM came for them, it would be on wheels, but he didn’t expect the exact same trikes—or that it would just be two of them. He didn’t know that LPFM was a six-person team this time—or that the other two had already run off on their own.
If their enemy had come in a truck or a 4WD vehicle, they could use the trikes’ speed to circle around them, then stop and attack from long distance, resuming their movement when the enemy tried to fire back. Then another trike could approach from behind and repeat the attack pattern.
It would be like a pack of wolves taking down a large prey animal, attacking with waves as often as possible, which is why they chose one trike for each member.
But that wouldn’t work if LPFM was on two trikes. Could they stop and attack to do enough damage to their current opponent? That was unlikely.
For one thing, LPFM had just as much space and mobility. They could easily zip away or zoom straight through any potential encirclement. GGO’s unique bullet-line system would make it easier for them.
That left only one real strategy: to keep up their own mobility and maintain the pressure of the chase.
When David realized that their advantage of numbers wasn’t going to guarantee them tactical superiority, he grumbled internally, Damn you, Pitohui. It was surely that vixen’s idea to limit their number rather than taking four trikes.
In fact, he wanted to put three bullets in his own head for ever having fallen in love with such a woman. Instead, he gave more orders to his team.
“We’re going to blaze right past them! Don’t chicken out and turn away! That’ll only make it easier for them to pick you off!”
Since they were both rushing by each other at high speed, if someone turned sideways to dodge, that would expose their flank to the enemy’s attack.
No matter how frightening it might be, once they passed each other, they’d just have to spin around to take the opponent’s rear.
Once his teammates had responded, David barked, “Let’s go! Time to hunt a poisonous bird!”
On the screen in the pub, two and six trikes approached at high speed.
Their relative velocity had to be over 150 miles per hour. This was a speed no one had ever seen in GGO before.
“It’s like a jousting match… So what’ll happen?”
“I dunno, but there is one thing I know—this interaction is gonna be over in the blink of an eye.”
“Way to say the most obvious thing in the world as if it’s some kind of revelation…”
“I’m just saying, don’t blink.”
There was no other battle happening, so all the monitors were displaying this interaction.
The bar fell silent.
As the two sides closed the gap at a rate of seventy-five yards a second, M’s calm, careful voice said, “Fire one time, Fuka. You choose the target and timing. After we’ve passed, fire at will, Llenn.”
“Roger that! I got it!”
“R-roger! Fuka, I’m counting on you!”
Fukaziroh grinned. “It’s good to be relied on!”
In her right hand was the MGL-140 named Rightony. In her left was Leftania. Her tiny index fingers waited, barely keeping space from the triggers.
When they were four hundred yards apart, just seconds from colliding, Fukaziroh did not fire.
Three hundred yards. She did not fire.
Two hundred yards. Her index fingers touched the triggers, generating two bullet lines that pointed forward, then stretched until they were nearly horizontal…
“Ha-ha!”
When Kenta saw the line appear straight ahead, he turned the handlebars slightly to his right.
He anticipated that the grenade girl on LPFM would attempt to shoot at them before they passed. He spotted her sitting in front of M on the right trike about two seconds before this.
All he had to do was watch and avoid the bullet line. Unlike a bullet at Mach 2, a grenade flew much slower, so whether she shot it upward or straight ahead of her, he would be able to evade it without trouble, as long as he paid attention to the bullet line.
Kenta’s trike changed directions, gliding to the right like it was changing lanes on the highway, and collided with Lux’s trike to its right.
He saw his own face reflected in Lux’s sunglasses.
When LPFM and MMTM passed each other, two of the trikes were already completely off the ground.
Kenta’s and Lux’s vehicles experienced a nasty sideswipe, and they shot away from each other on the rebound.
The trikes had a function to maintain stability and prevent drifting or rolling, but they weren’t quite capable of stopping the force of a full collision.
Kenta’s trike flipped over to the left, and Lux’s to the right.
“Urgh!” “Hya!”
Both of them flew into the air. Kenta landed on his back, while Lux landed on his head. The vehicles smacked off the asphalt and continued to roll sideways.
LPFM and MMTM passed each other, now traveling apart at seventy-five yards a second.
“Hya-haaa!”
Llenn spotted the cause of Fukaziroh’s delight at once.
Six trikes made their way into her field of vision from behind, with four of them rapidly speeding past. It was an incredibly brief encounter because, from the moment they appeared, they were already just dots in the distance.
The other two trikes appeared two seconds later, rolling and spinning. Parts of them broke off with each collision against the asphalt, wrecking the things. Amid the howling of the wind in her ears, she heard the crashing and smashing of machinery.
One of the riders slid on his back along the asphalt, damage coloration visible as the little polygonal effects splintered off.
The other one’s head was tilted at an unnatural angle as he bounced and rolled through the air near his trike. The DEAD tag was already floating over his head. With each bounce against the ground, the limbs of the body jolted and flopped.
The long rifle on his back snapped in half. Sadly, the MSG90 he’d been using since SJ3 was likely trashed for good.
So stunned that she couldn’t even fire the P90 once, Llenn asked, “Um…what just happened?”
She didn’t hear Fukaziroh fire a single grenade, and yet two enemies were destroyed from the trikes passing, and one of them was dead.
“A little magic spell. That’s all,” said Fukaziroh.
“You tricky sylph. What did you really do?” asked Llenn, skeptical. Maybe if this were ALfheim Online, it would be magic.
“Oh, I just blinked my bullet line at a tricky time interval to either side of those two trikes! They panicked and swerved away, toward each other, until they bonked! You guys better drive safer than that in real life! Didn’t you go to driving school? Always check your blind spots!”
“Whoa…you are a magician!” Llenn exclaimed.
“Way to go!” said Pitohui.
“Nice one,” added M. Then he asked, “Llenn, I know one of them died. What about the other one?”
Llenn squinted to see what happened to the black-haired man who slid on the ground, but she couldn’t make out the color of a DEAD tag from this distance.
“He took a lot of damage, but he should still be alive!”
“Got it.”
“M, stop the vehicle for me. If there was an accident, they should be rushing over to pick him up. Shall I pop ’em with one?” Fukaziroh suggested.
“No. They’re not that naïve,” said M.
“Lux is dead! My HP is down to twenty percent… Sorry!” called out Kenta, who’d been thrown off his trike.
David made a snap decision. “Stay there and focus on healing! We’ll get you later!”
“R-roger…”
“Form a vertical line after me! Right turn!”
The other four peeled off into a curve with David at the lead.
“We picked off one, but they’re not going to let us get away after that. We’re going to mount another head-on attack,” announced M as he applied the brakes so he could safely turn.
Pitohui followed his lead and braked, but much harder. Llenn wasn’t ready, and the sudden deceleration g-force smacked her head against the bulletproof armor on Pitohui’s back.
“Ow!”
By the time their two trikes finished turning around counterclockwise, David’s squad was already pointed straight toward them—racing at full throttle.
Pitohui jammed on the accelerator, so this time Llenn’s head lurched forward, nearly planting her down on the ground.
“Eeeeek!” she shrieked in terror.
If she fell, she’d wind up bouncing on the ground with a broken neck, like the dead man she’d just witnessed seconds earlier.
Traffic accidents are scary… Better try even harder to avoid them from now on, she decided. Between getting shot with a gun and being in a car crash, the latter was much more likely in real life.
It occurred to her that maybe forcing people who were guilty of reckless driving to experience a horrifying VR traffic accident might actually scare them into being more responsible.
“They’re not going to pass straight by us this time. They’ll probably split both ways before they reach us.”
“How do ya know that, Pito?”
“Woman’s intuition.”
“Then it’s as good as gold,” replied Fukaziroh. In the meantime, the distance between them and the enemy was rapidly shrinking again.
M told Fukaziroh, “Do it again. It’s up to you.”
“You got it!”
Pitohui told Llenn, “You attack this time, too, Llenn. It’s all right. You’re good at this. You’ll get the hang of it.”
“Huh? Of what?”
“You’ll know once you do it.”
Llenn didn’t know what to think.
“Five seconds,” said M in her ear. She clutched the P90.
When Fukaziroh saw that MMTM was spacing themselves out wider than before, she said, “Oh well!” and fired one shot each from Rightony and Leftania.
They were meant to land in front of the high-speed targets, but the four trikes split to the right and left with proper timing upon seeing the bullet lines. The grenades landed between them and exploded, doing nothing more than tearing up a tiny chunk of asphalt.
“Tch! No good! Llenn, they went to the sides!”
“G-got it!”
Llenn pressed the gun to her shoulder with just one hand and focused on the left side, which would be easier for her to aim at.
When a trike first crossed into her view, she pulled the trigger at once. The rapid succession of bullets was nearly one continuous sound without individual shots—a stream of lead erupted before her.
“Hrmm…”
Not one of them hit. They passed on the side less than a hundred feet away, which was very close, and the trikes were big targets, so Llenn figured that even without much in the way of marksmanship, she’d at least hit them once.
She understood why.
The bullet circle wasn’t where she was training her weapon. She’d aimed ahead of the moving target to make sure it led the trike into her gunfire, but the expanding and contracting circle was far behind the mark instead.
“Oh…I get it!”
Like Pitohui had just warned her a moment ago, Llenn figured it out at once.
“Everyone’s all right. Good. Then let’s split into two pairs and do a wave attack! If you can go for it, go! Don’t give them time to regroup or rest!” David ordered. MMTM swiftly braked and turned, then rushed back after LPFM’s two trikes.
The most skilled driver, who cut a sharp left turn and raced full bore after his target, was Summon. The wind smacked at his cut body.
He rushed after Pitohui’s vehicle from a position of about 250 feet to the right. The fore and aft distance between them was steadily closing.
Once he was at the trike’s top gear, Summon let go with his left hand so that he was driving with only the right in a feat of high-speed, one-handed control. The bike zoomed across the runway with utter precision and stability.
Next, with his free hand, he grabbed the FN Herstal SCAR-L assault rifle hanging around his shoulders. The stock was folded up, so he could hold it like a pistol.
With his preparations complete, Summon gunned the acceleration and pushed the handlebars to the left. Now he was zooming toward Pitohui’s trike from the right.
It was the kind of strafing run that a fighter jet would do in an aerial battle, so he didn’t have time to set up the bullet circle and aim with it. Summon used his own aim and hugged it to his side to steady the gun at full auto.
His target—Pitohui’s trike—grew rapidly larger in his eyes.
“Gotcha!” he said and opened fire one-handed. With a great rattling sound, the weapon loosed a volley of bullets—and they all missed.
“Huh? What the—?”
So that’s what it means!
The enemy’s shooting confirmed what Llenn had guessed from her intuition earlier.
He came over on a slant from the right and aimed at them as he passed by, but his shots—which were too fast to see, so it was really his bullet lines—passed right by their trike, about thirty feet in front.
The bundle of bullet lines meant the shooting was steady and aimed, not a wild spray. He’d been trying to hit them exactly on target, but all of the shots wound up going somewhere completely different.
There could only be one reason for that. His aim was completely wrong.
But he had clearly done it properly and accurately. He shot with confidence because he knew that at this range, he couldn’t possibly miss.
And yet he did, very cleanly, and just as Llenn had done a moment earlier.
She figured out why it happened.
It was because not only was the target moving at high speed, so was the shooter.
When you were stationary and the target was moving, you could simply aim ahead of the target’s path. That wasn’t very difficult to do; aiming ahead of a running opponent was something every GGO player had to learn to do consistently.
But when you were the one moving, everything was reversed.
If you were moving and the target was stationary, you would never hit them by aiming right at the target. The vector of the shooter’s own movement—the speed and direction—would be added to the bullet, striking ahead of the target instead.
The enemy had rushed up and past them on a diagonal slant. Since he was faster than them, the bullets he shot rushed past them and went in front, passing them harmlessly.
“Pito, this is gonna be really hard to aim!” Llenn complained.
From the front seat came her answer. “Yeah, I bet. But you’re used to it, right? And your partner is good at it, too, right?”
“Of course!” Llenn said energetically.
She’d pushed her agility as high as it could go, and she could move very fast on her own two feet. She had plenty of experience shooting and fighting while running that fast. And her P90 partner’s fifteen-rounds-per-second rate of fire assisted that strategy.
“I’m used to the speed and to your violent driving!”
“That’s what I like to hear, Llenn! So maybe we should quit playing nice and end this, eh? M, you two can sit back and sip some tea.”
On the other trike, M said, “Got it.”
“Awww, I only shot two grenades! Oh well. You can clean up the rest, Llenn!”
From the bar, the audience saw Pitohui’s and M’s trikes separate significantly. Confused by LPFM’s strategy, someone wondered out loud, “What? Are they splitting up?”
“If they’re trying to run away, will that even work? Riding two to a vehicle makes ’em slower, so they’ll easily get caught.”
“Yeah, for sure. What’s up with that Pitohui chick? Has she run out of ideas?”
“Is this the end for Llenn?”
“Get ’em, skull team!” cheered the audience, who had no concept of loyalty. But when the trike with the tiny pink rider suddenly took a wide turn, they shouted, “No! They’re gonna fight!”
“Awright, here we go!” Pitohui called out with delight.
“Yes! Gooo!” said Llenn. She squeezed with her left hand and her thighs.
Then the engine roared at a high pitch. The trike shot forward as though it had been kicked and began a right turn. The rear tire slid a little, causing the vehicle’s control system to intercede and keep it rotating without drifting.
“Urrrrrgh!” Llenn groaned, resisting the force that threatened to hurl her off.
This experience taught her that, in fact, what Pitohui was practicing earlier was safe driving—to give Llenn a chance to get used to the rigors of the back seat.
Pitohui’s trike was like a bullet, shooting after Summon just after he’d attacked them first.
Summon slowed down to exchange his magazine and regroup with his team, but when he saw the enemy getting rapidly larger in his side mirror, he exclaimed, “Whoa-uh!” and grabbed the handlebars with both hands, dropping down two gears with his left hand and gunning the gas with his right.
His trike began to accelerate to the best of its ability. But he had noticed too late.
“There’s the first one!” said Pitohui, reaching him at a speed of nearly 110 miles per hour, coming level, and then passing. They’d been only six feet away.
A police officer would surely write up a ticket—if not for the speeding, then for the ruthless hail of bullets that Llenn poured into him. It was like spraying him with water from a hose.
Of course, at such a short range, there was no way she could miss. The bullets pelted Summon’s sturdy upper half, dyeing it red with the light of lethal damage.
Above Summon’s head, which was splashed with color as though a bucket of paint had been dumped over it, the DEAD tag shone. His trike slowly decelerated.
“Okay! Nice kill! Reload for the next one!”
Pitohui slowed down on the accelerator and evened out their speed. Slower, in this case, meant only seventy-five miles per hour. She looked behind them to check on the enemy location. This was extremely reckless when driving, the kind of stunt one could only do in the free and open safety of a vast airport tarmac.
Llenn dumped the magazine that still had a good ten shots left and dropped it over the side, then pulled a new one out of her pouch and slammed it into the P90. Including the bullet still in the chamber, that gave her fifty-one shots to use.
As soon as Llenn was done reloading, Pitohui rapidly slowed the vehicle. It decelerated from seventy-five miles per hour to under forty before spinning into a rapid U-turn.
The fact that these were all right turns was the saving grace for Llenn, who had to hold on with her left hand. If it was a left turn, she’d easily be thrown off.
Although the g-force was powerful, Llenn’s will to fight was more than equal to the task.
“Next!”
But MMTM was just as motivated to fight. Two of their team were dead, and one was very injured, but they weren’t going to back down now.
“Jake! Stop and take a position!”
“Roger!”
Plans were meant to change on the fly according to the circumstances. Instead of riding with the machine gun, which would be very difficult to shoot at the same time, he was going to stop and set it up—resting atop the trike.
That left David and Bold as mobile fighters. They would gang up on one trike together and try to guide it into Jake’s line of fire.
Jake stopped the trike sideways, then rested the machine gun on the seat. He was between the runway and the taxiway. David observed the patterns on the ground, memorizing the locations, and said, “Keep up, Bold!”
“Got it!”
He and the man who wore his hair in locs zoomed off toward the distant target of Pitohui.
“Hello, M? Mr. M, what are we supposed to do now?”
Fukaziroh was using M’s monocular to watch Jake stop his trike and set up the machine gun.
They were quite a long distance away from where the main fighting was happening. While Pitohui and Llenn engaged in combat, this trike had distanced itself entirely.
M stopped the vehicle more than four-fifths of a mile away from Jake. “We wait here for now. When Pito is racing around and attacking and raising hell, we’d only be getting in the way.”
“Makes sense.”
Pitohui’s idea was to zoom and screech around and have Llenn do all the shooting, so they couldn’t just barge in and interfere. Sowing chaos with the grenade launchers wasn’t an option, either.
“Don’t you think we could at least take out that machine gunner? Both my feminine wiles and my explosives could do the trick,” she suggested.
“Not nearly enough range,” M said. “He’d shoot us before we got close enough.”
The longest effective range of Fukaziroh’s MGL-140 grenade launchers was a quarter of a mile. It would be quite a reckless idea.
“Hmm.”
But Fukaziroh did not give up. She wanted to pop out a brilliant little nugget of a plan and shower in the adulation of the rest of her team. She wanted to be the star.
“What if you go alone and sneak up with your shield, then snipe him? I can stay here and cheer for you,” she offered.
“It’s not the worst idea…”
“Right?”
“But I feel like the whole thing will be finished before then.”
“Ohhh.”
“Let’s goooo!” roared Pitohui as her trike zipped across the runway.
Once again, their speed was over a hundred miles an hour. The engine squealed like never before, and the body of the vehicle shook and shuddered.
Pitohui kept herself as low as possible to reduce resistance, which meant the wind was hitting Llenn that much harder. Her hat was tilted all the way forward, still on her head only because this was a virtual world that kept it stuck there.
But despite the insane rigors, Llenn’s body and eyes were getting used to the strain. And she had a very good bead on the two trikes rushing after them.
The two MMTM riders were hanging on desperately, trying to keep Pitohui from slipping away. GGO was supposed to be a shooter game, but in this case, it had become a racing game.
They knew exactly how far Llenn’s effective range was with the P90, so they kept their distance to a solid eight hundred feet. She tried to aim at them a few times, but between the distance and the vibration of the trike, her bullet circle was completely wild. She couldn’t possibly hit them like this, so she didn’t waste the bullets.
For ten seconds, the three bikes continued their high-speed chase. After which, Llenn said, “It’s not working! They’re not coming any closer!”
“Then we’ll have to come up with a different idea.”
“What if we try to lure them over toward M and Fuka?” Llenn suggested. She thought it was a pretty good idea.
“They’d figure that out before it worked. More importantly…,” Pitohui prompted, letting go of the left handlebar and opening her window quickly, tweaking her inventory. First, she was driving while distracted; now she was doing it one-handed with her smartphone out—in a manner of speaking.
A large plasma grenade, commonly known as a “grand grenade,” appeared before her. The object, a sphere the size of a small watermelon, plonked onto the tank and nestled itself between Pitohui’s thighs.
“Here, Llenn.”
She reached her hand around her back to offer the object to her partner. Llenn rested the P90 on her lap and accepted the grenade in the palm of her hand. She did not have a high strength stat, so it felt heavy. There was no way she could throw it far. She used both hands to clutch it so that she didn’t drop it.
Clearly, the idea was that she’d use the explosive to attack the two trikes chasing them.
“Pito, do you really think I’ll hit them? If they see me drop it, they’ll just drive around it and be fine.”
It seemed like a desperate move to her. Llenn was constantly surprised and impressed by Pitohui’s intuition and creativity in battle, but this time she couldn’t help being skeptical.
“You don’t have to hit them with it. Get it? You see…”
As he pursued Pitohui’s three-wheeled motorcycle, determined to strike if she gave him the opportunity, David saw the pink shrimp drop something onto the asphalt. It looked like a grand grenade—it had to be that.
Bold noticed it at the same time. “Grand grenade! Dodge! Dodge! Dodge!” he warned before David could say anything. They split to either side of it to stay away from its wide blast radius, thereby limiting their exposure to the explosion. David went right, and Bold banked left.
The grand grenade rolled and rolled and continued right on past them.
“Huh?” “Huh?”
Pitohui’s trike reversed and backed right after it, chasing the bomb. As a matter of fact, both the explosive and the trike were still moving forward, but David and Bold were going so much faster that it looked like they were rolling backward.
The uniform color and lack of features of the asphalt, and the fact that the pink shrimp was sitting in reverse position, made the illusion all the more convincing.
The grand grenade continued to pull away from them, remaining intact. Pitohui’s trike went with it, after her sharp brake.
The activator on the grenade had never been pressed.
“Shit!”
By the time they realized it had been a trick, it was already too late.
Pitohui gunned the accelerator again, racing after Bold, who had shot far past her on the left. She caught up to him in moments, pulled level, and then passed him.
“Get him!” she yelled.
“On it!”
Llenn fired the P90, held sideways in her right hand, on full auto.
Because the gun was horizontal, the recoil that normally pushed upward moved it side to side as it fired. Bold tried to lift his Beretta ARX160 assault rifle to shoot back, but he was too late.
Since she was shooting one-handed, the bullets sprayed, but the P90’s fifteen-shots-a-second frequency was deadly. The liberal flow of 5.7 mm rounds spread out in a horizontal array. Three of them struck Bold’s forehead.
The speed at which his hit points dropped made it clear that it was an insta-kill.
“Damn youuuu! Not again, you pink pip-squeaaak!” cursed Bold as he died. His hand was fixed in place, meaning the trike continued to drive off, carrying a corpse.
It would probably continue all the way to the northern edge of the map.
“Got him!” Llenn cheered.
Pitohui shouted, “Hold on with your left hand!”
She braked hard and went into a left turn. Promptly, the vicinity was full of stabbing bullet lines.
“Eep!” Llenn instinctively ducked, looking for the source of the lines.
It was David.
“Huh?”
Neither of his hands were on the handlebars of the trike. In fact, he was standing up in the saddle, holding his assault rifle firmly with both hands. And the vehicle continued to ride at a steady speed.
“Howww?”
David began his assault like an archer on horseback—only with hot lead instead of arrows. Bullets roared all around Llenn as they traced the paths of the bullet lines.
“Hyaaa!”
The bullets whizzed past her ears. Don’t hit me, don’t hit me, don’t hit me! Llenn repeated, like some kind of magic spell.
Then she heard Pitohui grunt, “Hrrg!”
“Ah!” Llenn looked at her party member’s hit point bar in the upper left and saw that Pitohui’s was shrinking quickly.
“I’m all right,” she reassured, her HP stopping at 80 percent. “He only hit me on the side of my boob. The perv!”
“That’s good,” said Llenn, relieved, when there was an explosion on the left of the trike without warning.
“Urgh!” “Gaaaah!”
It blew the front left tire upward and clean off, jolting Pitohui and Llenn to the side. The trike had been in the midst of a left turn, so the blast and horizontal g-force threw them hard to the right.
“Pito! We’re gonna tip over!”
“We’re fine! Raaah!”
Pitohui jolted the handlebars to the right. Right wheel screaming, the trike shifted from a left turn into a right. That forced the weight into the opposite direction, redirecting the momentum to prevent it from rolling over.
The trike rode on for a few moments on just its right and rear wheels, until its body steadily evened out. Then Pitohui warned, “Hold on tight, Llenn!”
“Hu—eep?!”
The body of the trike came down onto the ground where the left wheel was missing.
Although Pitohui was braking, they were still going over fifty miles per hour. It scraped against the asphalt, tearing parts off and creating a shower of sparks as more and more of the trike broke away.
“Yeep! Ouch!”
A number of them struck Llenn’s right side as they came off, because she was sitting on the rear seat facing backward.
The trike gradually slowed down, creating a constant stream of sparks all the while. It was Pitohui’s sheer tenacity that kept them from tipping over. Despite missing its left front wheel and several parts below, the trike was able to slow down intact until it came to a stop on the side of the runway.
“Ahhh…”
The moment it stopped, Llenn tumbled weakly off the back seat and plopped onto the asphalt on the left side of the vehicle.
Pitohui was still straddling the trike, grinning. “You’ve done it now, Daveed! M, my precious wheels are ruined. You have to pay off the rest of the loan.”
M replied, “Wait there. We’ll come to rescue you.”
“Don’t come here! Daveed’s riding around with his gun in both hands, shooting the rifle and grenades both. He’ll attack you if you get any closer.”
“Hmm? How’s he doing that?”
“Dunno. Maybe he picked up a new acrobatic trick or two?”
“Nice!”
From a distance, David confirmed that Pitohui’s trike had stopped. Since he wasn’t controlling his handlebars, his own vehicle was simply driving straight ahead, taking him farther and farther from Pitohui.
He released his right hand from the rifle and reached toward the accelerator grip—and removed the combat knife he’d stuck into it to keep it fixed in place. David put the knife back into the sheath over his chest and grabbed the handlebar directly.
The hard rubber accelerator handle had a hole it in from the knife’s point and would probably split and fall off if he stabbed it again. Or perhaps it would be designated DAMAGED, vanishing into a spray of polygonal shards.
The accelerator gambit was something he’d come up with on the spot, but it would probably only be possible one more time.
“Jake! I knocked the poisonous bird out of the sky! Can you aim at her?”
“She’s about a thousand yards off! It’s a bit far, but I can keep her in check!”
“Good, do it! Don’t let them get away until I can arrive!”
“Okay!”
Jake prepared to blast in full auto at Pitohui and Llenn now that they were stationary. As he had warned, they were quite far away, too far for anyone to seriously consider aiming at them. And the wind was stronger than a few moments before, providing the occasional gust that would throw shots off farther.
But a 7.62 mm bullet was plenty heavy enough to carry that far, and it still packed a punch. Jake peered through the scope of the HK21 set up on his trike seat. In the distance, Pitohui and Llenn were the size of tiny beans. He aimed higher to account for the projectile falling over distance. He timed his pulse so that the bullet circle was as small as possible and centered over the two.
Then, hoping to keep them occupied and maybe even coincidentally strike them, he taunted, “Here’s a present!” and unleashed a number of ten-shot bursts.
Pitohui detected the bullet lines, and rather than warn Llenn verbally, promptly grabbed her tiny partner by the neck with one hand and hurled her over to the right side of the trike.
“Gyaaa! Pito, what was that for?”
Then Pitohui herself leaped nimbly over the side of the vehicle as machine-gun fire struck all around them, bouncing off the ground and kicking up asphalt.
“Hya!”
It sounded like there were firecrackers going off in every direction. The gun itself was shooting from so far away that they could barely hear it.
Gagank! That loud clang was a sign that a bullet had struck the left side of the trike. It couldn’t run anymore, so it didn’t matter, but Llenn was worried about the possibility it might explode.
Vehicles in GGO had a predisposition to exploding spectacularly. When a bullet was determined to have struck and ruptured the gas tank, they would blow into smithereens in an orange explosion.
If you shot a car in real life, it’d only make a hole. There wouldn’t be any fire. At least, not that easily. The conditions would have to be terrible to explode the entire car, like if the gasoline evaporated inside the cabin and ignited.
But this was the world of GGO. Vehicles were designed to explode quite easily from gunshots, once you got past certain armor types. Otherwise, having a vehicle would be an overwhelming advantage and destroy the competitive balance.
A truck’s fuel tank was on the bottom of the body, so they didn’t get hit by bullets very easily, but on a motorcycle or a trike like these, it was found on the upper part of the body.
While riding, the bullets would hit the riders first, so Llenn wasn’t as worried about the secondary damage, but now the situation was different. The idea that the trike that had zipped around with them on top might become a bomb that could engulf them in an explosion in an instant was a terrifying thought.
As she lay on the ground behind it, Llenn turned to her teammate and asked, “Pito, is this bad? We might blow up!”
“Yes! It’s very bad! And not like ‘bad as in good’! I mean bad-bad!”
“You sound like you’re having fun, though…”
Llenn craned her neck upward to look around. She saw that the bullet lines in the air above them were not actually that dense. And since she could hardly hear the shots, that meant the shooting was coming from far away. The aim was vague, then. She could probably get away by sprinting.
“Pito, let’s run for it! It’s better than staying here!”
“That’s true, but I can’t really do that. I’m on a diet,” said Pitohui, and she lifted her left foot so Llenn could see it.
“Ugh!”
That was when Llenn learned that Pitohui’s slim left leg was missing from the knee downward. The side where it was severed was as clean and straight as broken glass, and glowing green with a wire-frame outline.
“It was the grenade. But I’m lucky it only did this much!”
“…”
Llenn quickly glanced to the upper left. Pitohui’s hit points were lower now, around 60 percent. She hadn’t noticed the shift at all.
She looked back to Pitohui and saw that her leg wasn’t the only part that was damaged. Red damage effects were glowing on her arm, chest, and side, all over her left half.
That was from the shrapnel of the grenade. But considering where the trike’s tire had blown up, Llenn came to another realization.
Pitohui had seen the bullet circle for David’s grenade and leaned herself to the left to protect Llenn from the shrapnel. It was the only explanation for all the damage she suffered—and for Llenn’s perfect health.
“Pito…”
“Yes, yes, it’s not over.”
Pitohui injected herself with the emergency med kit. Her entire body glowed briefly, initiating the turtle’s-pace healing effect that would give her back 30 percent of her health over three whole minutes.
Loss of fingers or limbs took two minutes to automatically regrow in GGO, but until then, Pitohui couldn’t run. And with Llenn’s low strength stat, there was no way she could carry her friend. Instead, she would need to rely on her teammates.
“M! Fuka! We’re trapped by a machine gun and a trike! Pito lost a leg and can’t run! Do something!”
Fukaziroh responded, “Well, whining to us won’t get you far… What say you, M?”
“It’s a grim situation.”
“Awww…,” whined Llenn. She decided she should try to think of something on her own and suggested, “I could run and try to fight MMTM’s leader one-on-one…”
“And you’d get shot and killed before you get him in the effective range of the P90. He’s good at shooting grenades to keep you at bay, then picking you off with his rifle. You can’t match him now that he’s got both hands to use. Even your speed can’t overcome him now,” came Pitohui’s quick and accurate assessment.
“Awww… In that case…”
But she was out of ideas now—except for one.
“Then as a last resort, you should run away on your own, Llenn. Meet up with M, get away from here, and focus on survival. There’s no need for three unharmed people to expose themselves to danger on account of one injured member.”
“What about you, Pito?”
“Daveed’s obviously coming after me out of personal enmity, so I’ll try to hang in the fight here until my leg grows back,” said Pitohui, lifting her beloved KTR-09 with its drum magazine.
She pulled the lever back a bit to check if it was loaded. Sometimes violent action caused a magazine to get dislodged, or the loading lever got pulled without a bullet inside, so it was important to check it often.
As she did this, machine-gun fire pelted the area ceaselessly, occasionally striking the trike.
“Go! Get a move on! You’re going to fight Boss, aren’t you? Didn’t you make a woman’s promise? Listen, you’re only putting yourself underfoot hanging around here!”
“Ugh… Well, Pito…good luck!” Llenn said at last, glancing back at the bullet lines before leaping out from cover.
She went the opposite direction from where David was. It put her closer to the enemy machine gun, but she knew she could avoid the lines from this distance.
After a bit of zigzagging, she finally wondered, Wait, which way am I supposed to be going?
“Llenn! Can you point yourself west-northwest? That’s where you’ll find us!”
“Thanks! But what about Pito?”
Jake seemed to have noticed Llenn and was sending more shots her way. That was a good thing, because it meant less danger to Pitohui.
Watching carefully for bullet lines, Llenn kicked it up to top gear. Every last projectile hit asphalt helplessly behind her.
“Pito is… Well, Pito is Pito, so she’ll manage! Don’t worry!” said Fukaziroh worryingly.
“Sorry, Leader! The pink shrimp got away!” said Jake.
“That means it’s only Pitohui behind that trike!” said David. His mind was made up. He’d been running the trike slowly and watching out for M, but now he pointed it toward Pitohui.
“Keep her down, but watch out for the other trike! We’re going to take her down for good!”
“Roger that!”
Jake pulled the trigger of the machine gun, and David tugged the accelerator of the trike. MMTM began to zero in on Pitohui alone.
As David’s trike started small and distant and rapidly grew larger, Pitohui muttered, “Yeah, that’s not good. M, you take it from here.” It was practically her last will.
No, Pito! Don’t give up! Llenn thought but did not say.
Pitohui had essentially accepted her own death to allow Llenn to escape. That was the one thing she couldn’t tell her teammate in return.
Instead, she sprinted at maximum speed, her back turned, and prayed. I don’t care what miracle or coincidence it has to be, or what god or devil or spirit of death—just send your gust of heavenly wind to protect Pito.
At that very moment, the breeze went still and silent.
As he reached a distance of six hundred yards from his hated rival, David held on to the Steyr STM-556 hanging from a sling around his neck with just his left arm. His hand was around the magazine so that he could fire a grenade, rather than bullets.
“Keep up the covering fire! I’m going in!”
“Roger that!”
David had tasted defeat twice in Squad Jam thanks to Pitohui. He revved the trike. He could see the path to victory.
David would drive toward Pitohui doing high-speed slaloms, avoiding her bullet lines if necessary. He was going to close in to where she sat all alone in the middle of nothing. Of course, he would avoid coming from the opposite direction as Jake so that he didn’t get hit by a stray shot. A forty-five-degree angle would be best.
Once he was within four hundred yards, he would stick the knife into the accelerator grip and switch to two-handed aim again. Then he would shoot her with all the grenades he could—if he scored a direct hit, great. If he missed, he could shoot her with the rifle while she was taken aback.
Conveniently for him, the gusty wind chose this moment to calm down. That would make aiming with the grenade launcher easier.
“This time!” snarled David, baring his canines in triumph.
Then Jake exploded and died.
Or to be more accurate, the trike he was stationed behind exploded.
It was one of those classic GGO vehicular explosions, and before Jake could even react, he was blasted into polygonal pieces by flame and explosive force.
When he saw the orange light of the explosion, David slowed the accelerator and gasped, “What…the…?!”
A few seconds later, the sound of the explosion reached his ears.
“Whut? The bad guy blew up? What happened?”
Fukaziroh, too, saw the distant explosion.
“I don’t know, but the situation’s changed. Let’s go!” said M, who checked through the scope of the M14 EBR, then swung the weapon over his back and started to drive the trike again.
“Pito!” he shouted. “Enemy machine gun is silent! The reverse side is safe! We’re heading there now! Hang in there!”
“Oh? I don’t know what that’s all about, but…sure thing.”
Pitohui hopped up onto her one foot, then bounced over to the other side of the trike to hide where the bullets had been flying at her before.
Once she was there, she murmured, “So what god saved me?”
“Amazing! Was that your shot, M? Or was it you, Fuka?” marveled Llenn, who stopped running and turned around to look at the black smoke rising in the distance.
“Neither of us,” said Fukaziroh. “It wasn’t you?”
“How would I do that?”
“Maybe you awoke to your magical powers.”
“I don’t know how.”
Then the both of them together wondered, “No, really, who was it?”
Behind Jake—at least, behind him when he’d been alive—inside the airport control tower that loomed over the entire vast runway area, lurked two players.
The tower had to be very tall so air traffic controllers could give instructions for takeoff and landing.
It was about three hundred feet above the ground. In the control station, which was like an observation deck walled in with glass all around, lying atop the filthy carpet, was a green-haired young woman: Shirley.
“Phew…”
She pulled the bolt handle of the R93 Tactical 2 rifle and expelled an empty cartridge. Then she pushed the handle forward again to load the next shot.
Thanks to the bullet going through it, the glass was significantly broken, the wind howling low and deep now that it was picking up again. On the other side was the vast expanse of runway asphalt.
“Nice shot! Twelve hundred yards! That’s a record, a huge new record! I can vouch; I was your witness!” clamored Clarence, who was also lying on the carpet off to the left.
She was looking not through her own binoculars but through a larger pair she’d found in the room, a proper air traffic controller’s binoculars.
“Shut up. I can hear you through the comm—you don’t need to shout.”
“You said there was no way you could hit at this distance! And you did it in one shot! Are you some kind of whiz kid, Shirley? You should change your name to Jesus!”
Shirley got to her feet without much hurry and glanced at Clarence’s brainless smile. “I think the word you’re looking for is genius.”
“Oops! But even still, that shot was divine!” Clarence raved.
Shirley kept her tone low and explained, “I hit the vehicle. That’s a bigger target than a human. Thanks to the explosive round, it blew up. And the wind quieted down for a moment, which helped. All of that was coincidental. I got lucky.”
“Coincidence and luck are a part of skill! Bravo! Or are you supposed to say ‘Brava!’ if it’s a woman? Anyway, why’d ya save Pitohui? If you let them keep going, they would have killed her for sure. You could have smiled and watched it happen from a safe place. So why?” Clarence asked, smiling.
Shirley smirked back at her and said, “Don’t ask what you already know the answer to. I’m her Grim Reaper.”
“……”
For several seconds, David sat on the trike in complete shock.
In the upper left of his view, Jake’s hit point bar was empty, with a big X next to it. He had no idea why Jake’s trike had blown up.
All he knew was one thing: He’d lost his chance to finish off Pitohui for good.
“Fine, then! We’ll go down together in a blaze of glory!” he snarled, brows furrowed. He squeezed with his right hand, ready to drive the trike straight into her.
“Leader!”
“Ah!”
He relaxed his grip. It was the voice of his only surviving teammate, Kenta, that brought him back to his senses.
“Leader, don’t die for nothing! Squad Jam is all kinds of chaos this time! We don’t know what the alliance is up to! Even just the two of us, we’ve still got a chance to win it!”
“You’re right… I got it… I’m sorry,” David said. He grinned to himself, then told his teammate, “I’ll go pick you up! Wait right there!”
Pitohui watched the trike speed off, lowered the KTR-09, and murmured, “Oh-ho-ho? Am I saved?”
The wind gusted again, brushing her long ponytail.
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