CHAPTER 1

The Battle Is Over, the Day Is Done

September 20, 2026 (Sun)

“Hullo! Hi, Llenn! Good job yesterday!”

Pitohui greeted her with yet another energetic, obnoxious welcome and went in for a big hug, but Llenn dodged out of the way. She was faster than anyone.

They were in a private room at a pub in Glocken, at one fifteen in the afternoon.

About twenty-four hours had passed since the start of the battle to the death known as SJ5. Yes, it was the next day.

“Am I the last one here? Sorry for making everyone wait.”

Everyone else who’d been called here was already present in the rectangular room, aside from Llenn. The group included the five members of LPFM and the six members of SHINC. They could easily fit another ten people around the long table.

After the end of yesterday’s Squad Jam, Llenn had fallen and fallen until she finally hit the ground and died after roughly seventy-five seconds. She suffered quite the impact.

In fact, Llenn had been lulled into a kind of stupor and was so startled by the sudden jolt that the AmuSphere’s safety measures kicked in and shut down the game. She was returned to reality.

As a result, all the aftereffects of her long, protracted battle immediately hit Karen in the form of a headache. So she sent a message to everyone explaining that she wouldn’t be logging back in—and thanked Boss in particular for saving her.

They decided to schedule the LPFM celebration party for the next day, instead, starting at one thirty.

That was pretty prompt scheduling, but since she was the first to return to the real world, she certainly couldn’t ditch this one. Thankfully, she didn’t have any other plans, aside from doing her classwork.

Llenn thought she was showing up early, but she was the last one there.

“You’re not late!” said Clarence, looking dashing and handsome, as always. She had a French fry in her fingers.

“Pito gave you a time thirty minutes later than everyone else’s,” Fukaziroh informed her. She had her helmet off, letting down her smooth golden hair. It really changed her look quite dramatically.

“Oh, dang,” Llenn blurted out. That would explain it, then. “But why?”

“Because we can’t keep the guest of honor waiting, of course. And you did show up pretty early,” Shirley said, eating a potato next to Clarence. “Fuka just got here.”

“Hey, I thought we agreed not to mention that!”

“I didn’t agree to do anything.”

“I thought we agreed not to mention that either!”

“Which I did not.”

Llenn ignored them and went over to Boss. She was still huge, even sitting down.

With a little bob of her head, Llenn said, “Thank you for saving me.”

“You already thanked me yesterday. But you’re welcome.”

Llenn continued to thank each and every member of SHINC, then sat down at the end of the table.

“All right! The guest of honor has seated herself, so the party may begin!”

Of course, they’d already been eating and drinking quite a lot, but that was fine.

“Here,” said M, setting down an iced tea in front of her.

“Thank you, M. Good job yesterday.”

“It was a fantastic battle.”

“In that case, I’ll take the lead!” Pitohui cried energetically. “Before we can toast, I’m going to give a really long, stupid, boring speech that’ll last until all the beer is lukewarm! GG, everybody! Cheers!”

It was one of the shortest speeches in world history.

Llenn had just enough time to take a sip of her iced tea through a straw.

“Okay, party’s over! Time for the SJ5 postmortem!”

One of the shortest parties in world history came to an end, transitioning into a chance for reflection and betterment.

There wasn’t all that much to do, however; they just recollected the battle from the day before, and talked it through with the occasional diversion—in this case, the diversions took up the bulk of the time.

Whether party or postmortem, they were doing basically the same thing, so Llenn didn’t mind. It was more fun doing this than battling, and it was always wonderful to spend quality time with her friends.

So she made an offer. “Maybe we should order some pizza for once. If you eat too much here, it can be dangerous, because it ruins your appetite in the real world… But I could stand to eat a little less for one day.”

“Yeah!” Clarence roared, having just finished off a huge plate of potatoes. How much was she planning to eat?

Pitohui said, “I’m down! What better food for a party than pizza? Let’s get extra-larges! I’m talkin’ the size of a manhole!”

What happened to the postmortem? Llenn wondered but did not say.

“Take it away, M,” Pitohui said, dumping the responsibility on him. “Anchovies, anchovies! And one with pineapple! Let’s get a thin crust! But also one deep-dish! Also, we can get Buffalo wings, right? I’ll take it medium-hot! Also…”

Her love for Kenji Miyazawa was apparent. This was indeed a Restaurant of Many Orders.

“So no one ended up winning that bounty prize,” Llenn mentioned, bringing up the topic she was most curious about. “Who do you think put that out…?”

“Oh, that came up first when we met up today, so we got the answer before you showed up,” Fukaziroh said, to Llenn’s surprise.

“Really?”

After SJ5 yesterday, Karen had mulled over that question quite a lot. If there was an answer, she very much wanted to know it.

“Yeah. We came up with our own answer.”

“And that is?”

“Anyone.”

“Huh?”

“It can be anyone. Ultimately, we don’t know the answer in the current situation, so there’s no point fretting over it.”

“……”

This was a very unsatisfying answer, but if they weren’t going to learn the exact person, then this was clearly the best.

“All right, we’ll go with that.”

Llenn reached out for a piece of the massive pizza that was now resting on the table, piled high with anchovies.

She grabbed it by the crust and carefully angled it upward, supporting the underside with her left hand, keeping the tip pointed upward so that none of the melted cheese dripped off.

“No hesitation, no mistakes in your handiwork. Tell me…are you a giant-pizza connoisseur?” Fukaziroh said theatrically. Llenn ignored her and moved the pizza toward her mouth.

“Let me in!” boomed a man’s voice, right as the door to the room slammed inward.

“Eep!”

Llenn was so startled that she almost stuck the tip of the pizza slice up her nose. Thankfully, her reflexes were quick enough to stop her.

Munch, munch, munch.

The virtual flavors of the acidic tomato sauce, salty anchovies, rich cheese, and piping hot crust mingled in her mouth as she cast a glare at the door. Pondering the identity of the intruder almost caused her to ingest her pizza nasally.

“Who goes there?!” Boss boomed in return. The other members of SHINC looked sharply in the same direction. If they had guns, they’d be pointing the barrels at the door.

Pitohui, meanwhile, had a slice in her hand and looked about as shocked as if it had rained during the rainy season. M’s face was as craggy and impassive as ever. Neither of them budged.

Fukaziroh and Clarence ignored it completely and continued looking over the pizzas to decide which one to try first. Shirley was eyeing the bright-red Buffalo wings and trying to figure out if she could handle their spice or not.

“Forgive the impropriety, as my business is urgent,” said the man, keeping up the theatrical performance. It was a face everyone recognized: David, the leader of the team Memento Mori, which abbreviated to MMTM.

His avatar’s face was handsome, if a bit menacing. Everyone agreed that he had a mind for combat tactics and team leadership. He was tough. Real tough.

As always, he wore Swedish military camo, which featured shades of green and lots of straight lines. A patch of a skull with a knife in its teeth adorned his shoulder.

Naturally, he was unarmed. Even if he had a gun out, the game made it impossible for players to have shoot-outs within Glocken city limits.

Behind him, the swinging door slowly closed. None of his MMTM teammates were with him. He was alone.

“Ohhh, the leader of them Memento Mori boys, eh?” said Fukaziroh in a weird voice, lifting a slice laden with pineapple. She did not bother to support it with her other hand, unlike Llenn, so the tip of the slice did a little bow and dropped a chunk of pineapple wetly onto the table. GGO was realistic about its items to an unnecessary degree.

“I know what you’re after, sonny,” she added.

“Oh?” David said, impressed that they were already aware of the information he’d brought.

“But too bad. You’re not getting a slice of pizza.”

“……”

He regretted his impressed look now, realizing that they were not aware of the information he’d brought.

David strode into the room, said, “I am not here to eat pizza,” reached out to grab a slice of anchovy pizza without permission, and shoved it into his mouth, chewing rapidly.

“Hey! No fair! I’m gonna tell the teacher on you!” Clarence protested childishly.

“Heh. Not bad. Not bad at all,” Fukaziroh said, for some reason. “I’ll allow that slice. But only if you answer my question. How did you know we were here?” she asked as he blissfully devoured the pizza.

Yeah, how did he know? Llenn wondered, munching her own slice. How did he—oh, wow, these anchovies really are good. I can see why they’re not for everyone, but I do like the intense saltiness and oiliness of them—know we were here?

She waited for David’s answer, getting distracted with thoughts of anchovies.

Munch, munch, gulp.

David swallowed and said, “Thank you for the pizza. For my first time trying it, I must say that it was rather tasty. Allow me to answer your question, then: I requested that all of my teammates and everyone else I know inform me if they saw the pink shrimp from GGO today.”

“Oh, so you’re just a stalker. Well, all right, then,” Fukaziroh said. For some reason, that answer satisfied her.

Hell no, that’s not all right! Llenn thought, but her mouth was busy chewing, so she couldn’t say it out loud.

“But it’s not Llenn you’re after, is it? It’s the rest of us,” Pitohui said, after maintaining her silence for a long time. She didn’t sound angry. If anything, she sounded pleased. Then again, Pitohui was the type of person to find the fun in something before she let it get her upset. She really wasn’t one to get angry. Llenn had tried hard to make her mad, very hard. It had been a horrible experience.

“That’s right. I was looking for all of you. I’d like you to hear me out.”

“Sure thing. As long as you pay for all the food and drink,” she said.

Ohhh, Pito’s already trying to rip him off, Llenn thought, but didn’t say that out loud, either.

GGO was a virtual world, but it didn’t mean you could eat and drink for free. Buying meals and snacks in Glocken did require paying with a credit card. They said it was because there was a lot of complicated data that went into recreating flavors and textures. People said that the delicate business of getting accurate flavors was actually the most difficult and costly part of managing a VR game. Even more difficult than pulling off the effects of a battle.

So the table full of pizzas and drinks for twelve represented quite a large expenditure, actually.

“Very well,” David said instantly. “I’ll pay for all of it. You can even order more, if you’d like. But you must hear me out as you eat.”

Pitohui was surprised that he actually accepted her teasing offer. “Aw, damn! I should’ve told you to pay for all the bullets I used in SJ5 yesterday instead.”

“You’re pushing it, Pito,” Llenn said.

“It was this morning.”

David had been given the seat at the head of the long table and was regaling the party with his story.

They were merciless—cruel, even—with the number of extra French fry, salad, and drink orders they put in, but listen they did. Though they were brazen enough to take full advantage of his offer, they weren’t cruel enough to feast on his dime and then completely ignore him.

“Vivi reached out to me. She said, ‘Take part in my minigame and make it to the end.’ In other words, it’s both a challenge and an invitation.”

Oh my!

Llenn was shocked! …But she was also busy scarfing down French fries, so she didn’t say anything out loud.

Vivi, of all people, was running her own minigame, and she had extended an invite to David? She’d always seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t go to those lengths for something like that.

“She also said, ‘It’ll be beneficial for you to bring as many friends as possible.’ I don’t know what kind of game it is.”

“Uh-huh,” murmured Pitohui, speaking for the group. She had known David the longest, so the others let her do the talking.

“Naturally, I will accept her challenge.”

“And what kind of prize awaits the person who makes it to the end of the minigame?” Pitohui asked.

A natural question. She wouldn’t be inviting people to play a game for nothing, Llenn thought but didn’t say aloud because she was busy tucking into her third slice of anchovy pizza.

“Vivi will invite the winner to an IRL meetup.”

Pspsps! Mumble-mumble! Murmur-murmur!

A wave of whispers took over the room.

“Ngulp!”

Llenn was so shocked that she nearly choked on her pizza. Was it even possible to send food down the wrong pipe in VR? She wasn’t brave enough to test it out.

The reactions of the SHINC members were also dramatic. Boss’s eyes were practically bulging out of their sockets, and her nostrils flared. It increased her gorilla quotient approximately 43 percent.

“Ahhh…” Pitohui smirked, despite her surprise. M did nothing more than raise his eyebrows slightly.

But that wasn’t all.

“Uhhwwhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!” screamed Fukaziroh, bolting to her feet. Her rivalry with Vivi ran deeper than the Mariana Trench. Back in Fukaziroh’s home game of ALfheim Online, where all the players were winged fairies, Vivi had been responsible for all of her most bitter defeats and memories.

She thrust a finger rudely at the man at the end of the table and said, “Hey! David Card!”

“That’s not my name. Are you calling me a debit card?”

“Hey! Card!”

“So you are doing it on purpose. Fine, what is it?”

“Is this story true…?”

“Yes, assuming she’s not lying.”

“She wouldn’t lie about it!”

“Then it must be true. I didn’t go to the trouble of asking people to find Llenn or pay for this ridiculously expensive meal for the sake of a joke,” David pointed out.

It convinced Fukaziroh to plop back into her seat.

“My God… What a monumental day… This day is going to go down in VR history…”

The expression on her face told Llenn that Fukaziroh didn’t just sound ridiculous, she actually believed it.

“Is it really that rare for her to say something like that?” Llenn asked her friend.

“Of course!” Fukaziroh snapped. “She never, ever let anything slip about her real life! Not the tiniest bit! Not a speck! Not an atom! If the conversation gets casual enough, even I might accidentally reveal facts about myself, like my beauty, my sexiness, or the fact that I love tripe stew, but she never said a thing!”

“Ah, I see.”

Fukaziroh turned from Llenn back to David. “Hey, Card.”

“What?”

“Card? Is that really your last name?”

“Just get on with it.”

“What, you don’t like Totoro?”

“I love Totoro.”

“Anyway, are you positive it was Vivi who invited you? You sure it wasn’t some other similar-looking character? Or a hallucination you saw after ingesting dangerous mushrooms or experimental substances?”

“Is it really that hard to believe…?”

“Yes. It is. What did you say to Vivi anyway? What could you possibly have told her to provoke such a response? Out with it! Speak, damn you!” Fukaziroh demanded, slapping the table like a frustrated interrogation agent.

“Whoa, look out.” Llenn pulled her glass away before it could tip over.

David, however, kept his cool and said nothing.

“I bet he asked her out or something,” Pitohui murmured.

“What?”

“Huh?”

“Eh?”

The high schoolers in SHINC perked their ears up at that one.

“More or less,” David admitted.

“Kya!”

“Eeek!”

“OMG!”

Squeals filled the room.

When the topic of romance was broached, the teenage girls couldn’t help but revert to their true selves. It was very strange seeing such juvenile reactions from such fearsome avatars. Boss looked terrifying with her facial muscles all slack like that.

“Whew!” whistled Clarence, like the protagonist of a certain classic sci-fi manga with a gun built into his left arm.

“……”

Shirley, meanwhile, ate her Buffalo wings in silence. They weren’t as spicy as they looked. They were pretty tasty, though. Oh, the bones vanish once you finish the meat. I guess the data cost of leaving the model around is too high. Maybe I’ll have another one.

Pitohui teased, “Look out, all you sweet, defenseless girls. This sick bastard is trying to find a girlfriend in an online game.”

“Interpret it however you like. There are countless examples of people who found each other in a game and ended up together,” said David bracingly. He had once tried to ask out Pitohui, too. There was only one trick to finding a partner in an online game: to have no shame.

Fukaziroh fixed David with a withering look. “I see. So, you’re choosing someone else, despite being aware of the adorable avatar of Fukaziroh, who also happens to be pretty bangin’ in real life. Are you blind?”

“I am.”

“Well, that would explain it.”

That was it for their little routine. The jokes ended there.

“In short, Vivi has given me a challenge,” David declared. He was good at rephrasing things to make them sound cooler. “My teammates have agreed to take part.”

That makes sense for MMTM. They’d happily do their part to help the team leader’s romantic chances, Llenn thought but did not say aloud. Ohhh, I’ve never had margherita pizza before. This is really good.

“But the more people we have, the better. Naturally, I want the best possible teammates to help me win. That’s why I’m here. And how fortunate I am that SHINC is here as well,” David added.

“In that case, can I order a hot dog?” Clarence asked. David nodded. “Yippee! Anyone else want one? No? Just me?”

Impressed by her partner’s inability (or refusal) to read the room, Shirley silently sent her a message to order one for her, too. Then she took a sip of her favorite GGO beverage, an iced coffee with sweetener but no cream.

“When?” asked Pitohui, pointing at David with the index finger of the hand holding her cup. It was a very sophisticated, adult move. Like she was at a bar.

“Saturday, the twenty-sixth. Starting at one o’clock, outside the eastern gate. Don’t be late.”

“And the IRL meeting?”

“Sunday, the next day. Same time, one o’clock. The place isn’t clear, but I’ve been told that you can take an ordinary train there from Tokyo Station and still make it back with plenty of time before the end of the day. So it won’t be a problem for me.”

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh, uh-huh,” murmured Pitohui, glancing around the table. “Who among you are the scoundrels who cannot take part in this game?”

“I’ll go! I can go!” said Boss immediately. Around her, the other members of SHINC nodded so forcefully, it looked like they were headbutting.

“Oh.” David looked surprised. He was pleased that SHINC were so eager to help out, but he was confused as to why they would follow Pitohui’s lead so easily.

The answer is because Pitohui is actually Elza Kanzaki. The end, Llenn thought but didn’t say aloud, of course.

“Okay! Then we’ve got twelve right here,” Pitohui said breezily.

Naturally, Shirley interrupted. “Wait a second. I didn’t say anything.”

“Hmm? Oh, you have plans? Eleven, then.”

Pitohui was sharp enough that she knew Shirley would be annoyed to be counted out as much as counted in.

“No plans. But…I guess I could kill a little time with you. Just the game part. I can’t do the IRL thing.”

“Oh, what a wonderful gift from the sniper who sniped me!” Pitohui drawled, after Shirley had finally gotten the kill shot yesterday that she was hoping to score for so long.

That’s a very Pito response, Llenn thought.

“I’m in, too. I’m curious about Vivi’s real identity,” said Clarence, who was dumping as much relish as she possibly could on her hot dog.

“What?” said Shirley with surprise, pausing her ketchup application to look at Clarence.

During SJ4, Clarence had talked about them meeting up in person but never mentioned it again, as though she had forgotten all about it, so this comment took Shirley aback.

“You…you’re gonna go to the meetup?” she asked.

“Huh? No, I can’t. I’m too busy in real life. Berry berry bizzy,” Clarence admitted.

What the hell? Shirley mouthed to herself.

“But if we beat the minigame, then someone gets to go see Vivi in real life, right? Or at least, David will. Right?”

“Why would I not go?” he pointed out.

“Well, I’ll be really curious to hear about whatever you can tell me later. So you’ll owe me a story! That’s my price for joining!”

“Interesting… Very well. You will get a full report from me.”

“Yaaay!”

“I demand to espy her true visage as well—wherever in Japan she may be!” Fukaziroh barked. Miyu (her real name) was in the city of Obihiro in Hokkaido, so any location that was a same day round-trip by normal train from Tokyo was a major trip for her.

But if Miyu cared about something like that, she wouldn’t be Miyu, thought Llenn, though not out loud. It would’ve been a waste of virtual oxygen.

“That’s right! And Llenn’s coming with me!”

“Wait a second,” said Llenn, who had finally tapped out after her fifth slice of pizza.

“What, you’re not? Don’t you want to see her with your actual organic eyeballs? The true Vivi, in the flesh!”

“You make it sound so weird… Though I’ll admit, I do want to go, just because I’d be worried about what you would do on your own… Also, um…I suppose I am a little curious…,” Llenn said, a big admission for such a small person.

“If possible, we’ll come, too!” said Boss, staring at David. The other five did the same, their expressions screaming, Take us!

She continued, “And just between us here…”

“You have my word.”

“Aside from Clarence and Shirley, we know all of them in real life. There’s no issue with us going together. The six of us can handle a round trip from Tokyo. And if Fuka and Llenn go with us, all the better,” she explained.

“Interesting… Well, if you’re able to play the game, you’re certainly welcome on the trip,” David said, surprised. They had his permission.

“Well, this all sounds rather exciting. Maybe I’ll go, too, then,” Pitohui said.

“Huh? Pito…are you sure?” Llenn asked. She could hear SHINC gasping and holding their breath. After all, she was Elza Kanzaki. What if she blew her cover?

But she couldn’t mention all of that around David and Clarence and Shirley. It was out of the question.

“Well, I’m not that busy this weekend, so…”

“That’s not what I…”

“You don’t need to worry about me, Llenn.”

“Really…?” she asked. Do you have a plan in mind?

“And I’d go, even if I was busy.”

“No! That’s not what I mean!”

She doesn’t have a plan at all, Llenn realized.

“I understand your concerns, Llenn,” said Fukaziroh gravely. “Pito’s real-life identity is…shall we say…rather extraordinary.”

In a sense, she was correct.

“If someone reports her to the police, it’ll completely ruin our meetup.”

No, not that extraordinary. It’s not like she was on the Most Wanted list…

“Aha-ha-ha-ha, I’ll be fine,” Pitohui said, downplaying any trouble. “They won’t be able to tell if I’m in a kigurumi, right?”

“Aha! That’s the ticket!” said Fukaziroh, giving her a thumbs-up.

Uh, that’s only going to make her stand out, Llenn thought, but it also occurred to her that it might be better than showing her face as Elza Kanzaki. Could they pass it off as some kind of special event?

“Depends on where it is,” M said, breaking his silence. “If it’s a busy place, you can hide your face well enough with a mask and sunglasses. If that’s not good enough, I’ll go, and you can be on camera phone.”

Good old M. He always has solid advice, Llenn thought, relieved.

M, whose real name was Goushi Asougi, had to be used to this sort of thing. Elza was the kind of person who didn’t like being cooped up in real life.

That reminded her of the time that she went to a store to buy an AM.45 air gun, but because she couldn’t remove her mask and sunglasses, they couldn’t confirm she was an adult, and Karen had to go pick it up for her. So maybe Elza could walk the streets with less trouble than she imagined.

“Guess we’ll have to go with that, then.”

After hearing all of this, David had to realize that Pitohui’s real identity was a whopper of some kind. But because of that, he just said, “Well, it sounds like you’ve got your issue sorted out,” to suggest that he didn’t care in the slightest.

He had tried asking out Pitohui once before, but he came to realize that she was bad news in real life, in a variety of ways, and had avoided any connection to her there since then.

Plus, he was pining for the fair Vivi now. And he did not double-time anyone.

“So I suppose we’re all clear now. I’m glad I came,” David said, waved his hand, and started fiddling with his inventory control panel. Of course, he was the only person who could see it.

From the wallet on the panel, he used the GGO currency, credits, to pay the bill for the food before them.

All thirteen of them had eaten their fill, so the price was nothing to laugh at. It came out to roughly the same cost as a pretty good pistol. That said, David didn’t even flinch at the total.

“Come to the interior side of the eastern gate of Glocken next Saturday at twelve forty-five. Fully equipped.”

He put his wallet away and stood up from his chair. He didn’t leave his contact information behind as a sign that he trusted Llenn and her whole group. Or maybe he just didn’t want Pitohui getting that information.

“Okey-dokey. You got it, mister,” said Pitohui lackadaisically, waving her hand. “I got a free meal, I heard some interesting details about Vivi’s game and her real identity, and I love tearin’ shit up, so I guess I’ll show up to kick some ass. Thanks for dinner. What about the rest of you? Anyone gonna thank the nice man?”

She sounded like a teacher. The others all chimed in to say, “Thanks for the meal.”

“I value your skill, all of you. I have high hopes,” David said.

“Good, good. We’re so pro at this, you Memento Mori boys can just be backup for the dozen of us and have a chill time,” Pitohui taunted him.

David was in love, however, and had no time to be distracted by that.

“Looking forward to it. See you on Saturday.”

CHAPTER 2

Sunny with a Chance of Mille-Feuille

It was Thursday, September 24.

Saturday would be the challenge from Vivi, the minigame day, so Karen Kohiruimaki spent her every waking moment in GGO honing her skills for the big day—that is to say…she was also regularly attending her college classes, of course.

Fall semester in the eighth year of the Reiwa era started today, after a long weekend. She was a college student, so she couldn’t afford to neglect her studies. Karen was a good student.

At night, however, she did lots of practice and repetition in the living room of her rental apartment, where her black P90 airsoft gun hung from the coat rack…

“Quit being so damn serious all the time, Kohi!”

At least until Miyu called her up out of the blue to interfere. Karen decided to treat it as a nice little breather and told herself that once a certain amount of time had passed, she would just hang up on her.

As usual on their calls, Miyu’s voice was echoing wildly, meaning that she was in the middle of a nice long bath for beauty and health purposes. The thing about her long baths was that they were so long, her family always complained. There was a time when the Shinohara family was seriously considering either having another bath installed or forcing Miyu to get her own place to live.

“Anyway, have you been diving into GGO every day since then, Kohi?”

“No! We just did SJ5 on Saturday.”

“Gah! This is the problem with you students!”

“You’re in school, too.”

“You shouldn’t even need to think about which is more important, classes or GGO training.”

“You’re right. Classes.”

“Did you know that since you’re not around, I just shoot grenades around the dry and dusty landscape all by my lonesome?”

“I don’t feel like ‘lonesome’ is a word that deserves to be in the same sentence as ‘grenades’…”

“Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Card’s love life, Kohi.”

“Hmmm…”

Karen was conflicted. She had been thinking about this ever since Sunday.

Card—er, David—er, David’s real-life person—was trying to woo Vivi’s real-life person. That was his own life to do with as he pleased. But did she feel comfortable offering her own wholehearted encouragement—to be an onlooker whistling and hooting for the would-be couple?

“It’s fine. Vivi said he could bring friends,” Miyu said.

“Ugh! What are you, psychic?!”

“I can read your every thought, Kohi. How many decades have we known each other?”

“We’re twenty.”

“Don’t think too hard about it. ‘We might have been born apart, but we do everything we can for the love lives of strangers.’ Don’t you remember when we made that promise, on that day, in that place?”

“I don’t know who you made that promise with, or where, or when—but we’re already signed up, so I guess I’m riding it out.”

“That’s the Kohi I know. I’m in love all over again. Anyway, the reason I called you today is…”

“Wait, that wasn’t the point?”

“Look at this news article,” Miyu said. Karen’s smartphone vibrated briefly. She had sent over a URL to a news website through a messaging app.

The headline read: Award from Akita Prefecture for Games.

It was kind of hard to parse what that headline meant at first glance.

“Hang on, I’ll read it,” Karen said, clicking the article link.

In short, there was a game creator who had been prolific and active for many years, and her most popular series of games were set in Akita Prefecture, causing its passionate fans to make regular pilgrimages to Akita. She was now receiving an award from the beaming prefectural governor of Akita.

It wasn’t a full-dive series but a classic traditional RPG, which were still quite popular. The series began twenty years ago, changing platforms over the years, and now the eighth installment was out. Akita was the setting for every entry, and various locations in the prefecture were used as settings in the games, so it raised the recognition of the area across the country.

There was also a short video to watch. It featured the series creator, dressed in a suit, walking into the office of the Akita prefectural governor to receive her award.

“All right, I’ve read it and watched it. So what is this?” Karen asked, examining the image of the fifty-something game creator, whose name was Tokiko Isobe.

She had a petite build and wore round glasses that framed her chubby face. It was a sweet and kindly face, like those adorable tanuki statues from Shigaraki. All she needed was a rounded sake decanter to complete the image.

“I’ve been aware of Ms. Isobe’s name since elementary school. She’s a hardcore gamer.”

“Well, if she’s making games, I would think so.”

Even before full-dive games came along, Miyu loved games of all kinds, from smartphone games to consoles. Karen, meanwhile, had never really played anything prior to GGO.

“What about her?” she asked.

“Watching the video made me think… Does she seem familiar to you?”

“Huh? Familiar how?” Karen asked, unsure of whom Miyu was referencing.

“Come on, it’s been the topic all week! Vivi, obviously! Vivi’s Week!”

“Oh, right…”

“Did you notice that I was making a pun on ‘Vivi’s Week’ and ‘Vivi’s weak’?”

“Only once you pointed it out. Also, she’s not weak in the slightest.”

“Like I don’t know that,” Miyu muttered. Karen looked at the image on the screen again.

Tokiko Isobe and Vivi. Vivi and Tokiko Isobe.

She played the video back, paying particular attention to the way she walked down the hall, entered the office, and shook the governor’s hand.

Vivi was a GGO avatar, so naturally there would be no resemblance there.

But in full-dive games, each avatar was controlled by the player’s senses, so while it was a virtual body, there was often a bit of reality in the way the person controlling it moved. Particularly when it came to unremarkable actions. Things like how you held your chopsticks or ate food, the way you put down your feet when going down the stairs, how you waved when saying good-bye, and the like.

Sometimes you could recognize a person by getting them to perform highly disciplined, trained actions. Dead giveaways if they happened to dance, or jump rope, or perform kendo, for example.

All of these things together could be seen as “bearing a resemblance” to an avatar’s player in real life.

Karen thought back on all the many times she’d seen Vivi moving around in GGO and ultimately concluded, “Umm…I don’t know. But you know Vivi much better than I do, and you’ve seen her different avatar in ALO, so if you say they seem similar, you could be right.”

Ignore the fact that until the end of SJ4, when Vivi smiled and introduced herself to Fukaziroh, Fuka hadn’t recognized her at any point. Karen was nice like that.

“Obviously, I can’t be sure of it at this stage. But when I saw this article, it just lit up my brain. Like, the LEDs on the side of my head were flashing.”

“Ahhh.”

“This is a woman’s intermission.”

“You mean ‘intuition’?”

“Yeah, that’s the word. You’re so smart, Kohi.”

“Just get on with it.”

“So my intuition says, I can’t be certain, but I think it’s highly probable that Ms. Isobe is Vivi. I would put money on it, in fact.”

“Just from this?”

“There’s other evidence. For one, of course, she’s a heavy gamer. Also, the past year or two has been a recharging period for her. She’s been taking some time away from game development to relax. Also, she’s superrich because of her hit games. Vivi had barely spent any time in GGO since converting from ALO, but she had some pretty sweet gear, right?”

“Good point…”

“Her skill with getting the best of people comes from her years of experience leading a team, which makes sense. She’s decades ahead of us there.”

“No doubt.”

“And it makes sense that she knows so much about battling if she had to research it to make her games. She’s such a diligent study that I’ve heard she went to tour an automotive plant because she wanted to put cars in her own game. And that she asked the SDF for help when she wanted to depict a combat scene. She’s also a big history buff, which would explain her understanding of tactics and strategy. Also, her favorite samurai general from the Warring States period is Tsuchiya Masatsune.”

Karen was surprised; she’d thought this was just a wild whim on Miyu’s part, but no, she had been a real detective. Also, she had never heard of that samurai in her life. Very sorry, sir. I’ll look you up later.

“If Tokiko Isobe’s next idea is for a full-dive game using the Seed, then she can just play ALO or GGO or whatever game she fancies for research. Maybe she’s been cavorting around through other games that we don’t even know about, and she uses real money to get all the items she needs. She can write them off as expenses during tax season. Also, her family is rich, so she’s set no matter what.”

“Oh really?”

“What, you didn’t know that? She’s the daughter of a famous politician, Kohi. Remember Minister Isobe, about thirty years ago?”

Karen wasn’t expecting a minister to be brought up. “Um, well, if I’m being honest…I don’t know about ministers from before I was born,” she admitted. She was ignorant, it was true, but Japanese cabinets and ministers changed all the time. If she didn’t know him, she didn’t know him.

“We’re talking about someone fairly famous, who could have potentially been prime minister…but, fine. I don’t really know that much, either. But I remember that this minister was from the family that owned one of the big conglomerates. In other words, superrich.”

“I see.”

“And that’s why it was notable that the family’s daughter was not a politician but an elite game designer.”

“Ohhh…”

Karen was honestly impressed by Miyu’s knowledge. It made her want to pay more attention to the news and learn more about the world, rather than just playing games all the time. She’d limit herself to two hours a day.

“Now it’s time to get to the real topic.”

“What? You still weren’t at the point?”

This was turning out to be a very long preamble. Karen really needed to get back to her college studies.

“If it turns out that Tokiko Isobe is Vivi, as I suspect…things are going to get really interesting!” Miyu burbled excitedly.

“How so?” Karen asked. She had no idea. Then she remembered the point of all of this. “Oh, right! David was trying to ask Vivi out…”

That was why they were going to fight on Saturday. To assist David in his love life.

“Exactly! When he begs and hires his rivals for help to beat this game, and it turns out that she’s a plump old lady, what’s David going to think?”

“Hmmm.” Llenn thought. They didn’t know what David was like in real life. There was a chance that he was in his fifties, just like Tokiko Isobe…

“No, he’s gotta be younger. Thirties, at the oldest. But not in his twenties. He’s a little too calm for that.”

“Stop reading my mind. Anyway, I agree.”

“Just imagining the look on his face fills my heart with glee.”

“Bad taste!”

“Look, he wanted this.”

Yeah, I suppose that’s true, Karen admitted to herself.

“Anyway, we’re guests in this game, so let’s enjoy it. There’s no betrayal like M’s in SJ1, no being manipulated by a demon like in SJ2, no back-and-forth betrayals like in SJ3, no…whatever happened in SJ4…”

“If you forgot, that’s all the better.”

“I remember now! No getting dumped like in SJ4!”

“Ugh…”

“And no enormous bounties placed on your head like in SJ5. We can just have fun and enjoy the game!” said Miyu, cheerier than usual. But then again, she was always cheery, so it was even cheerier than that.

“All right…I get it,” Karen acknowledged. She waited several seconds, and when Miyu didn’t read her mind, she said, “So…you just want to beat your rival Vivi and find out who she is, don’t you?”

“I hate perceptive women like you.”

“You said that before. I’ve heard that phrase a lot, what is it from?”

“Gaaaaah! You didn’t know?! The author’s from Hokkaido, just like us!”

Saturday, September 26.

The day of Vivi’s minigame had arrived.

At exactly 11:55, the time of the meetup, Llenn and Fukaziroh arrived at the central fountain of Glocken to a greeting from Pitohui.

“Yoo-hoo! You made it on time. Good girls!”

Of course, this was because Llenn, meaning Karen, had been bombarding Miyu all morning with obnoxious calls to make sure she wasn’t late. She did not let her eat any ice cream first.

“Good morning, Pito and M,” said Llenn, hiding her usual pink battle fatigues under a dark brown robe. M was hovering over Pitohui’s shoulder like a ghost.

“Greetings! It is perfect Vivi-identity-exposing weather!” said Fukaziroh, wearing a robe like always, her eyes sparkling.

What kind of weather is that? Llenn wondered but did not say.

In real time, it was nearly October in Tokyo, but it was a horribly humid day already. You couldn’t afford to turn off the A/C for even a second. Miyu’s home in Obihiro, Hokkaido, had been rained on for two days, however, and was quite cool.

The world of GGO, as always, was neither hot nor cold but just right. It was so nice that it made you not want to go back to reality.

“If only I could stay in VR forever…how nice would that be?” every full-dive gamer had thought at least once in their life.

But the only ones who succeeded at that were the people trapped inside SAO, or the ones who used the Medicuboid, the full-dive machine for palliative care.

If you really wanted to call that “success.”

The meeting with David was at the eastern gate at twelve forty-five. They still had nearly an hour.

The reason for the early rendezvous was not to share a quick pre-gaming drink but to stock up on items and ammunition first. This one wasn’t a Squad Jam, so there weren’t any major item restrictions—they could use what they wanted. The instructions hadn’t been clear, but if anything was truly off-limits, Vivi would have made it known first.

Healing items were especially important. Though it was exorbitantly expensive, they would take along an Instant Medkit, a magical injection gun that would restore your HP to full with a single shot. It wouldn’t do for anyone to get killed before they achieved their goal.

The foursome headed through the city. Pitohui and M were on the tall side, while Llenn and Fukaziroh had two of the smallest avatars in GGO. They made for quite the mismatched quartet.

First, they went into a large shopping mall. It was early on a Saturday, so the shops were packed with players. Sadly, this being a game, female avatars were always susceptible to catcalling, but Pitohui’s reputation had gotten around, and no one was foolish enough to bother her. That would make their shopping excursion much easier.

“Do you have enough ammo, Llenn?” Pitohui asked sweetly. If she said no, Pito would probably buy her a refill, but sadly, Llenn was already fully stocked.

Karen’s diligent personality forced her to keep Llenn prepared at all times. She had just about filled her carrying capacity with 5.7 × 28 mm ammo for P-chan, her P90, and 45-caliber ACP rounds for the Vor-chans, her two Vorpal Bunny pistols.

You didn’t even need to log in to GGO to buy items; all it took was a few taps on her smartphone to stock up. Of course, many people preferred the manual experience of diving in and buying them in person.

“Llenn’s got it covered. The problem is me,” said Fukaziroh, her always understanding partner. “Grenades cost too freakin’ much. And when you shoot them, they don’t come back.”

She was like a child saying, This sucks! When you eat your candy, it’s gone forever!

“Ah, well. M will buy that for you.”

“Score!”

Llenn side-eyed her friend. She was much too used to getting what she wanted out of people.

“What kind should I get, though?” asked Fukaziroh. Her weapons were MGL-140s, six-shooting revolving grenade launchers, which she dubbed Rightony and Leftania. They fired 40 mm grenades.

There were a number of types, however, from traditional hi-spec shrapnel-spewing explosive grenades to the smoke grenades she used in SJ2 to illumination grenades with parachutes attached, and so on. But perhaps most important were the plasma grenades, which were a fictional item that existed only in GGO.

Each one cost dozens of times as much as a rifle bullet, even hundreds of times as much in the case of a plasma grenade. Only richie-riches allowed. Fukaziroh made pretty good bank, but she also spent it just as fast, because she would blast away at fairly mediocre enemies without considering the cost.

To be frank, she had overkill issues. But it also meant that Fukaziroh’s skill with aiming the grenade launchers had improved considerably with practice.

“Go ahead and get her all the regular kind she can carry, and about twelve plasmas,” Pitohui said generously. She often sounded like she was joking, but in this case, she was dead serious.

Plasma grenades were tremendously powerful, but that made it difficult to use them effectively, and you just couldn’t take that many with you, no matter how much money you had.

For example, if there was an ally anywhere near the enemy, you couldn’t fire a plasma grenade. Unless you wanted to kill your teammate, too. In that case, bombs away.

There was also the danger of chain explosions. If Fukaziroh was under heavy gunfire and a bullet hit a grenade on her person or loaded into her launcher, a plasma grenade would blow up everything within a radius of thirty feet. That could easily wipe out an entire team in the wrong situation.

It was a fact of games that the most powerful items were often the trickiest to use.

“Got it,” Fukaziroh said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to borrow your wallet—I mean, M.”

“And get three of those injections for each person, M,” Pitohui added.

“All right.”

Fukaziroh led M away. Llenn expected that she would just hang out until they were done. But Pitohui looked down at her and said, “Well, now that the others are conveniently out of our hair, I have some special advice for you.”

“What’s that?” Llenn asked, looking up at her.

“If you end up facing off with Vivi today, you should ease up on the offense at the start.”

“Why?” asked Llenn. As the fastest, she usually ended up in an offensive role. The others would keep the enemy hiding behind cover, while Llenn rushed forward and hit them from before.

If the occasion arose today, she was expecting to rush up on Vivi. Why would she hold back from doing that?

“Because Fuka will probably attack her herself if you don’t.”

“Oh…definitely.”

Those two fought like cats and dogs, if that saying ever applied to anyone.

“And while Fuka gets tunnel vision and recklessly fights with Vivi, we’ll hold down the machine gunners. Then you can aim for Vivi. And in that case…”

“Yes?”

“You can shoot through Fuka if you need to. That’s the kind of thing you’ll need to do to beat Vivi.”

“Got it…”

Llenn was impressed that Pitohui already had this plan in her head. But there was another thought in her head, too.

I can’t tell Fuka about this.

When the shopping was done, the four of them walked to the eastern gate of Glocken. If you wanted to leave to go into the wilderness, you had to leave through one of the city’s many gates.

“This is a video game, so you should make it so we can leave with the press of a button,” some people complained, but they were in the minority. Knowing that when a battle was finished, you had to get back on your own, watching out for PKers, just made the game that much more exciting.

Plus, among all the varied full-dive games, not just GGO, the starting town was always a safe zone where players could relax and let their guards down. There was no fighting in town, so players enjoyed strolling around, window shopping, and drinking in the atmosphere.

So shouldn’t there be more full-dive games where you just went on walks? Wouldn’t they be quite popular? You would think so…

But the funny thing was, they weren’t.

People just demanded more gameplay out of their games.

GGO was one of the few sci-fi games. It had ruined buildings separated by filthy alleys, but with loud, neon-lit stores on their ground floors, illuminated in the middle of the day. It was hard to tell if the city was falling into ruin or flourishing, and that was an aesthetic that people enjoyed.

“Ooh, a new gun store over here! Is it player-run? Think they have any good ones?”

“Not today, Pito.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah! Bookmark this location!”

The four continued walking without stopping by.

“Hello, everyone!” said a deep voice behind them.

Llenn didn’t need to turn to see who it was. And when she did, she was correct. It was Boss and the rest of SHINC.

As usual, the Amazons were in intimidating form. Their uniform was a green speckled camo pattern. They hadn’t equipped their gear and weapons yet. It was always better to go light in town.

“Hi!” Pitohui said, with a smile and a wave. “Hello!”

The women all hit a perfect forty-five-degree bow. It was in perfect sync. Because their avatars were on the large and burly side, it made them look like they belonged to the mob.

Naturally, the reason for their formal salute was that Pitohui was Elza Kanzaki.

That reminds me, when did I stop caring about that? I forget, Llenn thought, a haiku that neither fit the right number of syllables nor contained any proper seasonal terms.

Naturally, the man who suggested this was on time.

At 12:40, the group arrived at their destination, the square before the eastern gate, a simple concrete-encased assemblage of rubble, where they were met by David and MMTM, all in a row.

They wore matching camo of right angles and had all their gear and holsters attached. The guns were materialized and placed on their backs or at their feet. They were ready for battle and ready to rock.

David said, “Thank you for taking part” and bowed slowly but deeply.

He was a very diligent and responsible man. Llenn wasn’t sure how she should react.

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Pitohui drawled.

Oh, like that, she realized.

“We intend to lay waste to our foes,” was Boss’s deep response. She sounded like a samurai. On the inside, she was a teenage girl.

MMTM was a team known for their balanced firepower and excellent coordination, which they could utilize without speaking.

David, the leader, used a Steyr STM-556 assault rifle with a single-shot grenade launcher under the barrel. The grenades could keep foes at a distance, and his sniping skill helped him pick off any targets that popped up.

The straight line of a rifle shot and the arc of a grenade launcher caused entirely different bullet lines, and it could be difficult to identify which was coming in the moment, which was what made it so effective as a tactic.

His sidearm was the M9A, a 9 mm Parabellum pistol from the same company. All of his teammates used the Beretta APX, but he chose to be different. He also had an APX.

Since Pitohui had turned him to sashimi in SJ2, he also carried around a lightsword, since it weighed almost nothing. He lost their duel on the bridge of the cruise ship in SJ3, but he swung it well.

Jake, the slender one, used a 7.62 mm HK21 machine gun. He was excellent at providing covering fire for his teammates. It involved shooting a ton of bullets, so his ammo costs were the highest of the group.

Bold, who was recognized by his fashionable dreadlocks, shot a Beretta ARX160 assault rifle.

Kenta, the black-haired one named for his love of a certain fried chicken franchise, used an HK G36K assault rifle.

The last two were shock troopers who often took the lead position. They took the most damage, but that was part of the job. They literally put their bodies on the line for their comrades.

The largest of the group was Summon, who was also the newest. Still, he’d been around for several Squad Jams and had plenty of experience. He used a SCAR-L, an assault rifle that was prized in GGO for its excellent specs.

The previous four all used assault rifles with the same ammo, so they could share magazines. They all had pouches on their backs so that their teammates behind them could grab a fresh set when needed.

Almost no other squadron in the game was so complete in its attention to detail. GGO was a game populated by gun freaks, so most of them threw tantrums and said, “I wanna use my favorite guns!”

They tended to be very self-sufficient, or at least self-satisfied with their own way of doing things, so the thought of using guns with the same ammo type was against the common philosophy. Not so with MMTM.

The last member was the shades-wearing Lux, the only true sniper of the group. He was also the biggest firearms fanatic and had used a variety of weapons across all Squad Jams.

In SJ5, he used a rare FD338, which could use powerful .338 Lapua rounds in auto mode. He’d terrorized Llenn’s team with the power and speed of his gun in the final battle at the castle.

This was the first time she got to see the FD338, which was propped up on a bipod at his feet. It was slim but long, and it looked powerful. Llenn didn’t want to get shot with that one.

At the end of SJ5, Lux was a ghost, and got shot the heck up by M, who was also a ghost. Llenn saw the FD338 get hit, too, but the game had determined that weapons in that mode couldn’t get busted up.

MMTM were a real hassle to fight as foes, but this time they were allies.

Hopefully, Llenn muttered to herself.

In both SJ and this minigame, rules tended to get revealed after you showed up, and it regularly turned friends into foes, and foes into friends.

They wouldn’t know what rules Vivi had devised until they were underway. She was a dyed-in-the-wool gamer, so she wouldn’t create rules that made the game impossible to beat. But neither would she make it easy.

I agreed to this, so I’m going to take it seriously, Llenn thought, feeling a surge of determination. N-not that I’m rooting for David’s romance to succeed, just because mine was a failure!

She didn’t say that one out loud. She just couldn’t.

The second hand of the watch—well, it was digital, so it was just a readout—crossed 12:44 and 0 seconds.

It was now less than a minute until the meeting time, and not everyone was present.

“Miss Pitohui! Shirley and Clarence are tardy!” Fukaziroh said, raising her hand.

“Then we’ll leave them behind,” Pitohui said mercilessly.

“There’s still time. They can come to the gate at one,” David noted, revealing to all that they still had fifteen minutes. “I had you come a bit early for an equipment check and some strategic planning.”

He was a diligent man. Was this just what men were like when romance was on the line?

“He’s driven by the power of love!” teased Pitohui, wasting no time.

David thoroughly ignored her and asked all the others, “Does anyone have any major weapon changes?”

This was very important. A different gun meant fighting with different tactics. MMTM’s display of their guns was to send the message that they were going with their typical loadout.

“All right, I’ll start,” said Pitohui. “No. The end.”

That was quick.

“Neither do we,” added Boss, just as quickly.

“I appreciate the brevity. Just as I expected,” he replied.

In the recent SJ5, special rules allowed for a secondary loadout, which another member of the team would carry for you.

For example, M had the Alligator anti-materiel rifle, while Pitohui had an MG5 machine gun. Those were both powerful weapons, but they weren’t involved this time. M went with his M14 EBR, and Pitohui with her KTR-09. It was best to go with what you were used to using.

For the same reason, Llenn and Fukaziroh couldn’t use their fearsome PM—the Pseudo-Trash-Can Two-Man Human-Powered Armored Vehicle. Even if she wanted to use it again. It had worked out great.

“We won’t know what kind of game awaits us until we start,” David explained. “This is Vivi, so I expect it will be difficult, unexpected, possibly shocking, and entertaining.”

“But we’ll destroy her!” Fukaziroh shouted, like an excitable hype man.

It might sound like she’s all in to support David’s romantic hopes, but she is not. She’s just at the level cap for the seething rage that’s built up since her fairy days, Llenn thought but did not say.

Whatever he might have thought of this, David continued, “I would like to be flexible for this, and I think that means that each of our three teams should work separately. Anything that involves lots of cross-team work, like the castle siege in the August six-teenth playtest or the crab battle in the Five Ordeals, should only be undertaken if we have plenty of time to come up with a strategy.”

Neither LPFM nor SHINC had any objections to this.

The other times, the enemy NPCs guarding the castle—or the gigantic crab made of combined mecha-dragons—were too tough to handle, forcing the teams to work together. This time, the three squads were on the same side, but working as one giant team of eighteen would be very difficult. There was too much to keep track of for any one person to order them all around.

“Yep, yep, bingo,” said Pitohui.

“Understood,” Boss added.

“That’s all from me. Your assistance is appreciated,” David said seriously, bringing the strategy meeting to a close.

“Hey, everybody, you’re all here so early!” said Clarence obnoxiously, showing up quite late.

“Sorry we didn’t make it on time,” said the killer sniper Shirley, who was much more sensible.

Their outfits and gear were the same as ever. They had their weapons out in the open. Perhaps intentionally.

Clarence had an AR-57, which used the same magazines as Llenn’s gun, hanging from her neck, while Shirley’s R93 Tactical 2 rifle was slung over her back.

“It’s fine. You’ll still be in time to deploy. Get the debriefing from your teammates,” David said, being the mature one. They still had three minutes until the hour, so technically speaking, they weren’t late.

Shirley noticed the sunglasses pointed directly toward her. Lux had his eyes trained right on her from just a few yards away. He grinned and said, “Green-haired sniper. You really got me last time. You’re a hell of a shot.”

Without a hint of a smile, Shirley replied, “Same to you. It took a lot of work to get rid of you.”

They had shared a furious tower-to-tower sniping battle in SJ5. A sense of prideful chivalry arose between the two combatants.

“What about me? Anyone have anything nice to say about me?” asked Clarence, brushing that chivalry aside like smoke on the wind.

Less than a minute before one o’clock.

“All right, let’s go,” said David.

Eighteen sets of boots marched toward the eastern gate.

They made their way through a darkened tunnel about thirty feet tall, and beyond that was wilderness.

When the spaceship Glocken crash-landed on the ruined Earth, it tore up all of the land around it, which was why the area around the city was a rocky, wild wasteland.

The tall, tightly packed buildings were behind them now, leaving nothing but reddish sky and open expanses before them. In ordinary circumstances, the players of GGO spent their time passing through the wilderness, defeating enemies, and searching ruins for loot.

No one gave any orders, but MMTM naturally took the lead, with LPFM following and SHINC forming the rear guard.

The procession was accompanied by a whole lot of metal clanking and clunking and clanging. Bullets were loaded from magazines to chambers, or via manual bolt. Some kept the bolt pulled back. Others were jamming their machine gun ammo belt in.

They were the sounds of guns baring their fangs. Each gun and caliber had its own unique loading sound, and in total, it formed something of a symphony.

Once they were even a single step outside of Glocken, they were targets. Someone could choose to attack them at any time.

Llenn kept her eye on the horizon and whispered to her partner, “Let’s kick some ass today, P-chan.”

Then, much louder, she said to no one in particular, “So what happens now?”

No one knew the answer. From what David had said, all that Vivi specified was that they were to leave the eastern gate at one o’clock.

MMTM came to a stop a hundred yards from the gate. They stayed wary, because they could be PKed from this spot, but at the moment there was no one in visible range.

“Nobody around. The eastern gate’s not really a place to congregate,” Clarence commented. It was common knowledge to any GGO player. Outside of the eastern gate was somewhat of a tutorial area where only weak enemies were found. Once you were a certain strength, it simply wasn’t worth coming over here anymore.

“Hey, everyone!” Clarence shouted again. The other seventeen tensed up, looking around for danger. “Did anyone notice that I made a pun with ‘gate’ and ‘congregate’?” she continued.

Immediately, they all wished they hadn’t reacted.

“Trucks! From the northeast!” announced Kenta, the scout from MMTM, going into a crouch.

They all reacted as one, dropping their center of gravity but staying on their feet for better mobility. Snipers used the scopes on their rifles to see, while others with monoculars or binoculars like Llenn, David, and Boss took them out.

Llenn, in particular, kept getting her monocular broken or lost, so each time M bought her a new one.

“Three vehicles. Eight hundred yards and closing,” Kenta continued. His voice was not amplified.

That reminded her that the whole group wasn’t synced up with communication items. But for now, she just followed the stated direction with her lens.

A trio of hooded green military trucks was driving toward them in a row, kicking up a cloud of dust. Llenn increased the zoom on her lens to get a better look.

“It’s the machine gunners,” Boss announced. She was quicker.

“Aha. Are they here to pick us up?” Clarence wondered. “Hey, Shirley, take a shot at them to see.”

Fortunately, Shirley was a sensible person and ignored that dangerous suggestion.

Llenn had a good view at the trucks now. She could see the driver of each one. Naturally, she recognized the three drivers as members of ZEMAL.

The one driving the left truck was Huey, the one with the brown, slicked-back hair. It was an American truck, so the wheel was on the left.

The driver of the middle truck was the smallest member of ZEMAL (though still pretty large), Peter, who kept tape over his nose. And on the right was the black-haired Shinohara, who’d suffered a grisly murder at the hands of Fukaziroh back in SJ5.

It wasn’t possible to see their weapons from here. They used very long machine guns and special backpacks with over a thousand rounds of auto-loading ammo, plus the belts, so it would be weird if you could see them in the driver’s seat. They had to be stashed away in inventory space right now.

They were wearing green fleece jackets, their squad uniform. Their trademark was an insignia on the right breast of an ammo belt in an infinity symbol. Their pants weren’t visible from here, but they obviously weren’t going to be showing up in their underwear, so it was presumably the usual black combat pants.

“Let’s assume they’re here to greet us. Remain on standby, weapons down. Watch for trouble,” David said, presumably to MMTM, but the other twelve listened and obeyed. They would wait until the trucks arrived.

Naturally, they stayed vigilant. Some other random player could attempt to PK them from any direction, so they made sure they were ready to shoot back at a moment’s notice.

For example, the other three players on the team could be hidden under the hoods of the trucks, pop out and shoot them, and then claim it was “game over.” It would be a nasty trick, but they couldn’t rule it out at this point.

Or maybe the other ZEMAL members were approaching from a different direction, using the trucks as decoys. Or some random players that had nothing to do with the minigame might attack.

Llenn had P-chan loaded with the safety disengaged. Playing a lot of GGO teaches you never to let your guard down, she thought.

She didn’t know yet if that would ever be useful in her real life.

The trucks stopped about a hundred feet away, probably to keep the dust clouds away.

“Greetings, honored guests! Thank you for your patience! We’re here to pick you up!” said Huey, getting out of the car. His newfound courtesy was a bit creepy, but at least it didn’t seem they were about to fight.

Kenta from MMTM, M from LPFM, and Tanya from SHINC walked forward to inspect the truck beds. No one and nothing was in them.

Wearing a smile (as he usually did), Huey addressed the group.

“Our goddess of machine guns”—that was Vivi—“bids us to welcome you and deliver you to the first location of our game. Pick whichever truck you like; they’re all going to the same place.”

If he was lying, there wasn’t much they could do about it anyway, so David said, “Shall we split up by squads?”

They grouped up and climbed the ladders into the truck beds.

LPFM didn’t exactly pick and choose. They just wound up in Peter’s truck, because it was the closest to Pitohui when she said, “Everyone get in! Looks like we’re getting a free ride!”

If it had been Shinohara’s truck, there might’ve been concerns about trouble with Fukaziroh, but that land mine had been avoided, thankfully.

“We’re all loaded up! Let’s get going!” Huey called out.

Bwah, bwah, bwaaaahhh!

The trucks blared their horns and pulled U-turns.

In keeping with their nature as machine gunners, their driving was equally brazen. They stomped on the gas, ratcheted up the gears, and blazed a path through the wasteland at top speed. It was rather impressive that they could each handle a manual transmission so well, though. The only question was whether they could always drive manual, or if Vivi had trained them. Probably the latter.

Meanwhile, in the back of the trucks, the wooden benches proved quite hard and bumpy on the bottom.

“This isn’t the first game, is it? Ass endurance!” Clarence cackled.

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Pitohui said, looking out the window—meaning that she just flipped up the corner of the tent cover to look outside.

“Why not?” Clarence asked, peeling back the tent to look for herself. The others were curious enough to follow suit.

“Ugh!” Llenn blanched immediately. All they could see outside was milky white. “Mist!”

It was misty outside. That thick mist that had tormented them so much at the start of SJ5 the other day was back. It had only taken a few seconds for the trucks to be engulfed in it. The nearest truck, carrying SHINC, was barely visible anymore.

“Hey, don’t they tell you to slow down in heavy fog when you go to driving school?” remarked Fukaziroh. The truck had not adjusted its speed at all.

“We’re not going to crash, are we?” asked Shirley. She was not a confident driver and was familiar with the dangers of heavy fog, being a resident of Hokkaido.

“We’re good,” said Pitohui confidently. “The machine gunners can see just fine.”

“I see… Well, the game master is Vivi in this instance,” said Shirley, convincing herself.

Llenn bought the premise, too. The thick mist was designed to cover their tracks on the way to the game’s arena. Once they were through, no other random player would be able to get inside, most likely.

They could have simply used teleportation, like Squad Jam or other minigames, but it was a little too easy and didn’t have the same effect as a seamless in-game travel period.

“Just like a game designer,” Fukaziroh whispered into Llenn’s ear with a smirk.

Stop reading my mind, Llenn thought but did not say. If she did say it, she had a feeling that Pitohui and the others would have some questions for her.

But she did make a mental note to keep in mind, for the rest of their little game, that Vivi could very well turn out to be the famous game designer, Tokiko Isobe.

Between the wild driving and the fog, it felt like a very long ride, but the total commute time was actually only three minutes. When the wristwatch Llenn kept pointed to the inside of her left wrist said 1:06, the truck came to a gradual stop—in the middle of the mist.

“Are we supposed to get out?” Llenn asked the group. She clutched the grip of the P90 in preparation for an enemy attack, keeping the barrel pointed upward.

“I dunno. Hello, driver?” Clarence said, heading up to the rear of the cabin to peel back the tarp from the window. “Huh?”

There was no one inside.

“Um, the driver ran away. When did that happen?”

They hadn’t heard him opening or closing the door to get out, but Peter was no longer inside the cab. No one was.

“He’s like a ghost or something,” Clarence said, delighted.

“Ugh,” Shirley grunted, but none of the other five heard her.

“Shall we get out, then? All units, disembark!” Pitohui joked, taking the lead. The rest of the group hopped out of the back of the truck.

The ground was gravelly beneath Llenn’s feet. This was clearly different terrain than the wasteland they were in previously. She moved onward carefully, watching her feet. There were large rounded rocks around.

The mist was so heavy, it was like walking through milk. About ten yards away, another truck was parked. SHINC was disembarking on the right, and MMTM on the left.

“Awright, got it. Both of you gather up over here,” Pitohui muttered to herself. Llenn realized that she was patched in with David and Boss, the other team leaders. When did that happen?

That also caused her to realize that they hadn’t decided on a team leader for LPFM this time. Since this wasn’t Squad Jam, they didn’t need a designated leader for the map. There was no problem with Pitohui being the leader. M was there to be her adviser anyway.

MMTM and SHINC approached LPFM’s truck. Their environs were almost completely concealed by mist, but they were experienced enough players that they didn’t huddle up very close, to ensure they had eyes on every direction.

The three leaders approached one another and began a close discussion. First, David said, “I can’t get any map data loaded. Seems like we’re already in the minigame’s special field. Must have crossed over in the vehicles. This is rather elaborate. I wish they’d set up a scenario like this for Squad Jam.”

Boss asked, “Do you think the mist is going to clear and put us right into battle?”

Pitohui shook her head violently. “We’re more likely to be moved again after this.”

“Why do you think that?”

“The gun fanatic author had us fighting in the mist in SJ5. You don’t want to put on a rehash, right? But I’m guessing they’ll have a surprise set up for us, like we’ll see something surprising when the mist clears,” said Pitohui.

Boss grunted to herself.

“Hey, guys! There’s something over here! Someone come on over!” cried Fukaziroh. She was standing somewhat farther away through the mist.

She’s gone off wandering again, Llenn thought grumpily. It wasn’t a bad thing that she’d found something, though.

“Can I go see?” she asked.

“All right. Shirley, remember the direction Llenn goes,” M instructed. Shirley responded in the affirmative.

Llenn slowly made her way through the thick fog. She couldn’t see ten yards ahead of her. The ground around her was still rocky. It was also sloping downward a little.

“Fuka!” she called out, just in case.

“Hey, Llenn! This way!”

She was on the right track. Fukaziroh’s voice was quite clear. In a few moments, she saw a small shape up ahead. It was about a hundred feet from the truck. That was all it took for her to turn around and see no vehicles and no people behind her. If they didn’t speak up, she wouldn’t be able to find them again.

And yet Fukaziroh had simply wandered off through the mist without a care.

“It’s dangerous to go this far by yourself, Fuka,” she chided as she reached Fukaziroh’s side. “I mean, I get that you really want to be the one to take out Vivi, but still.”

“So you’ve learned to read minds as well. Anyway, look at that,” Fukaziroh said, gesturing with Rightony’s barrel. Llenn followed it with her eyes.

About seven yards ahead, already fuzzy through the mist, was what appeared to be a wooden bridge. It looked like a wooden slat bridge that extended straight out from the downward gravel slope.

“That’s…a bridge, right?”

“So you think so, too. Good, come check it out with me.”

“Sure. Were you waiting for me?”

“If it’s a trap, I don’t want to die alone, you know?”

“Hey!”

“C’mon, let’s go.”

Fukaziroh darted forward. Llenn had no choice but to follow at a distance of about ten feet.

As they got closer, it became clear that it was indeed a bridge. It was about six feet wide. There were wooden wedge supports holding up wooden boards—and no handrails of any kind.

“If there’s a bridge, then…”

The thought of traps had completely left Fukaziroh’s mind. She started walking right across the bridge.

“Bingo! Come check it out, Llenn.”

Llenn decided that after coming this far, it probably wasn’t a trap, so she followed the sight of Fukaziroh’s backpack and made her way out onto the bridge. The boards creaked under her feet, but they were sturdy enough that they weren’t going to give way.

Within a matter of seconds, the scenery below the bridge changed.

“It’s water!”

The sides of the bridge were no longer rocky ground but brown, cloudy water. It didn’t seem like there was a flow or waves to it, just a mirrorlike still surface with nothing to reflect except for mist.

Whether it was a lake or a sea was unclear, but the rocky ground turned out to be its shore.

“Fuka…are we supposed to cross this to move on? Maybe there’s something at the other end.”

“I can’t imagine any other possibility!”

“So if we’d just been standing around after getting off the truck and never found this, we might not have been able to take part in the game at all…,” Llenn murmured. “Fuka, you’re a genius! Amazing! Well done! The genius gamer!”

She had nothing but praise for Fukaziroh’s solitary wandering, which had initially seemed thoughtless, careless, reckless, and brainless.

“It’s like the River Styx!” Clarence said with delight.

“Don’t even say that,” grumbled Shirley, who was walking ahead of her.

The group was in the process of crossing the bridge.

The mist was still as thick as ever, offering less than thirty feet of visibility. And their path was a wooden bridge only six feet across. There were no railings of any kind, so a bad step would drop them into the dull brown water a few feet below. Since it was so cloudy, there was no way to tell how deep it went. And it was a fact of life in GGO that going into water meant taking small amounts of continual damage. Falling in would be a bad thing.

All eighteen members were crossing the bridge in a single-file line, and to protect against attack, they spaced themselves six feet apart, making it quite a long one.

Llenn was leading the LPFM group. Lux and Bold from MMTM were visible ahead of her, but David past them was just a hazy suggestion. SHINC was behind them, but she had no idea if they were actually keeping up or not.

All in all, it was just plain creepy.

They were in a silent world of mist, trudging onward in silence in preparation for an attack from the water. It felt like being in a line of defeated soldiers.

It’s so eerie, Llenn thought. Clarence’s comparison to the River Styx felt quite apt at this point. They were crossing a seemingly endless, narrow bridge through the mist.

A hundred yards, two hundred, three hundred. How far would they have to go…? Would there be enemies or not…? If so, where would they come from? Above? Below…?

The terrain was grinding down Llenn’s mental state. How could it be so tiring when there weren’t any enemies? Whatever Vivi was trying to do to them, it was rather impressive.

“So anyway…”

No one had given an order not to talk, so Clarence started up a conversation. She might be kind of oblivious, but that also gave her a certain kind of courage.

The squad had synced up their comms before crossing the bridge, so the others could hear her loud and clear.

“This all must’ve cost a lot.”

That’s the thing, Llenn thought. This was a completely isolated map. Vivi had spent a lot of money to reserve this space—this chunk of data. How much would you have to pay to the developers to get a place where you could use the map for whatever you wanted, and engineer conditions like mist and terrain? Llenn couldn’t even imagine.

“Well, that—,” Fukaziroh started to say, before clamping her mouth shut.

Llenn was certain that she was going to say, That’s because she’s superrich in real life!

“That just means we’re going to enjoy it even more! You can’t beat free!” Fukaziroh corrected herself.

“Yeah, totally! I’m gonna kick some ass!” Clarence said, oblivious.

That was when the wind blew.

A gust hurtled across the water from behind the group’s left shoulder, disturbing their hair and shaking their bodies. It was just strong enough to make it feel like they might fall.

The group of eighteen ducked down to make themselves steadier and to wait out the wind. It brought other changes, too, however.

“The mist,” Llenn murmured.

Like peeling a veil away, the wind was pushing the mist away.

All of a sudden, the world was much brighter.

Instead of the cloudy white sky, it was back to the usual GGO look, a reddish blue color.

They could see much farther down the bridge, including the MMTM members, and what was beyond them. It was almost like the bridge itself was growing before their eyes.

And at last, they could see their goal, the far end of where the six-foot-wide passage was taking them.

“Wh-what the hell is that?” Llenn exclaimed.

“Whaaa?” Fukaziroh shouted. Another dozen-plus voices joined in with similar utterances of shock.

“Hyaaa! That looks so yummy!” squealed Clarence, the odd one out.

At the far end of the now clear bridge was…

“Llenn, what does that look like to you?”

“…A mille-feuille.”

“What a coincidence. I was just thinking the same thing.”

It was a mille-feuille.

A mille-feuille.

Yes, the pastry.

The one made of layers of thin pastry crust with layers of cream in between.

It was rectangular, the form most typically seen in Japan, with the thin end pointed at an angle. It looked like there were five layers of golden piecrust with off-white cream between them. Though the angle made it hard to see, it looked like there was a cream color on top of the structure, too.

And it was massive.

It looked like the size of a school building.

They knew the bridge was six feet wide, and it continued on at least a hundred yards from where Llenn was currently standing, making it a tiny little thread in the distance. And the mille-feuille was past that.

It looked like the mille-feuille was simply floating on top of the water. There was no dish beneath it.

For the first time in her life, Llenn had the experience of looking up at a gigantic mille-feuille in the distance.

“It’s enormous,” commented Boss.

“But tasty looking!”

“An island of treats!”

“I wanna eat it!”

“It’s so cute!”

“Aww, how nice!”

The others chimed in with their delighted thoughts.

The entire SHINC team loved sweets. They were a gymnastics team that burned a ton of calories, so they had the privilege of being able to eat plenty of desserts without worrying about putting on weight.

“Wh-what is that thing…?” David exclaimed in shock.

“It’s a kind of dessert called a mille-feuille!” Clarence helpfully pointed out for him. She was nice that way.

The sudden appearance of the giant mille-feuille seemed to have utterly destroyed the horror-like atmosphere from just moments earlier.

“I’m scared…”

But Llenn was still feeling its effects.

It was the sudden appearance of a familiar object, only gigantic. There was something very alien and off-putting about it. She found it terrifying.

“She’s really done a number on us this time,” Fukaziroh muttered.

Everyone aside from Llenn would have assumed that by “she,” Fukaziroh meant Vivi. But Llenn was thinking of Tokiko Isobe, with her goofy little bespectacled face.

“Didn’t know she loved mille-feuille that much. Another thing to learn about her…”

They didn’t know that she had put it there because she loved it that much, but it was certainly a possibility. Llenn chose not to say anything.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” M murmured.

“Seems like it’s telling us to climb up on that thing.” Pitohui grinned.

“Very well. Let’s continue,” David said, giving his team the order to march.

MMTM held their guns at the ready and continued down the bridge toward the giant mille-feuille.

After a hundred yards’ worth of travel time, Kenta announced, “I’m getting on!” and took mankind’s first giant leap from bridge to mille-feuille.

The others could only watch his traversal with concern; fortunately, there were no nasty traps involved, and he was able to simply step across.

Kenta reported, “The ground does crumble a little like the pastry crust, but it’s solid underneath!”

Then, “It’s about thirty feet to the next layer up! The cream acts as a kind of obstacle, but you can get around it.”

Then, “It doesn’t have any smell.”

For now, it appeared there were no traps or incoming attacks. MMTM made their way over, one at a time, until none of them were on the bridge anymore. Next, it would be Llenn’s turn.

It’s so huge, she thought, gazing up at the looming pastry crust as she stepped over to it.

No matter what angle or distance she viewed it from, it just looked exactly like a rectangular piece of mille-feuille that you’d see at a bakery. It was just the size that was a little—no, a lot—abnormal.

Once she was on it, she could see that the short side of the rectangle was about fifty yards across. The long side was twice that much, around a hundred yards. Compared to the vast terrain found elsewhere across GGO, it wasn’t that big of an arena.

As Kenta had announced, the distance to the “ceiling,” or the next layer above, was about ten yards. It was a five-layer pastry, so it would be a bit over fifty yards to get all the way to the top.

Between each layer of pastry crust were huge dollops of cream that extended from floor to ceiling like big fat pillars. But they weren’t so thick that they completely filled the space all the way across the structure. You could make your way around them to get to the other end.

As she walked, the pastry floor did indeed crack and crunch in a satisfying way. It was almost unsettlingly realistic, and it made her feel bad for walking on food. It was very bad manners. Her foot sank about four inches down before it hit a solid core that felt like vulcanized rubber.

It was strong enough that she could run at full speed, she figured. Footing was extremely important for all-agility characters like Llenn. If there was one thing she hated, it was swampland.

She approached a blob of cream the size of a house and reached behind her back to draw her combat knife, Kni-chan, and gave the substance a hesitant poke with the tip.

“It’s rock-hard…”

It looked so soft, but whatever it was made of was actually quite firm. She’d let her expectations rise a little, but it didn’t seem like it was edible after all. Too bad.

As for her teammates, Clarence was wandering to and fro in a rapturous state. “Wow, it’s like a fairy tale. What a fantasy!”

Fukaziroh did a circle and said, “Games can truly offer you anything… What a magical wonderland we live in…”

She was a hard-core gamer, so it meant a little more, coming from her.

Pitohui seemed quite taken with it. “Bwa-ha-ha! What is this?! It looks like shit! I like it!”

M did not appear to be impressed. “It’s sapping my will to fight…”

“……”

Lastly, Shirley had nothing to say.

But like Llenn, the first thing she did was touch the cream, so she had definitely been hoping to take a bite and was undoubtedly suffering bitter disappointment.

MMTM had proceeded warily onward on the first layer of the giant mille-feuille. LPFM followed suit. They spotted no enemies and heard no gunfire.

“SHINC is all on now,” Boss announced from the rear.

“Oh! The bridge fell!” said Tohma, the last member in SHINC’s line.

Llenn spun around and saw that the very long bridge they had crossed to get here was crumbling to pieces and sinking into the water, despite being made of wood. On top of that, the land where the trucks had dropped them off, which certainly wasn’t far enough away to have sunk beneath the horizon, was no longer in sight.

“We’re trapped on the island,” M announced. There was no way out now, unless they beat the game.

From all around them came the sound of an unseen woman’s voice.

“Heroes…”

It was not Vivi’s voice. It was a cool, featureless, and unappealing voice, most likely AI-generated.

“Tread upon the sweet snow that lies at the peak.”

That was all they got. Repeat instructions? No such luck.

“I see. So basically, ‘Get up there’?” David remarked.

“Seems like it.”

“Makes sense,” chimed in Pitohui and Boss.

“They haven’t indicated a victory state, but that’s got to be it. All the games I’ve played over the last half century are telling me that’s the case,” said Fukaziroh (age twenty). “She’s not spelling it out for us because she wants to prioritize realism and atmosphere over gameplay. It’s exactly the kind of thing she’d think of.”

“Realism? You’re talking about the giant mille-feuille?” Llenn pointed out.

“It exists somewhere out there in the world. We just don’t know about it.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

If there was one thing to know about Llenn, it was that she was 50 percent made of kindness.

If this was a map with floors, they needed to go up. They needed stairs.

The first floor was probably just there to be ascended. If there were going to be enemies, they would likely appear on higher floors.

“Let’s search for a way up. We’ll take the lead,” David said, prompting MMTM to move onward.

LPFM followed about five yards behind. Instead of crossing the narrow footbridge, the eighteen of them were now weaving around blocks of cream as they proceeded through the ground floor of the mille-feuille. Once again, they were simply moving forward, with nothing else to do.

“Sheesh, what’s the big idea? Are they forcing us to walk all the way to the top? Is this game just an exercise in orienteering?” Clarence complained, ruining the tension of the scene. She was not worried in the slightest.

Obviously there’s more to it than that. This is Vivi’s game. She’s clearly forcing us to trudge around and get sick of it to lure us into a state of carelessness, Llenn thought.

“Hell no. Vivi’s the game master here. She’s gonna make us walk around, get annoyed, and wait for our guards to be down before she finally strikes,” Fukaziroh said, which was just about the exact same thing. It saved Llenn the trouble of saying it.

Up ahead, MMTM were suddenly moving much faster. Kenta was hiding behind a chunk of cream, while the others approached, watching vigilantly.

Did they find stairs? Llenn wondered.

Pitohui, who had David’s voice in her ear, said, “Going up.”

They’d found the way forward.

She was standing before the stairs.

Next to a piece of cream was a set of double doors that were wide open. It was eighty yards down the length of the cake, almost on the opposite end of where they came in. Beyond that was a gently rising set of stairs about ten feet across. The steps were ash-gray, and they numbered about forty, before ending in another set of closed doors.

The stairway was bright enough to see by—it seemed that the cream allowed just a bit of light to pass through—and Llenn could make out MMTM farther up the stairs. For now, they hadn’t entered the second floor.

“We’re going to wait at the middle of the stairs. SHINC takes rear guard. The scouts will rush through, and if they meet any resistance, we’ll rush after them. Everyone got their safety off?” Pitohui asked.

So MMTM was going to perform one of their patented team rushes into the second floor, and if there were any enemies there, LPFM would hurry up to provide support.

Each member chimed in with their affirmative, and SHINC declared that they were ready, too.

“Let’s go,” said David. Bold and Kenta shoved the doors open and charged into the light that spilled forth.

As for Llenn, she kept the P90 pressed to her shoulder, wondering, Are they coming? She was ready for bullets to begin flying and stayed at the ready, keeping her eyes trained on the second-floor entrance.

But instead of hearing the sounds of a gunfight from above, she heard Kenta’s and Bold’s voices.

“What the hell is this?!”

“Huhhhhh?”

“They better be edible this time!” Clarence raged.

LPFM and SHINC were faced with the same sight.

“More mille-feuille…,” Llenn said, groaning.

On the second floor, the floor was the color of cream, and before them were mille-feuilles. Yes, the pastry.

They were in cubes about six feet to a side. In other words, like dice.

Like the structure in which they now stood, the cubes had golden pastry crust with cream sandwiched between the layers, plus a sprinkling of sugar, with a strawberry resting on top. The cakes themselves were very large, so the strawberries were huge as well. They looked like the size of balance balls.

The cubed mille-feuilles were arranged all across the floor.

There were cream pillars behind the doorway they had come through. That part was the same as on the first floor. There were also cream pillars elsewhere throughout the floor. That was the same as the first floor, too.

What was different here were the delicious looking mille-feuille dice arranged at random, starting around a hundred feet from the doorway. There were too many to bother counting, but it was at least a hundred of them.

“These look tasty, too…,” Boss murmured.

David, who was farther ahead, muttered, “I’m starting to get a headache… I feel like I’m in a nightmare.”

If that was the intent of Vivi’s plan, then it was working decently well. No, very well.

“Should I shoot them, Team Leader?” asked Kenta.

David considered this idea, then said, “I’ll take a single shot. Be on the lookout for any movement,” and raised the STM-556 to his shoulder.

He took aim through the scope at a mille-feuille located about a hundred yards ahead. They didn’t know what the objects were made of, so he made sure to keep his distance. If he was too close, it was possible that he might suffer a bullet deflection. Many players of GGO had suffered a death due to deflected bullets in an indoor battle.

Bang!

The first shot of the day rang out, loud and bright. The empty casing flew to the side.

“As I thought.”

The bullet did what David expected it to do. Rather than bouncing off the mille-feuille, its power was absorbed, dropping it harmlessly to the ground. It also created a shining INDESTRUCTIBLE OBJECT indicator in English.

“So basically,” said Pitohui, putting on a smile like she was about to deliver some profound truth that everyone else had already figured out, “they’re just part of the scenery. C’mon, let’s keep moving.”

“We’re taking the lead, though,” David pointed out, glaring at her.

“Well, of course. You started this whole thing.”

“……”

David had no response to this. There was literally nothing he could say. The other MMTM guys could only hide their awkward smiles. We’re with you, Team Leader. We’re on your side. We don’t really like that tattooed chick, either.

“Let’s go. A little faster this time,” said David, marching off without much care. He wanted to be done with this floor. He strode right past Kenta and took the lead.

“I’m going to look for the stairway up. Let’s just get to the top.”

Pitohui’s teasing had gotten under David’s collar a little bit.

It ended up being the reason for his death.

Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. A heavy thudding.

The sound of a 7 mm machine gun firing in sequence.

“Guh! What—?”

David’s body was covered in red damage effects before he could even finish the sentence. The force of the bullets shook his body, and in barely a second, his hit points were all gone.

A DEAD tag appeared over his body, and he toppled over.

The first person to fire a shot today was also the first casualty of the event.

“Huh?”

“What?”

Kenta and Bold, the closest to David’s position, were stunned.

Who shot him, and from where?

Despite being a beat slower, they didn’t forget to throw themselves to the ground to defend themselves. If their team leader was the first one shot, they would be next.

“Ah!”

Llenn reacted quickly. She was the next to duck, after MMTM. She was ready to shoot back if she knew where the enemy was, but she didn’t. Plus, the other five MMTM members were in front of her, so for now she just stayed put.

Naturally, the rest of her team and SHINC took the same defensive action.

Well, now David is dead. So what do we do? What happens now?

The questions burst through Llenn’s mind, but the real problem right now was where the enemy was.

“Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Welcome!”

And from somewhere—clearly in front of them, but at an indistinct angle—came a loud and raucous voice.

After the previous burst of machine-gun fire, the conclusion was clear.

“It’s ZEMAL!” said Kenta to the group, before Llenn could do it.

“Shit! Where?” Bold demanded.

“Right here.”

It was Shinohara.

Bolt—and Llenn, who was farther behind him and looking in the right direction—saw him.

A black-haired man’s head popped out of the middle of one of the mille-feuille cubes, just thirty feet away. And so did a black gun barrel belonging to an M60E3 machine gun, and the arms of the man holding it.

“Hweh?”

Bold was so taken aback by the bizarre appearance that his reaction was too late.

“Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Shinohara unleashed a hail of laughter and bullets.

“Oh, crap!”

Llenn had to roll out of the way to avoid the glowing bullet lines right in her vicinity. She rolled rapidly over the pastry crust until she bonked into Shirley, then rolled over her and continued on her way.

“Ow!”

Sorry, Shirley. Forgive me, she thought, not having the time to speak. The important thing was to get away from Shinohara’s bullets.

She completed her roll and snapped up to a standing position, pointing the P90 exactly at her target: Shinohara Mille-Feuille.

“Nwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

His face, arms, and gun melted back into the middle of the pastry.

“You bastard!”

Llenn opened fire.

Prrrrrrrrrraaaaa!

P-chan sprayed ten bullets a second. But it was too late.

Shinohara’s limbs and face were blocked by the mille-feuille, so the only result she got was the INDESTRUCTIBLE OBJECT sign.

Bold, meanwhile, had taken a full spray of machine-gun fire. He was, naturally, DEAD.

“Everyone, ZEMAL’s hiding in the mille-feuilles! They stick their faces and guns out! Be careful!” Llenn shouted at the top of her lungs.

“What…?” gasped Boss.

“Are you freakin’ kidding me? That’s no fair!” raged Fukaziroh.

“Do the rules even exist here?” demanded Lux, MMTM’s rearmost sniper.

“I wanna go in there, too!” whined Clarence, a moment later.

“Will shooting make them pop out, Llenn?” asked M.

“I don’t know!” she had to admit.

Had whoever killed David popped out of one of the mille-feuilles he shot at, a hundred yards away? Llenn couldn’t tell, because she didn’t see the moment that it happened.

But Bold didn’t seem to have shot a single bullet, it seemed to her, though she couldn’t be sure. Maybe he did shoot, and it was drowned out by the machine-gun fire.

Maybe they would react only if you pointed a gun at them with intent to kill. Or maybe they reacted to bullet lines.

“Nobody shoot. Watch out for bullet lines,” M instructed calmly.

“What happens to the people who died?” wailed MMTM’s machine gunner, Jake, who was probably the second-in-command of the squad.

And just then, as if kindly answering his question, new text appeared over the bodies of David and Bold.

Ding.

The messages said, Will revive at the next map.

“Oh…that one they wrote in Japanese,” Anna mumbled from the back.

“All right, folks, it sounds like we just need one person to beat this mille-feuille map!” Pitohui said, taking control now that David was dead. “Everybody, keep your guns and eyes on those dicey mille-feuilles! If you see any movement, blast ’em! Watch every direction when you move!”

She had her KTR-09 readied at her shoulder, just in case.

“Got it! You heard that, girls?” roared Boss. The rest of SHINC chirped back.

The four remaining members of MMTM mumbled, “Roger that…”

They didn’t have much choice but to follow. Please come back soon, Team Leader, they prayed.

“And as for you, Me-mori…”

Don’t abbreviate our name! they silently screamed at her.

“Looks like we’ve got to make our way up to the top, so be our guest.”

Llenn couldn’t see the sour faces MMTM were making, but she could certainly imagine them. They had to be cussing her out on the inside.

“Let’s beat this thing and bring the boys back!” Jake said, getting his mind back on track. Kenta, Lux, and Summon responded.

“Summon, watch the rear,” Kenta said from the point.

His larger teammate said, “Roger that,” and lifted his SCAR-L. The two of them would be on the buddy system.

They took a fifteen-foot lead, with Jake offering backup with the HK21 machine gun, and Lux the sniper bringing up the rear. LPFM and SHINC followed warily behind them.

Kenta and Summon had moved about twenty yards forward when Kenta cried, “Right!” and pointed his G36K.

“Left!” Summon shouted, pointing his SCAR-L, in full view of everyone behind them.

A violent outburst of shooting followed.

Though she couldn’t see it herself, Llenn could tell that something was happening to the sides of the two men. More ZEMAL guys must have popped out of mille-feuilles up ahead.

Please just don’t get shot, she thought, praying for the safety of her former foes turned friends.

“Urgh!”

“Gahk!”

It took less than a second for her prayer to be obliterated.

Kenta and Summon reacted quickly in opening fire, but given the combination of sounds of their 5.56 mm assault rifles and the 7 mm machine guns, it was obvious who was going to win out.

Even as he got shot, Kenta kept his finger on the trigger, trying to spray as many bullets as he could. But once his legs were shot, he couldn’t hold himself up anymore and fell to the ground.

If the muzzle ended up pointed back at them, it could be disastrous. Fortunately, that did not happen. Kenta’s last bullets hit the ceiling before he died.

The mille-feuille over their heads didn’t put up any kind of fight. The bullets tore holes right through it. What a fragile ceiling. If anyone was on the third floor, they might have a terrible time with stray shots.

“To the left, Llenn!” said M. She reacted, pointing her gun to the left.

“Hi-yah!” said a mille-feuille just ten feet away, which was now sporting Peter’s face, bandaged nose and all, and his Negev machine gun.

Gross! And I don’t have time!

She chose to leap forward and roll, rather than aiming the P90. If she hadn’t taken that rapid forward roll, Peter’s 5.56 mm bullets would have easily pincushioned her.

All she could do was pray that the shots didn’t hit any of her teammates behind her. For now, she just popped back up to her feet and fired back. “Take this!”

“Get him, Llenn!” P-chan cried.

“You got it!” Llenn obliged by yanking on the trigger. He was just five yards away, so there was no way she could miss. Every bullet hit its target.

“Owww!”

Peter stopped shooting and withdrew his face and gun into the cake. A few of Llenn’s shots had hit his left arm, but that was it. The man born from the mille-feuille slithered back into its protective depths.

“What?! No fair!”

Outraged, she added on, pumping all fifty of her magazine’s shots into the target.

“You’re just wasting shots, Llenn,” Fukaziroh warned her. They were all landing on the mille-feuille, which was an indestructible object, and bouncing off to land on the floor.

“Dammit! It’s so cheap!” she shouted, unable to stop herself, and executed a lightning-fast magazine change.

But she didn’t forget to thank the person who deserved it.

“You really saved my butt there, M!” she called out, but she received no response from behind her. “M?”

She turned, dreading what she might see.

“Oh no…”

Her premonition was accurate. M’s entire body was glowing red with damage and toppling over before her eyes.

That bulletproof shield he always carried was in his backpack, sadly, and Peter’s curtain of shots had riddled him from head to thighs. He was never aiming for Llenn, but M, who had tried to turn to shoot back and ended up dead.

M thudded to the ground. A DEAD tag popped up over his body.

“Crap! This sucks!” she raged. They popped up out of mille-feuille from their hiding spots, shot deadly machine guns, then retreated to safety again. Was there any way to describe ZEMAL’s plan other than “cheap”? No, there wasn’t, she decided.

“I’m getting the feeling,” Shirley muttered, aiming the R93 Tactical 2 rifle from a prone position, “that they weren’t planning to let us win from the start.”

“Maybe not!” said Clarence gleefully, pointing the AR-57 all over the place nearby.

Rrgh… They might be right, Llenn thought. She had to admit it.

There was always the possibility that Vivi had planned it out to be impossible and completely intended to wipe them all out. Had Vivi designed this scenario so that David, the guy who asked her out, would suffer her point-blank rejection?

“Point-blank is right! This is Gun Gale, after all!” Fukaziroh said, reading Llenn’s mind.

“Guh…What are we even doing this for…?” Llenn groaned in despair.

“But don’t worry. She’s not the type of woman to do that,” Fukaziroh added confidently. She had known Vivi for a long time, so she knew some things about her nature. Regardless, this was a very difficult situation to be in.

From behind them came a burst of gunfire and a woman’s scream.

It was Tohma. Llenn spun around to see the Dragunov-carrying sniper standing stock-still, covered in red, and about to topple over backward. She hadn’t been able to fire off a shot before the machine gun blasted her to bits.

Rosa was behind her but didn’t get a chance to counter because she couldn’t tell which mille-feuille it came from. She had taken a shot or two as well; her shoulder was red. The PKM machine gun remained silent.

“Are we really going to get wiped…on the second floor…? Way before we reach the fifth-floor roof…?” Llenn murmured.

“Yeah, maybe. If we stay here the whole time,” Fukaziroh said at once.

“No way!”

“So we just have to not be here.”

“What?”

“Didn’t you see the holes that Kenta shot into the ceiling?”

“I did… Why?”

“It leaves us one thing to do, right? C’mon, use that brain of yours!”

“Huh?”

Llenn still didn’t get it. So Pitohui took the lead.

“Everyone, point up and shoot!”

“Die, die, die, die, die!”

Fukaziroh wasted no time in blasting with an MGL-140 on each hand. It would be too dangerous to shoot straight upward, so she fired ahead at an angle. A full dozen grenades hit the ceiling and exploded, opening holes several yards across.

“Do it!” Boss ordered.

The surviving members of SHINC opened fire, too. This time Rosa was able to shoot her PKM, which thudded loudly in the vicinity of where Fukaziroh hit the ceiling. The bullets tore new holes in the ceiling, causing chunks of it to vanish as it was destroyed.

Sophie the squat dwarf used a GM-94, a pump-action grenade launcher. Like Fukaziroh, each of her shots opened a gaping hole in the ceiling.

“They better give us ammo reloads!” Shirley complained, though she knew what to do. Her bullets cost as much as fifty, but she didn’t hold back. Each shot blasted a hole in the ceiling just as big as the grenades.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to die before I get the chance to shoot my gun!” Clarence said.

“Well, in that case…”

Jake joined in, blasting his HK21 machine gun for all it was worth. He didn’t care how much the bullets cost.

“Why?” repeated Llenn, who was still lost. But since it was better than doing nothing, she stuck the P90 up toward the ceiling and pulled the trigger until the magazine was empty, then exchanged it for a fresh one. “Again, why?”

Around the time that the holes in the ceiling above were truly vast, Fukaziroh began to load plasma grenades into her revolving magazine instead.

“This is why!” she said, snapping it back into place. “I’m shooting up a plasma! Everyone up front, duck!”

The MMTM survivors freaked out and threw themselves flat. Fukaziroh pointed Rightony up through the hole in the ceiling and shot just a single grenade. The projectile passed through, and somewhere between the third and fourth floor, a blue explosion erupted.

The plasma surge melted through the ceiling and floor. When it subsided, they had a view all the way up to the ceiling of the fifth floor.

“And another one!”

She shot the next plasma up through the same spot.

When it exploded, it blew through the ceiling of the fifth floor, ripping a hole in the roof of the mille-feuille itself.

“How’s that?”

Fukaziroh couldn’t have been prouder of herself.

When the blast subsided and Llenn could look all the way through, she said, “Snow…?”

Through the enormous hole they’d shot open—with Fukaziroh doing the heavy lifting—a flurry of small white objects was filtering down through the structure. It seemed like powder snow at first, but it wasn’t. Most likely, it was just the sugar that had been piled up on top of the gigantic mille-feuille.

“Hey, Llenn! Come step on—gwugh!”

Llenn started running. She’d heard some heavy gunfire nearby, and it was clear that Fukaziroh had been shot before she could finish her sentence.

“Hey, that hurt!”

Oh, she’s not dead. But Llenn didn’t have time to worry about that. She just had to run for all she was worth.

She burst past MMTM, crossing a hundred feet faster than anyone else possibly could, and spotted Tomtom’s face popping out of one of the mille-feuilles as she passed.

“Gotcha!”

With her last step, she performed a long jump and landed atop some of the sugar that had fallen from the fifth floor. The mille-feuille crust cracked satisfyingly beneath her boots.

“How’s that…?” she murmured, holding her position.

“Hey,” said Max, the member of ZEMAL with the Black avatar, appearing from a nearby mille-feuille cube.

“Aieee!” she shrieked, startled. She pointed her P90 at him, but he did not reach out with his Minimi Mk 46, only his two arms.

“Congratulations!”

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. His gloved hands gave her a slow clap.

“You’ve solved one of the mysteries! Don’t forget about this place! Let’s meet again on the next map! Two more to go!” Max said with a big smile, before he and the mille-feuille crumbled away like sand and vanished.

CHAPTER 3

The Flow of the River Never Ceases

“I see…”

David exhaled sadly. He’d just received an explanation of what happened after he died from those who had survived.

All eighteen of the players were now standing in a wintry valley map. The sky was blotted out by clouds, and the ground was piled up with snow around them and completely flat. The space was about a hundred and fifty feet across.

To either side of that flat snowy ground were huge rock formations that rose nearly vertically to a height of at least three hundred feet. It was a U-shaped valley, like one of the fjords from Scandinavia.

Farther up the valley, about a hundred and fifty feet behind them was a large ice cliff, white and forbidding, that blocked their way.

About two minutes earlier, in the instant that the mille-feuille island melted away into nothingness, they found themselves here.

They had been teleported, but it was an instantaneous switch, without any warning, that they could not see coming.

“I appreciate all of your help. Especially Fukaziroh for turning the situation around, and Llenn for racing toward the goal. Thank you,” David said formally.

“You’re welcome!” Llenn beamed, a spot of bright pink among the world of white.

“It was nothing, really. By the way,” said Fukaziroh, who also stood out in her brown fatigues, “all of you diers: What happened after you died?”

David replied, “I was sent to a very strange place. It was rather dark and hard to see, and the only action I could take was to log out. I was forced to sit with my knees up on a white plate that was just large enough for one person and wait. I felt like a piece of sushi on a plate at a revolving sushi bar. I’m guessing it was supposed to be a mille-feuille plate, though.”

“Same for me.”

“Me too.”

“That was exactly my experience.”

M, Tohma, Kenta, and anyone else who died had gone through the same thing.

Both those who had died and those who were only shot were back to full health, and everyone, including the perfectly healthy, received a full refill of ammo and recovery items. Shirley was quite relieved; she had shot a bunch of those fancy exploding bullets.

“In any case, we’re all topped off, so let’s go to the next spot! Two more to go! What will we find on this map?!” Pitohui said, sounding like a next episode preview.

“Well, it seems to me,” said Boss, pointing at the downslope of the narrow valley as it curved to the left, “that we’re supposed to go down.”

The group was unanimous in that assessment. The frozen cliff of ice behind them and the snowy, icy mountainsides flanking them were, if not impossible to climb, extremely unlikely to get them anywhere good. Certainly, you weren’t going to get anywhere without some actual ice climbing or rock climbing skill.

If anyone on SHINC could do it, it might be Anna, who actually did some bouldering. If she had the ropes, Shirley might be able, because she presumably had some mountain climbing experience.

Surely Vivi won’t be so cruel as to demand that we climb the mountains in order to pass this test, Llenn thought, but she couldn’t be positive. That mille-feuille test was pretty messed up.

“So first we climb, and now we descend?” David pondered, smiling to himself. “Very well, then. Let’s move.”

This time, he acted as the point man, taking responsibility for leading the group. This was something he would never do in other circumstances.

Kenta and Bold silently fell in behind him, acting as the wings of his pointing arrow formation, with the other three behind them.

Fukaziroh gazed at the man walking at the head of the group and said, “Ah, there’s no sight so gallant as a man in love.”

As they marched, they left footprints about an inch deep in the tightly compacted snow. It wasn’t that slippery, so they had no trouble with their footing. They could probably run on it if they wanted.

But out on top of the glacier, there was no cover to hide behind or use to block bullets, so if they got shot at, they couldn’t run or hide. They’d just have to shoot back as best they could.

Naturally, they kept their eyes peeled for the emergence of any enemies. One line would just be too long, so they formed two instead.

Clarence leaned toward Shirley, who was walking beside her, and said, “Hey, you’ve got skis, right?”

“I do. Are you suggesting I go ahead on my own?”

“Yeah!”

“No.”

Clarence was, as always, Clarence.

For about five minutes they walked, feeling tense and uncertain of what might pop up at any moment.

“Stop,” David ordered. The terrain had changed.

To this point they had been traversing a downward slope, but it was flat from this point onward. The mountainsides still blocked their path to the sides, but the ground was perfectly flat now. The valley curved gently to the left and right, so it almost felt like they were walking on a highway.

There was another change, however. Where the snow had piled up before, the ground was just ice from here. In other words, it was white, shiny, and almost completely flat—just like a skating rink. It seemed very hard to walk on.

David approached the boundary between the compacted snow and the ice. It was a clean split, as though it had been drawn with a ruler.

They had never seen this kind of terrain in GGO before, even in Squad Jam.

“I’ll bet you a hundred credits that they spent all their money on that fancy mille-feuille data and had to skimp out on the map terrain here!” Clarence said. No one picked up that bet.

David knelt to touch the ice.

“It’s completely smooth…”

So it wasn’t just for looks. It really was solid ice.

“And we’re supposed to walk on this?” he continued, furrowing his brow.

Ping.

A cute little sound effect interrupted him.

“An…item…?”

Llenn gaped at the pop-up window before her eyes. It was the inventory window that appeared whenever she waved her left arm.

In both Japanese and English, it said: Accept new item? Y/N

“I got it, too,” said Fukaziroh. So did the other sixteen.

Though Llenn couldn’t see it, all of them had an invisible item window in front of them, offering them a new item.

“I see. So they want us to use this.” M reached up and tapped the Y button.

“I’m assuming it’s not just going to explode on us,” Pitohui said, following suit.

“Oh, that would be so awesome if we all got blown up!” Clarence burbled excitedly. “It’ll be like, ‘You naive fools, you fell right into my trap!’” She didn’t hesitate to touch the item.

Would it be better if at least one person didn’t take it? Llenn wondered. Then again, if disaster struck them all, one measly survivor wasn’t going to be able to do much. She accepted the item.

Tiny bits of light coalesced, taking form before her eyes.

They were white leather high-laced boots with…

“Shoes…? No, wait…these are skates!”

There was a single metal blade on the bottom of them.

Of all the different kinds of ice skates, these were for figure skating. Your average rental skates they gave you at the rink, with the little jagged bit on the point of the skate to help you stop.

“And now they want us to skate,” Boss said, lifting the pair of skates that had appeared in the air before her. The laces were already in place, just like when you rented them at the counter.

Llenn grabbed her own pair from midair and felt the immediate weight on her left arm. Once again, she was reminded of how heavy ice skates were.

The sizes of the skates looked the same for everyone. Llenn’s foot size was quite small, as her body was, but in GGO, all clothes automatically adjusted themselves to fit snugly and comfortably. It wasn’t a problem.

“They just want us to do everything, huh?! I hate ice skating, but I’ll do it! Anything to avoid losing to that damn Vivi!” Fukaziroh groused, plodding over to the edge of the ice, then lowering her grenade launchers and putting the boots on.

Of course, this was a virtual world, so all she had to do was call up a window and perform the clothing switching action. There was no need to go through the trouble of working her feet into the shoes, tightening the laces, and tying them into a knot.

Llenn followed suit, sitting down next to her and using the unequip button to remove her usual boots.

“I’m guessing that at the end of this highway of ice, we’ll run into more enemies. And there’s gonna be a time limit on this one.”

“Probably. I wonder how long…”

Right at that moment, in response to Llenn’s question, a large piece of text appeared over the ice right before her.

00:10:00

“Ten minutes…”

Since the numbers didn’t immediately start counting down, it probably wouldn’t begin until they were actually on the ice.

Then the time indicator rose slightly, revealing another string of text.

3,500 yds

“So we gotta skate for thirty-five hundred yards, huh?” Fukaziroh said. She seemed to be enjoying herself despite her hatred of skating, but only because her desire to discover Vivi’s identity was winning out.

Llenn finished equipping her new ice skates. “All right, let’s do this! Is everyone ready?” she asked, turning around. Her eyes turned to points. “Huh…?”

Most of the others weren’t even close to ready.

They were just standing there on the snow, holding their skates, with their guns on their backs. They weren’t even pretending to put them on.

She turned to her side and took note that only the six members of SHINC and Shirley were putting on their skates, like Llenn and Fukaziroh.

M, Pitohui, Clarence, and the six men of MMTM weren’t doing anything. What was their problem? Were they asleep? In a standing position?

“Hello…?” Llenn asked.

“Let me be frank with you,” said David, sounding rather apologetic. “I cannot skate.”

“Huh?”

“Neither can I,” Jake chimed in. The other four men each said as much in turn.

Skating in GGO required actual real-life skill. For one thing, you didn’t need it in order to beat the game, and very few people ever bothered to try it out. So if you didn’t know how to skate in real life, you wouldn’t be able to do it here, either.

“What?!” Llenn couldn’t help but be shocked.

“I’m sorry, Llenn, me too! It’s the one thing I’ve never done, really. But I can ski perfectly fine!” admitted Pitohui, most shockingly of all.

M gave her a glance before confessing, “Me too. I skated as a kid, so it’s not like I have zero experience with it, but I’m not good at balancing, and I can’t go fast. Crossing over ten thousand feet in ten minutes means going over ten miles per hour. I’m sorry, but I can’t keep up with that.”

Lastly, Clarence said, “Hi, hi! Listen to my story, too! The answer is…I can’t do it! Like M, I’ll just fall down. But aren’t there, like, sleds like chairs? If I could just push something like that along, I’d be fine, because I wouldn’t need to balance!”

“……”

Llenn was speechless.

“Oh, geez! Yeah, I guess they don’t teach it in class,” lamented Fukaziroh. She and Llenn—meaning Miyu and Karen—could skate perfectly well, thank you. They were from Obihiro, a city in Hokkaido, the great frozen north. What did you do for gym class in the winter in primary and middle school? That’s right, you skated.

The faculty and parents would tamp down the snow and spread water carefully to create a special rink on the school grounds in the winter. Then the students would bring their own skates and do lap after lap until they couldn’t keep going.

Because of that, everyone they knew could skate to some degree. Until Karen came to Tokyo, she had simply assumed that everyone could skate. However, even in Hokkaido, the areas that got more snow on the Sea of Japan side, like Sapporo, would often go skiing for gym class instead.

“How about you folks?” Fukaziroh asked SHINC.

“We can all skate just fine. We’ve even gone to the rink together. We’re gonna give it our best shot,” Boss answered.

“Tanya’s really good at it!” Anna spoke up.

“Yes! I’ve actually taken lessons from a professional figure skater before!” Tanya claimed, raising her hand.

That was gymnasts for you. Anything that involved moving your body, they could do better than anyone. As usual, they were going to be great at this one.

“Very impressive. And Shirley?”

“Not a problem,” she said casually, pulling her long rifle off of her back and letting it hang in front from a sling. She was planning to shoot her sniper rifle while skating. Incredible.

They didn’t realize that in real life, Mai Kirishima loved being in the outdoors, and she could do just about anything physical. Just not drive very well. That was still a problem for her.

It seemed that the group of nine girls would be the only ones who could finish this mission, or map.

“Only half of us can go. I wonder…was Vivi counting on this…?” Llenn mumbled.

“Dunno,” shrugged Fukaziroh, holding her MGL-140s up. They each weighed several pounds with the grenades loaded, but to Fukaziroh, they were as light as fans.

Llenn could feel her sense of pessimism ballooning. “Then…what if they have enough enemies for eighteen of us waiting up ahead…?”

“Then we just have to beat twice as many enemies each. Are you bad at math or something?”

“That’s positive thinking…”

“Listen, we’ll just figure it out when we get there. Plus, you’re forgetting one very important thing, aren’t you?”

“Huh…? What’s that?”

“If we’re not up to the task, and we flame out, all that happens is David gets dumped. Am I right?”

“You’re right…”

When you put it that way…

From behind Llenn, Boss bellowed, “Indeed! We lose absolutely nothing! So let us simply give it our all, each and every one, leaving nothing on the table!”

“Yeah!”

Five powerful women raised their voices enthusiastically.

All of this was happening directly in earshot of the man in question.

“……”

But since David couldn’t skate, he couldn’t tell any of them off.

“Here we go!”

Llenn stood on the ice with the edges of her skates and kicked off.

00:09:58

The countdown began, and it was also placed in an inconspicuous spot in the upper left corner of her vision, above her teammates’ hit point bars.

3,499 yds

The remaining distance was on the upper right.

“Come on!” shouted Fukaziroh, accompanied by the silent Shirley.

“Here we go, girls!”

Boss and her team took off at once.

Llenn and Fukaziroh made the most of their natural Hokkaido talents and were off to a smooth, assured start. When they kicked harder off the ice, they left a series of diagonal slashes behind.

Since Llenn had the highest agility of anyone, she kicked more often than anyone else, making it look like she had more legs than usual. In no time, she was leading the group.

“Hey, don’t leave us behind!” complained Fukaziroh, but she had both her real-life experience and her powerful strength stat to help her leave Shirley and SHINC in the dust. She even lifted her grenade launchers up in the air to show off.

“They’re really good!” commented Tanya, who had taken figure skating lessons and was rushing to keep up with them. Her Bizon was in a sling that went over her shoulder. She kept her right hand on the grip as she accelerated.

“Yaaah!”

She jumped as she skated and did an elegant twirl in midair. One leg was gracefully extended as she came back down. Then, while she coasted along facing backward, she complained, “It’s hard to do this while holding a gun! No wonder none of the figure skaters carry a gun with them onto the ice!”

As they watched the nine women race off down the fifty-yard-wide path of white at blistering speed, David and Jake traded sad, lonely comments.

“I suppose there are many things I still need to practice…”

“Yeah…”

They had learned how to handle manual transmission vehicles, when they never came into contact with them in real life, as well as mastering boats and hovercraft. But there were still more challenges yet to be completed.

Meanwhile, M said, “Clarence, thanks for the excellent hint.”

He removed the bulky backpack carrying the shield plates and dropped it to the ground.

“Can I go in front? I wanna be the point man!” Llenn suggested, waiting for Boss’s response.

The nine of them were cutting a course through the wind as they skated down the valley, speaking through their comm devices. Llenn and Fukaziroh were connected to M and Pitohui, too, so that there was a line of communication to the left-behinds, but they weren’t going to get a response from that side.

After two seconds of thought, Boss replied, “Please do. But stay within view, close enough that we can immediately back you up. If you contact the enemy, come back if you want. I’ll have Tanya work with you as your buddy.”

“Roger that!”

The slippery ice path meant that Llenn, as the most agile one there, could get up to tremendous speed. We’re talking Olympic-level speed skating, the kind that no one else could keep up with.

But if there were enemies up ahead—and of course there would be—she would end up having to fight them all alone.

The game was probably set up so that any one of them reaching the goal would mean victory, but Llenn couldn’t be the only one rushing ahead.

Boss was leading this group. Boss was the best choice.

“You stay in the rear, Fukaziroh. You offer the best firepower, and if everyone else is dead, you’ll be the one to keep charging. So don’t die before the rest of us do.”

“Well, shucks. Guess I’ll let you guys have all the glory. Not that I could beat Llenn in a race anyway,” said Fukaziroh, going into a coast.

“Seeya around!” said Tanya, passing her on one foot. The other members of SHINC followed suit, and so did Shirley.

“Good grief.”

Fukaziroh decided to pass the time by keeping her feet parallel and doing slalom movements and seeing how close she could veer to the walls at the edges of the valley. She very nearly hit the side.

“Whoa, careful.”

“Right curve!”

Llenn was about a hundred yards ahead of the group, enjoying a healthy dose of momentum. The valley curved to the right up ahead, so she sidled over to the left to get the best possible view of what was farther on.

The texture of the left wall of the valley slid rapidly past her. She stopped moving her feet, pressed the P90 to her shoulder, and kept a finger close to the trigger to shoot as soon as needed. Were there any enemies?

“Clear!”

There were not.

The only thing beyond the curve was more white icy road. Llenn straightened out her trigger finger.

The remaining distance indicator was just dropping below three thousand. She’d already skated five hundred yards. There were over eight minutes remaining.

If she continued at a pace of five hundred yards per minute, she would reach the end in under seven minutes. Easy-peasy. Assuming there were no enemies, of course.

Her speed was nearly at twenty miles per hour, but the others were keeping up with her pace. Thanks to the way GGO worked, there was no leg fatigue. They wouldn’t be able to maintain this speed in the real world.

This was quite a slow pace for Llenn, however, so she took strides only occasionally, and had both feet on the ground almost the entire time.

When she wasn’t aiming her gun, the P90 rested on its sling under her right arm, with her right hand holding the grip. Her left hand was free, just in case she needed to keep her balance or do anything else.

After the right curve was a long straightaway. She couldn’t tell, but it looked to be several hundred yards long. It was almost like a highway; she could see quite a long way.

There were no visible enemies on the ice or along the mountain walls on either side of it.

She couldn’t afford to be careless, but this was practically designed to get her guard down. Which was why she had to keep it up.

“Hmm?”

Something on the right edge of her vision caught her eye.

Atop the ice ahead of her, along the border with the right-side wall, was a pole with a sign atop it.

What is that…?

She skated up toward it until she could see that there was writing on the six-foot sign, and that it was Japanese-type kanji, and that she could read it…

“Huh?”

When recognition kicked in, she thought her brain wasn’t working right.

Three lines of white text on a blue sign.

That’s the sign for a river that the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism puts up in Japan.

In the world of GGO, this was a bizarre outlier, a total deviation from the setting of the game. But even still…

That has to be on purpose…

Llenn didn’t know what Vivi was thinking, but she knew that she was thinking something. There was an intent behind this, and a meaning that she placed this sign here.

She slid past the sign and turned back to see that the same text was on the rear side.

Is this the Tiber River, then? What’s the Tiber River? Is it in Japan? There are lots of rivers in Hokkaido that have foreign-sounding names because they came from the Ainu language, but that’s not it. So where is this river from?

Though the questions came fast and unanswered, Llenn did not forget to report her findings.

“Listen up, everyone. There’s a weird sign on the right side.”

“Weird sign how?”

“It’s probably easier for you to see it for yourself…”

A point man’s job was to describe what they were seeing, but how could she do that? They were about to come up on it anyway.

She could hear reactions that ranged from disgust to confusion. The last to see it was Fukaziroh, who muttered, “Heh, damn you, Vivi…”

She didn’t elaborate on it, but it was clear from her tone of voice that she was enjoying this.

“Where’s the Tiber River?” said Anna, asking the straightforward question.

Several seconds passed in silence. It seemed as though no one knew the answer.

“It runs through Rome in Italy,” Shirley mumbled. The other eight were mildly shocked.

“Ohhh. And is that under the purview of the Ministry of Land?” Fukaziroh asked. Shirley said she had no idea.

So nobody had the answer to the mystery. Llenn had easily crossed a thousand yards by now. The remaining distance said 2,499 yds and dropping. A little less than eight minutes to go.

Then she saw another sign.

This one was on the left and had the same white lettering.

CLASS A RIVER

THE SEINE

MINISTRY OF LAND

“……”

Llenn just had to go past without comment.

A few seconds later, Tanya saw it, too.

“Ooh, I know this one! It’s in Paris, France!”

“So what’s next, London?” asked Fukaziroh.

“It looks like you’re right,” Llenn had no choice but to say. Near the right wall just a hundred yards after the Seine sign was another one.

CLASS A RIVER

THE THAMES

MINISTRY OF LAND

She knew that the Thames was the big river in London, because she had seen it in a Sherlock Holmes movie. Apparently, it used to be really dirty and smelly in the past.

“So…what is Vivi trying to do with this?” came the obvious question, from Boss’s burly lips. No one could give her an answer.

While it wasn’t a substitute, Anna offered a question instead: “What do you guys think the next river will be?”

Rosa noted, “All the rivers have gone through world capitals, so maybe the next one is the Sumida River from Tokyo?”

“Ooh! I think it’ll be the Potomac in Washington, D.C.!” suggested Tanya.

“The Chao Phraya in Bangkok!” said Tohma.

It was a little weird how much they seemed to know about this. Maybe they’d just had a geography class recently.

If the point of these bizarre, out-of-place signs was to draw the players’ attention and lower their guard, it was certainly doing the job. Llenn kept her nerves even more taut now, certain that the enemy would strike in the midst of this confusion.

But after several moments, nothing happened.

Instead, she was greeted by a shock that far surpassed anything she expected.

“Hmm?”

Another hundred yards after the Thames sign, Llenn noticed something.

The color of the ice ahead was getting less distinct.

Previously it was the pure white of a skating rink, but now it was fading, becoming more translucent. You might also say that it was turning gray to reflect the sky overhead.

Is the ice going away? Turning to water?

For a second, she tensed up, but the ice remained ice. She continued to zip right over the area where the color was leaching away. There were no nasty traps like sudden, unexpected ice breaks, either.

So it’s just getting more translucent, Llenn thought.

Then she realized that it was becoming clearer because the purity of the ice water was increasing, like the fancy ice sold by an ice maker. It was more like glass.

Naturally, that would make it possible to see through the ice, as though through underwater goggles.

“Whoa!”

And then Llenn saw what was underneath.

“Look under your feet when it gets clear! It’s really, really, strange!” she said, which was about the best description she could manage in her state of shock.

Llenn stopped striding and used the edge of the blade to come to a stop. Tanya followed suit with a tremendous double-footed brake, sliding up next to her.

“Whaaaeh?” she squawked, when she saw the sight below her feet.

They all had the same reaction in the end. First Boss, then the rest of SHINC, then Shirley.

“Hey, who stops in the middle of a battlefield? Also, you’re shouting too loud,” said Fukaziroh, the last to arrive. She looked down. “Bwa-ha-haaaa! What is thaaaat?!”

She shouted the loudest of all.

Beneath the ice there was a city.

It had to be a city, because the neat lines of houses and streets couldn’t be anything else.

They were skating down a frozen river, which meant that it was a submerged village down below the ice. It looked like it was around a hundred and fifty feet down. Like they were staring down at it from the sky.

It looked quite Japanese.

The buildings were familiar but old-fashioned wooden houses with tile roofs. They were two-story homes. Every window was a shoji screen, and every door was the sliding kind. Between the tightly packed houses were straight cobblestone streets. Some were larger than others, with the smallest being narrow alleys between the homes.

And it wasn’t just houses. There was also a temple with a spacious center yard. You could see graves lined up, too, and in another spot, a red torii gate. In fact…

“This looks…just like…”

“Kyoto,” Shirley said, finishing Llenn’s sentence.

“Yes, exactly! It’s just like when my family visited Kyoto when I was a little kid…”

It was a fond and distant memory that she hadn’t thought back on in a long time. They had taken a ferry together. Until SJ3, that was the largest boat she’d ever been on. She’d had soba noodles with herring at a restaurant. The color surprised her at first, but it tasted very good.

The first time she saw Kinkaku-ji, the golden temple, the brightness made her eyes flicker. Ginkaku-ji, the silver temple, was much more chic. She got to look down from the elevated balcony at Kiyomizu-dera…

“I know what you mean! I got to go for my middle school field trip! It was crowded but really fun!” Sophie exclaimed.

“You’re lucky. Our trip was to go skiing!” said Rosa.

“This is incredible… I can’t believe they made this,” Boss said, her thick legs standing over what appeared to be a teahouse. There was guest seating outside the front, a table with red cloth draped over it, and even a hanging curtain and a standing umbrella.

“Where did they get such detailed models?” Tanya wondered.

The tiles on the roofs weren’t just textures fashioned in such a way to suggest three-dimensionality. Each and every one was its own polygonal model, overlapping just like a real roof would.

Fukaziroh reacted to this: “Well, they’re definitely not from GGO, so it must’ve been some other game running on the Seed engine, I guess. Maybe they were in Asuka Empire, the Japanese-style game. Or else…they’re from some completely different kind of game…”

Llenn realized why she had suddenly gone vague in her explanation. Most likely, Tokiko Isobe had used Kyoto as the setting for one of her other games.

The distance to go was about two thousand yards, with a bit less than six minutes to go, when the nine came to a stop and took in the sight before them.

“Oh, crap, crap, crap! Crap, you guys, we shouldn’t be indulging in this!” Boss said, snapping back to her senses.

“You’re right! I’ll get moving!” Llenn resumed her mad dash. The party continued their travel soon after.

As she skated over the city of Kyoto before everyone else did, Llenn muttered, “But why Kyoto…?”

“She loves games about all the events at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate,” explained Fukaziroh, who was still waiting at the earlier spot for the rest of them to get ahead of her.

“Ah, I see…”

Llenn understood that when Fukaziroh said “she,” it was in reference to Tokiko Isobe, not Vivi. The others would have assumed it was about Vivi. Since the two had known each other in ALO, they just assumed that’s how Fukaziroh would know that.

But that interpretation would seem a bit strange if you remembered that just the other day at the bar, Fukaziroh had said that Vivi never did anything to reveal her personal identity.

Seventeen hundred yards to go. A bit over five minutes remaining. Everything was halved now.

“Enemy ahead!” Llenn shouted.

They had company at last.

As the point man, Llenn reported back with all the details she could make out.

“Enemies in black up ahead! On the ice and on the mountainsides! About thirty of them! Distance of four hundred yards!”

What Llenn—and soon the rest of the members—could see were humanoid enemies in black.

“They look like robot soldiers,” said Boss, pointing the Vintorez and peering through the scope as she skated. If she did this while running, the image would be bouncing and unsteady, but it was quite smooth on skates.

Robot soldiers were a rather unremarkable type of enemy. They were about five and a half feet tall, faded silver, and slender. There was one large red lens in the center of their faces.

But these ones were black, meaning they weren’t the ordinary kind. There were no other colors, ordinarily.

“Oh, I got it! They’re all wearing black kimonos!” said Boss.

“My goodness…” Llenn lifted her monocular to her eye.

Thirty robot soldiers blocked the path ahead or came out to perch on the sides of the mountain. Indeed, they were all wearing a black traditional garb called a hakama. They looked like samurai. Naturally, nobody had seen anything like this in GGO before. It was a shock just to see traditional Japanese clothing in GGO.

Despite being robots, their feet were wrapped in straw sandals that were tied over the ankle. It was really detailed work.

The sandals must have had spikes on the bottom or something, because they were walking easily over the ice as they approached the skaters.

The distance between the two sides was about four hundred and fifty yards.

“What are they…?” Llenn wondered, reeling from yet another shock to add to the recent list.

“I think they’re meant to be like the Shinsengumi,” muttered Shirley.

“Shinsengumi? You mean, like…the famous group you see in movies and TV shows?” asked Llenn. That was about as much as she knew.

Surprisingly enough, it was Anna who replied, “That’s right! They were a group of ronin brought together to help keep the peace in Kyoto right at the end of the shogunate! I could explain more, but it would take a lot longer!”

Did this mean that Moe Annaka, her real-life player, was actually a history buff?

Boss kept the Vintorez in place to shoot at a moment’s notice and asked, “If my memory serves right, didn’t the Shinsengumi have a much more colorful uniform?”

“Yes! They’re famous for their light blue uniforms with white triangular fringe!”

Llenn thought back to the image she’d seen in some show or another over the years. All she’d really felt about it at the time was that they looked quite flashy and colorful for samurai.

“But that was only for the first year or so!” Anna continued. “After that, we believe they mostly wore black!”

“So we can just call them the ‘Shinsengumi,’ then,” Boss concluded. They were about three hundred yards from the thirty robots now.

Right on cue, silver beams of light extended from their hands. While the color was different, they were the exact same weapon that Pitohui enjoyed using so often.

“Lightswords! So they are swordsmen…,” Llenn exclaimed.

“So should we call this battle ‘Shine, O Sword’?” Fukaziroh said, making a pun on a famous Shinsengumi novel.

Nobody reacted, except for Anna, who quietly giggled.

Within three hundred yards, the robot Shinsengumi singled out Llenn, the lead skater, and charged at her. Their blades flashed as they swung. Literally.

“Let’s do this!”

A sword couldn’t beat a gun. Although she had the advantage at a distance, up close, a photon sword was far stronger, and she really didn’t want to get sliced up.

She took aim at the first robot, trying to keep her conflicting thoughts under control, but her P90 had an effective range of two hundred yards, so it was too early to shoot.

“Stay down for a while, Llenn,” said Shirley. A second later, a bullet shot past her about ten feet to the right.

“Yeep!”

Even knowing it was a friend’s shot, it was still scary.

Shirley’s rifle had a muzzle brake on the end of the barrel to help lessen the recoil. It sprayed the combustion gas from the gunpowder to the sides of the muzzle.

In other words, the noise was incredible.

It created a shock wave that reflected off of the side walls, then bounced again off the opposite surface, and so on, echoing wildly.

Shirley’s first shot closed four hundred yards in 0.6 seconds, where it struck a robot soldier in the stomach and exploded.

Pity the poor robot soldier—it split into two halves. The top half flew backward, but the bottom half maintained its running speed and got another three steps before it fell over. The lightsword was still switched on. It sliced into the ice, which fizzled with the heat and melted away, swallowing the sword.

“Llenn, dodge right! Tanya, left!” said Boss this time.

Llenn had been in the process of throwing herself flat, but with a quick “Hah!” she smacked the ice with her free hand, bouncing back up, and skated off to the right as instructed. Behind her, Tanya split off to the left.

Llenn had an idea of what was about to happen, and it turned out that she was right.

Even as the echoes of Shirley’s shot continued, a new sound entered the fray.

Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh!

A heavy, deep thudding filled the entire world. It was like an earthquake.

Llenn could identify it from the sound alone: Rosa’s PKM machine gun at full auto. The sound filled her with both fear and fondness, as it had been used against her all the way back in SJ1. She’d nearly died.

As she skated to the side, Llenn turned her head to see Sophie a few dozen yards behind her, squat and firm, carrying the barrel of the machine gun on her left shoulder. Rosa stood behind her, aiming. Boss was behind the both of them. Her skate edges were up, helping her support Rosa.

“Oh, because the recoil would push her back,” Llenn realized. The recoil force of each shot was very powerful, she was firing many shots in a row, and she was on ice. The reason a gun barrel rose after being shot was because the shooter’s body was underneath it, holding the gun up, and their feet were planted on the ground.

But on ice, without her soles staying firm, shooting on auto would just push Rosa back faster and faster. Plus, it would be one thing if she just went straight back. But if she lost her balance at all, the barrel might twist to the left or right and cause her to shoot Llenn or Tanya.

Thanks to the support, however, Rosa could keep shooting. Nearby, Tohma and Anna were flat on the ice. They had their Dragunovs with bipods attached and had their stomachs to the ice to shoot. Each shot caused them to slide backward, but they were using semi-auto, so the distance wasn’t far. It was easy enough for them to adjust between each shot.

Shirley, ever the professional, fired standing up. Recoil? Not a problem.

In the very back, Fukaziroh asked lazily, “Hey, can I shoot, too?”

“No, we don’t want the ice flying everywhere,” Boss replied, shutting her down. If the ice got destroyed by a grenade blast, they might not be able to keep skating onward, even if they defeated their enemies.

“Sheesh, fine. Guess I’ll wait for you all to die before I go off,” Fukaziroh said. Out of sheer boredom, she began doing dance steps in her skates. It was quite an adorable dance, but no one else saw it.

True to their Shinsengumi nature, if you could really call it that, the samurai robot warriors in black were quite brave and bold. They raced up the ice, fully aware they would be shot. Some of them took on zigzag patterns to evade shots.

But they could not match the merciless power of guns.

To beat the game and support David in his romantic endeavors, Llenn and her friends spared no thought for the cost of all the ammo they were using.

Bullet lines and the projectiles they represented flew over the ice and Kyoto beneath it.

Rosa’s machine gun and its heavy report sent shots swaying left and right, literally mowing down rows of robot warriors. Limbs were torn loose, even heads, turning the robots into scraps littering the ice.

When more came rushing over from the edges of the valley, Tohma, Anna, and Shirley made good use of their aiming skills to snipe them one after the other.

I don’t have anything to do, Llenn thought, crouching behind a large boulder at the side of the ice, as the explosions and gunshots roared nearby.

She couldn’t just space out and lose focus, so she kept her eyes on the edges of combat, watching for fresh enemies coming into the valley. So far, she hadn’t found any.

The real problem was the remaining distance and time.

They had sixteen hundred yards to go and just over four minutes left. She could go five hundred yards in a minute, so in that sense, they were still all right. But…

“They’re almost gone! Llenn, Tanya, get ready to skate!” Boss called out.

“Roger!” Llenn replied, watching the robot soldiers dwindle.

Only five were left. Two came rushing side by side into machine-gun fire, while the three snipers picked off the other three. The robot Shinsengumi was no more.

“Yeah!” Llenn cheered.

“Here we go!” said Tanya.

They launched themselves from the sides of the valley and resumed skating.

They kept their guns loose in front and leaned into it, hurtling at top speed. The remaining distance dwindled a hundred yards at a time, down to thirteen hundred. It felt good to see it drop.

Eventually they reached the spot where the remains of the robot warriors lay scattered across the skating rink. They were turning into motes of light that vanished, however, so there was no need to avoid them.

Llenn took the point, with Tanya behind her.

The other seven followed at a distance.

The remaining distance number went from four digits to three.

“Time left…”

00:02:28

“Under three minutes…”

Llenn fretted. She was on a highway, but one of clear ice with the sights of Kyoto beneath her, and the path was curving heavily to the left up ahead. She couldn’t see what was awaiting them.

She chose to rush at full speed and try to finish the last thousand yards on her own and find out if that was a good or bad idea.

The goal was beyond the curve. If there were more enemies after the curve, Llenn herself wouldn’t be able to handle them and would need to rely on her friends’ firepower to get past. And if the same enemies showed up again, would they even be able to get past with just three minutes to go?

“Now, Llenn,” said Fukaziroh through the comm, “there are going to be more enemies, so watch out.”

“You think so?”

Fukaziroh had known Vivi for a long time and was a hard-core gamer, so she would know. Naturally, this was enough to get Llenn and the others focused on the task ahead.

“Where do you think they’ll be? Ahead of us?”

“If I were Vivi,” said Fukaziroh, right as enemies appeared a hundred yards ahead of Llenn, and behind Tanya, in the space between them and the others in the group.

“I’d send them up ahead and in the middle.”

“See? Just like I said, right?” Fukaziroh said proudly.

“Gahhh!” Llenn shouted in frustration.

There were twenty enemies a hundred yards ahead of Llenn and Tanya. Another thirty appeared about fifty yards behind them, in front of Boss and the others. It took less than a second for them to simply rise up out of the ice.

“Are they snowmen?!” Llenn yelled, when she had a moment to take them in.

They were styled in the Japanese way, meaning two balls of snow, one small and one large. The lower sphere that was the body was about three feet across. The upper sphere that was the head was no more than a foot and a half.

Using black rectangles and circles, cute little faces were drawn on the heads. Other than that, they were simple and unadorned: no bucket hats, no twig arms.

“They’re so cute!” Tanya squealed. A second later, she regretted this comment.

As one, the twenty snowmen in the path ahead of them shot laser beams from their eyes.

The beams were the same as the kind shot by optical guns: bullets made of light with long traces behind them. And the black round eyes of the snowmen were the barrels.

First they glowed red, then they fired half a second later.

Forty orange beams of light focused directly on Tanya and struck her with perfect accuracy.

“Buhya!”

She flopped onto her back.

GGO players always kept an item called an “anti-optical defensive field” equipped that lowered the damage caused by optical guns—but forty shots all at once was more than it could handle.

Tanya’s body slid on its back a bit down the ice. Above it was a tag that said DEAD.

“Scatter and fight back!” Boss ordered, the best choice she could make in the moment.

They’d just have to shoot like crazy and topple their foes, but if they stopped, they’d get shot. It wasn’t a good idea for them to be clumped up, either.

All Llenn could say was, “Just shoot, don’t worry about hitting me!”

They’d be shooting forward, of course, in her direction, so there would naturally be some stray shots in her vicinity.

She ran as far as she could to the right side of the valley. Like the last time, she spotted a large boulder embedded in the ice and hurried toward it for defense.

“Sorry if I hit you!” Rosa said from the back. Once again, the hills shook with the roar of a machine gun. Like spraying a hose, she was taking down as many snowmen as possible, Llenn could tell from the sound; she wasn’t looking in that direction.

Please be over quickly! she prayed, sliding into the shadow behind the boulder. She didn’t have time to get her skate edges down, so she plopped onto her butt on purpose. Sliding on her bottom and back, she crashed into the side wall behind the boulder feetfirst.

“Gueuh!”

It was quite painful. She lost 10 percent of her health on impact, but there were bullets flying where she’d just been standing, so it had probably saved her life.

She was concerned for the others, too, but right now she had to focus on herself. Llenn flipped over onto her stomach, intending to clear out some of the snowmen in front of her.

Fortunately, there was another rock next to the one she was hiding behind, which would be a good defense against the light beams. Crawling like an unspeakable bug across the ice, she popped her head out from behind the second rock, aimed the P90 sideways, and aimed at one of the snowmen about seventy yards away.

Apparently, the snowmen not having legs wasn’t just a visual feature; they couldn’t move from where they appeared. They were still in the same spots.

The bullet circle closed over her first target, and Llenn pulled the trigger. Pra-ra-ra-ra-ra! She dumped five shots into it.

The bullets vanished into the torso, which burst like a water balloon. The head plopped onto the ground helplessly.

They’re so weak!

Like the robot soldiers, these were not meant to put up a tough fight.

I think I can shoot them all down myself! Llenn thought. The next moment, however, she realized that she was wrong about that.

Anna saw the exact same thing that Llenn did.

She blew up the body of a snowman with her Dragunov, and the head fell toward the ground—and then shot toward her, rotating.

“Whuah?”

It was like a bowling ball. The head rolled several dozen yards up the ice toward her, spinning madly.

“Aw, dammit!”

She fired in a panic, but her second and third shots missed.

The sixteen-inch ball of snow struck Anna’s legs at high speed.

“Aaah!”

It knocked her off her feet into a flip. The impact caused the snowball to burst into a shower of powder.

“Ouch!”

Her 360-degree flip meant that she landed right on her butt, but the impact damage cost her a third of her health. If it were real life, she probably would have broken her legs.

Small cracks appeared in the ice where Anna’s butt had smashed it.

“Yeee!”

Llenn jumped to avoid the snowball hurtling toward her. She got plenty of air and kicked her legs wide. She just barely got out of the way.

The rapidly spinning snowman head passed below Llenn’s thighs and slammed into the rock she was hiding behind, bursting into bits of snow.

As soon as she landed, Llenn reported back, “Look out, the remaining half of the snowman will come spinning back at you!”

“So it seems,” Rosa said, releasing the PKM’s trigger. “Left!”

She fled. So did Sophie, who was supporting the machine gun, and Boss, who was supporting Rosa.

For one thing, she had taken down a large number of the snowmen, and there were now eight snowballs hurtling toward them.

There was no homing ability on the snowballs, so they converged on the spot where Rosa had been two seconds earlier, smashing into each other and crumbling into huge sprays of snow.

“Yikes… All those hits at once would’ve been lethal,” Sophie murmured, just before a wave of light beams struck her body.

“Ah! Ow! Dammit! Stop moving, and they hit you with the opticals!” She swore.

“And beat them, and they attack you with spinning snowballs! What a nasty setup!” Rosa added.

“Now I wish we had our full number,” Boss admitted.

If there were more people here, they’d be able to split up into long-distance attacking teams and defensive teams who would stay hidden on the sides of the valley and pick off the rotating balls as they flew up at them.

Plus, all they needed was one person to rush past and reach the goal.

Boss turned to the survivors and said, “Hug the sides! Hide behind rocks!”

The five members of SHINC, Shirley, and Fukaziroh followed suit, splitting left and right toward safety.

When they were hiding behind the rocky walls of the valley, the optical gun blasts from the snowmen were less likely to hit them, too. But it also made their forward progress grind to a halt.

“What now? Is it time for the star of the show to make her appearance? Have we finally reached Fukaziroh Gale Online?” she asked from the shadows of the left side. Boss was almost inclined to agree with her.

But then Shirley’s voice came over the comm.

“Don’t do it. You’re likely to shatter the ice. I saw a spiderweb crack where Anna got hit by a snowball and fell down. It’s not as thick as you think. It’s going to do a lot worse than just making the road bumpy.”

“Gahh! What a nasty design!”

“You’re just realizing that now?”

“Good point.”

Cursing out Vivi wasn’t going to solve their problem, and the remaining time was quickly ticking away.

Llenn glanced at the clock and saw 00:02:10, followed by 00:02:09.

“Crap, the time!”

At a full sprint, Llenn could probably close the last nine hundred and seventy yards in a minute—but only if she had absolutely no interference.

“I wish I had firepower!” she screamed, a cry from the heart.

“Allow me to make that dream a reality!” said a familiar voice into her ear.

It was Pitohui.

“Huh? Pito?”

“Indeed! I have come to offer my help!”

“Huh?”

“Behind you, kid.”

Llenn popped her head out from cover to look back up the way they’d come. There was a group of four on the other side of the road very far back.

“Hmm?”

But the shape was so strange-looking that she couldn’t tell what she was looking at for several moments.

“Ohhh…”

Once she recognized it, however, it was clear.

About two hundred yards behind them, the four figures she was seeing were Pitohui, M, Jake the machine gunner, and Clarence.

Pitohui and Jake were sitting in chairs, and M and Clarence were behind them, giving them a push.

Fukaziroh saw it, too, and exclaimed, “Hey, you got chair sleds!”

That word was a blast from the past for Llenn. When her old elementary school did skating for gym class, they used their school chairs as sleds. That way, kids who weren’t good at skating or who just wanted to relax a bit could sit down and be pushed along over the ice.

If you went to a proper commercial skating rink, they did have chair-like sleds, but at the school, they used literal chairs. Hooray for misappropriation.

Now she recalled that Clarence had said something about not being able to skate for herself, but being open to using a sled instead.

“That’s genius! Sleds!” Llenn exulted. Then she wondered, “But where did they come from?”

Had they just popped into existence as usable items? That was hard to imagine.

So did they make them?

“We made them, of course!”

They made them.

“But how?”

“We rearranged M’s shield!”

“Ohhhh! I get it now!”

Now she remembered the bulletproof shield M had stored in his backpack. She had forgotten all about it.

Each piece of the shield was tough armor about twenty by twelve inches in size. M had eight of them, which he arranged in a fan formation to create his own gun emplacement. Or, by adjusting the joints, he could fashion four of them into a handheld shield.

This time, they had turned three of them into a simple C-shaped chair, with the fourth as a backrest. Pitohui and Jake were sitting on the two chairs, while M and Clarence held on to the backrests and pushed.

Even if their balance was poor, the chair sled wasn’t going to tip over, so it didn’t matter. The rest came down to a battle of leg strength.

“Genius!” Llenn crowed. One of the eye beams from a snowman zeroed in on the back of her head. “Yeow!”

It knocked her to the ground. She’d lost 10 percent of her HP.

Still, she kept her attention on her approaching teammates.

“If you can, knock out both the heads and bodies of the snowmen shooting lasers! The part that gets left behind will roll after whoever shot it, superfast! It’ll totally smash up your sleds!”

“Got it! Jake, shoot both torso and head!” Pitohui instructed the man next to her.

“Roger that!” said Jake, pinning the HK21 machine gun resting on his knee under his right arm and squeezing the bipod with his other hand. This was his specialty waist-height shooting pose.

“Let ’er rip!” Pitohui cried, raising the KTR-09 to her shoulder and opening fire.

She used her 75-round magazine to engage in full auto fire, as did Jake. The recoil of the guns sapped the momentum of the sleds, but M put more power into his legs to keep the skates pushing the sled forward.

“Hrngh!”

“Yaaah!”

Clarence followed suit.

The distance between them and the main group of snowmen was a hundred yards now. It was too close for them to miss. A storm of bullets pounded the snowmen, reducing them to powder. If any of them happened to survive with either a head or a torso, the others were ready to pick them off before they could start rolling.

“Aim and shoot!”

“You got it!”

It was possible this might hit the others on the opposite side of the valley, but it was too late to worry about that now.

Shirley let SHINC take care of the situation and moved upward. She skated along the left edge of the valley and said, “Llenn, I’m going to snipe at the guys in front of you. When there’s only one left, start running.”

“G-got it! Thanks!”

Shirley scraped the ice to come to a stop, pressed herself against a rock on the left wall, and took aim with her long rifle. The eighteen snowmen blocking Llenn’s way forward were her target. She fired.

“It didn’t need to be an explosive round.”

She hit a torso, then reloaded with incredible dexterity. The straight pull action of the R93 Tactical 2 truly shone in these circumstances.

The instant the head fell to the ice and began to roll back up toward Shirley, it exploded with the next bullet.

Pitohui’s and Jake’s firepower completely swept through the pack of snowmen that covered the valley floor. They wiped them up.

“Guess I’ve got nothing to do here.”

Watching the powder fly from the edge of the ice, Fukaziroh felt lonely, being the one person who wanted to see Vivi defeated more than any other.

“Two to go!” Pitohui said, replacing her drum magazine. The two unfortunate snowmen were left withered under a hail of automatic gunfire.

All of the thirty that had been between Llenn and SHINC were now gone.

“Brilliant! Let’s go!” Boss ordered. The four surviving members of her squad took motion, joining her as the two pairs on the sleds caught up.

Llenn was thirty yards ahead of them, and the ten or so remaining snowmen were ninety yards past that.

In a desperate attempt to fight back, the snowmen kept firing lasers on a shorter interval, but, perhaps because there were more of them, the individual power of each beam was lower and wasn’t instantly lethal.

SHINC’s anti-optical defensive fields brushed off the beams like they were made of water. They shot back, helping Shirley, who had already dispatched over ten of the targets.

“Can I take a bit of a break now?” she asked, replacing magazines after her frenetic shooting spree. She’d earned a breather.

Between the newly arrived sled teams, the uptick in activity from SHINC, and Fukaziroh, who had tagged along but had nothing to do, the remaining snowmen finally vanished.

“You’re clear! Get going, Llenn!” Boss called out. Llenn finally had the chance to jump out from behind the rock.

Only nine hundred and seventy yards to go. In one minute and nine seconds.

“Max speed!” Llenn made full use of her agility to skate pell-mell for the bottom. But then she remembered something. “Sorry! Somebody pick up P-chan for me!”

She’d left her beloved P90 on the ice. When trying to skate at maximum force, a nearly two-foot-long object was only going to slow you down.

“See you later!” P-chan called out to her, its voice fading into the background.

Llenn was in fine form now. Her top half was completely hunched over. She swung her arms low, left and right, getting into a sprinting motion.

Pitohui watched the tiny pink figure get smaller in the distance and called out, “Let’s keep up, gang! You don’t know what might be ahead! Plus, we can’t force Llenn to do all the hard work on her own!”

It was a very cool and impressive speech.

“So push harder!” she said to M pathetically.

Be in time, be in time, be in time!

The rock walls on either side passed in a blur. They were like the sheer walls of the Shuto Expressway when Goushi was driving. In other words, Llenn was moving as fast as a car.

She’d been ceaselessly working her legs without coasting, so her speed stayed consistently fast, but that meant she was at her limit. She couldn’t go any faster than this.

It had been a nice straight path up to this point, but about two hundred yards ahead, the path curved to the right—and much sharper than any curve thus far.

Four hundred yards to go. In thirty seconds.

I can make it! But…I don’t have much leeway!

She didn’t let her speed drop. If she failed to make the turn or slipped and fell, she’d crash right into the wall, but if she slowed down, she might not close the gap in time.

It was go time. Do or die.

And on the inside, her heart was consumed by one pure, dedicated thought: If I screw up, it only means David gets rejected. No big deal.

She leaned to her right and crossed her legs as she headed into the curve, the way that speed skaters did on TV.

Much farther behind, being pushed on his sled by Clarence, Jake murmured, “Holy crap… I’ve always wondered, how does Llenn do this stuff? I know it’s against the rules to ask about a player’s private life…but what’s she really like? Is she some elite athlete?”

Nope, just a college student. On the tall side.

“I’m through! Gotta get there!”

With pluck and heart, she had conquered the sharp right turn, and now it was straight ahead. The walls were as direct as could be.

She didn’t see any visual indicator of a goal, whether a big gate to hurtle through or a line of tape raised across the finish line or a guy with a checkered flag, but the remaining distance was just a hundred yards. This was clearly the final stretch. She had twenty seconds.

And the enemy arrival that she feared most…never came.

She knew she was going to make it, but she wasn’t going to let her guard down. She kept her focus honed.

Again and again and again, she kicked against the ice. Again and again and again, she swung her arms. It was the most she had ever moved her limbs in her GGO life.

The little pink blur flew over the rooftops of Kyoto. The only sounds in the world were howling wind and scraping ice.

On she went, cutting through the wind, becoming the wind.

Forty yards, thirty yards, twenty yards…

Over fifteen seconds remained.

If I trip and fall, I’m going to look so stupid…

Full vigilance, all the way to the end!

She repeated her final steps and slid right through to the end.

When her tiny body crossed the invisible threshold, there were still more than ten seconds to spare.

“Yo! Brilliant work!”

Llenn sat on the ice and gazed down at the vision of Kyoto below. The first to reach her, scraping the ice with the edge of her skates, was Fukaziroh. She had Llenn’s P90 around her neck and both grenade launchers in her hands, and had still beaten everyone else to the bottom by a long shot.

That was her Hokkaido upbringing at work, just like Llenn’s. It was also a reflection of the athletic skill of her player, Miyu Shinohara.

“Thanks for P-chan!”

“Yep, I picked it up for you. In exchange for saving your beloved gun, I deserve ten percent.”

“Ten percent…? Can I give that to you in the form of lead that goes faster than sound?”

“Hmph. You’ve learned to dish it out as well as you take it,” Fukaziroh said, handing over the P90 peacefully as Llenn stood up. She didn’t want to get shot, after all.

“I’m back!” said P-chan with delight as Llenn hugged it to her chest.

“Welcome home,” she replied.

“Hey, Llenn! Well done!” said Boss, her face very large and impressive. The other members of SHINC, aside from the deceased Tanya, joined her. They all had nothing but effusive praise for Llenn’s speed.

Next to arrive, nonchalantly, was Shirley. She merely turned her head toward Llenn without a comment, but she was definitely praising her on the inside.

Then, much later, “Way to go, Llenn, thatta girl!”

Pitohui arrived on the chair sled, pushed by M, who looked as desperate and exhausted as he had ever looked before.

“Thanks, Clarence,” said Jake.

“No problem. How much you gonna give me?” she replied. What a sweet and touching moment.

All the survivors had gathered.

“So we beat it, right?” Boss asked. Both the distance and remaining time countdowns were at zero. But nothing seemed to be happening. They weren’t being teleported, no musical fanfare was playing, and no members of ZEMAL had appeared to offer guidance.

“I kind of thought that it would happen when all the surviving participants crossed the goal,” Llenn suggested nervously.

Ding. A little sound effect chose that exact moment to arise.

“Oh! Look, something popped up over there!” Clarence said, pointing farther down the road.

Fifty yards ahead, there was a door that hadn’t been there before. It was a simple wooden door, encased in a frame standing directly on the ice. The color was an eye-searing blue.

“Ah, another Anywhere Door. So we’re supposed to go through that?” Fukaziroh said. “Very well, Vivi. Sit back and prepare for your doom!”

She was the first to take off for it. Llenn followed, taking her sweet time. There was no rush right now.

Fukaziroh reached the door first, grabbed the knob, and wrenched it.

“Bwah!”

She was instantly knocked off her feet. The door opened and buffeted her all the way back.

“Dwaaah!”

A powerful gust of wind poured through the open doorway.

Llenn looked up to see Fukaziroh rapidly rushing back toward her.

“Huh?”

She darted out of the way with a move that only she would have been able to do. Fukaziroh zoomed past her, going backward.

“Be careful, Llenn! The door is—!”

She didn’t need to hear more to understand. The words were drowned out by howling wind that tugged at her hat and hair and pushed her around.

The air pressure on her skin told her all she needed to know. A tremendous gust was hurtling through the door from the black space beyond it. It was strong enough to stop Fukaziroh’s forward progress and push her back up the hill, and now it was hitting Llenn.

Big deal! she thought, pushing with her legs. She picked up speed, made herself smaller, and rushed into the oncoming wind.

But…

“Eeeep! Too strong!”

She got within twelve feet of the door but completely lost her momentum there. The air was being shot through the doorway, so the density of that exhaust was higher the closer you approached. Eventually, she couldn’t get any closer.

She was still going at top speed, kicking her feet as fast as she could. She just wasn’t getting anywhere. Her skates were tearing up the ice, but she made no progress. It was like being on a treadmill.

One of the wonders of GGO was that all that wind didn’t knock her hat off her head.

“Ugh!”

Not only was she not moving forward, the force was starting to win out, pushing her back.

I’m sorry, P-chan!

She threw the P90.

“What the?”

P-chan clanked onto the ice and began sliding backward. Llenn continued pushing, hoping that she could manage to burst through and reach the door.

It’s no good…

Not only was her leg strength not getting her any closer, the slightest bit of letup would cause her to lose ground.

“Use me!” said Kni-chan the knife.

“Oh, right!”

The image of Pitohui right before the final battle of SJ3 flashed into the back of Llenn’s mind: the cruise ship going vertical, but Pitohui clinging on without falling.

She reached behind her back and drew the combat knife she kept there, then crouched and stabbed it into the ice, falling forward. The ice cracked, and the tip of the eight-inch black knife jabbed in deep.

Llenn kept her weight low and added her other hand so that she had a firm two-handed grip on the handle.

“I stopped!”

She had managed to neutralize the backward momentum.

The wind showed no signs of stopping or weakening. It continued to push at her; the pressure was incredible. It felt like gravity itself pulling her downward. She might as well have been hanging from a sheer vertical cliff with only the knife keeping her in place.

She glanced behind her, where Boss had caught Fukaziroh over thirty yards away, to keep her from sliding farther.

“The wind’s really strong!” she warned them. “Please! Come and push me!”

“Hrrgh!” Boss and Sophie, the heaviest and strongest of the group, tried to skate their way up. “N-no good…”

They couldn’t get to Llenn, and the slightest give in their step caused them to lose ground and fall backward. Their size only meant that they had more area for the wind to push.

“Damn, that didn’t work…”

She looked forward; the door was just ten feet away.

Only ten feet, but the force of the wind was so great that it might as well have been a solid river. The instant she let go of the knife, she was going to wind up sliding all the way back.

Clearly, there was a huge pressure differential between the two worlds—this side and the other side of the door. This was what happened when you didn’t think about possibilities like that.

Though it was too late now, they should have considered what might happen before opening it and have a plan for that. Like waiting right next to the door and zipping through once you opened it, or having someone there to push you in. Again, too late for anything now.

What a nasty trap. They had beaten the challenge, but it wasn’t letting them continue. Did Vivi think of this? What a jerk. Llenn clenched her teeth.

“Just keep holding firm,” M told her through the comm. “None of us can get any closer. We can’t even make it up the sides.”

Not surprised, she thought, waiting for what she assumed would be his instructions.

“I’ve come up with an idea, however. Can you change equipment to the Vorpal Bunnies from your position?”

“Huh?”

That wasn’t the question she expected.

The Vorpal Bunnies were her special “Llenn Version” of the AM.45 pistols, painted pink with a white line along the side. Pitohui had gifted her the pair in preparation for the pistol-only area of SJ4.

Llenn kept them around as her secondary weapon loadout.

“I think I can do it…but give me a second to try!”

She tried moving the fingers of her left hand, which was providing support to the right hand squeezing the knife grip. A small inventory window appeared just above the knife.

“I can!”

“Okay, switch them.”

“All right…”

But?

She decided not to ask. Surely M had a plan in mind.

Using just the fingers of her left hand, she chose to switch her primary weapon. The windswept P90 vanished off the ice, as did the magazine pouches on either side of her waist. Black holsters appeared in their place.

Two pink pistols jutted from the holsters. The Vorpal Bunnies, aka Vor-chan.

Lastly, a backpack appeared that was just the right size to completely cover her back. It was black with pink and white lines, a nice little detail.

It contained forty magazines for the Vorpal Bunnies, along with little gimmicky loaders on either side of the bottom that allowed the magazines to pop out. Frankly, it made fighting with the two pistols actually feasible when she could reload this easily.

On top of that, the backpack had armor plating that ran throughout its length, offering her good protection from behind.

Once she’d transformed, M calmly—which was his usual tone—explained the plan.

“Okay. I’m going to shoot you now.”

“Excuse meeee?”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to hit the armor plating inside your backpack.”

“Excuse me…?”

“That will push you.”

“Oh, I get it…”

Now it was making sense to her. He was going to shoot the extremely tough armor, which was the same as his own shield, and use the physical pressure of that force to push her forward. An extreme answer, but one that might use the laws of physics to a successful end.

In real life, it would be an insane thing to try, even if you thought it would gain you likes and subscribers. Never do this at home.

Thankfully, this was Gun Gale Online, a virtual world.

Still, she had to ask the obvious question: “Is that really going to work? The wind is incredibly strong!”

M used an M14 EBR, which fired 7.62 mm NATO rounds. The impact would surely push her forward, but would it get her the ten feet she needed? She’d flown that far when Tohma shot her with a Dragunov in SJ1, but there was no wind resistance pushing her the other way then.

“Don’t worry about that, Llenn,” said Boss.

She was starting to have a bad feeling about this.

A very, very bad feeling.

“Tohma’s going to shoot the antitank rifle.”

Bingo. The very bad feeling was true.

“No, wait!” Llenn pleaded.

“Don’t worry. It’ll take a little bit longer to set up,” Boss reassured her. Yay, how nice.

She specifically chose not to turn her head and see Sophie setting up the six-foot-long PTRD-41 antitank rifle just a few yards away from her. Or Tohma, the best sniper on SHINC, taking aim while Sophie’s shoulder acted as a firing stand. Or the shockingly huge 14 mm bullet being loaded into the back of that drying rod of a gun barrel. Or the thick, heavy bolt that accepted the bullet and pushed it forward.

“Almost there. Just a bit longer, Llenn. You can do it,” Boss said thoughtfully.

“My patience is eternal over here!” Llenn said, the most she could possibly resist.

“Sorry, we couldn’t think of a better plan,” said M.

“It’ll be all right, Llenn. We already know from SJ2 that it won’t penetrate the armor plating,” added Pitohui helpfully.

Clarence chimed in. “That sounds fun! Do it to me next!” she said excitedly.

“I’ll trade spots with you if you trade me that apple!” Llenn said immediately, channeling her inner Tom Sawyer.

“Too bad! I don’t have an apple with me!”

Well, so much for that idea.

I’ll trade you even without the apple! Llenn screamed to herself.

“Aim is ready!” Tohma said.

“We’ll start a countdown, Llenn. Let go of the knife on zero and prepare for impact. Five, four, three,” Boss said, without warning. There was no time for her to even think about it. “Two, one…”

Oh, geez! Llenn thought.

“Zero!”

But she did as she was told.

The instant Llenn let go of the knife, the wind blew her backward about an inch, before the bullet hit her back and propelled her forward. The enormous antitank rifle bullet struck the armor plating in her backpack but did not pierce it, transferring all of that kinetic energy through her instead.

In the recent SJ5, Llenn fell ten thousand feet, and the G-force on her now was stronger than the terminal velocity she reached in free fall.

“Buhya!”

The system determined that all the blood in her brain shot to the back, and she blacked out. The darkness of her vision was not because she had been hurled through the other side of the door.

Clarence watched Llenn fly like a bullet herself through the Anywhere Door and said, “Me next! We can take apart the chair and stick it to my back, right?”

But at that point, they were all disintegrating and vanishing. The teleportation to the next map had begun.

“Darn!”

CHAPTER 4

The Journey of Ten Thousand Years

“I thought I was going to die!”

“Don’t worry, you didn’t.”

“It was super scary! Who am I supposed to take out my anger upon?”

“Uh, Vivi, right? How dare she set up such a nasty trap!”

Llenn and Fukaziroh were in a wasteland map. It was where they’d been sent after the end of the second game.

This was a typical brown landscape like many found in GGO.

For the most part, it was just tough earth with rocks all over, plus the occasional sand dune or large, mushroom-shaped boulder. It was basically the same setting as Llenn and SHINC’s battle to the death in SJ1.

The sky was overcast and dark, the reddish-gray clouds looming overhead like a ceiling. Under that sky, the eighteen kept their eyes sharp, preparing for Vivi’s next challenge.

The dead teammates were back. They also got all of their HP and ammo replenished. It was a considerate gesture, but it also indicated that the next stage would be equally treacherous.

David, meanwhile, the very person who suggested this whole thing, delivered a very deep and proper bow to the others.

“Thank you. I once again owe you for everything.”

The rest of MMTM were compelled to do the same. After all, not a single one of them had skated with the others. None of them could skate. If it had been MMTM alone in this minigame, they would have been helpless.

It was a strange thing for Llenn to see six men all together, executing formal bows.

“Huh? Uh, no, it’s…um…,” she mumbled.

“Buy me a pizza!” said Fukaziroh.

“And cream sodas! For all of us,” Boss added. “Bonus points if you add donuts.”

“Buffalo wings,” said Shirley.

Once they had finished giving their orders, David smiled and said, “You’ll have them all.”

The other MMTM guys thanked them, too. Sometimes when someone is truly thankful to you, it lessens the mental load if you make demands like that instead of playing humble.

In that regard, they were very clever women. Or maybe they just felt really hungry. That might have been the main point. Actually, it definitely was.

“I’ll take an avocado cheeseburger, too,” Fukaziroh added. Yes, she definitely just wanted to eat, knowing that VR food wouldn’t add weight.

Once things had seemingly warmed up, Miss Pitohui was ready to give her lesson.

“That Vivi really is a nasty piece of work. And I mean that as a compliment. Those first two games were clearly designed in such a way that Mement alone wouldn’t have been able to beat them.”

Don’t rhyme it with “cement”! Llenn could hear MMTM screaming. But since they didn’t say anything, she didn’t, either.

“In short, team strength isn’t just about statistics and other surface-level factors,” Pitohui’s lecture continued. However, there was one person who didn’t know how to read the room and chose to interrupt—or perhaps she never intended to read the room in the first place.

“It’s about whether or not you have people who are willing to help you in your romantic journey? So it’s like a test of David’s character and popularity!” said Clarence.

“Oh, you just stole my line. Anyway, yeah—that,” Pitohui concluded.

David smiled.

“Thank you. I’m really counting on you.”

It was a very fetching smile.

“So, what’s the next one? This should be the last battle,” Boss pointed out.

When they finished the mille-feuille mission, Max had said there were two more, so come rain or shine, this would be the last one. They just had to pray that there wouldn’t be an overtime period.

At this point, they just had to throw everything they had at it. Llenn was curious about Vivi’s real life, too, but she didn’t really have anything to add, so she stayed quiet.

“At this point, we just have to throw everything we have at it. I’m curious about Vivi’s real life, too!” Fukaziroh said. “That’s what Llenn’s thinking!” she added.

Just then, there was a rather silly sound off in the distance.

Toot-toooot!

“I just heard something. It sounded like a steam whistle,” said Clarence.

“It is a steam whistle. And it means the journey is calling us. Onward!” Fukaziroh announced pretentiously.

Toot-toooot!

The sound happened again.

“It’s that way, to the west.”

Boss pointed out the direction with her Vintorez. It was an effective way of conveying information for both those who were looking at her and those who weren’t. Playing GGO was a lesson in how to pass information as briefly and accurately as possible. If you failed at it, virtual death was the result.

“Let’s go,” said David, taking the lead again. MMTM followed him.

Weaving through the large mushroom boulders was the same sound once again.

Toot-toooot!

The eighteen of them made their way in its direction, aided by its repetition every couple seconds.

Soon, they saw the source of the sound.

It was an old-fashioned locomotive. The steam whistle sound they were hearing belonged, in fact, to a steam whistle.

There was a train ahead.

About thirty yards away from them.

A set of rail tracks started there, and resting atop them was a train engine connected to a string of cars.

The locomotive was a classic-type steam engine in a foreign style, not Japanese in make. It looked a lot like those from that one show where the toy or CG trains had human faces on them. This one did not have a face. Its color was burnt brown.

At the end of the engine was a large steel guard that fanned out six feet to the sides of the cars in a way that you never saw in real trains. It was like a giant rat guard. This was clearly a mechanism to keep players from getting into the engine cab. In other words, a message: You don’t get to control the speed.

The cars lined up past that point were classic train cars. They were painted a deep green on the body, with tasteful, off-white curved roofs. There was wood paneling from about the midpoint of the sides on down. Above that, there were rather thick support pillars at regular intervals, and no glass windows.

So there was plenty of visibility out of the cars, and plenty of visibility into them. It was truly designed for enjoying the open-air experience. The cars had benches lined vertically down the middle of the cars facing outward, so they could see the scenery. The very last car ended in a rounded observation deck.

Both the engine and the cars were absolutely shiny and pristine, as though they’d just come off the assembly line. They were brand-new.

All the objects you’d see in GGO—that is, the visuals sent to the players’ brains—were just graphical data. Adding grime and dirt and texture to create a lived-in effect cost a lot more in texture size, so a fresh new coat of paint was actually much easier to pull off.

“They have trains like these at tourist areas, huh?” Fukaziroh commented, to unanimous agreement.

The rails were about four feet, eight inches apart: the same size as the Shinkansen trains. The cars themselves were eight feet wide and about sixty-five feet long. For a tram-style train, that was quite large, and it didn’t feel like a toy.

The cars were attached by what were called “screw couplers” that weren’t used in Japan. It involved hooking through a metal loop and tightening it. To the sides of the couplers were two shock absorbers like bullhorns that absorbed the impact when braking, for instance.

Below the bodies of the cars were two wheel trucks that held three sets of wheels each. The wheels were packed together like little dumplings.

“One, two, three,” Clarence counted. “Six cars in total. So that’s three people per car!”

Not that there was any need for them to split up into equal groups.

Toot-toooooooot!

The whistle blasted, loud and much longer this time.

Gashunk.

Without warning, the train began to move.

The locomotive, which hadn’t seemed to be occupied, was already belching black smoke from its stack. It rolled forward, tugging the cars behind it via the coupling.

“All aboard!” David called out, and the eighteen began to run.

Getting onto this train had to be the requirement to start the next stage. If you didn’t make it on board, you were going to be left behind.

A thirty-yard dash through the wilderness began.

Naturally, the first to approach the passenger cars was Llenn. She was very fast. The others could only eat her dust. No one was going to beat her.

Within seconds, she was at the train and gave it a brief examination before concluding, “I don’t think there are any traps…”

She adjusted her speed to match the train’s and jumped. She caught the ladder on the side of the caboose and hopped through the opening into the car—no door to open.

When she turned back, she saw the scenery slowly speeding up and all of her companions still running hard.

“Oh nooo… Oh, this is bad… If they don’t reach the train…”

Her anxiety shot through the roof.

In the end, that anxiety was wasted.

“It’s so slow…”

Now it was her frustration that was through the roof.

The tram-style train was trundling along with everyone on board, and its speed was best described as leisurely. At the start, it had really picked up speed, but eventually that acceleration waned until it settled on a slower pace.

It was slow. Verrrry slow.

The train maintained a speed about as fast as a person jogging, heading down the tracks running straight through the wasteland, the rail connectors reporting at a rhythmic clip—gatatan, gototon. Onward they went.

It went gatatan, gototon rather than gatan, goton because the wheel trucks had three wheel axles rather than two.

The one good thing about the slow speed was that it easily gave everyone enough time to reach the train.

“This thing’s a turtle! You had me scared there, Vivi!” fumed Fukaziroh.

The procession had gathered in the last car, so it meant there were eighteen people riding in a space that was eight feet by sixty-five feet. That was a pretty solid fill rate, though far from full capacity. Compared to typical workday train traffic in Tokyo, it was paradise.

Perhaps the tracks were built very precisely, because there was very little sway, and it was easy to stand up without needing to hold something for support. Who knew what would happen later, though.

M said, “I’m anticipating an attack on the train from the outside.”

Boss said, “Absolutely. That’s what this is designed for. And we probably won’t beat it if we fall off or descend from the train.”

David said, “A fight to protect the vehicle. I like it.”

The others watched the scenery, alert for danger. They all had their comms connected now, so they could share intelligence.

“We should probably split up to defend more effectively,” M suggested. There were no objections, of course. Enemies could start showing up at any time, so he quickly elaborated, “Watch out for attacks and hijacks from the sides and the rear. We’ve got two machine gunners on our side.”

He was referring to MMTM’s Jake and SHINC’s Rosa. They both had major, continual 7 mm firepower.

“I want you to each take a side of the fourth car. We’ll give each of you a sniper and assault rifle teammate. Jake, get the right. Rosa, the left.”

They said their affirmatives and got up to take their position. Jake took Lux the sniper and Bold, who used an ARX 160 rifle. Rosa took Anna as her buddy.

“I’ll join you,” said Boss, rushing for the car ahead of them. SHINC had no pure assault rifle gunners, so Boss’s automatic-shooting Vintorez was the next best thing.

“Llenn and Tanya.”

“Yes!”

“Nya!”

“You two will be our wild cards, rushing to various areas to offer spot support. Just keep on your feet. If any enemies get on board, you’ll be in charge of the interior combat.”

“Got it!”

“Nya!”

The pair glanced at each other, then nodded and headed for the forward cars.

“Clarence and Shirley.”

“Yuppity yup. We’re both here. We’re not falling asleep,” said Clarence, the only one to reply.

“You’ll be a pair here in the back. You’ll be our eyes and sniper support. You get anyone who comes chasing after us.”

“Got it!”

“I can handle that.”

Clarence and Shirley walked to the observation deck at the back of this car. It was a spacious deck with a fence, which made it perfect for Shirley to lie prone on and shoot.

“Fuka.”

“Yeah?”

“Can you stay up on the roof of the car in front?”

“You love to ask the impossible of me just because I’m cute. But sure, I can figure it out,” Fukaziroh said, then put her grenade launchers and backpack into her inventory so she could climb to the roof unencumbered.

“Lates!”

She rushed over to the coupling section to the fifth car and began to climb her way up.

“Pitohui and I will provide defense for the three rear cars. David, I suggest you do the same with the front three.”

“Understood. Let’s go,” said David, who had no objections. Kenta and Summon joined him in traveling toward the front of the train.

That left Tohma and Sophie, who carried the antitank rifle.

“Stay in the fifth car. But before that, leave the Degtyaryov and its ammo in the last car. I’ll use it on any large enemies that try to chase after us.”

“It’s the only way to use it,” Sophie agreed. She materialized the antitank rifle on the bench. Until the next time they needed to use it, Tohma would fight with her Dragunov, and Sophie with the GM-94 grenade launcher.

“All right! Let’s find a way to survive!” M said, concluding his instructions.

“Hey guys, there’s something up ahead!” cried Fukaziroh from the train roof, at that very same moment.

Llenn was in the third car. She leaned out through the open “window” on the right side and peered in the direction they were moving.

The tram train was still crawling along at the pace of a turtle, as Fukaziroh had said. There was barely any wind resistance pushing on her face.

And up ahead, she could see a brilliant carpet of green.

“The wasteland is ending…”

About two hundred yards ahead, the brown wasteland abruptly changed to green grassland. But Fukaziroh’s announcement had mentioned something being ahead, so it probably wasn’t about this, Llenn concluded.

“It’s people! A bunch of them, on either side, out in the grassland!” Fukaziroh added.

Llenn took out her monocular and pressed it to her eye. Within the green carpet of magnified grass, there were a group of people dressed in cream-white clothes—or perhaps they were just dirty. In fact, they looked like…

“Jōmons!”

As Fukaziroh said, they looked like the Jōmon people, ancestors to the modern Japanese, as they had learned in history class.

Their clothes were simple robes, a single piece of woven fabric with a hole for their heads to go through, and tied with a rope around the waist. There were various theories about what the Jōmons wore, and this was simply the most common imagined example.

Their black hair was tied up in bunches on either side of their head. It was literally exactly like the illustrations in the history books.

And now there were twenty, if not more, of these characters out there, who had never been seen before in GGO. There had to be more like fifty, and that was just in visible range. There were probably even more up ahead.

They must have been on their bellies, hiding in the grass. As the train slowly approached, they gradually stood up to show themselves.

“They really are Jōmons…but why?” Llenn asked. No one could give her an answer.

“What weapons?” M asked Fukaziroh.

“I don’t see any. Nobody’s holding a spear or a sword or anything like that.”

“Ooh, Jōmons! I want to see them! I’ve never seen a Jōmon person before!” said Clarence excitedly. She was stuck in the back car and couldn’t go up to see.

“Don’t leave your post. I’ve never seen one, either,” snapped her partner, Shirley.

The tram train approached the boundary between the wasteland and grassland.

Toot-tweeeeet!

The steam whistle sounded again.

It was a mystery as to who was sounding the whistle if nobody was inside the locomotive cab. It was also a bit odd as to why the sound had changed.

“Vivi wouldn’t place them here without a reason. We should treat them as enemies. First, we’ll observe. If they start trying to get on board, shoot them,” M told the group. Naturally, no one had any argument.

“Aww, that’s so mean, shooting the Jōmons! We should give them a ride.”

Except for Clarence.

“By the way, can anybody speak Japanese from the Jōmon period?”

“I apologize for how unbelievably airheaded my partner is. Please, everyone, I beg you to ignore her.”

Llenn felt a rush of pity for poor Shirley.

The train entered a world of green.

The rails continued to stretch on in an endless straight line, and Llenn could now see green all the way to the horizon. It was a vast plain.

The Jōmon people were visible to the naked eye now. They were scattered around about twenty yards from the tracks on either side, watching the train.

Their eyes met.

While the hairstyle was that of the Jōmon period, their facial features were not those of the ancient Japanese but the familiar style of any other GGO player.

This particular individual stared right back at Llenn and smiled.

“Huh?”

Then he lifted something from his feet.

“What?”

And threw it.

A heavy clunk made it clear that something had struck the train roof nearby.

“Bastards!” followed Fukaziroh angrily.

“They’re throwing stones!” said David, from one of the cars.

Llenn could already see that he had it right. The Jōmons were picking up fist-sized stones from the ground and throwing them at the train. Several went right through the open windows, smashing and damaging the wooden benches.

“Ugh.”

Their power was considerable. If one of them hit Llenn, it wouldn’t kill her, but it would certainly hurt. She’d definitely lose a significant amount of health.

In the midst of the onslaught, she heard Anna scream.

“Aaah!”

One of the rocks must have hit her.

“Damn you! M, requesting permission to fire!” Boss demanded angrily.

M’s response was, “Nobody shoot.”

Clank, clonk, bonk, wham, clunk, bang, thud, whud.

The stones being hurled toward, against, and into the train formed a rhythmical patter that accompanied M’s softly spoken command.

“Don’t shoot until they try to board the train. This is a ploy to reduce our ammo. We don’t know what’s coming ahead, so save your bullets. Eventually, the train will pass through.”

Ahh, I see, Llenn thought, though she did draw back from the window to stay farther away from the stones. The Jōmons continued to hurl rocks at them without pause, and with seeming glee. Either it was because they felt emboldened by not being shot at, or because they didn’t care and would do it anyway.

Even after passing them, the train was moving so slowly that they just chased after it. If they ran hard enough, they could overtake it. Then they picked up more stones and threw them again.

Llenn felt like this must be a little bit what it was like for a star to be surrounded by fans. Except that fans didn’t usually throw rocks.

Of all of the companions strewn about the six train cars, ducking and weaving around the rocks, only Clarence seemed to be having fun.

“Whoo-hoo! These really are Jōmons!”

She could see them from the rear car now; if anything, they were gathering back there as they chased after the train, so she had all the people she could see.

“Whoa! Yikes! They’re throwing at me now! I dodged it, though!”

She was enjoying herself a bit too much.

“C’mon, don’t just throw rocks, try to climb up on the train! Then I’ll shoot you!” she taunted, waggling her AR-57.

But no one took her up on the offer.

“Man, this is boring! Hmm…? Mmm?”

Clarence’s handsome face wrinkled with confusion.

“Wait, I recognize one of those Jōmons!”

“What?” David demanded.

“Explain,” Llenn heard M say.

“It’s hard to tell through the Jōmon clothes and hairstyle, but I know that guy. He was in SJ3, at the place with all the freight cars. The one I betrayed and shot. I can tell for sure. Hey, how you doin’, man?”

Oh, the switchyard! Llenn recalled.

It sounded familiar to Shirley, too.

“Ah, that time,” she commented.

The two of them were now fighting side by side, but their friendship only bloomed after they had battled against each other several times. They ended up taking each other out at that event, which made things much easier for Llenn’s team.

A rock came hurtling toward her.

“Hah!”

Her agility won out. The rock passed before her face and dented the roof support of the car, then rolled onto the floor.

“Yikes!”

They were trickier than bullets, because they had no bullet lines to help you dodge. Plus, they were scarier. Ordinarily, a bullet would be much scarier, obviously. But it was a strange fact of GGO that rocks were just more frightening. It was similar to how getting stabbed with a knife could be scarier than being shot.

Llenn’s mental gymnastics aside, M said, “So now we know that these so-called Jōmons are actually just player characters.”

“They were hired by Vivi!” declared Fukaziroh from the roof. She had no defense from the stones. Was she doing all right?

Llenn looked to the team’s HP bars in the upper left of her view: Fukaziroh’s bar was perfectly whole. Either she was dodging them or deflecting them back with the grenade launchers. By hitting them, not shooting them.

“Interesting. We’ve beaten down so many people through all the Squad Jams that I’m sure there were plenty of volunteers looking for payback,” Boss said with savage pleasure.

“That has to be it,” David agreed.

Toot-toooooot! Toot!

The whistle went off again.

The stones stopped coming.

The symphony of clanging on the train cars stopped. Llenn peered out with great hesitation and saw that the Jōmon people had stopped and were slowly fading into the distance. That speed was increasing, because the train had suddenly sped up. The “Jōmons” were smiling and waving, seeing them off.

Llenn couldn’t decide whether she wanted to wave back or take a shot at them.

“Farewell, hired goons! So long! How much chump change did you get for that? Buh-bye!” said Clarence, waving her hand wildly. Was she taunting them?

“Did we beat the stage? No, that’s not right…there must be more. Maybe they’ll show up again,” Boss said.

No one could argue against that. If she had gone to the trouble of hiring players to show up, it wasn’t going to be just the one time.

“Do you think,” Pitohui said, “they were the ones in the robot Shinsengumi, too?”

It could have been, but there was no way to know.

The train picked up speed and crossed the grassland at a pace that made their previous clip look like a joke.

Has the turtle become a hare? Llenn wondered. It felt to her like they were going fifty miles per hour now. It also made her wonder how Fukaziroh was doing up on the roof, directly in the flow of the wind.

“Hya-hooo! This is so fast! Chugga chugga choo-choo!”

She was doing just fine. She was having a blast.

“It sure is smoky, though!”

But apparently, she was getting smoke in her eyes.

“Tell us if the terrain ahead changes again, Fuka. More enemies will be coming.”

“I hear and obey! So who is next?”

She was a samurai.

About one minute after leaving the Jōmons behind, the train’s speed plummeted once again, like its dose of steroids had worn off.

“Change of scenery ahead!” warned Fukaziroh at that very moment, keeping her eyes peeled from the rooftop. “What’s this one…? Oh, a sandy beach. There’s ocean on the left side and beach on the right.”

What does that mean? Llenn wondered. She poked her head out of the second car of the train, which had resumed its turtle’s pace, and looked ahead to the right.

It was indeed a beach. Or maybe desert would be a better word for it. Everything visible was just pale gray sand. She could see it all the way to the horizon.

Then she headed to the other side of the car and popped out next to Tanya.

Yep, that’s the ocean, she thought but did not say.

The grassland had been cut clean away, replaced by a deep black sea, a feature of GGO. It looked very unhealthy, the kind of sea nobody would actually want to swim in. This, she saw to the horizon as well.

The tracks continued straight, directly on the beach. You might think that sand couldn’t possibly serve as the foundation for rail tracks, but GGO was impervious to wisecracks like that. It was the virtual world. Lean into the curve and enjoy the unreality of it all.

M calmly said, “Watch for boats and such on the left side. But pay more attention to the right.”

Llenn patted Tanya on the shoulder and headed back to her side.

“We’ve got company!”

This warning came not from Fukaziroh on the roof but from Clarence on the rear observation deck.

“Horses! A lot of them!”

She wasn’t very good at it. Honestly, it was terrible. What was that supposed to mean?

Pitohui leaned out of a right-side window and said, “What’s this, then?” A moment later, she continued, “To the rear right. Robot horses approaching the beach from the grassland. Oh, let me amend that. Samurai were hiding behind the horses.”

Samurai?

It was probably an accurate report, but it sounded so bizarre that the only reaction she got from the others was floating question marks over their heads.

Shirley could see through the scope of the R93 Tactical 2 to confirm, so she added, “They are definitely samurai. Horseback samurai from the Kamakura period with red helmets and armor. They were hiding behind the horses’ flanks and rose all at once. There are about ten of them. They’re carrying large katanas, but they also all have Japanese bows. Vivi must be a big history buff.”

By now, David had left monitoring of the side to Kenta while he took his scope out and got a good look at the approaching samurai warriors.

The armor was brilliant, the swords fine, and the bows massive. Even the dull silver robot horses had tufts of red mane.

It was like watching a scene out of an epic TV drama.

David shared his suspicions with the group. “Are they hired players, too…? I don’t think there are that many players in GGO who can ride those robot horses.”

“Shirley can do it!” Clarence chimed in.

“I know. I saw the playback of SJ4. It was brilliant,” said David, deciding that ignoring her would cause more trouble than it was worth.

“I’ve got it,” said Pitohui. “They’re converted mercenaries from a different full-dive game. I don’t remember the name, but you fight with bows and arrows on horseback, and it’s prized for its realism. Do you remember what I’m talking about? The first thing you do in the tutorial is learn to ride a horse.”

“Now it makes sense,” admitted David. If you’d learned how to ride a horse really well in a different Seed game, that expertise and familiarity would carry over to this one.

All the while, the horseback samurai were closing the gap with the agonizingly slow train. They lined up along the right side of the tracks, spacing themselves out at intervals of about a hundred feet.

“Okay, now can we shoot them?” Fukaziroh asked.

“Shoot one regular one in the center of their midst,” M replied.

“Yesss! I’ve got permission! It’s your time to roar, Rightony!”

The grenade launcher made a little pomp sound. The grenade flew into the middle of the horsemen, exploding between the fourth and fifth of them.

The blast sent sand flying up from the ground, showering the area in gray.

When it had cleared, the samurai riders were…unharmed.

“What?”

Both the shooter and the observers were stunned at the outcome.

“I’ll shoot one, too. The leader rider.”

M took aim with the M14 EBR and fired. It was a proper sniping shot, with the rifle steadied against the windowsill.

He couldn’t possibly miss from just a few dozen yards, but the lead samurai racing across the dunes was completely unfazed.

“That confirms it. They’re designed to be invincible,” M declared.

In what constituted a grave tone of voice for her, Fukaziroh said, “I had a feeling. She would never give us an easy game to conquer.”

“Why can’t our bullets hit them? That’s not fair!” Clarence fumed.

“Clearly, this won’t be easy…,” David muttered with chagrin.

Llenn watched as the lead rider lined up parallel to the train, matching its speed, and prepared to attack. He drew an arrow from the old-fashioned quiver known as a shiko, set it to the astonishingly long bow, and pulled it back as far as it could go. The distance was about a hundred feet.

“Here comes an arrow!” she called out, just before it was released.

Fortunately, it wasn’t aimed at Llenn but at Bold in the fourth car. Unfortunately, it landed true.

“Gaaah!”

Bold screamed and hurtled backward to the center of the car, slamming into the bench and shattering it to pieces.

“Eugh!”

Lux had been aiming the FD338 sniper rifle next to him and reacted when he saw the arrow sticking out of his friend’s chest. It had almost entirely penetrated through the body. Only a little bit of the feathers were visible.

Bold said, “Urgh…damn, really…? How is it so stro…?”

But his voice gave out there.

Ding.

The sign above his body said DEAD.

“Bold’s down! Got shot through the chest! Those bows are crazy powerful!” Lux warned the group, right as a second, third, and fourth bowman loosed arrows.

The second arrow was aimed at Pitohui.

“Hup!”

She knew that it was coming for her when she saw the bowstring pulling back, and she had a hunch that it would be highly accurate. So she twisted and danced through the air to avoid it. The projectile shot through the train car and whizzed out the other end.

The third arrow was aimed at Tohma in the rear car.

She didn’t have the wherewithal to avoid it, but a tiny shred of luck was on her side.

The arrow struck the wood in the window frame, splitting the thick support beam and deflecting slightly, so that it missed Tohma by just an inch or two.

The fourth arrow was aimed at the bright pink target.

Llenn had thrown herself to the floor when she heard Lux’s warning, but the archer anticipated that and corrected his aim. The arrow struck the side of the car, splitting through several wooden slats and coming to a stop just inches from Llenn’s face.

“Yeeeep!”

All she could see was the dull silver of the arrowhead right before her eyes. She crawled and scrambled to get away from that spot.

Tanya murmured, “That’s a meowerful weapon…”

She said it in a cutesy way, but the only emotion in her voice was fear.

“They say that the traditional bows of the past were way more powerful than what people use in archery today,” offered Clarence. The only emotion in her voice was delight.

It still seemed like these arrows were a little too strong, but it was a game, so you couldn’t complain too much. It was just a waste of time.

More impressive than that was the aim of the archers. They were exhibiting this kind of precision while bouncing around on horseback.

Bows and arrows didn’t get any kind of aim assistance in GGO, so this was pure player skill based on nothing but the laws of physics. Between horse riding and archery, how much experience must these players have accrued in that other game? They were like real-life Kamakura samurai.

“How far does this scenery go, Fuka?” M asked.

Fukaziroh was plastered to the left side of the roof. She lifted her head just enough to look forward and reported back.

“It goes as far as the eye can see. Looks like we’re hosting these samurai for a while, huh?”

What a nasty bunch of guests, Llenn thought, getting off the floor in the middle of the car. The arrow that had tried to pierce her was still stuck low on the wall. A chill ran up her spine.

Mounted riders that were like ghosts, impervious to any bullets shot through them, yet they could shoot their arrows and kill their targets.

“Wh-what are we supposed to do…?” Llenn wondered aloud. It had to be a thought shared by the entire group.

“Welp, let’s present some options to solve this quandary,” Pitohui suggested lackadaisically.

“Huh? How?” Llenn replied. She heard another arrow whizz past her head.

“Everyone, shoot the arrows.”

“What?”

“If the riders and the horses have no hit boxes, the arrows must, right? It only makes sense if they’re able to hit us and cause damage.”

“Oh…you have a point…”

“So just shoot the arrow when it comes at you.”

“You say it like ‘let them eat cake’…”

“Everyone with a high-precision gun, lean out and make yourself a target. Then put your gun on the windowsill and take close aim. They need time to pull back the bowstrings, so make sure you get the bullet circle over the arrow, then pick it off. Easy, right?”

“……”

It did not sound easy at all to Llenn.

“Fine, I’ll do it!”

If that was the only option, that was the only option.

“I’m exhausted…”

It was a battle that lasted no more than five minutes, but Llenn felt as though she’d been fighting for over fifty.

On the right side of the train, Llenn, David, Boss, Kenta, Summon, and Pitohui made themselves targets and frantically shot down well over a hundred arrows in total. As Pitohui had ordered, they took aim and fired in the moment the arrows were loosed.

It was only thanks to the bullet circle that they could hit them. Some they missed; it was a factor of their success that they simply assumed those arrows wouldn’t hit them anyway and stayed their ground.

As a result, they made it through without losing anyone else to death or injury.

“That was a hard one, though. Don’t want to go through that again,” David said, which is how they knew it was bad. They had used up a ton of ammo, too.

Meanwhile, the architect of the strategy, Pitohui, had an M870 Breacher shotgun packed with birdshot pellets, so she had it easier than anyone else.

“Bwa-ha-ha.”

Even a small-caliber shot had a very good chance of diverting an arrow, if nothing else.

In the end, as with the Jōmons, the weird steam whistle issued a long blast, and the horseback samurai pulled on their reins and stopped the horses.

Then they thrust their bows high, some of them even applauding in recognition of the excellent fight the train passengers had put up. Presumably.

“Bye-bye!” said Clarence, waving, as lackadaisical as ever.

She hadn’t fired a single shot, expecting that she wouldn’t have landed a hit anyway.

“You guys didn’t win this round! You were cheating!”

Hopefully, they didn’t hear that.

Once again, as though someone had mixed something illicit in with the coal, the steam engine began chugging and picking up speed, hurtling the seventeen companions onward closer to their goal.

Bold, the lone unfortunate casualty, disappeared about a minute after his death. Since this was the final game, he’d likely been sent back to Glocken. He was probably moping all on his lonesome. He might even be drinking his sorrows away at the bar.

But the remainder of MMTM were not to be deterred. They made sure to grab all the ammo, the Beretta APX 9 mm pistol, and the ARX160 assault rifle from his body before then.

Now they could use them until the end of the minigame. They would come in very handy in the sure to be intense battle ahead.

“Let us know if anything changes again, Fuka,” said M.

“You got it. First it was stones, then it was arrows, so next should be—”

“Guns?” asked Llenn.

Clarence chimed in to say, “Yeah, if you’re following history. Maybe it’s flintlocks next?”

“No, it won’t be that,” Pitohui interrupted.

“Huh? Why not?”

“Because I think the next battle is the last one. It’s three stages, and there will be three battles here.”

“I don’t know why you’re so sure, but okay. Rule of Threes, I guess!” said Clarence, who didn’t actually sound convinced.

Pitohui addressed the group: “Listen up, everyone. I actually have something very serious to say for once.”

Their ears perked up.

“The next weapon to show up is going to take us forward in time to guns. Specifically, modern machine guns. That means our next foes are going to be the Machine-Gun Lovers. All six of them, with Vivi, shooting the hell out of us.”

Ugh.

Llenn stuck her tongue out. She was thinking of the terror of being shot at in the forest, all the way back in SJ1.

“There’s no way we can defend against that,” Boss pointed out. “They’ll tear this train to bits.”

“Exactly. Even arrows were smashing through the wood. It’ll be pockmarked to hell and back. So our most precious defensive resource, M’s shield, will be used only to defend the flanks of Jake and Rosa, our two machine gunners. Objections will be overruled.”

It’s the only way, Llenn thought. Boss and David probably did, too—they said nothing.

Most likely, they were going to get shot up without anywhere to run or hide.

As Llenn thought back on it, the rat guard defense around the steam engine probably wasn’t meant to prevent them from changing the train’s speed. It was because the engine was a mass of thick metal that offered high defense. They didn’t want the group using it as cover.

That was also the reason that Bold’s body vanished after just one minute: to prevent the players from using the indestructible corpse as a shield.

“They’re really gonna get us good!” Clarence burbled with delight.

“I’d tell you not to get down in the dumps, Clare…but I think you’re right,” replied Pitohui with equal joy. “Once they shoot at us, there’s nothing we can do to defend ourselves. A lot of good folks are going to die in this one. But we just gotta see our way through it.”

She sure makes it sound easy, Llenn thought.

“You sure make it sound easy,” David said. Even he sounded happy, as though he’d accepted his fate. He continued, “But we’ll give it everything we’ve got. I just want at least one of us to survive. Speaking of which, I don’t think I mentioned what we’re doing after this. Whether it’s a celebration or commiseration party, I’ll buy you whatever you want. Come to the Western-style bar called ‘The Alamo’ in Glocken’s fifth district. I’ve got a room reserved under ‘David.’”

“We’re there!” said Clarence, always the first to jump at these offers.

Even Shirley seemed infected by her partner’s cheeriness. “However they approach us, we can shoot back. We’ll see how they like my explosive rounds. They’ll make the Buffalo wings taste that much better.”

Boss added, “We gotta keep up, girls! Tohma, you get the Degtyaryov. Don’t worry about the remaining ammo!”

The bold and beautiful Amazons grunted and roared their approval.

“Things are getting exciting. I suppose I’ll blast all the shots I have and then die on my feet with honor, like the great warrior monk Benkei,” Fukaziroh declared.

“No,” said M at once. “When you see the enemy, hide between the cars. We need to save your firepower for the end, Fuka.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve got plasma grenades. I know I can take out at least some of them.”

“They’ll dodge them. They’re almost guaranteed to be coming by car.”

“Damn, really?”

Llenn understood M’s point, though. If they were coming by car, they didn’t need to get too close. The effective range of machine guns was much longer than the MGL-140s. Even if they did get within range, the slow velocity and ballistic arc of the grenades would create big, obvious bullet lines that could be easily dodged.

“Save those plasmas. And that was a great hint, Fuka.”

“Right?”

Oh, she doesn’t get it, Llenn realized.

“I don’t think you get what I mean, so I’ll tell you when it’s needed.”

“Sure thing.”

See?

“Llenn.”

The mention of her name caught her by surprise.

“Yes! Yes!”

She didn’t even mean to respond twice.

“Come to the fourth car and hide between the armor plating on both sides. We might need you to perform the most dangerous job at the end. We need you as whole as possible until then.”

“Uh, all right,” she replied. She didn’t know what he meant, but it definitely wasn’t going to be good.

Still, she replied, “If it’s gotta be done, I’ll do it!”

Right after that came the silliest steam whistle yet.

Toot, too-too-too-too-too-toot!

“The terrain’s gonna shift again. It’s a wasteland like the first area. Also, I’m sure you can tell, but our speed’s dropping, too!” said Fukaziroh, the little person who lived on the roof.

The tram-style train was slowing as it carried its seventeen passengers toward their final confrontation. Eventually, the sandy beach and ocean ended, and the train passed into a wasteland terrain much like where they started. It was flat brown earth, with only the very occasional rock formation that might offer some cover. There was no wind.

“Not many rocks,” Llenn noted as she hurried to the fourth car. At the end of SJ1, and where they left from earlier, there had been many rocks and boulders, but there were almost none here. It was like being on a sea of brown.

“That’s to make it easier for them to drive. This place reminds me of where we fought Mecha-Dragon during the Five Ordeals,” Boss said.

Llenn agreed with that. The more rocks there are, the harder it is to drive.

Toot, too-too-too-toot! Toot, too-too-too-toot! Toot, too-too-too-toot!

It was a truly bizarre whistle. It made you wonder how someone could possibly force a steam whistle to produce that sound. It was the kind of jingle a screen advertising today’s special at the butcher’s window in the supermarket would make.

“Right side, here comes the enemy, la-la-loo-loo,” sang Pitohui from the fifth car.

Take it seriously, Llenn thought. She assumed that the enemy wouldn’t be shooting quite yet, so she popped her head up to look over Jake’s shoulder.

Ahead and to the right, she saw a rock mountain.

It looked about eight hundred yards away. But because the land was so flat, the perspective was warped, and it didn’t feel as far away as the number suggested.

How tall was it, a hundred and fifty feet? Somewhere between a mountain and a hill. It had a gentle slope and a flat top, like an overturned plate.

And resting on top was a line of cars.

Lux caught them through the scope of the FD338. He announced, “I see five vehicles! One red pickup truck. Turtle-like chassis armor and an M2 heavy machine gun mounted in the bed! It’s a technical!”

“Technical” was the term for an armed vehicle with a platform that allowed for mounted heavy machine guns, offering both mobility and firepower. They were a huge threat to infantry. Their power in urban areas and flat land like this was considerable.

The M2 machine gun was the monster 50-caliber gun that had torn up the towers where they were hiding in SJ5 recently. Its effective range was over a thousand yards.

At this point, they already didn’t want to hear more about the vehicles, but it had to be done. Reluctantly, Lux continued, “The other four are smaller buggies covered in armor. They’re Kawasaki KRX 1000s, like from the Five Ordeals.”

Oh, those, Llenn recalled. They were off-road four-wheel-drive vehicles with no windows or windshield, seating two, about ten feet long and six feet wide.

But they had very tall suspension for dealing with uneven terrain, so the clearance was tall, like a deer stretching its legs. The top of the roll cage protecting its riders was over six feet off the ground.

They had armor on the front and sides, just like the time when the mecha-dragons combined into the crab. Back then, M had duct-taped his shield to create an improvisational armored vehicle, meaning that there were gaps and spots where the crab knocked them loose.

This time, however, the armor was surely fastened tight—based on M’s idea from back then, of course. It had probably cost a lot of money to have done, but Vivi would’ve paid for it.

“I can see barrels sticking forward from the middle of the buggies. They’ve attached the machine gunners’ guns to them to face ahead.”

“I see. So they’re like fighter jets that can only shoot forward,” David noted.

Llenn didn’t know a lot about jets, but she felt like she understood what he meant. If they had to both drive the buggies and shoot the gun, they must’ve given up on manual control, set them down with a tripod or some other base, and pointed the barrel in the direction the car was facing.

Then there would be a wire or some other mechanism by the wheel that they could use to fire whenever they wanted. The bullet circle would help them aim, of course.

The buggies were going to rush at the train, spray a bunch of bullets, then disengage. It was a hit-and-run strategy.

M figured it all out and told them the strategy. It was the best plan they could possibly execute.

“Stay scattered, don’t clump up. They’ll wipe us out in one volley. When the buggies charge us, do your best to avoid them. Don’t risk shooting back if you can’t do it. They’ll outshoot us.”

With the flimsy defense the train cars offered, the only real way to survive was to stay out of the line of fire. With the exception being those safely behind M’s shield.

“You don’t have to try to hit them with grenades, Sophie. They’ll just avoid the lines. If they come close enough, however, you can try to lead them and provide a smoke screen, or just get close enough to jostle the cars and throw off their aim.”

“Got it!” said Sophie, hoisting her GM-94.

“Tohma. Take the Degtyaryov to the rear deck. Point the barrel straight behind us. Only shoot it at anyone who comes chasing from behind.”

“Roger!”

Tohma had her orders. There was no time to swivel that long, heavy barrel from side to side. So if she was going to protect anything, it would be their direct rear.

“Huh? What about us? Are we out of a job now? So long, good luck?” complained Clarence. Naturally, they’d been the ones holding down the caboose.

“I have two suggestions for you.”

“Let’s hear ’em.”

“First, stand there and be a literal meat shield for Tohma.”

“Rejected! What’s the other one?”

“You can leave your station. Buddy up with Shirley and move about the cars, sniping at the buggies.”

“We’ll take that one! Right, Shirley?”

Shirley didn’t respond. She told M, “I’ll aim for the tires, but don’t expect too much. Plus, those buggies can probably still run with a missing tire.”

“Understood. The rest of you, just focus on survival. That’s all from me. Best of luck.”

“So the time has finally come, Goddess,” said Huey, the slicked-back ginger, from the bed of the technical vehicle. Vivi was in the driver’s seat.

Huey wore the uniform of ZEMAL: a green fleece jacket with a patch of an infinity symbol made out of ammo belts, plus black combat pants.

He was watching a train traveling slowly and carelessly across the horizon from left to right. Before him was a gun emplacement welded to the truck bed, holding a massive M2 machine gun.

A metal ammo box was attached to the left side of the gun with the mechanism for feeding the ammo belt into the gun inside. It could fire up to a hundred shots consecutively.

In the back of the truck bed were five more of those boxes. You didn’t even want to think about how much all that ammunition cost.

The armor plating on the technical was arranged to surround Huey’s standing position: the front, right, left, and above the cab, and between the cab and bed. It was the perfect defense, as long as no one ever shot at them from behind.

“Yes, it has.”

While the plating completely covered the windshield, there was an open slit in it about two inches tall and a foot wide, through which Vivi’s smiling face could be seen.

She wasn’t wearing her trademark tiger-stripe camo today, but the ZEMAL uniform instead, like her squadmates.

“Listen up, everyone,” Vivi said through her comm to the drivers of the other four vehicles. “We just have one strategy. Shoot, shoot, and shoot like hell. No need to hold back or work together. Just race however you like, shoot however you like, and show all the people on that train how deep your love for machine guns really goes.”

There was a lot of guttural roaring and cheering in response, so she didn’t know exactly what they were saying, but it was clear that there was no objection.

The drivers of the buggies had their say, however.

“We are bursting with gratitude for your love for us and machine guns!” said black-haired Shinohara with his M60E3.

“Witness our love! Love is our witness!” said Tomtom, the one wearing a bandana. He patted the base of his FN MAG.

“I’m gonna shoot and shoot until I’m all outta bullets,” said Max, the Black avatar, gazing at his Minimi Mk 46.

“Give us orders whenever you want!” said Peter, with his trademark taped nose, winking to the Negev in his buggy.

Vivi revved the technical’s engine and said, “Then let us show respect to these worthy heroes for their feat in getting this far—by killing them all!”

“Here they come!” Fukaziroh announced to the other sixteen.

Before Llenn ducked down behind the armor plates shielding the sides of the car, she caught a glance at the four buggies, located at the top of the hill now parallel with the train, bursting out of the gates, and at the technical vehicle pursuing more slowly.

Please be safe, folks! she prayed, and she ducked under the bench running down the center of the car, where she was protected by the shields on the left and right. From here, they could shoot at her from either side of the train, and M’s fanned-out shield would block the bullets—or else Jake’s and Rosa’s bodies would.

“I’m scorin’ the first kill!” Max roared with delight, pressing the pedal to the metal. His buggy raced toward the train at top speed. A faint trail of dust rose behind him.

Touching the lever on the inside of his steering wheel with his thumb sent the message to the game that he was touching the trigger, generating a bullet circle that he could see.

Naturally, this also generated a bullet line. It was a system meant to prevent cheating the system by pressing the trigger with something else and thus not creating a warning line, but in this case, it was a big help to him.

Between the buggy’s very long suspension and its excellent shock absorbers, it felt like the chassis was floating on air, even as it tore through rocky wasteland. That meant that the bullet circle for the gun fixed to the buggy was quite calm, all things considered.

He had six hundred yards until he reached the train.

“Don’t charge in on your own. They’ll focus all their fire on you,” said Shinohara, who was in second place. Max just smiled.

“Let ’em focus on me! Then you guys can hit them from both sides! That’s the plan, right?”

“We never discussed a plan even once. But whatever! We’ll call it that! Good luck! OB!”

Shinohara turned to the left and headed for the rear of the train.

“We won’t let your death be in vain, Max,” Tomtom said, following in his tracks.

The last buggy, Peter’s, took a different tack and plunged right.

From an aerial view, it would look like four little bees attacking a long, slow-moving snake.

“Here they come. Lead car’s a decoy. The two on the left are the 7 mm-ers. Watch out if they get on the other side. You know what to do, Tohma,” said M from the fifth car, looking through his scope. The situation might have been bad, but he kept calm.

“Roger!”

The PRTD-41’s long barrel jutted through the railings of the observation deck at the rear of the train. The poles severely limited its left to right swing range, but this was the most secure, stable firing position.

Sophie had her GM-94 in position, ready to help defend Tohma from gunfire.

Huey watched this all unfold through his binoculars as the technical slowly descended the hill slope.

“The Degtyaryov’s fixed on the observation deck at the train’s ass. Watch out for it,” he informed Shinohara and Tomtom as they were on their way toward it.

“I don’t wanna get shot by an antitank rifle. It’s a bit far still, but I’m gonna hit ’em,” said Tomtom, pointing the buggy a bit ahead of the rear deck. At a distance of about five hundred yards, he opened fire.

The machine gun attached to the “nose” of the buggy spat fire, hurling bullets toward the train car. Because the train was moving, it timed out so that they trained precisely on the deck itself.

“Hrrg!”

Seeing the bullet lines all around her, Sophie stood her ground in front of Tohma and fired the GM-94. She was aiming ahead of the buggy.

Bullets spattered across the deck.

“Aagh!”

One of them went through Sophie’s left leg, but that was it. Tohma was unharmed.

Three grenades exploded in succession, just a few dozen yards in front of Tomtom.

“Hah! Not bad!”

He stopped firing toward the train car and turned the wheel to the right. His first hit-and-run sortie was a failure.

“Hey, buddy, what’s wrong?” Shinohara teased him, maintaining his direction on a course to swing around to the opposite side of the train. Eventually, he was set to cross the tracks about four hundred yards behind the train.

“Eat this!”

Tohma unleashed her first blast of fury.

The shot was a roar that reverberated across the world.

“I’m not eating that!”

Shinohara pressed on the brake for half a second, which was enough for the massive bullet to pass along its line from right to left, just three feet in front of his buggy, sending a shock wave along its path.

“Hya! That was a close one!”

If it had hit him, the impact traveling through the armor plating could have flipped over the buggy.

“Shit!”

The front of the PTRD-41 recoiled, and the empty cartridge fell out of the bottom, as it was designed to do. Tohma quickly loaded the next shot from below, then pushed the shockingly large bolt forward into place.

She took aim through the scope, but Shinohara’s buggy had already crossed over to the right side and was out of her aiming window.

“The other one’s coming up front!” Sophie announced, tracking Tomtom’s buggy as she reloaded her grenade launcher.

The target crossed the tracks from left to right.

“This time…”

Tohma watched the bullet circle pulse through her scope, waiting for the right moment.

Sophie counted down.

“Almost there… Three… Two…”

“Nice try!”

Tomtom yanked the wheel to the right.

It was about three hundred yards to the back of the train caboose. He went into a sharp turn, tilting the chassis hard to the left as it sank on its suspension.

Tohma hadn’t expected this move, and her bullet passed harmlessly by Tomtom’s left side. When the buggy was fully straight, it was pointed directly at the last car of the train.

“You’re mine now!”

The FN MAG spat fire, sending a swarm of bullets toward the observation deck.

“Gaaah!”

“Dammit!”

Tohma and Sophie screamed in the pub’s private room.

“Yo! So you guys were next, huh?” said Bold, the dreadlocked member of MMTM.

“Huh? Oh…yeah, they got us,” Sophie replied, realizing where they were.

If they died within the minigame, they were sent to where the first casualty currently was, back in the city of Glocken. She could see that they were in a room of a pub built to resemble a classic Western saloon. She was sitting on thick, luxurious carpet, in the same position she had been in on the train. Tohma was resting on her stomach nearby.

“This must be The Alamo.”

“That’s right. Oh, I guess the team leader must’ve told you about this.”

Tohma got to her feet and grumbled, “Dammit. He shot me.”

Bold suggested, “Why don’t you tell me what enemies were next, and what happened? We’ll have a drink and take our time,” as he guided them to a large table.

“The two in the rear are down,” Boss said, informing the group of her teammates’ deaths.

In the center of the fourth car, Llenn thought, Ah, alas. There was nothing she could do for them.

“Should I go pick up the Degtyaryov or grenade launcher?” Boss asked.

“No,” said M. “It’s too hard to hit enemies with this much mobility. We’ll focus on survivability instead.”

“More importantly, they’re coming! Get down!” Pitohui said. M threw himself to the ground.

“Doryaaaaaa!”

At two hundred yards from the train, Max started shooting the Minimi.

He approached the long train from the right rear, slowly turning to the right in order to spray a line of bullets against the sides of the fifth and fourth cars. He couldn’t see his targets, but he knew they were in there, and he pounded the cars, riddling them with bullets.

“Bastard!”

Jake wasn’t going to take this lying down, however. Even if he was lying down.

From behind M’s shield, he opened fire on the buggy with the HK21.

Two machine guns began a loud and brazen duel across the wasteland.

“So you’ve got a machine gun, too?! Then you’re a worthy foe!”

Max kept the wheel straight, training the bullet circle on the side of the fourth car. He stomped on the gas.

For several seconds, there was a brutal duel of machine gun on machine gun.

Max’s 5.56 mm rounds bounced off M’s shield. They deflected upward, putting a few holes in the roof. Bits of debris began falling right in front of Llenn.

Jake’s 7.62 mm rounds were right on target, striking the buggy, but the armor plating blocked them, too. At most, it caused the vehicle to waver a little.

If just one of them had gotten inside the little hole for the machine gun barrel to pass through, or the slit the driver used to see out, it could have done damage to Max. Unfortunately, Jake was not so lucky.

Max slammed on the brakes, and once he had stopped, he put the gear in reverse.

He distanced himself from the train without exposing the defenseless rear of his vehicle. He could also keep shooting this way.

They had plenty of ammo today. It was being provided by Vivi.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s goooo!”

Tomtom and Shinohara reached the left side of the train and began taking more vicious hit-and-run maneuvers.

In short, first they took a distance of four hundred yards, running parallel with the train. Then they turned right, pointing toward the train and rapidly approaching. At about three hundred yards, they fired their machine guns.

But only for a second or two. Then they disengaged, turning left, before doing some irregular slaloms to avoid exposing their weak backsides to gunfire.

They repeated this again and again, steadily shooting up the cars here and there, putting lots of very nasty pressure on the train passengers.

This tactic was meant to minimize their exposure to Rosa’s PKM machine gun in the fourth car, and it was certainly successful at limiting her ability to actually hit them.

David, too, was attacking with the grenade launcher attached to the underside of his gun barrel, but their mobility prevented him from landing any hits or even from interrupting their attacks.

“Don’t blame us for this!” Shinohara said. His third attack sent ten shots or so into the side of the second train car.

“Urgh!”

Despite being hidden out of sight in a prone position, MMTM’s Kenta took one of the bullets to his head, it having ripped through the siding of the car.

At this point, it was just a game of luck: You either had it or you didn’t.

As his hit points dropped, Kenta realized he’d been KO’d and performed an extremely quick maneuver. In the two seconds he had before his hit points reached zero, he materialized all of his gear onto the train car.

A pile of grenades appeared and rolled around the floor as the DEAD tag appeared over his body.

“Yo, you were next, Kenta?”

“You guys already started? Hey, you two.”

Tohma and Sophie were already drinking tea and chatting in the room at The Alamo. They greeted Kenta when he showed up.

He sat down next to Bold and said, “Damn, man. That game’s not meant to be winnable…”

He slumped against the back of the chair with exhaustion.

“Goddammit. I’ll take Kenta’s ammo.”

David checked briefly to see that no buggies were approaching, then rushed off for the second car. He scooped up all the magazines of ammo that fit his own gun, then stuck them in pouches and his inventory.

He noted the tattered look of the car’s siding. You could see right through it. It was no thicker than wallpaper at this point.

Man, it’s hard to woo a woman, David thought but of course did not say.

Surprisingly unharmed so far was Fukaziroh.

“Guess I don’t get shot here.”

She was above the coupling between the third and fourth cars, just below the roof, clinging to the side of the third car like a koala. None of the bullets were coming anywhere near her.

Apparently, they had overlooked her, considering that position to be unnecessary to attack.

“Shit. They’re so damn slippery…”

“If you cuss like that, Shirley, all the good luck’s gonna get away.”

Shirley was seated on the bench of the fifth car, R93 Tactical 2 in position.

She was aiming for the vehicles on the left side, but they were so quick and nimble in their movements that she couldn’t get a good shot. And since she was sitting, she couldn’t rest the rifle on a solid surface, which lowered her accurate range.

Clarence was trying to draw attention to herself about five yards away, leaning out the window and spraying bullets with her AR-57. Each shot was as small and weak as Llenn’s, though, so that even if she landed a shot on the buggy, it would only ping the armor.

After several approaches, Tomtom’s buggy finally took Clarence’s bait.

“He’s coming this way. Nice.”

“Good, keep shooting.”

“If I die, scoop up my bones and bring them home.”

“Should I offer a slice of pizza at your grave?”

Tomtom’s volley of oncoming fire riddled Clarence’s body.

“Owwwww. Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

It was hard to tell if Clarence was screaming or laughing. In either case, Shirley thought, Gotcha.

She got the buggy’s right tire in her scope and sent a bullet toward it.

The tire took an explosive round at a distance of three hundred yards, shredded, and completely blew off the vehicle.

“Whoa!”

Tomtom was startled by the sudden tilt in the buggy and stopped shooting. He would only be hitting the ground at this point. The front right wheel was exposed and scraped directly against the dirt.

“Crap, they took my tire off! Can I still drive this?”

He carefully turned the steering wheel to the left. That caused him to tilt even farther to the right, digging the exposed wheel harder into the ground, but it was able to rotate and move the car forward.

“Yikes! Better pray this works…”

Slowly, he distanced himself from the train.

“What are you doing?” Shinohara demanded.

“Sorry, sorry! Can I get a ride on your back along with my machine gun?” Tomtom asked, a split second before his buggy flipped over to the right.

She had just shot out the rear right tire as well, flipping the buggy over sideways.

“You’re finished,” said Shirley.

She trained the scope over the unarmored back of the buggy. Right over the driver’s seat.

She pulled the trigger. A second later, the word DEAD appeared over the buggy.

“I’ve avenged you, Clarence,” said Shirley, popping out a golden cartridge. It was very cool.

“I’m not dead yet!” said Clarence, a tiny sliver of HP left, lying on her back on the floor of the train car like a frog.

“They got Tomtom!”

Huey clutched the two vertical handles behind the M2 gun.

“Then let’s get in there,” said Vivi, stepping on the accelerator.

The technical had been cruising slowly along at a distance from the train, but now it picked up speed, heading toward the rails.

“We’ll carve them up from behind, as we planned.”

“With pleasure!”

“The technical’s coming up from behind. Vivi’s royally pissed that we got her teammate,” reported Pitohui, who leaned out the window after dodging Max’s attack to pinpoint the location of the imposing, approaching enemy.

M realized Vivi’s tactic at once. “She’s going to hang out straight behind us and shoot with the M2.”

“How come? The gun’s on a swivel, so they could shoot from the side, right? Do they not want to run parallel and have us sweep their side…?” Boss wondered through the comm. But she realized the answer on her own. “Oh! But then they might be cross firing on their own teammates…and behind us is the hardest direction for us to hit.”

“Exactly,” said Pitohui.

The M2’s 50-caliber armor-piercing rounds would go through the cars (and them) and still have plenty of kinetic energy carrying them through to the other side, where there was a small chance they might hit the ground and bounce back upward, potentially striking one of the ZEMAL buggies. It was a good example of why an all-powerful gun couldn’t just be used willy-nilly without consequences.

The entire time, Shinohara was on the left, and Max and Peter on the right, continuing their incessant hit-and-run tactics.

Rosa and Jake were shooting at the buggies each time they approached, and they landed some shots. It just wasn’t doing anything against the buggies’ armor.

“Hya-hooo!”

Shinohara was having a blast. Though he hadn’t aimed it this way, one of his bullets coincidentally landed right where Fukaziroh’s feet were, pinging back and forth between the walls of the adjacent cars.

“Yikes! Watch out, dammit!” Fukaziroh swore, clinging to the end of the car. “That’s not the end of me, though. I refuse to die. I cannot die until I’ve seen the light go from Vivi’s eyes.”

Meanwhile, Peter did a swoop attack on the right side that caught Anna in the window of the fourth car, where she was valiantly attempting to shoot back at a different buggy. She had been on the left side of the car, and it caught her from behind.

A swarm of 5.56 mm bullets flew through the car. The first hit was on her Dragunov, knocking it from her hands. The second went into her head from behind, and the third through her chest.

It was a very unlucky fatal combo of shots.

“Sorry, everyone, they got me!” she said, just before she was sent straight to the saloon.

“We’re just dropping like flies! They’re grinding us down!” Boss lamented, speaking for the whole group.

David used the grenade launcher on his STM-556 to successfully keep Shinohara’s buggy at bay.

“Yeah, it’s bad,” he agreed, expelling the casing.

But no better plan was coming to mind. So, to his chagrin, he had to rely on M.

“Got any ideas?”

In the fifth car, M glanced back at Pitohui, who was shooting her KTR-09 on the other side, and asked, “Is it time yet?”

“Yeah, sure. Let’s bring out the secret weapon. Hopefully, it works,” she replied.

Boss, David, Llenn, and the other survivors could only listen with question marks over their heads.

“Time to execute the plan we came up with. Fuka and Llenn, come to the fifth car!”

Llenn and Fukaziroh raced through the train cars, which were pocked with bullet holes all over, until they reached M in the fifth car, right as Vivi’s pickup truck straddled the rails behind the train.

The rails passed right between the sets of tires. The rail ties extending to the sides of the rails caused the truck to thump and bump, however.

The truck was about three hundred yards from the rear car of the train.

The trigger for the M2 was a butterfly-shaped metal plate located between the two vertical control handles. As soon as he put his thumbs on the plate, Huey could see a bullet circle up ahead. He adjusted the aim of the M2 with the handles until the circle was over the observation deck at the end of the last car.

“Ready to fire! Keep your distance, boys. There might be some strays,” Huey warned his teammates, before adding, “then again, it’s a rare chance to see what it’s like to get shot by an M2.”

He began shooting.

A withering hail of merciless automatic gunfire began.

The roar of the gun filled the world, and the 50-caliber bullets it produced tore the wooden train car to shreds.

Chunks flew from the sixth car, as though it were being devoured by some invisible monster. A number of shots hit the metal frame and the trucks that housed the wheels connecting the car to the rails; each one created a shower of sparks like a little firework.

Within ten seconds of automatic fire, the rear thirty feet of the sixty-foot car had been chewed away until it looked more like an open-top freight car.

After a hundred consecutive shots, Huey paused to replace the overheated, warping barrel and switch in a new ammo box. He was going to run through all of the four boxes behind him.

With the sound of the sixth car being torn to shreds in their ears, Llenn and Fukaziroh heard out M’s plan and realized what he meant by it.

“Will you do it?” he asked.

“Hell yeah, I will! I’m gonna give Vivi a taste of virtual violence! It’s what a vi-vi deserves!”

“I’ll do it, if that’s the only chance we’ll have!”

“Then shall we get started?” Pitohui suggested, receiving big handfuls of grenades from M.

David told them, “Fukaziroh, Llenn…best of luck.”

“We got this.”

“I’ll do my best!”

Boss added, “Stick it to ’em!”

“You bet!”

“Yeah!”

Their companions sent them on their way.

Huey had exchanged the long, heavy barrel for a new one, attached a fresh ammo box to the left side of the gun body, stuck the ammunition belt into the feeder, and yanked on the big reloading lever twice on the right side.

“All set! Reloading finished!”

It had taken a lot of work and time, but the job was done.

Huey took the handles and aimed for the train car again. This time, he was hoping to finish blowing up the front half of the sixth car and get into the fifth car.

“Hmm?”

That was when he noticed that the car was suddenly getting much larger—that it was coming toward them, in fact.

“Wha—?”

It was for one of two reasons. Either the technical had sped up, or the train car slowed down. He didn’t feel the acceleration, so it had to be the latter.

“I’m going to dodge around it,” Vivi said, pulling the car to the right and taking it off the tracks. The half-destroyed train car came closer, now to the left side of the technical, its wheels scraping on the rails.

There was a huge burst of sparks from around the wheels. The brakes were engaged, grinding against the wheels. The car slowly passed by them—but it was only the sixth car.

Huey looked up ahead. Three hundred yards away, the rear of the fifth car was visible. Since there was no deck at the end, the connecting walkway between cars was exposed.

“They cut the car loose?” Huey asked.

“Yes,” Vivi said. “Someone blew up the coupler, it seems.”

“Ohhh, I see!”

The coupler was a metal hoop that cinched the fifth and sixth cars together. Naturally, it was very sturdy, but with enough explosives, you could blow it up. Say, by wrapping a couple grenades around it. Only regular ones, though; a plasma grenade would destroy the car and its wheel trucks.

Once the coupler was destroyed, the last car would be left behind.

A train had brake lines that ran down its length. There was air pressure inside them that worked to release the brakes after they’d been engaged.

Levers on either side of the car released air pressure in the brake lines, so if they were opened, allowing the air to escape, the brakes would automatically engage. That was a safety measure that activated if the coupling were to come undone while traveling.

“They activated the safety brake, hoping to slam the last car against us. Quite a clever idea,” Vivi said, adjusting the wheel until they were back over the rails.

Huey put his thumbs on the trigger again and said, “But I’ll just grind down the other five cars!”

He was just getting the bullet circle over the car and preparing to shoot when he noticed it was rushing toward them again.

“Check that, remaining four cars!”

He removed his thumbs from the trigger and waited for the technical to swerve again.

“They cut the fifth car loose! It’s going your way!” Shinohara announced, reporting from his vantage point.

Vivi again steered to the right, taking the pickup off the rails to avoid a direct collision with the fifth car. Then she said, “They’re going to make their move. Get down!”

“Huh?”

Huey didn’t understand what she meant, but he did as she said, taking his hands off the gun and dropping until he was below the armor on the sides of the truck.

The sixty-foot car, brakes squealing, hurtled in their direction.

“Let’s go!”

“Yeah!”

Fukaziroh and Llenn pumped themselves up inside the train car.

“Viiiiii! Viiiiiiiiiiiii!”

Fukaziroh screamed like a demon, sticking her face out of the right side of the rear half of the car. And not just her face—but the barrels of the grenade launchers in her hands.

It was a plan to blow up the technical as the vehicles passed each other.

“I knew it!” Vivi shouted excitedly, stomping on the gas and cutting back to the left. The truck, which had been listing to the right, changed directions until it was so close to the tracks, it might hit the train car.

Train car and technical.

Fukaziroh fired as the two passed each other.

But the technical had veered very close to the tracks, and the grenades collided with the armor plating surrounding the truck—but did not explode.

Because grenade rounds had so much power, they came with a safety measure. If they hit the target within sixty feet of the shooter, they would not detonate, in order to protect the person who fired them.

The twelve grenades Fukaziroh shot in succession hit the armor of the technical and simply thudded off it. That was the point of getting so close to the train car. Vivi had it so close to the rails that they nearly collided.

Vivi looked through the narrow slit in the forward armor at Fukaziroh.

“Bastard!”

Fukaziroh looked through the train window at Vivi.

For a split second, their eyes met.

Then Fukaziroh was trailing away. Unless she stole the car somehow, there was no way she could ever catch up to her friends in the train.

The fifth car had almost passed by the technical.

And then something flew out of the window of the train car.

The pink blur leaped onto the bed of the technical pickup and landed with both feet on the back of the man huddled there.

“Gwegh!”

He only had time to utter a muffled gurgle before she silenced him forever.

Bang!

A few dozen seconds earlier, M went through the plan.

“We’re going to put Fuka in the car and cut it loose, sending it down the track.”

“Oooh. And then I get to grenade the hell out of them as we pass. Not a bad plan at all, giving me my flowers and allowing me to take down Vivi. You’re a damn good man after all, M.”

“She’ll prevent that. Vivi’s going to bring the car closer to the train to make sure the safety measures activate.”

“I take back everything I just said. The plan’s shit.”

“But while she’s distracted with that, Llenn will emerge from hiding inside the train car and jump onto the technical. Then she’ll take down the machine gunner and Vivi and take over the pickup. Once you’ve caught up, Fuka, you’ll use the car and the M2 to beat the other buggies. I’m aware that this plan is a real stretch, but if there’s any way we can win, that’s going to be it.”

“Ooh, I see! Can you do that, Llenn?”

“I’m in!”

“Good. We’re relying on you two. I got the hint for this plan when Fuka mentioned dying on her feet like Benkei the monk earlier.”

“How so?” Llenn asked.

“Benkei served the mighty general Yoshitsune, and Yoshitsune famously leaped over eight boats to escape the Battle of Dan-no-Ura.”

“Is that Llenn who just jumped on top of us and killed my teammate?” Vivi asked loudly, so Llenn could hear her in the truck bed.

With Huey’s dead body next to her, shot through the head by her P90, Llenn smiled and replied, “That’s right! Now it’s our turn to jump onto your car!”

“Here we go!”

Llenn grabbed the two-inch metal support holding up the M2 gun, right as Vivi yanked the steering wheel to the right. She knew that Vivi was going to try throwing her off. Somehow, she had to take out Vivi within her armored cab without getting tossed off the back—while keeping the vehicle and its weapon intact.

If they wanted to just destroy the technical, they could have hurled plasma grenades as it passed. But then they couldn’t beat the buggies, and there would be no way to win and clear the minigame. David would never meet Vivi in real life.

Vivi was sitting in the driver’s seat on the right side earlier. She couldn’t even shoot in there, because the armor was blocking her access.

The only way in is the slit in front!

In order for her to drive, she had to have that small slit to see through, two by twelve inches.

If she could just get the P90’s muzzle jammed in there…

But that would require clinging to either the top of the driver’s side or the hood.

“Urgh!”

With the car swaying wildly left and right, she was going to be thrown off if she just let go of the machine gun’s support. Huey’s body flopped and rolled all over until it was finally tossed from the truck bed.

The ammo boxes, which weren’t attached to anything, slid across the truck bed and hit Llenn.

“Ouch!”

It even took a few hit points. She wanted to hurl them off the truck, but she couldn’t waste them if they were going to use them later.

Then Vivi slammed on the brakes.

“Gahk!”

Llenn hurtled forward. She’d been leaning her stomach against the gun support, so at least she didn’t slam against the armor seated on the front of the truck bed.

Vwoom!

But then Vivi was on the gas again, throwing her backward.

“Hrrgh!”

Once again, she managed to withstand it by clinging to the support.

“You’re pretty good at this!” shouted Vivi gleefully.

“Practice defensive driving for once!” she shot back.

If she had a photon sword, she could tear right through that armor, perhaps, but that would also destroy the car, which is why Pitohui didn’t give her one.

Right and left, forward and back, Llenn tried to think of a plan as the car battered her around. How could she get to the slit on the front?

There wasn’t even three feet of difference from the edge of the truck bed to the windshield. But there was nothing she could grab on to along the way. The armor plating was flat and sheer.

“Hey, Llenn!”

She was startled to hear her name being called. It was coming from the gun slung over her shoulder.

“P-chan! This is kind of a bad time for me!”

“I know, Llenn! You need to use me!”

“What do you mean, P-chan?” Llenn shouted back.

“Hey, who are you talking to?” asked Vivi from the driver’s seat. She was busy yanking the steering wheel back and forth.

“Oh, I see…”

Her brief conversation with P-chan had been the spark Llenn’s mind needed.

She pulled the P90’s sling off her shoulder, using just her legs to wrap around the gun support pillar. This would require the use of both hands.

The P90 was attached to the sling with two points, a front attachment just below the barrel and a belt at the back of the gun’s body. She removed the sling from the rear belt attachment.

Then she said, “Go, P-chan, go!” and threw the P90.

“Here I gooo!”

The foot-and-a-half-long rectangular gun flew over the cab of the truck and landed with a clank on the metal armor covering the windshield.

“Now hook ’em!” Llenn shouted, pulling the sling so that the gun slid up the armor plating until—kchunk!—it caught on the slit in front.

She could keep pulling the sling from here so the pressure jammed the tip of the muzzle right into the slit at a diagonal.

“What?!” Vivi exclaimed. She reached for the gun barrel pointing right into the car. “Ow!”

She thudded against the windshield.

As soon as Vivi had let up on the steering wheel, Llenn leaped.

“Taaah!”

She was trying to go from the truck bed to the hood.

Stomach down, she hurtled over the cab and landed face-first on the armor plating.

“Gbwak!”

But undeterred by the pain, she reached out…

“P-chan!”

…for the jammed P-chan.

“Llenn!” it called back, still stuck in the slit.

She grabbed the P90’s grip, put her finger on the trigger—and didn’t need to aim after that.

The only place the barrel could aim, through the slit and the windshield, was the driver’s seat.

“Eat thiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!”

She did not hesitate to hold down the trigger.

Over ten shots per second sounded, along with the clanging of empty casings.

Llenn shot all fifty bullets into the driver’s seat.

Eventually, the truck slowed and came to a stop.

“Phewie…”

Llenn limply rolled backward, did a back somersault off the hood, then another backward flip until she landed on the wasteland feetfirst.

“I’m so…tired…”

She fell backward, staring into the sky, but had to be careful that the truck didn’t slowly roll over her, so she gingerly got to her feet.

“Hi there.”

And came face-to-face with Vivi, pointing an M17 pistol right at her.

“Huh?”

Vivi had simply opened the door and gotten out, pointing the gun. The P90 was still stuck in the armor slit.

“W-why aren’t you dead?”

“Because I flopped onto the passenger seat to duck.”

“Oh, that would explain it. Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Llenn chuckled. All you could do was laugh.

She reached for the knife behind her back.

“I’m ready and rarin’ to go!” said Kni-chan, whom she drew with a quickness.

Bang.

Before she could fling it forward, Vivi shot her wrist. Instead of burying itself in Vivi’s throat, the knife flew off fifteen feet in a random direction.

“Urgh!”

She gritted her teeth with pain and frustration. Vivi wore the same old gentle smile.

“Well done. You all fought very well. To be honest, I didn’t think you’d last this far into the final stage.”

“It’s not over! Our teammates are still alive!”

“True, but do they really stand a chance?”

“You never know!”

“Also true. But it’s fine either way. Will you be able to come see me tomorrow, too?”

“That was my plan!”

“Then let’s meet tomorrow! At one o’clock! I’m looking forward to it.”

“Huh?”

What was Vivi talking about?

Just as Llenn was going to ask, her vision went blue, and she could see no more.

“Yo, it’s Llenn this time. How’s it going back there?” asked Sophie.

Llenn was standing in the bar, the focus of Tohma’s, Anna’s, Bold’s, and Kenta’s attention.

“Gahh, she got me…”

Her shoulders slumped.

“I attacked Vivi’s car, and I almost had her…,” she reported reluctantly. “That blue flash had to be a plasma grenade…It was so sudden…”

And then Llenn had a realization.

Nobody in ZEMAL used those.

Maybe Vivi would, but there was no reason for her to use it as a suicide weapon.

There was only one person on that map who used plasma grenades.

Only one.

“Ah…ah…”

The image of a smirking, devilish little blonde crossed her mind’s eye.

“That bitch!”

Llenn screamed at the absent Fukaziroh.

“She killed us both!”

“Look, don’t get down. It means she was able to take out Vivi with you, right?”

“Yeah, I know, but still! Another drink, barkeep!”

“Here, drink up. Another iced tea.”

Despite Sophie’s best efforts at consolation, Llenn would not be cheered.

It was good that Fukaziroh had hopped off the stopped train car, rushed toward them, then managed to get off a shot while Vivi was distracted, but that didn’t mean she had to blow up Llenn, too.

I’m gonna give her a piece of my mind when she gets back! Llenn thought, leaning forward to put her mouth on the straw.

“Darn, we died!”

That was when Fukaziroh and everyone else returned from the battle.

CHAPTER 5

Vivi

Llenn had been waiting and planning to tell Fukaziroh off, but when all of the others came back at the same time, she was so taken aback that she realized the situation wasn’t quite what she expected.

“Wh-what happened…?”

Pitohui answered, “I guess we ran out of time? All of a sudden, the earth ahead of us split and collapsed, and the train and everything else fell in. So did we. And so did the machine gunners.”

Since no one else was speaking up, it wasn’t just Pitohui lying or joking around. It was a little suspicious that she didn’t seem even a little upset, though.

“What? What about the game…?”

David said, “I suppose it was a forced ending, wasn’t it? Sigh…”

He looked exhausted. Ordinarily, he had the handsome visage of a star actor, but today, he looked more like an office worker who was on the way home from an obligatory overtime shift.

Fukaziroh, however, was pleased as punch. She wore a huge smile, the biggest smile ever.

“Well, I’m happy! I got to kill Vivi! Honestly, that was the greatest moment I’ve ever had in VR! After decades of suffering! It was awesome!”

“Excuse me…you did shoot her and me, didn’t you?”

“I sure did! Thanks, Llenn! You held her down and occupied her attention! You’re the best friend I could hope for!”

“Sigh…”

Llenn lost the will to complain. Much more importantly, there was something she wanted to tell the group.

Kenta said, “Let’s just drink for now. We need to wash out the taste of defeat, now that it’s over.”

The others all sat down. He was a man who knew how to be considerate.

Llenn waited for things to calm down before she spoke up.

“We can eat whatever we want, right?” asked Clarence.

“Yes, whatever you feel like,” said David, even more depressed than before. It was like he’d aged ten years in a few minutes.

“Yippee! Thanks! I love you, David! I loooove you!” Clarence jabbered, not caring what he looked like or what she was saying.