CHAPTER 6
A Woman’s Battle
The time was 12:39.
The scan was just about to start, but the five men didn’t have time to stop and wait for it.
“What the hell’s going on…?”
Just moments before, they’d been split into a pair and a trio, along the left wing of the “crane’s wing” formation. They were hiding behind a locomotive and a train car that were still connected on the tracks. Thanks to another vehicle blocking their view, they hadn’t actually witnessed Clarence’s betrayal or Shirley’s sniping.
So when they heard full auto gunfire from the right flank, then a high-pitched sniper’s rifle from behind, they had no idea what to make of it.
The five of them gathered up without anyone suggesting they do so and huddled cautiously behind the train engine. One of them posited, “Maybe the guys on the right wing are fighting some new enemy…?”
It wasn’t entirely wrong, but another man concluded, “No way, that can’t be true! Nobody could’ve gotten here in time based on the positions of the last scan!” He was right about the scan, so none of the others had a rebuttal to that.
“We’re all shooting at LPFM, right? So the gunshots behind us must be some other companions helping out with a sniper rifle, right?” said an optimist.
“Okay, fine. We’re not going to learn anything here. Let’s move to the right side—but carefully. We want to be able to react to anything that might—”
Ba-koom.
An erupting sound cut him off.
As the others watched, his torso emitted an odd noise, and he toppled sideways. There was a red glow over essentially all of his upper half, as though he’d been flambéed with a blowtorch.
“Sniper!”
The other four promptly scattered. Yet again, they went into a panic, this time about a mysterious source of impossibly powerful bullets. And so they ran, without knowing where or why.
“Tsk!”
But it was Shirley who clicked her tongue in irritation.
She was standing next to a train car with her R93 Tactical 2 in firing position. She’d run across the mazelike switchyard with its many cars and spotted the five unwitting players just five seconds ago. They were six hundred and fifty feet away.
Even with the stiff winds currently blowing, there was no way she’d miss a target as large as a human torso from that range. Shirley’s explosive round hit the man in the side as he relayed his plan to the others—and burst inside his flesh. It was an instant kill shot, of course.
She was in good position and wanted to take out at least two of the others, but they split right there on the spot. Two went right, and two went left, promptly hiding behind cars blocking her view.
“Hmph! Then I’ll just pick them off starting from the left!”
Shirley spun around, moved behind the train car, and began to run in that direction.
“What the hell? It was an enemy! And with a superpowered gun!”
“Just run, dude! Damn, I hate cheap-ass snipers!” whined the two players who had run to the right. They were heading for the right wing of their formation territory. That was the place where all the fierce shooting had been until moments ago, but they preferred to run into battle and find friendly faces than just wander around on their own.
Coming around a container car, they found someone familiar.
“Oh! You two are all right! That’s great!”
The player was watching out from a prime spot between two freight cars, situated so he wouldn’t be attacked from the front or rear. It was none other than the handsome fellow who showed up late and suggested a plan for them.
What was his name again…?
The audience in the bar saw the whole thing happen.
It was practically an execution.
“No! You better not! He’s an enemy!”
The two men approached Clarence and crouched in the shadow of the train car, relieved.
“Go on, get outta there!”
“Behind you! Behind!”
And then Clarence quickly took position just behind them and put a bullet from the AR-57 into the back of their heads.
“Ahhh, well.”
“Shit, what was that? An antimateriel rifle?”
“It would have blown up a lot more than that!”
“So what is it, then?!”
“How would I know?!”
The two that ran to the left could only ask questions they didn’t have the answer to. They couldn’t spare any attention for their surroundings, focusing entirely on running. They sprinted and sprinted, darting from the cover of one car to another.
“Huh?” “Huh?”
And then they saw a certain figure wearing a gray poncho.
The audience watched the men as they ran for their lives. They weren’t especially quick characters, but once they got going at full speed, they could dash a significant distance.
The camera focused on them in the center of the frame, making the background speed past. Only those with very good kinetic vision would have noticed the figure in gray entering the frame.
The next moment, it switched to an angle behind Shirley’s back, making it clear that the two teams had noticed each other’s presence.
“You’re close!”
Shirley had been running to get to a good sniping location when she spotted the other two running across her field of view just fifty yards ahead.
“Ah!”
She raised the R93 Tactical 2 to her shoulder without breaking stride.
There was a screaming, high-pitched gunshot.
One of the two runners doubled over, his stomach red, and slid over the gravel, coming to a stop up against the rails. He was dead.
The man running behind him tripped over his friend’s corpse—or soon-to-be corpse—and tumbled forward. “Aaaaah!”
He still had all the momentum of running, so despite landing on his face and chest on the rails, he continued to slide. It took him ten feet over onto the next set of tracks.
“Yeow…”
When he looked up in preparation to stand, he saw a figure in a gray poncho rushing at him. Oddly, whoever it was held a long camouflaged stick, as if to stab him like it was a spear.
The tip of it flashed.
“Hya-how! Oh, man!”
“What was that?!”
The audience in the pub roared with delight at Shirley’s improvisational technique.
This was called a snapshot—when a shooter instantly took aim and fired at a close enemy. The same term was used in photography, but it had originally come from shooting, referring to the technique of a hunter swiftly and accurately firing at an animal making an abrupt, unexpected appearance.
It was a style of shooting that every player in GGO had experienced before, of course, but it took major skill to pull it off with a sniper rifle. And beyond that…
“That was a running snapshot…”
“Insane.”
Shirley had done it while on the run. She’d aimed with her rifle and fired while at a full sprint.
From spotting them to shooting had taken less than a second. That shot had hit the stomach of the first man just like any other shot she might take.
The exploding bullet was worth every bit of its fifty-times cost. If it had been a normal bullet, it would have penetrated through the stomach and certainly not delivered a fatal amount of damage on its own.
And because it was an instant kill and caused the man to fall, it had the added benefit of tripping up the second one. That man wasn’t in any state to fight back yet, so she could have stopped and taken careful aim, but Shirley did not slow down. She couldn’t rule out the presence of other foes around.
She used the R93 Tactical 2’s extremely fast loading mechanism to fire again, killing the second man—while still on a run, of course. She was like an archer on horseback in the olden days.
Shirley kept her eyes open for other threats and, finding nothing for the moment, finally came to a stop and took cover behind a train car. She still had two shots left but switched out the magazine anyway.
“Good thinking, lady.”
“Man, she’s good. She can snipe; she can snapshot…”
On the bottom of the screen, the number five glowed.
“That means the allied team is wiped out,” said another audience member. He glanced over at the adjacent table, where the man in the beret was seated alone, practically crying with frustration.
“……”
It was ten seconds after 12:41.
The fourth Satellite Scan was over.
“Damn, didn’t have time to take a look!” lamented Clarence as she hovered over the bodies of the two men she’d just executed.
The fourth scan had passed in less than a minute, and her device did not display any team dots. A map would pop up, but it wouldn’t even tell Clarence her own current location. That was the kind of unhelpfulness players could look forward to in Squad Jam.
“Ah-whuh?”
Clarence suddenly leaped back in surprise at the water that appeared under her feet without a sound. The sea was upon her.
It spread in a line across the ground, moving at about the speed of a brisk walking pace, steadily growing higher as it filled the switchyard without abiding.
Like lines of sandbags, the sets of rails briefly slowed the advance of the water, but being rails, they weren’t very tall. More water would push up from behind until it soon rushed over the metal tracks. If anything, the speed of the ocean’s progress seemed to be picking up.
“Uh-oh, this looks bad!” Clarence yelped, boots kicking up water as she ran.
After she left, the two dead bodies remaining silently sank beneath the rising water.
“Oh, look how far it’s come…”
Shirley was noticing the approaching water, too. Looking out from the freight car she was taking cover behind, she saw the scenery about three hundred yards ahead was being replaced by water.
The flat ground was covered with water the same dull, leaden gray as the sky above, turning the cars and engines into little islands—islands that promised nothing but slow, peaceful death if you got stuck on one.
Fighting against a powerful foe and getting shot to death was one thing, but Shirley was not about to let herself get knocked out of SJ3 from drowning.
Like Clarence, she wasn’t in a position to check the scan as it was happening, so she gave up on the idea of pursuing combat for the next ten minutes.
“Oh well. Guess I’ll withdraw from this battlefield for now…”
But deep down, she still wanted to fight.
Shirley knew that nobody was going to be able to check the locations on the scan and know where she was. It was thanks to her plan.
It was in the waiting area of SJ3, meaning just before the start of the event, that Shirley relayed her idea to her four teammates. The men could hardly be blamed for their incredulity. After all, she told them, “I’ll be acting alone as soon as we start. I want the rest of you to split up and just run free across the map. I have myself designated as the last member to become leader.”
“Huh? What?” Some of her teammates had no idea what she meant.
“Oh, I get it… So that’s your plan…” While others got the gist of it at once.
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“Only the leader shows up during the scan, you know? If all five of us run around separately, then even if they track down our dot to finish us off, they can only find and kill one of us every ten minutes.”
“Oh, now I see…”
“Then the next member becomes the leader, so even if the team leader gets killed within every ten-minute span…”
“Then they won’t know Shirley’s location for at least forty minutes! But won’t acting alone be dangerous…?” said one of the teammates, before stopping himself.
Setting themselves aside, Shirley had put in a lot of work to better her character, and she was probably more likely to survive on her own than they were. Given their relative lack of experience, they might actually just hold her back.
In a rush, she explained, “I’m going to look for as many one-hit kills as I can get with my exploding rounds. I’ve got a number of different camo ponchos for different environments. If I think they’re too tough, I’ll lay low and stay quiet. You’ll all find it easier to flee when alone, and you’re good enough to shoot without a bullet line if you have a clear shot. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I don’t think you’ll go down that quickly.”
Then she paused and added, “Plus, remember the plan the beret guy pitched to us, to gather when we see the signal flare go up? We can use that. If they get a big team together, all those people are going to be occupied with their fight for the first thirty or forty minutes. We’ll be able to hit them from behind or get the chance to slip away.”
“All right, that makes sense now…and I can’t think of a better plan. Anyone else?”
There was no argument from the others.
Shirley’s team had started SJ3 in the town that took up the northern part of the map, almost smack in the middle between east and west, but at the very northern edge, right along the water. The approaching ocean became very clear to them, right away.
“Best of luck, everyone. If all goes well, we’ll have a drink afterward. I’m turning off the comm now,” Shirley said. She donned a gray-camo poncho, called A-TACS AU from her inventory, then rushed off with her R93 Tactical 2 in hand. She was gone, around the side of a building in no time.
“Well, guess we’ll see how far we get…”
“Uh-huh!”
“Got it!”
“We’re like civilian troops protecting Hokkaido from invasion!”
The four men exchanged fist bumps, hoisted their hunting rifles, and went their separate ways. Unlike Shirley, they had kept their comms open, so they could talk if they felt like it.
And now, forty minutes later, none of Shirley’s teammates had died yet. The widespread plan to team up had worked out in their favor. Many of the teams in the game were preoccupied with taking out one of the top squads and had paid no attention to KKHC.
So all four of her comrades were currently alive and well in various locations.
Of course, it was only because they didn’t want to attack anyone else and get people angry at them, so they were engaging in the saddest option of all: running and hiding and trying not to be noticed.
Shirley decided to relocate for now. She checked her teammates’ HP up in the left corner of her view. It seemed like a miracle that all of them were completely unharmed.
“Thanks, guys. That gives me more of a chance to kick ass,” she muttered, prioritizing her own enjoyment over the safety of her teammates.
Between the results of the scan and the red signal flare, it was very clear to her that LPFM were on the other side of the switchyard. That team included Pitohui, whom Shirley had failed to take out in SJ2, and Llenn, who had been the one to knock her target out instead. She burned with desire to finish them off herself this time, but she decided that the circumstances weren’t ideal for a sneak attack.
They obviously weren’t going to merely sink into the water; they would be surviving through some means or another. And as long as they were alive, she would have another chance to come across them.
For now, she was going to retreat to the interior of the island to get away from the water, and she could wait for that chance to arrive from there.
When Shirley started to run, it took no more than thirty seconds for her to cross paths with Clarence, who was also going at full speed.
“What’s this?”
Clarence wasn’t expecting to see the sniper at such close range. She just assumed the gunshots earlier were from the other men in the alliance. Besides, a sniper rushing in was no longer acting like a sniper. It didn’t make sense.
“Huh?”
For her part, Shirley didn’t expect to see an enemy rushing toward the direction of a gunshot.
Clarence leaped out from behind the overturned engine as Shirley emerged from the side of the tanker car.
Unluckily for Shirley, Clarence’s cover was a toppled locomotive. If it had been a car resting on the tracks, the sniper would have been able to see the other side between the wheels and spot the approaching pair of feet.
Unfortunately for Clarence—well, it was simply bad luck that she’d been running that way at all.
The two spotted each other at the ultra-short distance of about twenty yards.
“Hya!” Clarence shrieked.
“Ah!” Shirley gasped. They pointed their weapons at each other from the waist position.
Clarence’s reaction wasn’t slow, by any means, but Shirley had already pulled off two successful snapshots, and she won out here, too.
The R93 Tactical 2 let out a high-pitched blast before the AR-57 could. Her special exploding round roared and smashed into its target.
“Gyahk!”
Right into the body of the AR-57 in Clarence’s hand.
It was powerful enough to reduce the gun to just one step short of utterly scrapped. It was out of SJ3 and wouldn’t be usable again until she took it to a gun shop for repairs.
They came to a stop ten yards apart right at the moment that the deflected AR-57 fell onto the rails.
Shirley pulled the bolt, expelling the empty, pushed the bolt back, loading the next bullet—but not before Clarence’s arm darted.
She grabbed the grip of the Five-Seven pistol in her right holster. With blazing speed, she pulled it loose as Shirley finished reloading and cackled happily while unloading a series of shots.
“Hya-haaa!”
“Urgh!”
Shirley fired as a bullet hit her left shoulder. The shift in her balance caused the shot to go wide, only grazing Clarence’s shoulder by a fraction of an inch and sending up sparks from the metal exterior of the train engine just behind her.
Clarence’s second shot passed over Shirley’s head and pierced her hood as it went. It revealed Shirley’s green hair, the camo cap she wore backward, and the trio of black lines she’d drawn on her face.
The markings on her face were made with mud the last time. Now she’d replaced them with black camouflage cosmetics. The way the pattern ran across her pale skin made it look like some fierce animal pelt.
“Wha—? Eh?”
Clarence’s third and fourth shots were not followed by another. The bullets hit Shirley’s arm and side, but they mostly deflected off and into the distance. The two faced each other, guns silent, from just thirty feet apart.
“Well, well! You’re a woman, too! Hey, no moving now!” Clarence said brightly, keeping her gun trained on Shirley with one hand. Her handsome features were turned upward into a dazzling smile.
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