CHAPTER 2
The Third Squad Jam
July 5th, 2026.
The start of the third Squad Jam was rapidly approaching.
Like before, the main gathering place to follow the tournament was a big pub in the city of Glocken. It was on the ground floor of a big building, but the interior was large enough to hold several hundred people easily. There were plenty of tables, counters, and even private rooms. Huge screens were hung on the walls and from the ceiling.
Altogether, thanks in part to GGO’s American origins, the place looked like a wild saloon from a Hollywood movie and not at all like a cramped, intimate Japanese bar.
The participants in the battle gathered here, as did the audience who drank and enjoyed the live feed. Ten minutes after they died, defeated players would return here, too.
As expected, the number of participating teams in SJ3 rose to a total of fifty-seven, a modest expansion of the forty-nine from last time.
Three of those teams were given seeded ranking, putting them past the preliminary round.
First, there was the winning team of SJ2, T-S.
Everyone remembered them. They were the team decked out in protectors that made them look like sci-fi soldiers. They had bided their time in SJ2 and seized victory at the end in the most improbable way.
For nearly the entire game, they rode atop the castle walls on bicycles. They shot the Machine-Gun Lovers from atop the wall. When Llenn and Fukaziroh were nearly dead from winning their battle against Pitohui, T-S shot them full of bullets from a long distance. The team as a whole suffered zero damage.
It was a strategic victory, to be sure, but it was not a popular outcome at all with the fans, who had come expecting a white-knuckle victory.
They recognized this and did not reappear in the bar following the end of SJ2—but here they were, proudly proclaiming their intention to fight again in SJ3.
The second-seeded team was called LPFM, containing Llenn, the champion and runner-up of the previous two Squad Jams, and Pitohui, who had won third place the last time out.
This was the name of Llenn’s team for SJ3. It was simply the initials of its four members: Llenn, Pitohui, Fukaziroh, and M. It was so named by Pitohui, and that was the official team name, not an abbreviated tag.
“Ell-Pee-Eff-Em? It’s too hard to say, Pito!”
“I’m glad you noticed, Llenn! That’s part of the plan! Every time an enemy team reads our name off the scanner, they’ll have to say the entire ‘Ell-Pee-Eff-Em’ name! Who knows, maybe they’ll bite their tongues and suffer damage! Not all combat happens down the barrel of a gun!”
“Oh, really…”
Since Llenn’s team and Pitohui’s team, the previous second- and third-place finishers, were on the same team this time, there were only three seeded teams.
The final seed belonged to SHINC, the fourth-place squad. They were the familiar team of Amazons. Only Karen and Miyu knew that, in real life, they were adorable little teenage gymnasts.
The other fifty-four squads had gone through the preliminary round the night before, Saturday evening. By coincidence, it produced exactly the number of teams needed for the final, so there would be no loser’s bracket—only the winning teams advanced. Like SJ2, the prelim battles were one-on-one team fights on a long, narrow map.
In those circumstances, experience and talent typically won out, so nearly all the teams that had already played in Squad Jam survived and moved on.
The quickest team to win and advance, by far, ended up being MMTM.
After eleven o’clock, the crowd in the bar began to swell noticeably. The deadline to arrive was 11:50, and that was a very hard cutoff—not a second later would be tolerated. The earlier you were there, the more time you had to eat and drink and strategize ahead of time, so the place was already buzzing.
With each new team entering the building, the audience that had gathered to enjoy the proceedings (or who had no choice but to enjoy them) murmured a little louder. It was like the entrances for a wrestling or boxing match, only without the snappy music.
When a particularly powerful squad entered, the muttering in the bar calmed down, replaced by cheers or whispers under the breath. All of this was the same as in the previous Squad Jam.
“Hey, look at them…”
Some observant member of the crowd pointed out a group of five especially burly men. Their team had no unified camo wear, and their guns and equipment were stored in their virtual inventory to keep them secret for now, but everybody knew who they were.
“Oh! Those are the machine gunners…”
Indeed, it was the lineup of ZEMAL. They’d failed out of SJ1 without anything to show for it, but they made good use of their situation in SJ2 and put up—rude as it might be to say—a better fight than anyone expected of them.
They were finished off when they failed to detect T-S attacking from atop the wall, but sixth out of thirty was a very respectable finish.
Every member of their squad used a machine gun, giving them significant firepower and a major ammo stock, which could prove very formidable if they were blessed with a good starting location.
What kind of entertainment were they likely to bring the audience this time?
More and more teams from SJ2 entered the bar.
First, there was the team that got wiped by MMTM on the side of the snowy mountain, where the last surviving member had his own camera so he could provide live commentary.
He had uploaded the commentary video to the Internet under the title “Battling Hard in SJ2! Alas, I Couldn’t Really Hear the Pained Screams of My Dying Friends on the Snowy Plain.”
His admirable death (that characterization was debatable) had earned him numerous condolences in the comments field. He had declared his intention to do another round of commentary this time, and many fans were eagerly awaiting the results.
Next was the team that used the optical guns, victims of Fukaziroh’s grenade bombardment in SJ2. Because virtually every player wore items called anti-optical defense fields that minimized the power of optical guns, they were considered nearly useless in PvP combat. These folks were the only ones who had ever used them in Squad Jam.
Would they stick to their guns (literally) this time?
The question would be: How could they take advantage of the long range, high accuracy, and room for extra weapons and energy packs, given their light weight?
In addition, there was the military history–buff team called the New Soldiers (NSS) who based their loadout and uniforms on Imperial Japanese officers, American Vietnam-War soldiers, and other distinct looks throughout history.
Their dedication to cosplay was so high and intense that their table stood out like a sore thumb among the others around them.
Finally, one of the big players arrived.
“Oh! Someone guide the contenders to their table!” joked someone near the door. The pub quieted down when they saw who had arrived: the six-man MMTM squad, one of the top overall teams in the event, wearing their trademark Swedish camo. The men had menacing looks in their eyes (except for the one wearing sunglasses).
Although the people in the pub would not be aware of this, Team MMTM had over the last month undergone even fiercer training than before. The team leader had chosen to forego the fourth Bullet of Bullets, the huge individual battle-royale tournament, in favor of focusing on SJ3 instead.
Lux had acquired his MSG90, as promised. He had also earned as much of a sniper’s skill as possible, to allow him to prevent his pulse from racing, give him the ability to craft high-precision ammo, and so on.
And of course, with plenty of shooting practice, his long-distance aim got dramatically better. Anything within 2,500 feet in windless, good conditions was in his kill zone.
With one less assault rifle member, the remaining four, including the leader, rebalanced their team play. Each one of them needed to carry more ammo, too.
Now they were ready. But since their only chance to use their new team composition against a live enemy had been the prelims, and they made record-setting short work of their opponent, they would essentially be live-testing it out in SJ3.
But they were ready for that. They wanted to win—and they wanted revenge against Pitohui after the way she’d annihilated them last time.
The audience certainly hadn’t forgotten that close-quarters battle inside the huge log house at the end of SJ2. MMTM’s assault on the building left the four masked men on Pitohui’s team dead, despite a valiant effort.
At that point, it was an interior battle of six on two, MMTM’s forte. It was a battle they absolutely should have been able to win, but Pitohui alone was successful at completely overturning their advantage.
They had also lost to Llenn and M in SJ1, so there was a score to settle there, too. And with all three of them on the same team, that was just fine and dandy with MMTM.
The potential rematch between MMTM and Pitohui’s squad was the biggest draw for the audience of SJ3.
Once MMTM had taken their seats, two more teams with female players entered the building in succession.
The first one featured a handsome player in black fatigues whom anyone who had watched Llenn’s battles in SJ2 would remember. She was the one in the massacre inside the dome who ended up getting shot by MMTM.
That was about the extent of their recognition, though. There was absolutely no hush that came over the crowd. It was hard to say how many of the people in the room even realized that she was female.
Clarence didn’t seem bothered, though. She turned to Sam and said, “Well, I guess that about sums up our talent level, huh? Nobody pays attention to us when we walk into the room.”
“Huh…,” murmured Sam, who wore mottled brown-and-green camo. They took seats near the door of the pub. It was just the two of them this time. The entire team showed up for the preliminary round, and they beat their new-to-SJ opponent to advance, but only the pair of them were entering the final.
It was essentially an unwinnable fight. While Llenn and M had won the first Squad Jam as a duo, they were also an exception to common sense.
Sam could hardly be blamed for his lack of enthusiasm. Clarence told him, “We’re gonna kick ass, all right? We do as we planned once it starts. Remember?”
“Ahhh…,” Sam murmured once again. It wasn’t clear whether that was an affirmative answer or just a sigh.
Right on the heels of Clarence came another team.
“Oh, those are the ones who got whacked last time,” someone muttered.
It was the five-person team named KKHC, whom Pitohui had shot in the back in SJ2. The group included four men and one woman, green-haired Shirley. They all wore their characteristic hunting jackets. It was the only gear they owned.
“That chick… She was the one who nailed Pitohui, right? She’s got guts,” someone whispered. It was true; only Shirley and Llenn had inflicted any damage on Pitohui the last time around.
The audience couldn’t see the hit points of the SJ participants. So when Pitohui took a shot to the head and survived, they just assumed that the bullet had only grazed her skull.
In fact, Pitohui had been a hair away from instant death. Her remaining points had been so low they had been visible simply as a sliver on the bar. Pitohui had survived only by the skin of her teeth; no one but she and her teammates knew how close it had been.
KKHC walked through the bustling bar and into the nearest private room. They sat around a table and ordered some drinks.
“Hey, Shirley, now that we’re here, we’re all in…but do we even stand a chance?” one of the men asked, his expression skeptical.
Another man said, “We haven’t even practiced our teamwork or coordinated plays. And Squad Jam’s a team battle. Can we actually beat a team who knows how to work together?”
Their skepticism was ironic, considering that after they had beaten their first enemies in SJ2, those very same men had said things like “Hey, given our skill, you think we might actually get pretty far in this?” and “Yeah, I bet. It’s gonna be a bloodbath.”
KKHC had chosen to enter SJ3 as a result of Shirley’s demanding enthusiasm, but they barely made it through their prelim battle.
Their opponent was a six-person team with assault rifles and machine guns. But because they’d started playing to practice their real-life hunting, all of KKHC used bolt-action rifles, which had to be manually reloaded after each shot. It was the only weapon they used.
They’d eked out a victory thanks to Shirley’s sniping. Since they could snipe without using a bullet line in the first place, their aim was excellent, if nothing else. The key to victory beyond that was simply keeping their wits about them.
In that regard, Shirley succeeded. While her teammates panicked at the hail of bullets coming from the enemy, she maintained her ground as the opponents charged, shooting and shooting with demonic coldness.
Her teammates couldn’t help asking her, “Since when did you get so good at PvP combat? And…what are those bullets…?”
Shirley answered matter-of-factly, “I played on my own whenever I had time. I tried fighting some monsters, but I also fought players. I’d set an ambush for a squadron, then snipe until my magazine went empty. After that, I ran. I made the bullets.”
“……”
No wonder they were flabbergasted. For all her vehemence about not wanting to shoot people, it turned out that she was actively going out and hunting down other players to kill them.
The fiercest member of this team was not any of the men, who had gone soft and submissive since SJ2, but Shirley.
In their private room, Shirley glared at her teammates and assurred them, “Don’t worry. I’ve got a strategy in mind that I think will be effective. It suits us, and it’ll let us act to our hearts’ desire.”
It sounded reassuring enough, and the expressions on the men’s faces softened a bit. If Shirley was the toughest member of the team right now, and she said so, then they could probably lean on her for guidance.
“So I want you to follow my commands,” she said.
The rest of them nodded.
At about 11:35, the monitors in the bar were playing an interview with the tournament’s sponsor, a novelist in his fifties. It was a recording, not a live interview.
Yes, it was the same clinically gun-obsessed man who sponsored the first Squad Jam. He was an unsightly fellow who worked under the impression that his unkempt facial hair made him look cool.
He fell into the rare case of a player whose real-life identity was known, but whose avatar in GGO was still a mystery. In the interview, he was carrying on about how someone else had sponsored SJ2 out from under his nose, but that he was so excited to be putting on the event this time. He certainly wasn’t acting his age.
At least he was aware that his SJ1 grand prize of a “signed set of novels” had been poorly received, so he gave up and admitted that the prize this time would be in-game GGO items.
When the interviewer asked him about the special rule, he made a theatrical show of saying “Well, actually…whoops! Can’t say that yet” and shook his head.
“Yeah, yeah, nice acting,” said someone in the crowd.
“He came up with the rule, right? He seems like a messed-up guy, so I bet it’ll be a messed-up rule.”
“Is there a single gun freak in the world who has a healthy personality? The answer is no.”
“Coming from you? I’m convinced. You would know.”
“Exactly. What can I say? It’s a skill.”
The audience didn’t seem very impressed with their benefactor.
Around 11:40 AM.
Nearly all the participating squads were present, and there was a larger audience gathered than in past instances. The bar was rocking, and there was a festive air in the room.
Once again, there was a pool going to guess how many shots (and optical energy bursts) would be fired overall during the battle. No one had guessed it exactly right the last two times.
Of course, guessing an exact integer five digits or higher might as well be picking a lottery number. Still, it was the best thing they could do without an actual betting book on the winner.
As for the previous champions, T-S, they had not arrived yet.
“I’m amazed they had the guts to enter again!”
“I can’t wait to boo them to their faces!”
“Don’t be annoying. Although I will pray they lose this time!”
“I can’t believe what they did to my poor Llenn and Fukaziroh!”
“I know I pointed this out last time, but they’re not yours,” argued someone from the audience in the bar. But unbeknownst to them, the members of T-S were actually present and sitting at a table.
“Guess it was the right call to dress light.”
“For sure.”
“Nobody’s figured it out.”
In fact, they were having an entire pre-game meal, with food and drinks spread out in a sumptuous array—as people within earshot loudly disparaged them.
The reason they went unnoticed was simple: all the members wore generic combat gear and none of the characteristic bulky armor they had on before. They were enjoying themselves, knowing that nobody was aware of their identities.
A man wandered over to their table, dressed in woodland-pattern camo and a red beret. He said quietly, “Hey, you guys…”
Eek! We’re busted! they thought, tensing up.
But the man only said, “You’re participants, not spectators, right?”
Taken aback, one of the T-S members said, “Huh? Well, yeah…”
“I knew it. Here, read this.” The man left them a message card, an item about the size of a stamp. Any player who touched it would receive a written message; it was essentially a letter. You could also place the item into an envelope and hand it over that way.
The man left without waiting for a reaction of any kind. Confused, the T-S members took turns tapping the card. Then they opened game windows invisible to other people, so no one could see them reading.
“……”
Six breaths were held in unison.
After a few seconds of reading, the message card automatically vanished, to avoid leaving evidence behind. At the same time, a separate item appeared in the inventory of the team members.
11:46 AM.
The participants of SJ3 had to be inside the bar by ten minutes to the hour. That was the point at which they would automatically be teleported to the waiting area.
One of the toughest squads in the competition showed up with four minutes to go. It was SHINC, dressed in camo with a spray of fine green dots. Runners-up of SJ1. Fourth place in SJ2. A team with the results to back up their reputation as fearsome Amazons.
“Here they are!”
“Whoo! It’s about time!”
“Get ’em, ladies! You’re gonna win this one!” the crowd roared as the women strode into the building.
Walking in the lead was a smaller woman with narrow eyes and short silver hair. Her name was Tanya, and she was the point woman on the team, the speedy attacker who took front position in battle.
She used a Bizon submachine gun. Her job was to wave this gun around, with its fifty-three-round cylindrical magazine of 9 mm bullets, to disturb and harass the enemy. For a sidearm, she carried a 9 mm Strizh automatic pistol.
After Tanya, who ran point in battle and into the building, was a woman with wavy blond hair and sunglasses, laughing with her teammate. That glamorous foreign actress type was Anna.
She was one of the team’s two snipers, who used a semiautomatic Dragunov sniper rifle. She was also the prettiest avatar of the bunch. Many of the men in the room stopped what they were doing to stare.
Anna’s conversation partner was Sophie, the sturdy dwarf of a woman. She looked like she could beat everyone with body slams alone. She used the devastating PKM machine gun as her weapon—in SJ1, that is. In SJ2, she gave up her favorite weapon to be a mule for SHINC’s best weapon—and one of the greatest in GGO, period.
Within her inventory, she’d been hauling the PTRD-41 Anti-Tank Rifle. It was a beast of a gun with a seven-foot length that shot massive 14.5 mm bullets.
SHINC used this weapon to fire directly on M’s special shield, rendering it structurally useless. The audience could still vividly remember the string of roaring blasts in that bombardment battle—as well as the role Sophie played in it.
Strolling behind them was a tall, thin woman with black hair and a green beanie. She was Tohma, the team’s other sniper. Normally, she used a Dragunov with a special adjustible scope, but when Sophie brought out the PTRD-41, it was Tohma who fired it.
SHINC’s secret weapon struck fear into the hearts of their opponents—and they were sure to use it without mercy, whenever possible. It was so powerful, after all. A devastating bullet could fly in from nearly invisible distances at any moment. And the closer it was, the harder it could punch through armored surfaces. Steel plates might be a stout defense under ordinary circumstances, but not against that monster.
“It’s scary, man…,” muttered one of the SJ3 contestants, quietly enough that they couldn’t hear.
The man seated next to him said, “It’s not fair, having an anti-tank rifle. Don’t shoot that at people.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“There’s no kindness to it at all.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
Next came the fifth member of SHINC, whose short red hair and freckled face made her look older than she was, like a middle-aged woman from the cramped urban backstreets. Her name was Rosa.
She, too, used a PKM and carried a large supply of ammo and backup barrels in a huge backpack to great effect in both SJ1 and SJ2. As the team’s only machine gunner this time around, she was sure to offer lots of backup firepower.
Lastly came the supremely powerful leader of the Amazons, a huge woman standing over six feet tall. Her face was menacing and, combined with her size, made her look positively gorilla-like. On the other hand, the pigtails were a feminine touch.
This was Eva, commonly known as Boss, the captain of the squad.
She used a silenced sniper rifle, the Vintorez. It was not just a regular gun with a sound suppressor or silencer stuck on after the fact, but a weapon built to be silent from the body to the ammo cartridges. It was a remarkably quiet gun, capable of killing targets very close by without them even hearing it. Like Tanya, she also carried a Strizh pistol in a hip holster.
SHINC had a certain combat pattern they liked to use that practically guaranteed victory. With perfect teamwork, they would first gain a positional advantage over their enemy, then lead with a crisp, violent hail of machine-gun bullets, while the Dragunovs took aim and fired from safety.
Even if the target survived the attack, they would be unable to move. From there, Boss and Tanya would sneak around the other side and quickly pick off the opposing team one at a time with their silent weapons.
They could also execute the reverse to great effect. In that case, the machine gunners and snipers fired into empty space on purpose. The enemy, thinking their location was safe, would emerge in an attempt to get behind them, only to run smack into Boss and Tanya.
Their teamwork and coordination were so tremendously smooth that the people watching the event feed wondered how it was possible for anyone to be that well coordinated. Only Llenn and Fukaziroh knew the answer.
SHINC was clearly one of the favorites alongside MMTM in this event. The audience couldn’t wait to see what they would do this time around.
It was late enough that all the tables were full, however, so they ended up walking past where MMTM were sitting.
“Hello there, ladies,” the team leader greeted. He and Boss had set sparks flying shortly before SJ2, so everyone watched nervously, wondering what kind of verbal sparring might ensue.
“Oh, hi there,” said Boss, stopping briefly, without any apparent malice.
He continued, “It was a shame we couldn’t square off properly last time. It just never seems to be in the cards.”
“Indeed. Well, that’s lucky for you.”
These teams had never traded direct gunfire in the tournament before. SHINC had laid down covering machine-gun fire to allow Llenn to escape last time, but MMTM had promptly withdrawn to safety.
“Let us endeavor to attract luck’s favor this time, then. By the way,” MMTM’s leader said, changing the subject with a humorless smile. The eyes in his handsome face held no mirth in them. “Let me be honest. Our greatest enemy in this fight is not you. If we end up as the last two teams, then yes, but not until that point. The same is true of you, isn’t it?”
“Ah, I see. It seems we think the same way,” Boss answered, her face hard.
Neither team’s biggest enemy was the other. They both had a higher priority target. In other words, there was an unspoken agreement being traded between them now: If we’re “unlucky” enough to cross paths before then, can we agree to withdraw in peace?
Just then, a murmur ran through the crowd of the bar. It stemmed from near the entrance. Neither of them needed to look to know who it was.
“They’re here…” “They’re here…”
The words and timing were perfectly in sync out of their mouths.
The greatest foe of both teams had just arrived.
Just after the clock showed 11:48…
Llenn entered the doorway of the pub.
“Why does it always have to be just in the nick of time?!”
She wore her usual pink combat gear and hat, with a brown robe covering them up. “It’s just getting ridiculous at this point! It’s bad for my heart! You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Llenn was furious. She was in a prickly mood, with the person she was venting at just behind her. You couldn’t blame her, though; in another hundred seconds, she would’ve been too late to enter the battle.
“Geeeez, I’m sorryyy. Listen, I’ll buy you an iced tea. And any snacks you like!” protested Fukaziroh, who followed her inside. Like Llenn, she was small and dressed in a concealing robe. With the way the hood covered part of her face, she looked like some wise monkish sage. A very small one.
“As if we have time for that!” Llenn was still angry.
“Oh, what’s the harm if we’re a little bit late?” said Pitohui in her bodysuit.
Last came M, wearing a T-shirt. “Looks like we made it in time.” The two of them seemed unconcerned that they’d just barely gotten through the door in time. They were as aloof and cool as always.
“Ugh…” Llenn sighed, robed shoulders slumping, quickly feeling absurd for being the only one angry.
Before SJ2 started, Miyu was late because of a stomachache due to eating ice cream just before diving. And once again, the group’s tardiness in arriving was absolutely her fault.
Believe it or not, Miyu (or her avatar, Fukaziroh) was in ALO until earlier in the day. Until just moments ago, in fact.
She’d been on a major adventure with her ALO friends and had been playing practically nonstop, except for meal and bathroom breaks offline, since Saturday morning—without sleep.
It was a very unhealthy way to play. More than a few hours a day of full-diving was bad for the mind. And if you spent too much time in virtual reality overall, you might enter a very dangerous mental state where it became impossible to tell which side was real life.
“They like to say you should only play two hours of VR per day, but…when you’re Miyu Shinohara, it’s not a problem at all.”
Her protests aside, the plan called for Fukaziroh to have a big, thrilling adventure with her ALO friends that wrapped up during the morning, giving her a few hours’ time to take care of converting to GGO. It was a risky move, but they registered her name under their team because she had a record of GGO play in the past.
The adventure dragged on and on, however, leaving her with almost no time to spare. Since they couldn’t meet up the day before, Llenn told her to be in Glocken at ten o’clock, a healthy buffer, and had all of Fukaziroh’s gear in a cart waiting for her—but when she received no glimpse or word of her friend, she began to fret.
She waved an invisible conductor’s wand with her left hand, bringing up a command window. With some button presses and icon slides, she first stashed away the robe, which she didn’t need for Squad Jam. It silently vanished, making the pink shrimp pink again.
Next, she materialized her rationed items. Everyone in Squad Jam received three crucial emergency med kits and a Satellite Scan terminal.
The med kits were the only HP-recovering item in the event. They were large, syringe-like cylinders that could be stuck against any part of the body. One kit healed 30 percent of the user’s health, but slowly, over the course of three minutes. A serious challenge of Squad Jam was that you couldn’t heal quickly in the midst of battle.
The Satellite Scan terminal was a special device just for Squad Jam that showed a map of the terrain and, once every ten minutes, the location of other squads. Visually, it was pretty much just a smartphone.
It was so important that no one stood a chance without it, so the game designers made sure that the item was indestructible. Putting it in her shirt pocket in SJ1 actually saved Llenn’s life. It helped that she was small and not particularly well-endowed.
Almost certainly because of that incident, the terminals were reprogrammed to allow bullets to pass through, starting in SJ2. It wasn’t fair to go around intentionally taking advantage of that, after all.
Llenn placed her med kits into a thin pouch on the front of her body and stuck her terminal into her shirt pocket. She’d had to show Fukaziroh how to use it last time, but that wasn’t necessary now.
Next she selected the EQUIP ALL GEAR command from her window. Utility belts appeared around her pink-camo outfit silently. They were nice and snug around her waist and shoulders, and the pouches for the long P90 ammo magazines materialized three on each hip.
She had her backup magazines in her virtual item storage. After nearly running out of ammo last time, she’d learned her lesson and stocked up with more: another fifteen, in fact. Her weight was just barely under the limit of what she could carry without a movement penalty based on her stats.
So she had one magazine in her gun, six at her sides, and fifteen in her inventory, for twenty-two in all. There were fifty rounds a pop, so that made 1,100 in total.
She also brought along the sound suppressor that she used to great effect last time. She didn’t have it on yet because the shorter the gun barrel, the more maneuverable it was.
Naturally, she equipped the comm device that allowed her to talk to her teammates like a phone. She also brought a monocular with a distance measure on it.
But the gear wasn’t done showing up. Next appeared Llenn’s valuable sidearm, a vicious combat knife with a black blade that she kept behind her at her waist, where she could pull it out backhanded with her right hand. The knife had played a major part in her final battles of both SJ1 and SJ2. She would have lost both fights without it.
Lastly, the most crucial item of all, without which she couldn’t fight at all: her main weapon. A gun with a mysterious outline, angled and boxy except for its smooth, molded grip, the twenty-inch-long P90. It was a smoky pink, like her clothes. This was P-chan the Third.
She grabbed it and slung it over her shoulder, thus completing her gearing-up process. With the familiar weight of the gun pulling on her, Llenn thought I just don’t want you to get busted up again.
“Ooh! You got a new one, Llenn! It looks good on you!” cheered Fukaziroh behind her shoulder.
“Yeah, isn’t it?!” Llenn was always happy to hear a compliment for P-chan. She spun around to see Fukaziroh in full battle mode.
Fukaziroh, too, had a very short and cute girl avatar. Her features, however, were so sharp they seemed likely to cut anyone who touched them. She had blond hair tied up in the back, with a knife holding it in place rather than a comb. This knife had also come in very handy when they needed it most in SJ2. Llenn and Fuka would have lost without it.
Her clothing and armaments were exactly the same as last time. This only made sense, as Fukaziroh hadn’t actually been present in GGO between the end of SJ2 and mere minutes ago. All her items had been stored in Llenn’s rental locker for the past three months.
On top of her brilliant golden hair was a green helmet that was just a bit too large for her head. Her combat gear featured a camo pattern that the American military called MultiCam. She wore a long-sleeve shirt and shorts, plus black tights and brown boots. It was quite a fashionable look.
Over her top she wore a green vest that contained bulletproof armor. It had some pouches sized to hold two-inch ammo grenades. She also wore a backpack that was positively stuffed with grenades.
Her primary weapon was the six-shot grenade launcher, the MGL-140. And not just one—she had a launcher for each hand.
These were monstrous guns capable of throwing lethally explosive bomb blasts thirty feet wide, up to a distance of a quarter of a mile. She made full use of it in SJ2, dispatching many enemies, even some she couldn’t see when she unloaded the launchers on them.
Reunited with her favorite guns, Fukaziroh babbled, “Oh, my dear Rightony and Leftania… How have you been? Hang on, have you lost weight…? Was Llenn feeding you enough while I was gone? The entire time I was adventuring in the land of the fairies, I never forgot about you for a single seco…for more than a handful of seconds.”
How warm were her beloved guns after three months of no use? As a matter of fact, Fukaziroh had one more gun. There was a 9 mm automatic pistol in a holster on her right thigh, a Smith & Wesson M&P.
But Fukaziroh was a terrible shot with a pistol. She absolutely sucked at it. In fact, she had fired it nearly point-blank at an enemy last time and didn’t land a single hit. It made you wonder if there was any point to carrying it around.
I wish she would just leave it behind, Llenn thought, but she kept that to herself.
The other two people in the waiting area, Pitohui and M, arranged their own equipment.
M geared up in the same style as before. Toxic green-stippled camo covered his mountainous, burly frame. Over that he wore a bulletproof vest with pouches for ammo magazines.
On his head was a bush hat with a number of leafy bits of cloth that made its silhouette harder to discern. Over his shoulders was a camo backpack with the hugely powerful shield inside that had played a major role in SJ1 and SJ2.
SHINC’s anti-tank rifle had hit the shield hard last time, breaking the joints that kept its eight plates together, but it had been restored, of course. Pitohui also used one of the shield parts manually for defense to excellent effect, so they had modified the shield to be easier to detach.
“Ooooh, how handy!” Llenn had exclaimed when she heard about it during the wait for Fukaziroh to show up. She might get the chance to use it, too, today. Not in an active sense, because it was so heavy, but perhaps if they were taking up a defensive position.
As always, M used the blocky M14 EBR. It had a high-magnification zooming scope that he could use for anything from sniping to run-and-gun combat. On his right thigh holster was the HK45 automatic pistol that he’d used on Llenn in SJ1. Lastly, there were four plasma grenades, which were more powerful than regular hand grenades. They would explode if struck by a bullet, so he kept them on the underside of his backpack behind him, as common sense dictated.
Pitohui’s loadout was identical to what she used in SJ2, as well. When a player got to be on the level she was, they tended to find an ideal set of gear that didn’t change often.
On her head she wore a set of black headgear, similar to those worn in sports, but with a more cybernetic look. It was lighter than a helmet but with good defensive plating here and there for protection.
Over her skintight navy bodysuit, she wore a bulletproof combat vest. It held a number of shotgun shells. There was also a ring of pouches for her main assault rifle’s thirty-round magazines strung up sideways like armor plates.
That rifle was the KTR-09, which she’d used copiously against Llenn in SJ2. It was a custom model of the Russian AK-47, the most famous assault rifle in the world, with a seventy-five-round drum magazine attached for longer firing.
For sidearms, she kept two XDM .40-caliber pistols at her sides. On top of that, she had a very powerful alternate Remington M870 Breacher shotgun in its own sheath at her left side. Even more, there was a narrow knife in the side of either boot.
Lastly, hidden inside the fanny pouch behind her back, she had a single lightsword handle. The gun-world version of a sword, which she had used to kill a great many people in SJ2.
“Pito,” Llenn said, approaching as she finished gearing up. The floating countdown said 04:33 now. There was plenty of time to talk. “You’re starting off at full power this time. I thought you might wait to change halfway in, like the last one.”
In SJ2, Pitohui only had her bodysuit on at the start. She went in totally unarmed for the challenge. When they fought in the mountain region, she actually stole the enemy’s weapons as she went. Later, she sniped with an M107A1 antimateriel rifle that her courier teammate hauled around for her.
It wasn’t until much later in the game that she put on her full loadout.
In preparation for SJ3, Llenn watched the video of SJ1 and SJ2 very closely. She memorized the guns and tactics used by the teams they had faced before. When she got to the scene of Pitohui’s brutal battle in the waterfall canyon, she felt a cold trickle of sweat down her back—as well as relief that she was now watching her own teammate.
Pitohui answered, “Yeah, I guess. I wasn’t able to prepare anything this time, so I don’t really have room to mess around.”
“Oh, I suppose that makes sense.”
Llenn knew the story already. Pitohui’s player, Elza Kanzaki, had been on a nationwide concert tour through just yesterday. She’d been traveling all over Japan, singing and singing and singing some more, giving encores until she practically needed extra oxygen to get through it all.
According to the online article she read earlier, last night’s show in Tokyo, the tour finale, was quite a showstopping performance.
“So has it been a while since you played any GGO?” Llenn asked. She’d at least made a few dives since deciding to appear in SJ3, when she’d had time between classes. She’d tackled some tough monsters, earned more experience, and trained to get her edge back. Between that and her video practice, Llenn exhibited her hardworking personality.
But Fukaziroh interrupted to say, “Ooh! Yeah! I haven’t played in forever!”
“I already know that,” Llenn snapped, waiting for Pitohui to answer.
“That’s right. It’s been a while. I wanted to at least get one good dive in, but it just wasn’t possible with the tour and all.”
“I had to keep an eye on her,” said M. “I knew that if she logged on to GGO even once, she wouldn’t be back for hours. And she’d want to play again the next day.”
“Ah, I can see that,” said Llenn. Then something else occurred to her. “What about you, M?”
M’s heavy jaw rose and fell, confirming what she suspected. If he was keeping watch over her in real life, Goushi wouldn’t dare go into GGO on his own.
“It’s been over two months for me, too,” he said. “It almost feels nostalgic to be here.”
“Hrmm…,” Llenn grunted.
Out of the four of them, she was the only one who was definitely tougher than before. The other three were powerful to begin with, which was good, but it did leave them with something lacking in terms of teamwork.
Llenn had teamed up with all three at different times, so she would be fine, but there was still the question of how well Fukaziroh would be able to coordinate with Pitohui and M. They really should have found at least one occasion to hunt together, just to get used to each other. But it was too late to worry about that now.
“I’ll admit, I’m still a little fatigued from yesterday, so I could have stood to hang out in the bar a little bit longer. I feel bad about putting on a poor performance. It’s not fair to the audience—I mean, to the other combatants,” Pitohui said gloomily.
“Ah…yeah, I get that,” Llenn said, also gloomily. Then a sudden thought came to her. “Huh? Daaah! I was the one who said I didn’t need to play, but you dragged me into this, Pito!” she piped up, little body exploding with indignation.
Pitohui looked unconcerned. “Oh, whatever. Look, I wanted to help you settle the score with the Amazons, you know?”
“Mmph!”
“No sulking now. Listen, I’ll give you a nice present for being such a good girl!”
“Mmmm?”
Pitohui brought up her window with a wave of her left hand, and a metal box about the size of an encyclopedia appeared. Llenn grabbed it in both hands; it was quite heavy.
“What is this?”
“A present for you. Open it up!”
She put it on the ground and opened the hinged lid to peer inside. There were six two-inch grenades stored inside, resting neatly on a bed of heavy, shock-resistant molded pulp. They almost looked like a pack of eggs—only colored bright blue.
“Oh! Just like you promised, Pito!” exclaimed Fukaziroh, who crouched over the box excitedly.
“What? What promise?” Llenn wondered. Fukaziroh reached over with a slender hand to lift up a grenade and stare at it closely. It was the first time Llenn had seen a grenade with such a brilliant blue head.
“Mwa-hoh-hohhh! Nwe-heh-heh-heh!” Fukaziroh cackled. Llenn had never heard her do that before. It was unsettling. “Llenn! Do you know what this is?”
“It’s a grenade for your guns, right?”
“Yes! But I’m referring to the payload! You know it?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Then listen up! This is a plasma warhead that blows up anything within a ten-yard radius when it explodes!”
“Holy—!” Llenn exclaimed.
She’d heard about them from the owner of the place where she bought the MGL-140s. 40 mm grenade launcher projectiles with plasma warheads—extremely expensive and rare due to their unfathomable power. They were as strong as the larger thrown plasma grenades, but these ones could be shot over a thousand feet with a launcher. In all honesty, it just wasn’t fair.
Fukaziroh wished she had some of these in SJ2, but she ultimately gave up on them in favor of the pink smoke grenades that Llenn needed for tactical purposes.
“Six of them! Thank you, Pito! I love you!” she shouted, hopping back and forth like a child receiving a very good Christmas present.
I get it. Pitohui must have used her considerable finances to buy these for the sake of the team. Thank you, Pito, Llenn thought. Then another thought occurred to her.
“Hey, wait! That present’s not for me!”
“Listen, Llenn. Don’t sweat the little things, okay? You’ll go bald early.”
“I won’t go bald at all!”
Fukaziroh, meanwhile, set down her MGL-140s and lowered her backpack to the ground so she could stick the lethal projectiles inside. “Whoo-hoo-hoo! One grenade, two grenades, three grenades…”
The main zippered portion of her backpack was already full of her ammo grenades, so she could only fit the plasmas into the side pocket.
“Is that safe there?” Llenn asked, worried. “They won’t explode if you get shot in the back?”
Normal grenades were programmed not to explode if they got shot in combat, but the plasma types were different. This flaw had been introduced to counterbalance the overwhelming advantage of their sheer power.
If Fukaziroh got shot in the back, and the grenades went off, anyone standing within thirty feet of her would be caught in the blast and probably die, too.
She stopped in the midst of her packing and smirked. “Are you kidding? With three mighty warriors guarding my back? I ain’t afraid in the least!”
“Fuka…,” Llenn murmured, feeling a warmth in her heart.
“Besides, I don’t want to die a lonely death. I would much rather have it be a huge disaster that gets everyone else involved.”
Llenn promptly looked off into the distance. “Ah. Okay. So I’ll make sure to keep my distance from you.”
“That’s so mean! I’m your partner! I’m your buddy! I came over here to GGO just to play with ya, remember?”
“And I’m looking forward to that. But it needs to be me who beats Boss at the end.”
“Fine, fine, you can have her.” Fukaziroh stood up, backpack straps over her shoulders. It was a very heavy pack, but thanks to Fukaziroh’s ridiculously high strength numbers, she treated it like little more than a light jacket.
That completed the team’s combat preparation. There were just eighty seconds of wait time remaining.
Pitohui said, “Shall we form up in a little circle before we head in? As a symbol of our special friendship!”
“Uh, isn’t one of those friendships actually love?” Fukaziroh teased, referring to M.
But Pitohui immediately said, “No. I actually hate him.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“Who wants a creepy stalker around?”
“I totally get it.”
“I ruthlessly made fun of him for being fat, and then he goes and gets all thin and handsome all of a sudden.”
“It’s not even fair.”
“Then he starts acquiring a fashion sense, and all of a sudden, other women are all over him.”
“Simply unforgivable.”
“I tried to beat him up to change the shape of his face, but it’s surprisingly hardy.”
“I just can’t stand it.”
“Instead, I try to mentally break him down within the game, but he just sticks around, takes a vacation to go practice shooting overseas, and gets more accurate than I am.”
“It’s like, read the room.”
“I’d love to shoot him in the back at some point during this event.”
“I’m willing to help.”
“Please stop this!” Llenn interrupted, noticing how M was silent. “Look, you’re going to make him cry!”
“Well, enough of that. Come on, everyone, hands in! Hands! Let’s go!”
The three of them formed a circle with Pitohui and reached out to cover her outstretched hand.
“Here,” said Llenn.
“Heya,” said Fukaziroh.
“Hail,” said M.
Pitohui cleared her throat. “Then I am humbly pleased to deliver a short message of encouragement! So, ah, Team Ell-Pee-Eff-Lem… Argh, it’s so hard to say! Team! You ready?”
Yeah! They roared in acknowledgment.
“Not that we had time to prepare, but are you prepared for a bout of violent virtual killing?”
Yeah!
“Don’t forget! One for all! And all for me!”
Yeah! …What?
“Let’s stick together! We may have been born separately! But I’ll die as the last of us!”
Yeah……
“And since it’s been a while, let’s enjoy this game for the game it is! No outcome is allowed except for victory!”
Huh?
“All right, gang, let’s kick—”
The time hit zero, cutting off Pitohui mid-sentence and teleporting them all away.
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