CHAPTER 8
Girls in Peril
It was an airplane graveyard.
A parking lot sat in the southwest corner of the spacious airport. Like the runway, it was covered in asphalt, but this was just an empty space for parking vehicles, a vast flat field of dark gray.
Atop it was an assortment of over a dozen business jets that would cost multiple billions of yen—the kind the very wealthy used for their own travel. They were tightly piled up in a space that was maybe a hundred feet in radius.
Some of their wheels were broken. Others were flipped over. Some were cut cleanly into two for whatever reason. Their paint was faded and flaking, most of their windows had fallen out or broken, and even the pilot seats were coming undone.
There were many usable vehicles in Squad Jam, but these didn’t seem to fit the bill. Not that anyone in SHINC had the skill, either in the game or in real life, to fly a plane.
Everything was open around it, but the broken planes formed a little hill of cover about thirty feet tall, like a giant’s toy box had been upturned onto the asphalt. It was the perfect place to hide.
That was exactly what SHINC was doing, huddled up like mice.
“Hmm. I should have expected it wouldn’t be that easy. This is MMTM, after all,” they muttered, watching the third scan proceed.
Ten minutes earlier, they’d decided to turn the airstairs truck into a time bomb. It was a little present—just for MMTM.
The mechanism to make the vehicle drive on its own was quite simple. First, SHINC duct-taped a few plasma grenades to the bottom of the steering wheel. That ensured that if the wheel turned at all, the weight would pull it back to an even keel.
Then they stuck a large plasma grenade, the kind known as a “grand grenade,” to the accelerator pedal. Finally, to make sure it didn’t go too fast, they stuck a belt of machine-gun ammo behind the pedal to prop it up.
All of these ideas came from Tohma, who had real-life driving experience.
The gun barrel on the top of the stairs was merely a spare PKM barrel placed in a likely location. They’d be losing that permanently, unlike the ammo, but it wasn’t that expensive a part, so they sacrificed it for the sake of the trap.
They set the timers on the plasma grenades to go off between fifty-five and fifty-nine seconds after the clock hit 12:29. Once one went off, it would blow up all of them, but they were thorough—better safe than sorry.
Once their unmanned, slow-moving airstairs truck was complete, SHINC went sprinting as fast as they could to the southwest.
They knew from the scan that no lights had been at the airport, but that didn’t rule out the possibility of enemies in wait, particularly troublesome snipers in the control tower, with their team leader located elsewhere as a feint.
That control tower, which stood at least three hundred feet tall, was going to be trouble. If someone took up a perch in there, everything within half a mile was in danger, in a full 360 degrees.
SHINC ran carefully, ready to instantly hide and counterattack if anyone in their group got shot. They made their way under the large rusted passenger planes sidled up next to the jet bridges, until they found their current location and took shelter, watching carefully for booby traps.
Not a single bullet was fired at them in the meantime.
“Now…where is my timeless rival, Llenn? I sure hope she hasn’t died already.”
Boss enlarged the southeast part of the map on her device’s screen and tapped the dot on the bridge right before the wetlands. As she suspected, the name LPFM appeared.
“Wah-ha-ha-ha!” she chuckled eerily. It probably would have sounded a lot cuter from the real-life teenager Saki Nitobe. “There we go, there we go! You’re finally coming out of the forest!”
Boss was truly elated. If Llenn’s team chose to stay cooped up in that area to the final stage of the game, it would have presented a major challenge to SHINC.
Llenn and Pitohui had a strong instinct to fight, but M was their team leader, and he was cool and rational. Boss had been afraid he would choose the safest and most secure strategy.
“I think we’ll get to have a real match this time…”
She was delighted at the thought of fighting with Llenn, and she hoped Llenn felt the same way.
Next, she touched the dot of the enemy team at the leftmost bridge, opposite from Llenn’s team, at the residential area. It was DOOM, a new team competing this time around.
“Hmm?”
They were on the move, fast enough that she could tell even on the scan; that was a sign they were riding something. And they were heading for the rightmost bridge.
In other words, they were preparing to attack Llenn’s squad. It was fairly close to SHINC’s current location, too, in fact, but at the speed they were going, there was no way they’d be catching up in time.
“So Llenn’s next opponent is them… Well, don’t die,” Boss said, offering encouragement to her enemy. Which in this case, of course, was Llenn.
Judging that they wouldn’t be entering combat with Llenn’s team in the next ten minutes, Boss and her squad checked on the status of the other surviving teams.
In the southwest part of the field map, ZEMAL was raising hell. The one shining light in the crater-pocked region down there belonged to them, and it was surrounded by gray dots. They were the only ones alive there now. They had utterly conquered it.
“Those machine gunners have really gotten good at this!” Boss exclaimed, honestly impressed.
Rosa, a machine gunner herself, lamented, “That ammo-feeding system they have isn’t fair. Man…I want one.”
She really felt like getting some new equipment, just ten days after seeing them at the playtest, but Rosa didn’t have anywhere near enough money.
The plans for the backpack-loading system, which was capable of firing nearly a thousand bullets without stopping, as well as the high-precision new PKP Pecheneg were both available in stores. And she wanted them. Oh, how she wanted them.
Players could use real money in GGO, but the price was two digits beyond what a high schooler’s allowance could afford.
“Channel that frustration into your bullets and blast the enemy with them!” advised Tanya.
As the special rule stated, all the ammo they expended dealing with the monsters came back in full. Normally, the empty magazines came back to players after the finish of Squad Jam, but this time all that ammunition was returned to their inventories—even the plasma grenades they’d used in their trap.
Boss’s eyes followed the map up to the northwest sector. There were glowing points here and there amid the ruined city, six in all. None of the teams there were eliminated.
Of those six surviving teams, only two had names Boss recognized: TOMS and T-S. That was the speedy, lightweight team including the SJ3 betrayer Cole and Ervin’s team of sci-fi armored troops, respectively.
The groups were free to hack at each other for now. Let them go on a killing frenzy. Even better, let them pursue a course of mutual destruction.
That left the majority of the remaining enemies to the upper left of the center of the map.
The highway interchange in the dead center looked like a four-leaf clover. To its northwest was a frozen lake. From SHINC’s current location, it was about a mile and a half to the west, across the north-south highway.
It was hard to make out the white dots on the white map feature, but once zoomed in, you could make out six blips gathered together within a space of about 1 percent of a square mile.
That many dots collected so closely on a flat, frozen lake could not possibly indicate that a battle was playing out. They were clearly working together. The other gray icons surrounding them were the unfortunate victims of this collective.
“Well, well, looks like we got a league of friends over here. So we’re doing that again… I’ll read the names,” Boss said. She jabbed at the dots with a broad finger and listed them off. “WEEI, V2HG, PORL, RGB, WNGL, SATOH… Nope, don’t know ’em.”
They were names she hadn’t seen or heard of in the three previous Squad Jams, with the sole exception of RGB.
“I remember RGB. They were the optical-gun team that Fukaziroh beat in SJ2, and the one we beat first in SJ3,” said Tohma. A well-placed shot from her Degtyaryov antitank rifle had split most of them in two.
Sharp-eyed Tanya grinned and said, “But they’ve got the advantage this time, don’t they? With opticals, shooting down all those monsters would be easy-peasy!”
“True,” said Boss. “That’s why they were invited to the alliance, I bet. So they’ve found a place to shine. That means that allied group won’t have to worry about moving. They can hang out on the lake, buying all the time they want.”
“No fair. Is there any way to break the ice there? Then we could wipe them all out at once,” Sophie wondered aloud.
“Maybe with the plasma grenades… But it’ll probably only create a hole where the blast is. The whole lake’s just too big,” said Boss.
“What if we run a real heavy truck over it? You hear news from Russia all the time about ice strong enough for people to walk over but not for vehicles weighing many tons. Even if it doesn’t break, sometimes the place they run over is weakened, though you might not see it,” suggested Tohma.
This is where it helped to have Milana, who split her time between Russia and Japan. She was full of information the average Japanese person wouldn’t know.
In extremely cold and large countries like Russia, it was common for frozen lakes and rivers to be used as roads, because in many cases, it was the quickest way to reach the destination. That also meant broken ice accidents were typical.
“A car, huh? So if we ran a heavy, empty truck like the last one down there, we might take them all out…,” Boss murmured, right as the lengthy Satellite Scan came to a finish.
The results of the 12:30 scan were as follows:
Llenn’s team was in the woods, near the easternmost bridge.
DOOM was at the other end of the bridge, valiantly preparing to attack them.
SHINC was in the southwest part of the airport. MMTM was on the north side of it.
ZEMAL was in the crater area in the southwest part of the map.
Six allied teams were clumped together atop the lake.
And six teams, including TOMS and T-S, were in the ruined city. Seventeen teams in all.
So what to do next…? Boss wondered as her teammates watched the horizon for activity.
Using the map information in her mind and her knowledge of the others’ locations and capabilities, she would need to think of a plan for their next ten minutes—perhaps longer.
She didn’t think they had the ability to defeat the entire allied group on their own, so they were going to ignore them. Instead, she wanted to fight Llenn as soon as possible, so they ought to move south or southeast.
Whatever was going to happen with DOOM, Llenn’s squad would probably win. Then they would cross the bridge.
So SHINC would go toward the huge shopping mall, or perhaps into the residential area around it, to wait. Once the forty-minute scan came in, they would know each other’s location and be able to engage in the long-awaited battle.
“Good!” she said, surprised at how cheery she sounded.
So far, SJ4 couldn’t have gone better for them. They avoided battle with MMTM in a way that was sure to get them mocked later on, but that sacrifice of their honor had turned out to be the right choice.
“We’ll move quickly. South. Pass through the airport, cross the freeway carefully, then hide in the mall or residential neighborhood. Same formation as always.”
The rest of the team chimed back, and SHINC was soon on the move.
The audience in the bar watched as the Amazons slipped out of the mountain of airplane wreckage.
“Oh! So that’s where they were hiding.”
When the group rushed to the south, a person in the bar noted, “Ah, must be going to fight Llenn’s team.”
“I get it. Ever since SJ1, they seemed like rivals.”
Led by the silver-haired one with the Bizon, SHINC rushed from the airplane parking area out to the taxiway, then crossed the runway. After twenty seconds of watching this, someone asked, “Isn’t this weird? Why are they on the screen if all they’re doing is moving?”
“Good point…”
“Yeah, that is kind of weird.”
The action feed always picked the most dynamic battle happening at the moment to display from multiple angles. Right now, several monitors were showing T-S doing battle in the ruined city with an opponent known as BKA, whose team members were dressed up like post-apocalyptic warriors.
A shirtless man with rippling muscles was rushing up on the sci-fi soldiers, probably shouting “Hya-haaa!” and blasting them with a modified shotgun. Their armor deflected all the pellets.
So why were the screens also showing SHINC, who were simply running from one point to another?
“Ah! I got it!”
One of the viewers figured it out. A battle was about to begin.
Someone had SHINC in their sights.
Unfortunately for SHINC, they couldn’t see the video feed, so they had no idea what was about to happen.
They were almost across the runway area, just five hundred yards from the highway that ran across the map from east to west. The fence that acted as a boundary between the two areas was visible to the naked eye now.
Running at the rear of the group’s formation, Boss was shot in her right pectoral.
“Huh?” The impact knocked her backward, and she slid atop the asphalt. “I’ve been shot!”
Since she was bringing up the rear, she didn’t forget to warn the rest of the members who were running ahead of her and might not otherwise notice.
The left edge of her vision showed that her hit points were dropping significantly. Boss was tough, and she wasn’t going to die in one hit, but the location couldn’t have been much worse. It would take at least half her health.
“Gah!” “Aaah!”
Then Tohma and Tanya shrieked at nearly the same moment.
Like Boss’s gauge, theirs began to shrink as well. They’d been sniped.
“Everyone down!” Boss shouted and, ignoring her own situation, prayed that her teammates’ HP wouldn’t drop too far.
The bars went down through the yellow zone and into the red, where they stopped at last. Both players had maybe 10 percent left. Those shots had been devastating. In a matter of moments, half of SHINC was essentially neutralized.
“Shit!” Boss swore, cursing her lack of caution and luck.
There was an ambush nearby. Either a roving unit with their leader situated elsewhere or a group in a vehicle must have attacked them. But there wasn’t any time to consider these things now.
“The bullet came from up ahead! The highway! I didn’t hear the shot—they’ve got a silencer!” she announced, coming to that conclusion based on how she’d been hit. If they were watching for a line coming only from just ahead of them, that would make it easier to dodge the next one.
Flat on their faces, SHINC craned their necks to look ahead toward the highway. Doing so would make it easiest to spot the enemy while reducing their own profile as targets.
Boss’s health was at 40 percent. She pulled out an emergency med kit and stuck it in her thigh at once. Her body glowed briefly, indicating that healing had begun. On the left, the gauges for her, Tohma, and Tanya started flashing, an indicator that they were currently healing.
Med kits were very inefficient items: They healed only 30 percent, and it took them three minutes to do so. And each combatant in Squad Jam received just three of them at the start of the event. There was no trading or using them on others.
Of course, these rules were there for a reason. If you could bring your own recovery items, then a richer player could buy a stockpile of the best possible kind and gain a major advantage.
A few seconds after SHINC dropped to the ground, there was a sudden blast. It sounded like thunder, and the ground even rumbled a little bit.
“An explosion…? But that was far off,” Boss noted correctly. Then she saw a mushroom cloud rising into the sky to the southeast.
That was Llenn’s direction. They must’ve been in battle. But what was that explosion from?
Despite her curiosity, Boss couldn’t stop to think about it now. They had to solve their own peril first.
“Still no sign of enemies on the highway!” Anna reported, aided by her scope.
“Should we bring out the fangs?” asked Sophie. She was asking if she should bring out the PTRD-41 antitank rifle.
Boss’s answer was immediate.
“Do it.”
“Gotcha.”
Without sitting up, Sophie swiped with her left hand to call up her inventory. Right at the top of her list was the PTRD-41. She hit the button to bring it out.
Having it out in the open here would let them use it as soon as they spotted the enemy, of course. But even more important was that if Sophie was sniped and killed, her teammates could still use the gun in SJ4. If it was in her item storage when she died, it would return to the waiting area with her.
Twenty seconds had passed since the attack, but no more bullets were forthcoming. The shots came from quite a distance, so it had been one thing when they were standing and running, but they were much more difficult targets flat on the ground.
Sophie brought out the PTRD-41, a gun over six feet long that was nearly all barrel, like some kind of drying rod. “I’ll stand up and be the bait! Just tell me when!” she said, volunteering for the most dangerous role.
Boss had no reason to argue. Once Sophie stood up and started moving, the enemy would surely aim at her. And once they could see the bullet line, they would know exactly where the sniper was firing from. Even if the player had enough skill to shoot without a line, the hit location and facing would be enough to give them a general idea.
Once she was certain the team was all concentrating in the direction ahead of them, Boss put the binoculars to her face and said, “Okay, go!”
“I’m off!”
Sophie stood up, fully expecting to get hit. It would be obvious that she was a decoy if she wasn’t holding anything, so she picked up the PTRD-41 by the carrying handle and proceeded forward with it held at waist height. It looked like she was trying to get the antitank rifle into sniping position.
If she was unlucky enough to get shot and killed instantly, her body would remain in place as an indestructible object they could use as a shield.
But after most of a minute, Sophie called back, “They’re not shooting!”
She’d been ambling to make a good target, but there was no response. Instead, there was a second giant explosion in the distance. Did they perform the initial sniping, then pull back and move away before their position was exposed? That was what SHINC concluded.
Just then, there was a little puff of black smoke from the freeway, followed by a dull, soft boom. It had to be the effect of an ordinary hand grenade or grenade launcher.
It was followed by distant gunfire. Ta-ta-tam, ta-ta-ta-tam, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tam.
The sound was quiet and rapid, like a small hand drum being beaten—an assault rifle’s classic sound. The lighter sound indicated a 5.56 mm weapon, and the rhythm overlapped, so there were at least two of them.
The airport was flat. And the freeway was a paved surface, too, so it was flat. And they were lying flat on their faces. SHINC couldn’t possibly see what was happening in the distance. They had only the sound to go on.
“Someone’s shooting at our sniper friend from behind, I guess?” Boss speculated, unable to think of a different possibility.
Her watch said it was 12:34. It bothered her that neither team’s location appeared on the earlier scan, but it was possible if they were both members separate from the team leader. Or perhaps using high-speed vehicles.
“You can duck, Sophie.”
“Roger that. Should we make a run for it?”
Boss considered this idea. Three of the squad, including her, were too badly hurt to be much use in combat, since the next shot to hit even a limb could kill them.
Rushing toward the freeway to the south and taking out all the enemies that might be hiding there was too risky. They had no idea what they were up against in that department.
And if they wanted to run away to the west of the wide-open airport, that meant a likely confrontation with the allied team atop the frozen lake.
If they ran to the east, that raised the danger that the group currently shooting at the sniper might attack them next. That left the safest route as the airplane graveyard to the north, where they’d just been hiding. Going backward, farther away from Llenn.
Argh, dammit! Boss swore silently to keep her team from hearing her in a moment of weakness. No matter how bad a situation might be, a leader should never let her subordinates hear any statement that might lower morale.
“Let’s pull back to the wreckage again! Run at full speed! Let’s get ready!” she told her squad.
But when SHINC started to tense their arms and rise up off the ground, they saw something that made the situation even worse.
“Wh-what?!”
Five hundred yards ahead, a trio of Humvees broke through the fence running alongside the freeway.
They were the American military’s squat, four-wheel-drive trucks, the ones MMTM and then Pitohui and crew used in SJ2. They were recognizable by their flat, boxed bodies, as though someone had slapped tires on a huge, dented box.
Like the ones in SJ2, these were the M1114 model, where the ordinary Humvee body was outfitted with extra plating to be bulletproof. They could completely block any 7.62 mm rounds.
An armored turret rose from the roof of each vehicle. The last time, they were sand-yellow, for desert combat, but these ones had dark-green camo patterns, for woodland use.
The three vehicles were coming their way, snaking here and there as faint puffs of smoke rose from their mufflers.
“Enemy vehicles approaching! Three of them!” Boss’s team heard Tohma shout. She was already running toward Sophie, likely so she could fire the PTRD-41 and do some kind of damage to the Humvees. It was the only gun they had that could make a difference.
But with the way the trucks were snaking back and forth, they wouldn’t have time to shoot all of them. The enemy wasn’t going to drive directly at them mindlessly.
If SHINC split up and even one of the vehicles escaped, their opponents had the whole spacious airport to run over the helpless squad.
How to minimize the team’s overall damage? How to avoid being wiped out?
Boss came to her answer immediately.
“Me, Tohma, and Tanya will attack. Gather up, and the rest of you, run for it!”
She sensed her teammates gasping. You could do that sort of thing when you spent all your time together, offline and online. When they’d first joined the gymnastics club, they’d had terrible chemistry, but now they could practically read one another’s minds.
“All right! I got ’em!” said Tanya, rushing toward Boss. She reached out, grasping with her empty hand like a child looking for a toy or candy.
“Yep,” said Boss, handing Tanya what she was looking for: two grand grenades.
Next Tohma came rushing toward her. She, too, held a grand grenade in each hand.
Boss clutched the last two and gave her final order.
“Sophie, you’re in charge of the team. Go get Llenn.”
As she placed the PTRD-41 back into storage, Sophie sadly but firmly replied, “Got it!”
The clouds were thickening in the vast open sky, over three Humvees that slowly made their way toward SHINC at a speed of under twenty miles per hour. They weren’t going all out, perhaps in an abundance of caution. They were no longer driving in a serpentine path to avoid an attack.
Boss stared them down. Though she couldn’t see behind her, Rosa’s group should be fleeing at top speed at this point.
But Boss and her two partners had no means of escape. Neither did they have the ability to shoot their foes. They did have a means of blowing them up, however: the grand grenades.
It was a plan that did not leave any room for survival. If even one truck made it through, it could catch up to the other three members and run them over from behind.
In that case, there was no point in trying to throw their explosives. To ensure the best possible chance, they would have to take down each vehicle from up close.
“One for each of us. Don’t get greedy. I’ll take the one in the middle,” Boss said to the other two.
“I’ll take the right! Don’t worry—I’m good at this!” said Tanya.
“I’ll have the left, then. I’ve never done it, but there’s a first time for everything!” replied Tohma. They sounded eager for the challenge.
Their foes were two hundred yards away now, close enough to make out the features of the drivers.
The players on the other side of the bulletproof glass were men in typical GGO-future gear: dark-blue pants, dark-green jackets with protectors, green masks, and single-lens sunglasses on their faces.
There were two men in the center Humvee, and one each in the side vehicles.
Boss, Tanya, and Tohma lay down, waiting for the Humvees to come and run them over.
But they did not.
She was ready to kill—and die.
“Huhhhh?”
So when the Humvees came to a sudden, screeching halt, and a signal flare shot up from the roof, Boss was utterly stunned.
The brilliant orange flare shone against the reddish sky and began to descend with a deployed parachute.
“What…?”
“The…?”
Tanya and Tohma could only watch in disbelief, mouths hanging agape.
About a hundred yards separated them from the cars. It was too much distance for them to charge forward and finish the job before the Humvees could react.
While they were unable to fathom what this action meant, the next one was much more direct. An arm stuck out of one of the Humvees and waved a scrap of white cloth.
“Are you serious…?” Boss muttered.
A white flag was the universal sign of surrender, but that couldn’t be true in this case. There was no reason for them to concede this way. So Boss took it as a sign that they had no desire to fight and that they only wanted to talk.
“Is it a trap?” wondered Tanya.
“I don’t see why they’d need to do that when they already have the advantage,” grunted Boss.
She got up to her feet and affixed her grand grenades to her belt. If you had an item called a “Plasma Grenade Holder,” the grenades would stick to your belt wherever you put them, like magnets.
It was the kind of thing that was easy to use, and nearly ubiquitous among players, but it also had a downside: If you were getting shot, it was easy for one grenade to set off all the others and blow you up.
“We might as well go talk to them. The three of you, keep running,” Boss said to the other half of the team as she began walking forward. Her Vintorez was in hand, and she wasn’t taking any chances.
As she headed away, Tohma called out, “Don’t die on your own if they challenge you. We’re still with you, remember.”
“I know.”
“If they try to pick you up, don’t go with them. You’re too cute to resist,” added Tanya.
“Okay. But if they invite me out to have as much GGO parfait as I can eat from a café in SBC Glocken, what then?”
“If you eat it without us, you’ll have hell to pay,” the other two said in perfect synchronization. That sounded serious.
“Okay.”
Boss closed the distance of ninety yards and stood before one of the Humvees. From here, she could throw a grand grenade and hit the car. But her pride would not allow her to do that.
“Here I am. I’m the leader of Team SHINC, Eva.”
Her voice carried to all the members of her team through the comm, as well as to the people inside the Humvee.
A man popped his head out of the turret, which was surrounded by armor plating but had no gun. His face was completely hidden behind a mask and sunglasses.
“Ah, I’m so glad that you came. Now we don’t need to waste time with unnecessary fighting. I’d rather not have my entire vehicle exploded with a grand grenade,” the man said. His tone was friendly, but it was clear from his position behind the bulletproof glass and from the assault rifle in his hands that he wasn’t relaxing just yet.
Boss glanced at his weapon: an HK433.
That was a Heckler & Koch 5.56 mm gun. It was the primary small arm for the German military in the present day of 2026.
In GGO, the HK433 was the newest and toughest kind of assault rifle. This was Boss’s first time seeing one.
Since it was still so rare, it commanded supreme prices. His gun also had an expensive silencer attached to the end of its barrel. That suggested this team was made of either GGO experts or extremely rich players, or perhaps both.
Without missing a beat and without a shred of humility, Boss replied, “Depending on your offer, I might be willing to rush up and give you a big hug.”
“Wah-ha-ha! I’ll pass on that. I’d prefer to give you a proper explanation with the main force. Can you get all six of you into the cars? The scan is close, and we might get monsters spawning,” he said.
Boss glanced at her wrist. It was after 12:36. They couldn’t afford to take their time.
When he mentioned a “main force,” she understood that to mean that he was one of the allied teams atop the frozen lake. That’s where they’d be taken if they went along. From there, they’d be given a choice: Join the alliance or die.
“I have one question first. Who sniped us?”
“Ah yes, the three snipers. We eliminated them. They were from a team called DOOM,” the man explained. Boss considered the possibilities.
DOOM had gone rushing toward Llenn’s team. They’d left snipers behind, and the rest had gone onto the bridge to fight Llenn, where they’d caused some kind of massive explosion. It all seemed plausible enough.
“Hmm… All right, then,” Boss said, making up her mind.
At 12:40, SHINC watched the fourth scan roll in from inside the Humvees.
At 12:39, they’d called a truce and loaded up into the three vehicles, two people each, to hear out this offer. Before that, they’d been told to put away all of their guns and grenades into their inventory space.
“I see. So you’re disarming us, in a way,” noted Boss with a piercing look.
“Nah. It’s just that there’s not a lot of space in here,” said the man with a shrug.
Refusing wouldn’t get them anywhere, so SHINC complied, setting away their long-range guns, pistols, grenades, and everything else into the translucent briefcase of pure data that was their inventory.
The masked drivers and rear-seated Amazons said nothing to one another. The vehicles moved in silence, a line of three that crossed the airport.
Boss, Tanya, and Tohma used their second emergency med kits at this time. Even after the second round, only Boss would have her hit points fully recovered. The other two would be at 70 percent, but after consideration, they chose to hold on to their remaining health recovery items for now, in case they got torn down again later. It wasn’t an easy decision, though—they could easily get killed with one good shot at the moment.
The scan started soon after they began driving, so the Humvees stopped and waited atop the runway.
The man Boss had talked to earlier, who was the only one on his team speaking to SHINC, turned around in the passenger seat. “You don’t want people knowing you’re moving during the scan, right? So we’ll stop for a bit.”
“That’s considerate of you. How very privileged we must be,” said Boss sarcastically, but in truth, she was grateful. This would give her a chance to see the state of the game and, more important, Llenn.
Of course, if LPFM was wiped out, they weren’t going to accept the offer. She’d kill the driver with her bare hands.
The fourth scan started from the north, displaying the location of the surviving squads.
Not much had changed in the last ten minutes. MMTM was on the north end of the airport, at the very north edge of the map. There were no potential opponents anywhere near them, so they were probably bored at the moment.
Two teams in the ruins area had vanished. As SHINC had hoped ten minutes ago, TOMS and T-S had done the job of cleaning up. Well done—keep it up.
As usual, ZEMAL was still around. But it was curious that they hadn’t moved even a bit from the center of the southwest quadrant. They were aggressive to a fault, so you’d expect them to go on the offensive. Why were they suddenly being strategic and cautious? Had they eaten something past its expiration date?
The six teams on the frozen lake hadn’t changed location. With RGB there, they were powerful enough to ignore the threat of the monsters.
Four of the members were in the trucks right now, which meant they had left their leaders behind on the lake. That was very risky for a team to do; that they were proactive enough to do so spoke to their confidence.
Lastly, there was one more team.
“Ah, good!”
Llenn’s squad was still alive atop the bridge.
DOOM’s dot was gray in the middle of that bridge, so whatever those mysterious explosions were, Llenn’s team won the battle. It was probably a piece of cake. They were no doubt humming and sharpening their claws, preparing for the next battle.
SHINC was located fairly close, but there was no way to head straight for them now. Boss gave up on that idea. She trusted that there would be more chances.
Fourteen teams remained. In only forty minutes, more than half of SJ4’s participants were out. That was a very fast pace.
The scan finished quickly, too, and the Humvees resumed their ride. Boss glanced at the dashboard to see how they were doing on fuel. The meter, which was placed in a highly visible spot, unlike in the real-life Humvee this one was based on, was shockingly almost at a full tank. They could drive for quite a while still.
I bet I know what it is, Boss thought. There were more than three Humvees. They just siphoned off the gas from the others to fill this one.
With a fuel tank and a hose, plus the Fuel Transfer skill, a player could simply pull those items out and hold them next to a vehicle, then move the gas to another one.
They could also do it the hard way, of course, by someone putting the hose in their mouth and sucking up the fuel, but like in real life, having gasoline in your mouth was a bad move.
The three Humvees rolled across the airport, huge tires trundling along until they reached the edge of the freeway that ran from north to south. A barbed wire fence with a gap in it about as tall as a person stood in their way, but the Humvees easily smashed the fence aside, and their large tires and tall suspension made it easy to roll through the moat.
From there, they crossed the vast freeway and drove off one of the exits at the four-leaf clover interchange, onto a surface street that ran parallel to the freeway. From the lakeside road going north-south, they could see a pure-white surface.
Tohma was in the same Humvee as Boss. “This is a familiar sight,” she murmured.
The man in the passenger seat glanced at her curiously, but there was no way he could know she was a teenager from Russia.
They traveled north on the road for most of a mile, until another path curved to the left toward the gravel lakeside. The Humvee didn’t stop there but rode straight over the ice.
Uneasy, Boss asked the man, “Hey, is this safe?”
“Hmm? What do you mean?” he asked, totally unguarded.
So she decided to play dumb about the safety of the ice and lied, “Just rolling us out in a totally visible area like this?”
“Oh, that? We’re fine. Only friends around this area. There, you can see them now,” he said, pointing at the white horizon, where little black dots were coming into view. They were about a half mile away.
“Ah, I see. That’s good,” Boss said, leaving it at that.
Internally, however, she wondered. If the ice beneath them cracked and gave way, she would die, but the allied team would die, too. Would Llenn be sad? Or would she be happy that triumph was that much closer?
The answer proved elusive. The Humvees roared across the ice at high speed, and they reached the group of six squads without any incidents of broken ice.
A little over a mile away from the shore, smack in the middle of the lake, an impromptu defensive formation was in place.
The little sesame seeds grew larger until it became clear they were people. They were sitting or lying on the ice in a big circle about a hundred feet across. The Humvees stopped about thirty feet away.
“You can get out now, but I’d appreciate if you didn’t try any funny business. We’ll have a lock on your backs at all times. I’d hate to have to destroy the team we already spared,” the man said.
“Would a kiss count as funny business? Well, I’m sorry to tell you that we’re only here to talk,” Boss replied. She was joking around, but she knew full well that if she tried to pull her weapons out of storage, steal one of their weapons, or even attack bare-handed, she’d find a bullet in the back of the head.
Despite her nerves, Boss did her best not to let it show on her face. The squad regrouped and formed a line.
They slowly approached the circular formation. Boss didn’t turn back, but she could feel keenly that there were sights on her back. It was as though the bullet lines cast off a heat of their own. Her teammates could surely see the line on the back of her head as she walked.
Does this count as being in peril? she wondered. She had no answer.
The closer they got, the more she could make out the allied teams’ appearances. Sure enough, the members of RGB were there in the outer part of the circle, all alive, optical guns at the ready.
They’d fought in SJ3, so Boss remembered some of their faces. They proudly brandished their optical guns. Then one person with a machine gun looked their way. It was quite a hostile glare and very easy to parse.
“Hiya! Nice to see you well!” She beamed.
“…”
The other person pointedly ignored her. Perhaps he was afraid.
They passed through the line of guards and approached the men at the center of the circle. There were no women present, it seemed. Even Boss might get some positive attention here.
The men were seated lazily on the ice, some of them actually lying down. They were utterly carefree in the middle of such a tense battle-royale setting.
She didn’t know any of the team names aside from RGB, so all of these people were new to the event. Their outfits were the same, so they had to be a team, she assumed.
There were two masked men with armored jackets like the men in the Humvees. That meant the team still had all six members alive.
I need to be wary of them, Boss decided.
Three men wore a toxic-looking camo pattern she’d never seen before. They were the only ones, so perhaps they’d been halved in combat. Or else the rest of the team was somewhere else now. They, too, were sporting masks and shades.
Watch out for them, too.
Then there were the men in tracksuits. It was a classic look: dark-blue suits with three white lines along the sides. There were six of them, all in masks and sunglasses.
Why are they dressed up for a sports competition? Boss had no idea why they chose the clothes they did.
It was almost like they had lost a bet and weren’t allowed to wear regular combat gear. Of course, Llenn liked to wear pink all over, so there was precedent for this kind of sartorial choice.
SHINC hadn’t seen their bizarre entrance to the pub, so witnessing the three squads all in masks and sunglasses stunned them. They made for a very suspicious sight—especially the tracksuits.
There were also six people in matching gray camo, and another six whose uniforms were a brown desert camo style. They weren’t wearing masks, so she could make out their expressions. While they looked wary of SHINC, they also appeared somewhat proud.
You know you’re not the ones who are tough here, right? Boss thought unnecessarily. She didn’t say it out loud.
From what she could see, those six teams were made up entirely of men, thirty-three in total. As she approached, Boss tried to keep an eye on all of them, memorizing their body types and numbers.
Shit! Dammit, they’re so thorough! she thought. Since playing GGO, her mouth had gotten much filthier. She needed to be careful that she didn’t break into this kind of speech in real life.
Her spite came from the sight before her: None of them, aside from RGB, had their weapons out. Like SHINC, their armaments were all in their virtual inventory. They had nothing equipped.
That was not, of course, because they were showing to SHINC that they meant no harm. It was because they were hiding their true combat power.
Now there was no way to predict how they might fight.
But they almost certainly weren’t going to be weak. With the three teams of matching masks and sunglasses on their side, the other two teams had to have pretty serious firepower to keep up.
On the flip side, they knew everything about SHINC. Anyone would know about them if they watched earlier Squad Jam footage. They’d know all about their tactics and all about their guns.
Would it have been better just to die back there after all? Boss wondered, sighing. One of the men stood up and approached them.
He was a very tall man, even by GGO standards.
In fact, he looked even taller than M, which was saying something. But unlike M, this guy was slim and slender—not burly. He stuck out like a sore thumb with his tracksuit, mask, and sunglasses, though.
Did he have no sense of aesthetics when choosing this uniform? Didn’t anyone on the team protest? And where could you actually get tracksuits in GGO?
Boss had many questions for the man, but the only one that actually crossed her lips as he approached was, “Are you the leader?”
She was a formidable character within GGO, but on the inside, she was a teenage girl. The situation had her quite nervous, but she played it cool to hide how she felt.
“Hi there. You don’t need to be so nervous,” he said kindly.
“So this is what you needed to prepare first?” Boss said, her own line at the ready. “Well, it’s nice to make your acquaintance. I’m Eva.”
She figured he wasn’t going to tell her his name, but to her surprise, he politely and promptly replied, “Nice to meet you, Eva. I play under the name ‘Fire.’”
Then he took off his sunglasses and mask, revealing a handsome avatar. “This is what I look like. Just so you know.”
“Well…thank you. But when you’re that tall, I don’t think I’d mistake you for anyone else, regardless of what you’re wearing.”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha. That makes sense,” he said, smiling pleasantly. Boss couldn’t decide if he was being sincere or putting on an act. Regardless, she had a few guesses about the man named Fire.
He was clearly the leader of the three masked teams. Everyone started in random locations in Squad Jam, so it initially seemed like good luck that all three teams would have congregated without losing any members, but she figured out how they did it so quickly.
There was an unspoken rule that the toughest teams, like SHINC, got spread into the four corners of the map at the start. That meant a brand-new squad would automatically be much closer to the center of the map. As long as they decided that “no matter what map it is, we’re heading for the center when the game starts,” it shouldn’t be too difficult to meet up quickly.
He’d certainly recruited some worthy players, probably with the power of cold, hard cash. Since you could convert real money into GGO credits, a rich enough player could easily hire BoB-level talent to his team.
And that wasn’t a bad thing at all. It wasn’t against the rules, and it wasn’t even against the spirit of the game. Though it was a little infuriating for a teenage girl who had to scrape together the three-thousand-yen monthly subscription cost just to play. Scratch that—it was super-infuriating.
The three unmasked teams, including RGB, had probably been brought into the fold during SJ4. That was handily done, then—whatever it was that he used as bait.
“There! Northwest!” someone in RGB shouted at that moment. That told Boss it was time for the monsters to spawn.
Sure enough, shining polygons were appearing and concentrating in the northwest sky, taking the form of monsters. Those that SHINC had originally fought sported an animal theme, but these ones seemed to be machines. The first one to appear was a serving robot with caterpillar treads and scythes for hands.
“All right, folks! Take it away!” Fire commanded RGB.
With a crisp shpow, a Sorpressa A2 sniper rifle unleashed its energy beam. The unfortunate robot burst into pieces in midair without ever touching the ground. As it did so, it unleashed a warning cry to its fellows that was inaudible to human ears.
“Good grief. It’s going to start the whole ruckus all over again. I was hoping we could relax and talk,” said Fire.
“Then let’s make it quick,” Boss suggested. “We’d prefer to make our decision without taking too long.”
Shpa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow. Shpow. Bshoo-shoo-shoo-shoo! All around them, optical guns zapped and blasted.
None of the monsters seemed to be breaking up out of the ice. They materialized about three feet above the ice, a hundred yards away, and came charging once they touched down.
“Ha-ha! You came back to get wrecked, huh?”
“We’ll smash ’em all!”
“Yaaah!”
RGB was ruthless with their gunfire. They were having the time of their life. At this rate, they were going to be too amped up to sleep tonight after having such a starring role in Squad Jam.
When she saw how quickly the mechanical monsters were dying, Boss decided it was safe for them to talk here. The rest of the team gazed in silence at the enemy squad they’d killed once before, now protecting their lives.
“Okay, let’s get right into it. I want you to join our arrangement here. And I want you to follow our orders. We’re trying to win this event,” Fire explained. The optical guns continued to bark in the background.
“I’m not going to ask you ‘What if we refuse?’ In Squad Jam, you eliminate every team that gets in your way, especially if you’re trying to win it all. So I’ll ask the more important question: What do we stand to gain by joining you?”
“Ah, a very good question. As it happens, you stand to gain quite a lot. I think you’ll be very happy,” Fire boasted.
That caused Boss to raise an eyebrow. “Like what?”
“I’ll create a situation in which you can fight the little pink one without any interruptions.”
“…”
Boss was afraid her shock showed on her face, but if it did, Fire didn’t react to it. He continued, “Llenn is the champion of SJ1 and SJ3. And I understand you view her as a rival, yes? You must want to have an all-out battle against her, like at the end of SJ1, and win this time.”
What does it mean that he’s describing this secondhand? Boss wondered, but she didn’t say anything about it. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue.
“Uh-oh, I suppose we’re a little too straightforward,” she said.
“Not at all. It’s a virtue, young lady.”
“I can’t help but be pleased that you’re calling me a young lady at this age.”
“That’s good to hear. Now, Llenn’s team, LPFM, will be a very tough opponent. All of the other members are extremely powerful. But if we don’t beat them, we can’t win the event,” he said.
“True. But with this many people, you could probably take them,” Boss said, gesturing toward them. RGB was still having fun with their target practice, and over twenty other men were relaxing in their circle atop the ice.
Fire replied, “I didn’t think we could lose. But it also seemed like we wouldn’t all make it. There would certainly be some casualties.”
“Well, sure.”
“And there are other threats around, like MMTM and ZEMAL. I wouldn’t want them to hit us from behind while we’re doing battle with LPFM. I want to win, you see, but I also want to limit the team’s damage as much as possible.”
“Wait a second,” interrupted Boss. Something was truly puzzling her about this, and she had to ask. “You want to win it all. But this is a battle royale. In the end, you’re going to have to fight your allied partners. What’s your plan for that?”
“We’ll all win.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, it’s not that mysterious. Once we’ve beaten the other teams, we’ll huddle up close and use a grenade so that we all die together. Just like the third Bullet of Bullets. By default, every team will be made cochampion.”
“…”
Boss was at a loss for words.
“I…never considered that…,” she muttered.
Competition or not, the point was to fight. Who would ever come up with an idea like that…? She was partly annoyed, partly impressed…and partly annoyed again.
In real life, she’d been doing competitive gymnastics since childhood. The entire purpose was to battle for every last tenth of a point against other groups and individuals.
GGO was the same thing. It was a world of contests, where everyone played their hardest to win. She didn’t understand this idea in Fire’s head that everyone would stop and hold hands to cross the finish line together like best friends. It made no sense to her.
What if…he’s not actually…trying to win the event…? Boss wondered, but she couldn’t ask that. And it didn’t really matter to her, either, so she let that idle thought sit.
Instead, she moved on. “Okay, I understand the logic. Getting to fight the little pink one isn’t a bad deal at all. But what’s your actual plan? Because I’m not going to play along if your only strategy is ‘Okay, there you go—now fight.’ We might just run away.”
“I like your honesty. Of course I have an idea. I had plenty of time to think before you arrived,” said Fire, flashing white teeth in a handsome smile. His eyes briefly darted to the upper right. “The next scan’s…going to come too soon for our plan. It’s nearly time.”
He wasn’t wearing a watch, so he had to look at the time readout in the corner of his vision instead. That sort of option was up to the player.
Boss looked at the watch on the inside of her left wrist. Nearly all GGO players preferred the wristwatch method over the utilitarian but boring way of checking your display. They liked to face it on the inside of their nondominant hand. That way you could see it while holding your gun.
Somehow, the time was already 12:49. Boss looked back at Fire, who continued his explanation.
“When we know LPFM’s location on the scan, no matter where on the map they are, we will send you to their area. Our team will handle the perimeter security, so you worry only about your own fight. You could ignore our promise and run away if you want, but will you really do that? Once you’ve beaten LPFM, you’ll be able to fight us for the championship. We’ll be a worthy opponent.”
“My goodness, what a tasty carrot you’re dangling,” Boss said, shrugging. She turned to look in the direction of her teammates, pretending to gaze into the distance. They looked back at her with absolute trust: No matter what you choose, we’ll follow you.
A soldier values speed above all else. Boss made up her mind.
“All right. We’re in.”
The time was now 12:50.
Fire grinned and said, “I’m glad to hear it. Let’s check out the scan.”
“If you insist.” Boss removed her Satellite Scan terminal.
The scan started from the east side. On the screen, Boss saw that Llenn’s team was still perfectly alive on the bridge. She didn’t know why they were taking so much time crossing it, but knowing them, they certainly had a logical reason for it.
Boss smirked and said, “If she’s still alive, I can still kill her.”
With RGB blasting away in the background and a swarm of monsters appearing and vanishing in a brilliant display of fireworks, the tall man smiled, his white teeth gleaming.
“I’m counting on you ladies.”
“I know. Just leave that little pink one up to us,” the gorilla-statured woman said with a grin.
The gust that blew across the frozen lake swung her braided pigtails.
As it blew over her, Boss thought, I don’t know what you think of us now, but after the next scan, we’ll come to properly introduce ourselves before the fight.
Llenn, don’t die before then.
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