CHAPTER 18
Llenn Goes Crazy
When the 2:20 PM Satellite Scan began, everyone in the bar thought, This has got to be the last scan in this game. The last event had reached its conclusion at a running time of an hour and twenty-eight minutes, and there were only four teams left at this point.
This scan started from the west, and it ran over the left half of the map quickly, then the right half much more slowly. It didn’t seem likely that any satellite would be that nimble, but nobody was complaining.
The map showed the surviving dots in a rough line from north to south: Llenn, PM4, and the Amazons. They were bunched close enough together—within a thousand yards—that you had to zoom in to make out the different dots.
The final team was the group of armored sci-fi warriors riding their bikes around on the walls, Team T-S. They were atop the eastern wall, in just about the center.
They’d been in the northeastern corner at the 2:10 scan, so their bicycles had taken them south along the wall from there.
“They’re probably hoping to take the valley through to whichever of the three teams survives the fighting and attack them there.”
“Keh! That’s cheap bullshit! A man oughtta stand up and fight headlong! Aside from M, all the other survivors are women!” the men in the crowd opined.
“Hang in there, you guyyyys!” shouted Anna, the beautiful blond in sunglasses, who had returned to the bar from the waiting area for deceased players. She was wearing her camo gear, and the combat vest still had a huge hole from the .50-caliber bullet that tore through it. Damaged equipment stayed that way when you came back.
In fact, her camo wear was also ripped in the same spot. Fortunately, her T-shirt was fixed up, lest she expose a little too much cleavage.
The dirt from SJ did not carry over, so her long blond hair was clean but rather bedraggled. The sniper with the Dragunov certainly had the air of a defeated soldier about her.
The bar quieted down when they heard Anna’s soulful shout.
“Yeah, y’know, I understand how you feel. Say, you wanna watch with me over here? I could teach you a few tips about sniping.”
“Feel like going on a quest sometime? There’s this one spot that has a really romantic view,” offered some sleazy men, who took advantage of the absence of the other Amazons to hit on Anna.
“Step the hell off! Would you say the same thing to my face in real life? Huh? Shut up and watch the monitors!” she snapped at them, and they promptly backed down.
“Whoa, yikes… Offer retracted!”
“Crazy bitch. She must be a total freak in real life…”
The disgruntled losers slunk off with their final comments, but if they ever met Moe Annaka in real life and saw that she was a shy little teenager, they would probably die of shock.
The surviving players watched the results of the scan come in. They, too, had to wonder, This might be the final time I make use of this device.
Llenn, Fukaziroh, and the remaining members of SHINC—Boss, Tanya, Tohma, and Rosa—were still in the same locations they’d been when MMTM raided the log building.
It was a third of a mile away, close enough that if they emerged into the open, they could get sniped by M at any moment.
Thanks to the scan, they knew that PM4 was still inside, and that the team called T-S was right at the eastern edge of the map.
Boss suggested, “This team must be moving on top of the fortress walls. Probably on wheels, probably unharmed.” Everyone agreed with her, because there wasn’t any other obvious possibility.
After the overwhelming display she’d just witnessed, Llenn murmured, “Just one team left… It’s possible that Pito might beat them anyway, without me needing to do anything…”
It was far from the first time she’d expressed a mixture of doubt and hopefulness today.
“…”
Boss said nothing.
“…”
Neither did Fukaziroh.
Llenn clutched her hands into fists with her face pressed to the ground. “No, I can’t say that! I have to do this! But what’ll I do, what’ll I do, what’ll I do?” she chanted, like a mantra. She set her brain to racing, trying to think of a plan.
If she just charged in there now, could she win? She was confident in her speed, so she might be able to reach the building unharmed. But could she fight and win at that point? When the six-man team MMTM had totally failed?
“What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?”
How could she get Fukaziroh to help in an indoor battle? Could she team up with SHINC? Would they take each other out? If someone else carelessly took out Pito, it was all lost. How could she prevent that from happening?
“What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?”
Can’t just send everyone in at once gotta think of a plan or it’s just like MMTM gonna lose gonna die gonna lose gonna lose gonna lose…
“What do I do gotta think gotta think gotta think gotta think of a plan a plan a plan a man a canal Panama plan a plan—”
Her brain was so overheated, her mantra was starting to lose meaning and meld into other things.
“Everyone prepare to charge the building!” Boss interrupted.
“Huh?”
“We can’t wait for Llenn’s orders. We’ll do it ourselves! Commence covering fire!”
“Huh?”
Then she heard a PKM machine gun firing. They had to be shooting at the windows on the far side of the log house, attempting to keep Pitohui at bay while they moved.
“H-hey! Wait, I wasn’t—,” Llenn clamored, raising her head.
“Whassup?” asked Fukaziroh, who had crawled over next to her. Llenn was startled by how close she was, without any kind of warning.
“B-Boss says they’re gonna rush the building!”
“Uh-huh…” Fukaziroh grinned. It was devilish.
“Wait, everyone! We still need to prepare!” Llenn protested to Boss.
But the other woman’s response was “Not good enough! We’re doing this our way!” Then she addressed her own team, saying, “All units move out!”
“No—wait—hang on! Wait, everybody!” Llenn begged, but Boss did not respond.
“Aha. So they’re just going to charge without any coordination with us or tricks up their sleeve?” Fukaziroh asked.
“That’s what it sounds like… But it’s suicide! Why would they do that? We can’t beat Pito without working together! We need a plan! A plan! A plan! A plan!” Llenn repeated, bashing her fists against the grass.
“Hmm-hmm,” Fukaziroh hummed. She was doing something behind Llenn’s back, and the other girl did not notice. Five seconds later, she stood up and said, “Then I’m going, too!”
“A plan, a plan, a… What?” Llenn lifted her face, which was nearly about to burst into tears.
Fukaziroh was wearing her same old smile, one MGL-140 in her right hand. “Thinking without ideas is just a poor man’s version of resting! Ranting about a plan isn’t going to do anything for us! Look at you, you’re just crying to yourself! You’re a li’l crybaby who can’t do anything on her own! Nah-nah, nah-nah!”
And with that schoolyard taunt, she turned and started running for the log house.
“Huh…?”
“Just you watch! We’re going to take Pito alive, wrap her up, and serve her to you on a platter!” Fukaziroh boasted improbably, running off.
Llenn watched her run off with one MGL-140 in hand, growing smaller and smaller, and could not formulate a single thought about it.
Ummm?
Meaning?
What?
Two seconds later, she finally recognized the most basic fact of what had happened.
Her friends had all left her behind.
“Waaaait! Nooo, you can’t!” she screamed. She scrambled to get up—“Whoa! Hrfp!”—and failed. She flopped onto her belly in the grass.
She’d tried to bound to her feet with her characteristic agility, but her left leg wasn’t cooperating. She couldn’t get fully upright.
“Wh… Why…?”
She twisted around to look down her side and saw the cause of her clumsiness.
“What? Whaaaaat?!”
It was so startling that she failed to register what she was seeing at first, but there was no getting around what her own two eyes were looking at.
There was a wide strip of nylon wrapped around the ankle of her left boot—connected to an MGL-140 grenade launcher on the other end. Whether it was Rightony or Leftania was unclear, but it was obviously one of Fukaziroh’s weapons. The heavy weapon was a shackle that kept her tied to the ground, like some chained-up prisoner of old, but with a gun instead of an iron ball.
There was no question who had done this. It was Fukaziroh, while Llenn was lost in her own hesitant thoughts.
Why, that…jerkwad!! she screamed internally. “C’mon! Dammit! Get off!”
She tried to work the material off, but her fingers kept slipping, so she finally just took off both her pink gloves to try again, but even then, the sling was vexingly tight around her ankle.
“Arrrrgh!”
She couldn’t get it off at all. The material was very tough, and with her brute strength, Fukaziroh had pulled the wide strip of nylon into a tiny little ball. Llenn had to keep her head down so they didn’t spot her and shoot her as she desperately struggled and pulled on the knot. Her hand slipped again.
“Nyaaaaaargh!” she shrieked.
“Calm down. Just take your time, and you’ll get it loose,” said Fukaziroh’s voice in her ear, almost mockingly. She could clearly tell what Llenn was having trouble with.
“Fukaaaaaa! What are you thinking?! Don’t rush ahead without me!” she yelled, giving up momentarily and glaring at the small shape running across the field ahead.
Fukaziroh replied, “Whosoever succeeds in undoing the knot shall become the rightful king of the entire world! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
“You…dummyyyyyy!”
Boss smiled to herself as she listened to Llenn scream through the comm unit.
As she sprinted across the grass, Vintorez in hand, she reached up to turn off the switch to the device that allowed her to communicate with Llenn and gave an order to her teammates. “This is all to get Llenn to fight like she did before! Everyone keep going!”
Tanya was the first to understand the intent of the plan. “It’s the only way to get Llenn to be at her most exce-Llennt!”
Tohma followed with “Let’s sweeten the pot so she has no choice but to ante up more sweets!”
“Nothing like a sneak attack to set up a snack attack!” Rosa quipped.
“…”
Boss was silent for several moments, then offered, “And then we’ll……… Dammit! I can’t think of another good pun!”
“Four Amazons making a charge. Distance: a bit over four hundred yards and closing.”
M had his M14 EBR at the ready. He was on the balcony of one of the guest rooms on the south side of the building. It was a very small balcony, so most of his considerable size was still inside the room.
The M14 EBR was propped up on a bipod, sticking a little bit out between the railing posts. Stuck to the round wooden railing was the shield that Pitohui had used earlier. There were two plates of the shield duct-taped to horizontal bars with enough space apart to allow the gun barrel through—but oddly enough, those horizontal “bars” were actually the G36K and ARX160 assault rifles that MMTM had used. The shield was fixed in place by wrapping the tape around two rifles.
The deceased characters had to spend ten minutes in the waiting area, but they were allowed to watch the stream to give them something to do in the meantime. The owners of those two guns had to be gnashing their teeth at this moment.
The bullet line of Rosa’s PKM sparkled around the vicinity of the room. The spray of bullets she sent their way punched holes in the glass and thudded into the log walls.
The Dragunov sniper’s bullets came flying at him, too, but coming from a lower location, they could only hit the logs of the balcony or the roof.
M ignored the many incoming shots, unconcerned with anything that wasn’t going to hit him. “Seeking instructions,” he reported to Pitohui, to whom he had conceded command.
“Well, let’s see…”
Pitohui was on the north side of the building, where the hallway was. She had the Savage 110 BA bolt-action rifle that belonged to her deceased teammate. She wasn’t using its attached bipod. Instead, the object propping the gun up was the body of one of the MMTM members. It was Kenta, his body whole again after his death by explosion. The body was facedown, the gun resting on the small of his back.
It was about the same plan as what SHINC had done minutes earlier—a body that wouldn’t budge, blocked all shots, and was just the right height—except that they had used their own teammate, and she was using an enemy’s body.
This still raised some moral questions, which did not trouble Pitohui in the least. One wondered how Kenta would feel about this, watching his body being used in this manner from the waiting room for the deceased.
There were no low windows in the hallway to allow her to shoot from a prone position, but that wasn’t an issue. There was a hole about fifteen inches across she’d carved through the logs with the photon sword, through which she stuck the barrel and scope of the gun.
Through the circle of the lens, she saw a tiny enemy rushing closer through the field. She was alone and carrying a six-shot grenade launcher. She was still far off, at least five hundred yards.
“For some reason, Llenn’s not coming from this side… It’s just the six-shot grenade girl, making her way here on her own. What do you think, former leader?” she asked M, keeping the gun ready to fire at any moment.
“What do I think…? I cannot imagine why the enemy would want to charge straight for us. They’re practically asking us to shoot them.”
“Exactly… It’s a bit creepy, really. I wonder if there’s something more behind this…?” Pitohui said skeptically. If she hadn’t had her cheek pressed to the rifle stock, she would have tilted her head out of curiosity.
“Still, we ought to thin out the enemy numbers while we have the chance.”
“I guess that’s the only real option. Okay, here’s your order: You are free to shoot and wipe them out. We’ll speak again if they get within two hundred yards.”
“Roger.”
One second later, M’s M14 EBR and Pitohui’s Savage 110 BA fired in absolute unison.
On the stream in the bar, they saw the head of the woman firing the PKM machine gun light up with a gunshot effect.
“Awww!”
“They got her!” the men wailed.
“…”
But Anna stood there with her arms crossed, watching her comrades fight in silence.
“I got shot, but I’m not dead yet! I’ve still got your backs!” reported stout mama Rosa, the right edge of her head glowing as she got to her feet with the PKM. Her hit points dropped until they stopped at 20 percent, in the red zone.
She didn’t use a med kit—she didn’t have time to bother. She put the heavy machine gun on her shoulder, aimed it at the light of the muzzle that shot her from the second floor of the log house a thousand feet away, and fired with all her strength.
“Ryaaaaaah!”
She used her sheer brute strength to keep the gun from jumping, the tracer bullets lashing the distant room. The PKM barked and roared, the personification of its owner’s fighting spirit. Flame and exhaust shot from the muzzle, rippling the nearby grass. Empty cartridges hurtled to the left, then disintegrated into computer graphics, evaporating into the air.
Five seconds later, all one hundred bullets were gone from the ammunition box below the gun, and the world was suddenly quiet.
“Phew…”
Rosa lowered the PKM. A single bullet flew at her forehead—and continued through it out the back.
While this furious gun battle was taking place on the south side of the building, Fukaziroh heard something metallic over her head that she had never heard before.
Jragnk!
Her head tilted a bit to the right, like some unseen person had pushed her.
“Yeesh, the bullet grazed my helmet! Yikes! But lucky me!”
She kept running.
Pitohui grumbled, “It’s not fair being so tiny…”
She moved the bolt of the Savage 110 BA, expelling the empty and loading the next bullet into the chamber. “How’s it going over there?” she asked M on the other side of the building.
“I just finished the second one. I can get them all,” he answered.
“This is a no-go.”
“They don’t stand a chance…”
The bar was in a mournful mood. On the screen, in the midst of Team SHINC’s reckless charge, Tohma the Dragunov sniper got shot and went down.
She had been in a pattern of running, stopping to fire a few shots, then running again. But once Rosa’s machine-gunning stopped, it was only natural that she became the next target.
Tohma emptied the ten-shot magazine, her bolt sliding back after its furious repetition while she reached to a pouch for her next magazine…
One shot to the head.
One high on her chest.
Tohma fell to her knees and toppled onto her face. Soon there was a DEAD sign floating over her.
“Well, I guess he got revenge for the shield…”
“Two members of SHINC left. The Bizon and the Vintorez.”
“They’re both pretty sharp, but they can’t actually get to M.”
“For having fought so well this whole time, it’s turning into a pretty underwhelming ending…”
One of the people in the crowd commenting on the action glanced over his left shoulder at the woman standing behind him.
Anna stared at the screens, unmoving, her arms still crossed. She was wearing her sunglasses indoors, hiding her eyes. There was no way to know how she felt while watching her friends get shot.
Then the squattest member of the Amazons appeared. It was the one who had let herself die to be a prop for the PTRD-41. She had just returned from the waiting area.
“How’s it going, Anna?” the dwarf asked.
“Boss’s plan is in motion,” the blond woman replied without turning around.
M switched out his magazine and turned the scope to his next target.
It was the silver-haired woman with the Bizon, the fastest of the group. She was about 250 yards off. She zigzagged every three seconds, but it was a very simple and consistent pattern.
“Right…left…right…”
M could easily see the pattern ahead of time. Because she was small, he aimed and fired at her body, rather than her head.
The bullet connected with the midriff of his target, and her body rolled forward and flipped over. He’d inflicted major damage but not instant death. On the ground, she picked up the Bizon she’d dropped and shot it back at him one-handed.
It was no more than pointless resistance. A submachine gun firing pistol bullets was never going to hit him at that distance. In fact, the bullet lines not only weren’t hitting M, they couldn’t even reach him.
M simply aimed at her head, now a stationary target, and pulled the trigger.
In the brief moment between firing and impact, M saw the delighted smile on her face.
“…”
The eyes in the midst of his fearsome visage were wide in stunned surprise—but the angle of the camera did not show this on the TV screens.
“Good grief, looks like I’m the only one left,” grumbled Boss, basing this on the readout of her teammates’ HP as she ran with speed unbefitting of her frame.
She looked forward again, just a bit over two hundred yards from her target. The log house was much larger ahead of her now, and she could actually see the man on the second floor pointing his gun at her.
“Okay! Let’s go, P-chan!” she replied, beginning to sprint at top speed.
When she heard that shout, Fukaziroh mentally burst into laughter. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
And then it occurred to her: So that’s what she’s like when she goes crazy.
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