CHAPTER 22
Light a Fire in Your Heart
“Here we go!”
Fukaziroh got to her feet and started running to the west from the fourth-floor stairs. On the floor behind her, she left a Degtyaryov antitank rifle.
“What?!” Llenn’s eyes went wide with disbelief.
She was headed for Kenta. It was practically suicide. No, scratch that. It was suicide.
Fukaziroh waved the M&P around, firing erratically, closing thirty-five meters of distance and preventing Kenta from popping his head out.
“Do it!”
She spun around on the spot when she was out of bullets and began to run backward—right in front of the lingerie store.
“Hey!”
Naturally, Kenta saw Fukaziroh approaching and aimed his APX at her.
Kenta and Boss fired at the same moment.
Kenta’s bullet went into Fukaziroh’s head.
A moment later, Boss’s bullet hit the grenade pouch on Fukaziroh’s vest, right over her stomach.
“Yesss!” Fukaziroh cheered as a blue explosion engulfed her body.
That one blast quickly grew into a chain that spanned twenty meters.
The fourth-floor hallway was demolished, a huge hole punched in both floor and ceiling. Stores caught in the explosion were eradicated.
“Run, Leader!”
Kenta’s body was blasted through the store behind him and blown into pieces, covered by bras and panties.
The discharge rattled through the third and fifth levels as well.
David felt the wind batter him as it came rushing down the stairs.
“Gah!”
He’d stood up at Kenta’s warning, and the force of the explosion tossed him twenty meters to the west. His head struck a bench in the process, taking damage, but a huge chunk of rubble landed where he’d been standing, so if not for that, he would have died.
The surge of air similarly buffeted Llenn.
“Rrgh!”
Only when Fukaziroh had turned around did Llenn at last understand what the plan was, and she spun to hide behind the pillar. Debris flew like shrapnel in her direction.
While the rest of the building shook as though suffering an earthquake, Llenn noticed that Fukaziroh’s HP gauge now read empty.
At the same time Fukaziroh sacrificed herself, a large shape was charging along the fifth floor’s east side.
It was M, one-armed, stomping down the center of the carpeted walkway.
“Hng!”
The player with the Desert Eagle noticed him and took aim from forty meters.
“…?”
However, something about the way M was running straight for the man elicited confusion. Nevertheless, he trained his weapon on the approaching enemy. When the bullet circle was at its smallest, fitting perfectly within M’s silhouette, he pulled the trigger.
Immediately after he fired, the shock wave from Fukaziroh’s explosion hit him on the fifth floor. So the .50 AE bullet plunged straight on course toward M.
It struck him in the face, removing the few hit points he had left. His large body toppled forward.
Then a dark shadow leaped over his back.
“What?!”
As Fukaziroh’s blast rocked the entire mall, pushing the tracksuited man forward, he spied a woman dressed in black, charging right for him.
A photon sword glowed blue in her hand—a Muramasa F9.
“Hi-yaaaah!”
The rippling blast winds made it impossible for the player in the tracksuit to aim, allowing Pitohui to rush forward. Blue light glinted eerily off of the crazed woman’s wild grin.
However, she was still thirty-five meters away.
Once the gales settled, the man tried to aim the huge muzzle at Pitohui.
“Dammit!”
Pitohui hurled something with her free hand. The man couldn’t tell if it was a normal grenade or a plasma one, but he could tell that it was rolling toward him.
“Ah!”
He turned his Desert Eagle on a display window instead, blasting the glass open with a few shots before jumping inside.
The man in the blue tracksuit landed flat on his stomach, covered his ears, and opened his mouth, but there was no explosion.
“It was a trap!”
Instead of a grenade explosion, he heard the woman’s quick steps growing louder and the sizzling of the air as her photon sword approached.
He hurried to his feet and scampered off, grabbing one of the store’s displayed products as he went.
“Where’s the little boys and girls who want to diiiiie?!” Pitohui growled, like a monster meant to scare children, a photon sword in one hand. With the other, she picked up the grenade she had just rolled, and she pulled the pin out with her mouth before tossing it into the store.
This time, the shrapnel grenade did explode.
However, the store interior was spacious enough that only a small part of it blew up. Pitohui hadn’t expected to eliminate her target with the bomb anyway. Instead, she extinguished her photon sword and rolled nimbly into the smoking aftermath.
Then she ignited the pale blade of light again, just as a large object came flying toward her.
“Hya!” she cried, recognizing it was too big to be a grand grenade, and she slashed through it. It was a perfect, quick, straight cut, made possible by Pitohui’s VR swordfighting experience going back to the beta test of SAO. The flying object was cleaved into two halves—which then exploded.
The force tossed Pitohui backward and knocked the photon sword from her hand. The blade even severed its owner’s limb from the elbow down before it hit the floor. Pitohui’s black-clothed left arm fell with a thud.
“Rgh!”
Was that a lucky or an unfortunate turn of events? If the sword had fallen a bit farther out, her arm would’ve been perfectly fine. Yet, if it had dropped any closer to her body, she would have died instantly.
The explosion hadn’t come from a grenade. As proof of that, it wasn’t black smoke that filled the air, but white water vapor.
“A steam explosion…?” Pitohui muttered, her hit points down to 20 percent. Instantly, the interior of the shop was as foggy as an outdoor hot spring in the winter. Through the haze, she heard her enemy say, “Welcome to the water shop. I thought you might be thirsty.”
Near Pitohui was a shelf that had toppled over from her grenade earlier. Lying on their sides were three- and four-gallon plastic bottles of water.
Some of them still held liquid, while others had burst from the shrapnel, spilling water onto the ground. The man had hurled one of the full four-gallon containers at Pitohui.
She had split it in two with her photon sword, also cutting through the water kept inside in the process.
“You haven’t practiced enough with your lightsword if you don’t even know what happens when it touches water,” the unseen man in the blue tracksuit said.
Pitohui’s brow wrinkled. “What do you mean? What about the Leidenfrost effect? And for that matter, what about the human body, which is mostly made of water?”
A steam explosion happened when a heated object made contact with water, instantly evaporating—and thus expanding—it with such force that it caused an explosion.
The Leidenfrost effect Pitohui had mentioned was a phenomenon by which water vapor covered the space between water and the heated object, preventing that heat from reaching the entirety of the liquid. It’s the reason water dripped onto a hot frying pan doesn’t immediately evaporate but maintains its shape.
Pitohui had assumed that a quick slice through water wouldn’t cause a blast of steam. And all the human bodies she’d cut through with a photon sword had technically been full of water, too.
Her questions were perfectly reasonable, but the man avoided them. “Look, I don’t know about all of that,” he admitted. “You can ask the developers if you ever meet them. I hear they log in now and then to hear player opinions.”
“I’ll kill them before I ask.”
“You’ll have to leave SJ4 first, then,” the man stated as he hurled another bottle that had to weigh at least thirty pounds at Pitohui’s face.
“Don’t mess with me!” she snarled—and punched it.
If she couldn’t cut it, a good fist would do the job. A single right punch slammed the heavy projectile away, and she bolted in the direction it had come from.
There was a shelf in the way, several bottles resting on it. Pitohui smashed to one side using her thighs and hips, like a bull knocking over a matador who’d failed to dodge.
Through the steam, she finally spotted a player in a blue tracksuit trying to ready a Desert Eagle.
“Too late!”
“Ugh!”
The man fired. The Magnum bullet boomed across the store—but Pitohui was already between his gun and his face.
She was so close that she was practically hugging him. Pitohui pressed on his left toes with her foot and used one hand to push his face. He fell backward and landed flat on the floor.
“Gah!”
“Raaah!”
Pitohui stomped on the wrist connected to the hand clutching the Desert Eagle, then dropped into a quick crouch and slammed her other knee into his solar plexus.
“Gburfh!”
“Don’t die yet,” she instructed, reaching out with one arm to pull a toppled four-gallon bottle closer and popping the lid off with her thumb. Then she lifted the lip of the bottle over the man’s mouth.
“‘I thought you might be thirsty,’” she parroted. The mouth of the bottle stuck into his face through the fabric of his mask, sending water gushing out onto him.
“Gobblubbublrble!” he gasped, attempting to say something. She ignored it.
“Go on, drink up,” Pitohui said, pushing the bottle down as hard as she could.
“Urbl! Gluk! Hagk!”
Gablunk, gablunk, gablunk, went the air bubbles sucked into the spout as its contents emptied into the man’s mouth.
“Goblbobl! Gabluburbgublah!”
“Yes, yes! Of course! I understand you!”
“Gurhklkgurblurukgkbl!”
“On the weekend, too? Sounds like a very strict workplace.”
“Gaggagaggagagl!”
“What? Chicken curry’s your favorite?”
“Gulk…”
He went silent, falling into suffocation mode. For the following twenty seconds, until a DEAD tag appeared over his body, the man was unable to do anything but twitch under Pitohui’s hands and feet.
All the while, Pitohui sang one of Franz Schubert’s famous lullabies in a soft and perfect pitch. “Schlafe, schlafe, holder, süßer Knabe, leise wiegt dich deiner Mutter Hand…”
Moments before, just after Fukaziroh’s tremendous explosion took out Kenta…
A large blast could cause retraction when it consumed all the air at its epicenter. In response, the surrounding gas rushed back inward to fill the void. This phenomenon was even more violent indoors, where air movement was limited.
The surge of retracted air coursed through the mall, buffeting tiny Llenn from her place behind a pillar.
“Aieee!”
“Uh-oh!” The heavier and stronger Boss grabbed Llenn to keep her steady. Though Boss’s braids whipped in the wind, her body stood firm.
“Boss!”
“We’ve got to make use of the opportunity Fukaziroh gave us!”
“Yeah!”
The gale died down. Boss released Llenn and grabbed what Fukaziroh had left on the floor before she’d run off: the PTRD-41 Degtyaryov antitank rifle.
“What will you do with that?” asked Llenn, knowing the weapon was inert inside the mall. Boss answered with action. She rushed over to an electric cart that had been abandoned at the side of the hallway and jammed the gun’s long barrel through the gap in the steering wheel.
The member of Fire’s squad with the Kampfpistole was rocked by the explosion like everyone else, but his missing arm prevented him from keeping his balance, and he doubled over before falling to the floor.
“Dammit!” he spat. The air in the hallway was expelled from front to back, then surged from back to front. Only when it had calmed did he raise his head.
“Hnn!”
And that was when he saw an electric cart zooming straight toward him.
Without getting up, he used his one arm to aim the Kampfpistole—and promptly realized the vehicle coming his way had no passengers.
“What the…?”
In place of any people, there was a PTRD-41 antitank rifle thrust vertically into the driver’s seat at the front of the cart.
Instantly and intuitively, the man understood that the long, heavy metal rod was jammed there to keep the steering wheel and accelerator in place.
The hallway was perfectly straight, so the unmanned cart came racing right at the man. Even so, avoiding such a thing was simple. The vehicle could only move straight forward. All the man with the Kampfpistole had to do was roll two meters to one side, and he’d be safe.
However, he remained where he was, even in the face of a cart advancing toward him at twenty-five miles per hour. The man couldn’t see the girl in pink or the big woman with braids, but he knew they had to be behind the vehicle—assuming they hadn’t just run away.
As long as he stayed put, they couldn’t attack him. The cart was a shield protecting him from the enemy.
Once the vehicle was twenty meters away, the man had to roll to avoid being hit. He could have gone in either direction, but he chose to go right since he had no left arm. Naturally, as this was a game, the stump of his limb didn’t hurt, but his instincts told him not to risk pressing his wound against the floor as he tumbled.
And that was precisely what Llenn had been counting on.
“Gotcha!” she cried in midair, pointing her Vorpal Bunnies at the man and firing.
“What?!” the man screamed, taking on shots as he continued to roll. If he stopped, he was dead. He had to keep going, keep moving until he reached a store on the right side of the hallway.
Amid his wildly rotating vision, he spied a small pink figure in the air. She was excitedly unloading her weapons on him.
Only ten meters separated the two. It was close enough that any pistol could hit its target.
How had she gotten so close?
Suddenly, the man in the tracksuit understood. The hint was the electric cart, which was trundling straight through the place where he had been standing previously, thanks to the PTRD-41 stuck into the driver’s seat like a spear.
The little girl in pink had been running right behind the cart, going at full speed to match the vehicle’s velocity. She was short enough that he couldn’t see her with the thing in the way.
While he’d been distracted, she’d jumped high in the air for a better shooting angle.
“Ha! Not bad!” the man howled with delight. He slammed against the double doors of a storefront and roll-roll-rolled his way right into the place.
Llenn landed on her feet, barely seven meters from the open doorway. She had loosed twelve rounds, so she stuck the grips of her pistols into her backpack for a reload.
It took only three seconds to do so, but that was enough time for the man to roll his way out of sight.
You’re not getting away! Llenn couldn’t allow him to escape and regain his other arm. She didn’t have time to wait here for Boss to catch up.
Llenn held up the Vorpal Bunnies and charged through the entrance.
Above the doorway was a sign reading BASEBALL SHOP.
Indeed, what Llenn found inside was a business selling baseball supplies. The spacious and bright interior was full of neatly arranged shelves and wall racks full of gloves of different colors, finely stitched baseballs, large buckets for holding ice water, replica uniforms from famous big leaguers, colorful spiked cleats, and a long wooden bat being swung by a man with one arm.
“Eeesh!”
If Llenn hadn’t pulled back with the maximum possible speed, she would never have heard the bat slicing through the air—because it would have split her skull first.
She’d been expecting gunshots. A blunt, close-range weapon had been the last thing on her mind. But now that she’d dodged it, the time was ripe for a counterattack.
Eat this, Llenn thought, aiming her .45-caliber pistols at the enemy player wearing a tracksuit.
She popped off three rounds with each gun so she didn’t need to reload immediately. That was more than enough for an opponent this close.
How about that? she thought, certain of her victory. There was no way she could miss a target two meters away, but her confidence was quickly shattered by a bat that lanced into her stomach.
“Gerf!” was the sound the air made shooting out of Llenn’s lungs.
Like a fencer, the man jutted his right side forward and jabbed at Llenn’s chest with the end of the bat. Llenn was so light that the blow shoved her three meters back and right out of the store. It did enough damage that the game declared her ribs broken, and she immediately lost 30 percent of her HP. It was only her sheer tenacity that kept the Vorpal Bunnies in her hands.
Llenn fell onto her back, her pack propping her torso up.
“Why you—!”
Llenn fired her remaining six shots, nearly all of which struck the man. His body glowed with bullet effects. Even one of the cheeks beneath his mask shone a brilliant red.
Unfortunately, he still wasn’t dead.
About four meters ahead of Llenn, the man slowly brought the bat up to rest on his shoulder.
“Whew… Both out of bullets, I assume,” he said, staring at the Vorpal Bunnies in Llenn’s hands; their slides were retracted.
“You’re…so…tough!” she gasped.
While only armed with handguns, Llenn had still put several rounds into her opponent’s body and at least one into his face. Yet he was still alive. What was going on with his HP? He had to be even hardier than M and Pitohui.
“Oh, I’ve barely got anything left. You could probably kill me with a forehead flick,” he admitted, his mask stretching and twisting as he spoke. With the sunglasses, his face was completely hidden, but Llenn got the sense that he was smiling.
“My whole body is numb, and it’s hard to move. It’s like getting a really intense acupuncture session. But I can still do enough to split your head in half. I mean, the whole reason we’re in this Squad Jam is to kill you, after all.”
Peh! Llenn thought. She let her disdain carry over into a spoken insult as well. “That’s right! As a hired gun, you won’t get Fire’s money unless you win!”
But the man reacted in a way she hadn’t been expecting at all.
“Money…? Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up! I don’t need that! I’m fighting for the company president! I’m fighting for his romance! We all are! We’re battling for his future!”
There was real anger in his voice. Given that he called Fire “the company president,” he seemed to have revealed that he was an employee who worked for the man.
His reason for participating wasn’t cash; he had entered the Squad Jam for the sake of Fire Nishiyamada.
Llenn paused, taken aback, and the man did not miss his chance.
Rather than charging, he simply sauntered toward her. It was so relaxed that she briefly failed to realize he was doing it.
“Crap!” Llenn yelped, reaching behind her back to reload. However, the moment she’d wasted could not be made up. I won’t be ready in time!
The tracksuit player picked up speed, and he swung the wooden bat with his one hand.
The Vorpal Bunnies finished reloading, and Llenn quickly pulled them free, pushing down the slide stops. Sadly, she had done so just in time to see that the end of the wooden bludgeon was coming straight for her skull.
Oh, I’m dead. Dead, deader, deadest.
Surprisingly, the bat vanished.
The man brought his arm down with an empty hand. His fist nearly grazed Llenn’s face as it flew by.
“Huh?”
The two locked eyes, though one pair was behind a set of sunglasses.
Llenn brought up her .45-caliber weapons. “Sorry!” Then fired them both into the man’s face. Two shots to the brain were at last enough to kill the man. The DEAD tag appeared immediately.
He fell limply to the ground. As she backed away, Llenn said, “Thanks for saving me, Boss…”
Twenty meters away, to Llenn’s left, her friend was in firing position with a Strizh pistol. She’d hit the bat and knocked it out of the enemy’s hands while he was swinging. That was some serious aim.
“No problem. That was pretty sloppy of you, though. What were you talking about?” asked Boss.
Llenn couldn’t bring herself to explain.
“Gotcha!”
David, having been saved by Kenta’s last words, dashed forward while firing an M9-A1 pistol. The 9 mm bullets whizzed down the open mall walkway, struck Boss’s ankle, and knocked her to the ground.
“Rrgh!”
David sent a few more shots in Boss’s direction, then changed his focus to Llenn, twenty meters farther away.
“Yeep!” The lines gleamed around Llenn. She shrank away and ducked down, allowing the armor plates in her backpack to guard her from the projectiles.
David hugged a pillar five meters away from Boss, ignoring the large, prone woman. He was after Llenn now.
“Eek! Eek!” With each round that hit her back, Llenn shook a little. She shrank as small as she possibly could for maximum protection.
“Tsk! That damn backpack!” David cursed, even though Boss was collapsed on the ground just five meters away, groaning and nearly dead.
He pressed himself against a pillar for steadiness, aiming carefully at Llenn’s tiny target twenty-five meters away and firing one shot at a time.
“Hya! Hyaii!” Each one hit Llenn’s back, eliciting a terrified response. Her Vorpal Bunnies were still loaded, but exposing herself by turning around to return fire seemed ill-advised. If she tried to stand up and run, he’d hit her.
David continued shooting from his place of cover. He was determined to finish Llenn off while he had the chance. He didn’t want her getting away.
At last, one bullet grazed the backpack and hit Llenn’s foot, creating a glowing damage mark on her boot.
“Eep!” She trembled, giving David the opening to strike her shoulder.
Llenn’s hit points were down below a third now. She screamed, “Aaaah! Someone help!”
“You got it!”
“Huh?”
David had emptied his M9-A1, so he tossed it aside and drew a Beretta APX from his midriff.
He leaped out from behind the pillar, intending to close the gap with Llenn and finish her off in one bold stroke.
Then Pitohui dropped in front of him.
David was so taken aback that he thought an elevator had suddenly materialized out of nowhere.
Pitohui landed with a thud on the fourth floor, riding on a round piece of flooring, right before David’s eyes as he ran.
“Perfect!” she screamed, and she thrust the photon sword with her remaining arm.
At this range, the power of the photon sword was absolute. One or two 9 mm bullets wouldn’t kill his opponent, and there was no way to stop her from running him through and killing him.
Instead, David attempted to use the greatest firepower he owned.
“You’ve got nothing!”
It all happened in the span of a few seconds. David released the APX in his left hand but kept his index finger inside the trigger guard, where it pressed against the trigger and pushed the gun forward with his right hand.
That dragged his index finger against the trigger, firing the gun. The recoil was more powerful than the force of his arm, pushing it backward. In doing so, it returned the trigger to neutral, resetting the weapon so it could be used again.
Because his right hand was holding the gun forward, the pressure on the trigger from his finger returned immediately, firing it again, causing the recoil to jump the gun backward—and this repetition resulted in ultra-fast shooting.
This technique was known as bump-firing, the fastest method of using a semiautomatic weapon. It was much swifter than pulling the trigger regularly, allowing you to fire quickly and wildly like with a fully automatic gun.
Pitohui’s lightsword pierced through to the back of David’s chest right as his shots struck hers.
“Gahk!” “Aaah!”
They exhaled together and went still, almost as though locked in an embrace.
“You’ve gotten so much tougher,” Pitohui murmured as she died.
“It’s all thanks to a certain…someone,” replied David as he perished.
Pitohui grinned. “If I knew you were going to get this strong…I might have actually fallen in love with you…Daviiid…” She toppled backward.
David crumpled to his knees and muttered, “That’s nice to hear…”
They were going to meet their end together.
“Oh, I’m joking, of course. Don’t take it seriously,” Pitohui appended.
“Why, you bi—”
He never got to finish that sentence.
“Oh…”
When the shooting stopped, Llenn hesitantly turned around and took in the aftermath.
Just thirty feet away, lying dead and faceup on the ground, were Pitohui and David.
There was a circular chunk of floor between them, and up above, a hole in the ceiling gave a tiny view of the fifth level.
Pitohui had cut a hole for herself and fallen through it down onto the fourth floor, right in front of David. Then they had fought and killed each other.
The photon sword rolled out of Pitohui’s hand. It was still ignited. Where it touched the floor, it burned away the carpet and melted through the material underneath, sinking like a hot knife through butter.
Lower and lower it sank until it had cut through the ground and disappeared. It would probably continue to descend into the earth until it ran out of power.
“Aw…Pito…”
There were five X marks next to the names of Llenn’s squadmates on the list in the upper left corner of her vision.
Clarence, Shirley, Fukaziroh, M, Pitohui—everybody was dead. Only Llenn remained now—a miracle considering her HP was only at 30 percent.
“I need to apologize to Pitohui,” said Boss.
She slowly pushed herself upright on numbed legs. She was glowing here and there because of David, but she was alive. Her natural defense was no joke.
Boss gazed at Pitohui with wonder and remarked, “So she wasn’t actually doing this for Fire at all… She wouldn’t have come to your rescue otherwise…”
Boss was right. Pitohui had been up on the fifth floor because she’d been battling some other blue-tracksuited player up there, no doubt.
“True… I should say sorry for suspecting her, too,” replied Llenn, standing up and walking over to Boss. “What’s your HP situation?”
“Barely ten percent. I only survived because a few of his shots hit my magazine pouch.”
“Great! You’re a lucky girl!” said Llenn, reaching out.
“Not as lucky as you,” remarked Boss, taking the offered hand. She started to rise but ended up dragging Llenn down and flopping backward.
“Gyack!”
“Oops, sorry.”
“You’re so heavy! God, you’re huge!”
“My bad, shrimp.”
The pair broke out into spontaneous laughter.
“Pfft! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha!”
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
For a good thirty seconds, they sat there, roaring with laughter, one’s laugh deep and one’s high-pitched, shot full of holes, in the middle of a shopping mall littered with dead bodies.
Once they’d had their fill of giggles, Llenn popped up to her feet. “Okay! Time for us to fight, I think!”
“I’m grateful for the offer—but if you lose, what happens to your deal with Fire?” Boss asked, lifting herself now that the feeling in her legs had returned. She reloaded her Strizh, checking for enemies, but they were alone.
Secretly grateful that Boss was still concerned for her well-being, Llenn smirked and answered, “I don’t have to worry about that if I win! But if it comes to that, I’ll just pretend I have no idea what he’s talking about!”
“Ooh, you’re bad… Well, in that case…”
“Let’s do this! Where should we go, and how should we do it?” Llenn asked, demonstrating that she was ready to go, whatever the situation.
Boss grinned back at her. In a frightening way. “Right here. Right now.”
“Okay!”
They were standing two meters apart.
Boss clicked the Strizh into the holster on her hip.
Llenn refreshed the ammo in the Vorpal Bunnies, then placed them in her thigh holsters without switching on the safeties.
Making full use of the spacious hall, Boss stepped backward until they were at a comfortable distance. Ten meters felt appropriate for a shootout.
“Let’s do this duel style, then. I saw this once in the BoB prelims, and I’ve always wanted to try it out.”
Boss took a spare magazine out of her ammo pouch.
“I’ll throw this up in the air, and when it hits the ground, we draw. Deal?”
“Deal. Just like in a Western. One shot will seal our fate.”
“Yeah.”
Llenn had 30 percent of her hit points remaining, and Boss had 10. But their respective levels of physical stamina were vastly different. If anything, Llenn probably had less survivability in terms of how much damage she could take. However, neither of them expected to live past the first hit.
One might think Llenn had the advantage, being so small and fast, but Boss was not slow in the least, either, and she was more comfortable with a pistol. Today was the first time Llenn had ever used handguns in a serious fight.
Llenn thought that put them on an equal footing, and she understood why Boss had suggested this as a way of having their contest. There was no reason for her to decline.
She set her backpack on the ground. Not to make herself lighter, but because having bulletproof armor on her back would be unfair.
That meant she couldn’t reload anymore, so she would only have six bullets in each Vorpal Bunny. If she couldn’t finish the fight within twelve shots, she would be dead.
Llenn dropped her center of gravity and smacked the sides of her thigh holsters. There were no straps keeping the guns snug. She just had to pull them out.
Her hands waited, right next to the holsters, almost touching the grips.
“Ready whenever you are.”
Boss kept her right hand next to its holster, too.
“Here we go.”
She chucked the magazine underhand with her other hand, high into the air.
Boss’s physical coordination from being on the gymnastics team was no joke; the magazine rose until it nearly touched the ceiling, then began to fall perfectly placed between the two combatants.
Gleefully, Llenn stared at Boss.
Gleefully, Boss stared at Llenn.
The magazine began to fall, slowly rotating…
Thud!
It landed with a muffled sound on the carpet.
Boss whipped the Strizh out of its holster with tremendous speed, just as Llenn leaped into the air.
Llenn’s jump rotated her to the right, during which time she drew the Vorpal Bunnies. Amid her turn, when her body was sideways and offering the smallest possible target, Boss’s 9 mm bullet passed in front of her chest.
And before her spin had finished, Llenn opened fire with both hands.
The two bullets flew straight, one of them passing over Boss’s shoulder.
“Gah!”
The second struck her in the forehead and lodged itself in her brain.
“Nice…ly…done…”
With those last words, Boss toppled backward, lifeless. Her large body fell to the floor of the mall thoroughfare, thudding heavily.
“…Ahhh!” Llenn gasped, landing with her pistols at the ready. “It…worked…”
Llenn had gambled on a long shot.
She’d assumed that Boss would draw and fire first. So she’d considered how to dodge—or at least, what gave her the best chance of evading: a rotating jump.
If she chose the usual crouch or sideways lean, Boss would react accordingly. However, when faced with a high-speed rotation, she would pull the trigger the moment she saw what was happening.
It was entirely possible that Boss’s bullet could have hit Llenn anyway. This had been a pure coin toss with no room for a third possibility. One of them was going to win, and the other had to lose.
And Llenn had come out on top.
“You did it! Way to go, Llenn!” cheered one of the Vor-chans.
“Even though she was this close to her target, one of our shots still missed!” chided the other.
Llenn stuck them back in their holsters.
“Mrph!” “Mrph!”
Then she picked up the backpack and put it back on, fastening the straps.
“No point letting your guard down after a victory. Not that I’m victorious yet… First, I have to find Fire…,” Llenn muttered to herself, alone in the hallway.
Until a man’s voice replied, “No, you’ve won this. You and your friends.”
“Ah!”
Llenn spun around, drawing her guns, pointing them in the direction from which she’d heard the voice. It was lightning fast.
“Wha…?”
The only thing she saw was the body of the man in the blue tracksuit.
“I’m talking on the wireless,” informed the voice. It was coming from the comm on the dead body. She realized that it was Fire’s voice.
“Fire! Have you been listening to all of this?!”
It clicked into place. There was a communication device with a speaker attached at the dead man’s side, transmitting his voice and status to Fire at all times. Now it was relaying Fire’s words the other way.
That meant that he must have heard the conversation where she asked how much money Fire’s lackeys were getting paid, and her insistence that she’d just pretend she had no idea about the deal.
The eavesdropping freak! Llenn fumed. But maybe declaring that she wouldn’t honor the deal had been worse than what he’d done in this case.
“Fire! You’re the only one left! And I’m the only one here! Where are you?! I’m going to rush over there and beat you senseless!” Llenn shouted at the wireless device. She was thinking, But what if Fire’s set up a trap wherever he says to go?
Llenn had absolutely no idea what kind of weapon he had or how he would fight.
Fire had to be an amateur when it came to combat, but given how his teammates were decked out with fancy pistols, he must have armed himself to the teeth, too. He’d probably spent tons of actual money to buy himself all the handguns and armor he’d need.
Llenn had no idea if she could beat him on just 30 percent of her hit points, but it didn’t matter; she was going.
She had to for the sake of her teammates who had fought and died to protect her.
“I’m in the courtyard. Right in front of the merry-go-round. Can you come down?”
“I’ll be there in three seconds!”
That may have been an overly optimistic appraisal.
Even at Llenn’s fastest, it took thirty seconds to descend from the fourth floor to the mall’s inner area.
She raced into the open area only to find it occupied by a theme park so sizable that Llenn didn’t feel like she was indoors anymore. All around were rides and attractions that sat silent and still.
Eventually, Llenn came upon the merry-go-round.
The paint was chipped and peeling, but what was there was brightly colored. The horses ran in concentric circles around the center underneath a fancy, cake-like canopy. Poles were stuck straight as ramrods through their torsos.
Standing in front of the ride, leaning against the handrail, was a tall, thin man.
“Fire!”
There didn’t seem to be any traps around, and Fire wasn’t armed, but Llenn was cautious all the same. She rushed over, stopping about thirty-five meters away, and pointed both of her pistols at her long-sought enemy.
“Here I am! Let’s fight!” she said happily, giving him a huge smile.
Fire’s handsome face did not twist into anger or break into a grin of its own. He simply stated, “What did I just say to you? You won. Your side wins.”
Is this a ploy? Llenn wondered. She couldn’t sense anyone else around. The only thing occupying the space between him and her was tile flooring. There was no place any grenades could have been set up to explode.
Still, Llenn remained on alert, ready for anything. Her eyes scanned all around her as she paced slowly closer to Fire. Once she was ten meters away, where there was no way she could miss, she said, “You’re still here! Why won’t you fight? Why aren’t you trying to get me?”
Fire extended his long arms, opening them before him. “I have no way to do so. I don’t have any weapons.”
Even Llenn was surprised at that. “Um…what?”
“I hate tools meant for causing harm, like guns and knives. Even here in the game, I would never choose to carry them. So I trusted my team and waited. They fought very hard for me. But they weren’t quite up to the task.”
“……”
Llenn was speechless.
She’d prepared herself for Fire to be the last boss, for him to pull out some wild, outlandish, and powerful weapon. But he had nothing.
“If you could kill someone with surprise, I’d be dead right now,” she admitted.
She prepared herself to shoot him. She took aim, touched the triggers, and fit the bullet circles over Fire’s body when they appeared.
“But there is one thing I’d like to say now, while I have the chance,” Fire added, staring at the bullet lines coming from Llenn’s weapons.
“Your last wish? I’m listening.” Llenn did not pull the triggers yet.
“I’m sorry for making fun of full-dive VR games and GGO. I take those words back. Go on and mock those statements as the words of a person ignorant of what these games are.”
If surprise could kill, Llenn would have died twice now.
Eyes wide, she said, “Okay…I accept your apology.”
“I’m glad. I feel better getting that off my chest. If there was anything I wanted to avoid, it was perishing without having said that. Well, go on and shoot me. You’ve won our bet.”
“……”
For three seconds, Llenn considered what to say, whether to cuss Fire out or laud him for his effort in the fight.
But she couldn’t think of anything.
So in the end, she decided to have an actual conversation with Fire. There was no worry of being overheard here.
After Fire’s apology, there was one thing Llenn wanted to say to him. It was likely to be the last time they ever met, so she might as well have it out here.
She stared Fire in the eye and opened her mouth.
“So, um…”
A horse appeared behind Fire and opened its mouth wide.
A monster! You idiot, this is because you waited here for too long!
Foolishly, Fire had been holed up by the carousel longer than five minutes. And as a result, an equine monster had spawned. For a moment, Llenn almost thought one of the merry-go-round animals had started moving, but that was not the case—the game had simply created a similar-looking, if distasteful, enemy.
“Shit!” Llenn swore, and she fired.
Two bullets hit the horse’s face, blasting it into smithereens. Fire hadn’t noticed it, and he looked somewhat confused.
Naturally, this called down more monsters.
Shlurp…
A rustling sound in the previously silent center of the mall drew her attention. There were living things nearby.
Many of them.
“Ugh!”
The creatures were oozing up out of the tiles around them.
They had human fingers that came out in bunches, then joined together at the base to form hands, extending into arms, and eventually, a face.
Gross!
Zombies, creatures in human form, wearing human clothes, but with disfigured, ashen-gray skin, milky-white eyes, and unsteady legs that wobbled in a way that suggested no working core muscles.
Presumably, the game was spitting out humanoid enemies because this was a shopping mall where people had once gathered.
“Gross! What terrible taste! Whoever came up with this idea, show yourself!”
Llenn felt genuine disgust at the line of thinking that had led to this. It had to have been that shitty writer.
Bang!
Before the rotting hand coming up from the ground could grab Llenn’s leg, she shot it. Each monster died from a single pistol bullet; the problem was their numbers.
“What’s this? What a sight,” remarked Fire, watching the dead rising from the ground where he stood at the merry-go-round.
“What are you doing?! Run!” Llenn yelled at him.
“Oh, the contest is already over. You’re the one who should be running.”
“Dammit!”
Llenn’s guns blazed. She popped a few shots into the head of a zombie that appeared between her and Fire. When the Vorpal Bunnies ran out of ammo, she reached behind her back and chunked new magazines in, then resumed shooting.
Damn it aaaall! What am I doing?! Llenn thought, moving closer to Fire as she shot the monsters. The Vor-chans spoke to her, urging her on.
“C’mon, what’s wrong with this? You wanted more action; let’s give them some.”
“You’ve still got plenty of bullets. Let us roar!”
Llenn snapped back, “I know! I am! You bastaaards!”
The gleam in her eyes was turning dangerous.
“I’ll kill every last one of you!”
Llenn’s right-hand shot blew off half the rotting face of a young zombie. Her left went through the throat of a middle-aged monster and struck the chest of a young woman behind it. When that female monster wobbled, Llenn broke into a run, weaving between the creatures and handily finishing the job with another shot.
“Whew!”
However, there was no time to rest, as Llenn was immediately surrounded by a wealthy family who had come to the mall to shop—the grandpa, grandma, dad, mom, middle-school daughter, all zombies.
“Yaaaah!”
The first thing she did was shoot the bearded grandpa with two bullets to the face, one from each gun. Then she ducked, crossed her hands, and blasted the hearts out of the grandma and daughter.
When the father came rushing straight toward her, she kicked him in the chest with both feet, using the recoil to spin toward the mother and smashing her face with the side of a Vorpal Bunny. The woman’s rotting jaw flew off her skull as a mass of flesh.
“Urgargargargar!” she grunted through her mangled mouth, not vanquished yet.
“You shut up.”
Llenn jammed her left Vorpal Bunny into the empty space where the jaw had been and pulled the trigger. It blew off the back of the head, which slumped over the front part of her gun.
Then she rotated on her heel and blasted the brains out of the risen father.
Dammit! There are too many!
Zombies were weak enemies, but dealing with the same amount as the entire team had earlier was a huge challenge.
Thankfully, the Vor-chans were rooting her on. “Get ’em! Get ’em! Shoot!”
“That’s our Llenn!”
“Thanks!” their owner answered. She could keep going.
Her right pistol ran out of bullets, so she reloaded it while blasting away with her left. Then that one ran empty and needed to be refilled. Llenn kicked over a few zombies, but then a horse monster approached.
“Tch!”
Llenn jumped sideways, taking herself out of the path of the wild stallion so she could pump a few bullets into the easy target that was its hefty rear as it rushed by.
Now there were more typical monsters among the zombies. A leopard-like creature snuck through the undead and pounced at Llenn, swiping with its front claws.
“Gah!” It caught Llenn’s backpack and threw her spinning to the ground. Thankfully, it wasn’t rough enough to cause actual damage. Less fortunate was that the side of the backpack was torn, and the magazines stacked inside came spilling out.
“Shit!” Llenn’s wonderful reloading apparatus was destroyed. She spun around and blasted the leopard’s face. “Take that!”
Then she told her empty left Vorpal Bunny, “Sorry, it has to be one of you!” and threw it aside.
“No faaaaair!” it screamed.
She yanked off the torn backpack, decided to make camp where the magazines had spilled across the tiles, and blasted at the approaching zombies with just the one remaining handgun.
She fired straight ahead, she fired right, she fired behind, and she fired left.
The one saving grace of this experience was that they were the good old-fashioned “slow zombies.” They shuffled and plodded toward her, faces exposed.
“Yah! Hey! Bam! Daa!”
Blam, blam, blam, blam.
The .45-caliber lead bullets burst through their targets. When Llenn ran out of ammunition, she just crouched, grabbed a mag off the ground, and loaded it into the gun manually.
Then she glanced over at Fire. He was still lounging in front of the merry-go-round.
The zombies weren’t attacking him at all. He was like a telephone pole, an inert part of the background, and they just walked right past him.
Why? Oh! Because he doesn’t have a weapon, Llenn realized quickly.
As long as you defeated the scout without shooting it, more wouldn’t spawn. And the monsters would not attack any player who wasn’t holding a weapon.
Whoever had designed the system had probably meant it to be a lifesaving measure for a character who had lost their weapons in battle. They wouldn’t have foreseen that any player would enter the event without one in the first place.
In other words, the monsters would keep attacking Llenn and only Llenn, and if she died, she would lose.
This is fun! she decided, suddenly surging with energy.
Fire’s declaration that the competition was over had felt anticlimactic, so Llenn made this her new contest.
If she could beat all the spawning monsters, she would win.
That was it. She had issued her judgment.
Ba-ba-blam!
She took out a series of zombies standing side by side with three quick shots and flashed Fire a sharp grin.
She fought for what had to be around a minute and a half.
Time lost meaning as a concept, and nearly all the magazines at her feet were gone when the horde of zombies slowed down to a trickle. While spawns were large, they had limits. The few enemies left had to be the last ones.
“Rrrah!”
Blam! Llenn sent a tourist zombie with an SLR camera around its neck to Hell.
“Uryaa!”
Blam! Llenn shot a little girl in a dress right through the teddy bear she was holding.
Then she was out of ammo.
“Hey, reload me. If you don’t, I’m just a pink paperweight,” said Vor-chan.
“There’re none left!” Llenn exclaimed, holding an empty magazine. The next one she tried was also vacant. There wasn’t a single golden glint of bullets anywhere around her.
Troublingly, there were eight groaning zombies left, shambling toward her. From a distance of four meters, they encircled her. There was no escape.
Police!
However, Llenn spotted a familiar navy-blue uniform on one of the zombies. There was a police belt around its waist with cuffs and a baton—and a holster.
“Yah!”
She threw Vor-chan at the zombie.
“Aaah, what was that for?!”
The Vorpal Bunny struck the police zombie in the face, knocking it back. Llenn leaped at the creature, reaching for the holster on its right hip.
She pulled out the friend of the American police officer, a Glock 17.
Any gun found in GGO could be used. Llenn pulled back, switching the gun to her dominant hand, then pointing it at the police officer’s stomach and pulling the trigger.
Click.
It only made a tiny sound and did not fire. The primer was too old to ignite.
“Dahh! You don’t have to be that realistic!” Llenn groaned before hurling the worthless weapon at its owner’s face.
Now Llenn had no firearms. The zombies continued to advance, step after step. Escape seemed unlikely.
“Heh!” she chuckled. There was one more weapon tucked under her backpack and behind her waist; she reached for it. The familiar texture of the grip met her fingertips.
“Here we go, Kni-chan Number Two!” Llenn exclaimed, pulling out the combat knife.
“Ready and raring to go! Ahhh, Miss Llenn, I feared that I might not have the chance to see combat today!”
Fire watched the action all the while, still leaning against the carousel.
Llenn advanced on the police officer zombie first, slicing open its windpipe. Before the monster even disappeared, Llenn was faced with a boy zombie holding a bag of popcorn. No sooner had she sped past it than its little head toppled to the ground.
A middle-aged zombie came lunging at her with both hands, but Llenn grunted and moved like lightning, leaving an afterimage.
The monster’s hand fell to the ground, followed by an arm. However, the woman still had teeth for biting, so Llenn turned the knife sideways and stabbed the creature’s heart through the ribs.
“Five to go!”
A zombie dressed in a fast-food uniform kicked something. The object slid cleanly over the tile floor and tapped Fire’s boot—clunk.
It was a pink pistol with the slide extended.
“……”
He crouched and reached for it.
“Three more!” she cried after slicing open the stomach of the fast-food zombie. Then she paused for a second. “Huh?”
Two of the remaining zombies—a woman in a sexy red dress and a fat man in a slobby T-shirt, like guests at a party of some kind—were walking toward Fire.
“Why?!”
Without missing its chance, the third zombie fell over on top of Llenn. “Ah!”
The undead man in a suit squashed her against the tile floor, opened its mouth wide, and tried to bite her.
“Ooogh…”
“Hey!” Llenn shouted, and she stuck the tip of the knife into the monster’s neck. Then she extended her arm into a full swing, bisecting the zombie’s face.
Llenn fell back to the floor and saw, upside down, two zombies not three meters away from Fire.
He was utterly still, as though waiting for them to kill him. In his hand was one of the Vorpal Bunnies Llenn had tossed aside.
Loaded or not, a gun was a gun. Pink or not, a gun was a gun. The monsters had reacted the moment Fire had picked it up, and they’d locked on to their new target.
“That idiot!” Llenn snapped, and she sprang to her feet, rushing for the zombies. They were five meters away.
The woman zombie was slightly faster than the other and reached out for Fire, leaning forward. Though Llenn couldn’t see for certain from her angle, she was sure the creature had its mouth open.
Realizing that there wasn’t enough time to rush over, Llenn said, “Ugh, fine! Take this!” and flipped the knife into a traditional grip before throwing it.
It stuck into the spine of the lady zombie, which fell to the ground right before Fire. But that did nothing to stop the other one, the fat older man.
“Raaaah!”
Llenn jumped forward. She had no weapons, but that didn’t matter.
She could still fight. She would keep going until she was dead.
It was how she’d beaten Pitohui in SJ2.
She took a few quick strides and pounced, latching herself on to the body of the big zombie and sinking her teeth into its neck.
“Arrrrgh!”
Shrnk! Llenn’s mouth filled with the texture of throat skin, and a dull pain ran through her left eye.
The old zombie’s thick thumb tried to fight back against the little pink combatant in its own way, lodging itself in Llenn’s eye. It pushed harder, working its way into her skull.
Crap! Aware of how much of her HP was being taken away, Llenn bit down even more fiercely, until—crunch.
She bit through the zombie’s carotid artery.
The old man turned into glowing particles and vanished, body and thumb and all.
Llenn fell to the ground on her back. “Bwegh!”
She stared up at Fire, who stood tall over her. Her hit points kept dropping. The damage was severe enough that it was clear the zombie had not hurt just her eye, but the brain behind it as well.
She was already under 10 percent, and when it became clear that death was unavoidable, she said, “Fire, I—”
But she could not finish that final thought of hers.
Her one working eye remained open to the last moment—but all she saw was the cold, quiet figure of Fire holding the Vorpal Bunny before everything vanished.
Two screens presented the action to the audience in the bar.
On one they saw Llenn dying, right next to a tall man in a tracksuit operating a game window. Then he fell limp on the spot. A tag reading RESIGNED appeared over his character.
On the other screen, three men wearing armor and masks were running desperately down the highway while a storm of bullets assailed them.
They were from V2HG, coming all the way around the broken lake to rescue Fire, but they died without ever reaching the shopping mall.
CONGRATULATIONS!! WINNER: ZEMAL!!
The huge, shining message appeared in the sky with a bit of musical fanfare.
Five men with machine guns connected to their backpacks by metal rails—and one woman—stood on the highway.
The men were standing in the middle of the road, guns blazing, while Vivi called out, “Congratulations! We won it all!”
They lowered their weapons, smoke rising from the barrels, and slowly turned around to face her.
To Vivi’s surprise, however, her squadmates didn’t look pleased.
Tomtom, the man in the bandana, looked nearly ready to cry. “Um, Goddess, if you’ll forgive me for speaking frankly…”
“What?”
“Is this the end of the game?”
“Of course!”
“Then…that makes us very sad.”
“Why? Even though you won?”
“That’s true, but if we’re honest, we really wanted to shoot some more… We wanted to shoot like crazy…”
“Huh? So you didn’t want to win?”
“Er, well, surviving as long as possible allowed us to fire for the longest amount of time, so that part’s good, but…”
Vivi looked at the mournful Tomtom and the rest of the group, then murmured, “Hmm, maybe I picked the wrong strategy…”
Time of game: two hours and fifty-eight minutes.
Fourth Squad Jam: complete.
Winning team: ZEMAL.
Total shots fired: 234,901.
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