CHAPTER 15
A Rampaging Duo
“Hya, aaah, aaah!”
Llenn tumbled over and over, her hands stuck inside her poncho and unable to help her stabilize. She rolled with great speed into the intersection, then bounced off the street one last time and crashed into the back of a yellow school bus without any tires.
“Bwehf!”
At last, she stopped.
“Durgh!”
And fell to the ground.
But Llenn had absolutely no idea that the instant she tripped and fell, a powerful .338 Lapua Magnum bullet passed right over her head.
It would have blasted open her skull if she hadn’t fallen.
“Good luck…is the sign of a hero…,” a man muttered, pulling the bolt handle of his weapon. It expelled an empty cartridge from the gun’s right side and loaded the next round into the chamber.
The man was inside a toppled container truck four hundred meters to the east of where Llenn had fallen. It was dark inside the empty trailer with just one door open—the perfect place to hide.
He was resting on the floor with a Barrett Model 98B sniper rifle. It was a bolt-action antipersonnel weapon made by the American company Barrett, famous for its .50-caliber antimateriel rifles.
The 98B fired .338 Lapua Magnums, well regarded for their balance between strength and size against human targets. Like the .50-caliber antimateriel rifle, it could strike a target at 1,200 to 1,500 meters.
Since its bullets were so large, the Model 98B was about four feet long. A magazine held ten rounds. It was the kind of gun that would make Pitohui exclaim “Sell it to me!” as soon as she saw it.
This man, of course, was one of the Wrong Lancers. He wore that distinctive green camo, a mask, and sunglasses.
The back of Llenn’s head was in the center of the crosshairs after she fell. He’d zeroed in at four hundred meters, meaning the scope was already focused at that distance. All he had to do was pull the trigger.
However, the man did not shoot—because his target had already been struck.
“Ouch!”
Llenn grimaced against the pain of the bullet in her shoulder, but she did what she needed to do to survive. Meaning she rolled herself under the body of the school bus to hide.
With her cheek right next to the ground, she could see more bullets pinging and scraping against the asphalt of the road. Two more shots would have gone right through her if she hadn’t rolled away.
Llenn crawled toward the middle of the bus for safety.
“Dammit!”
“What’s up?” M asked through the comm.
“I tripped in the intersection and got shot! Sniped!”
Although she couldn’t have known this, if she hadn’t faltered where she did, Llenn would already be dead. Her hit points were down to 70 percent, so she used one of her healing kits immediately. Now she had two left.
No more bullets flew at her under the bus.
“I’m hiding under a vehicle right now. I don’t know where the enemy is! Am I safe to jump out?” Llenn asked, hoping her allies could send the drone to check.
“I don’t know. Can’t send the drone. Fuka’s keeping the Minigun occupied right now.”
“Aw…”
Llenn took off the poncho and crawled on hands and knees past the middle of the bus toward the west face. With the P90 in her right hand, she used the other to hurl the poncho out from under the bus and into the street.
Pshk!
A bullet immediately tore a hole in the cloak. That was frightful reaction speed and accuracy from the enemy sniper. She couldn’t leave from under the bus now.
“I’m completely in their sights! I’ve gotta stay put!”
“Okay. Well, we’ve got bad news, too,” admitted M.
“What’s that?”
“The drone’s battery has less than a minute left.”
“Ugh!”
“Also, there are twenty seconds until the scan. They’ll find out where you are.”
“Gah!”
“But there’s also good news.”
“What’s that?”
“We know they’ve got a number of snipers, so after the scan, we’re popping up and moving west.”
“Bravo!”
“We’ll do everything we can. Good luck, Llenn.”
“Got it!”
The only problem was, this didn’t actually give Llenn any idea of what to do herself.
During Llenn and M’s conversation, Pitohui watched the footage from the drone. She told the pilot, “Fuka, get as much altitude as you can!”
From atop M’s shoulders, Fuka replied, “Got it! I’ll fly it so close to the sun that it melts! Fly, phoenix, fly!”
That was definitely not the correct mythological figure, but regardless, Fukaziroh sent the drone into a rapid vertical ascent.
Pitohui watched the scenery expand on her screen, paying careful attention to the west. She spotted a pair of metal tracks running straight across the scene at an angle—and resting atop them, a diesel locomotive. With nimble fingers, she zoomed in on it.
And smirked.
The tattoos on her cheeks bunched up.
The clock hands pointed to 2:00.
The SJ4 battle had reached the two-hour mark. That was a new record; SJ3 had lasted for an hour and fifty-nine minutes. And this record was likely to grow even larger.
The audience in the bar knocked back drinks and snacked on their favorite foods, enjoying the action.
When they saw that Llenn was stuck under the bus, they shouted and jeered.
“Oh no, Llenn’s really done for this time! Gweh-heh-heh.”
“Why do you sound so pleased about that?”
“Oh, no reason. Just thinking of how I can console her when she comes back heartbroken after losing.”
“Gross!”
Meanwhile, SHINC and Pitohui’s team leaped out of their hiding spots as soon as the scan was finished.
Tanya was in the lead, followed by the rest of SHINC, then M with Fukaziroh on his shoulders for some reason. Pitohui took up the rear position.
“Here we go… Do those two squads have any chance of winning?”
“Probably not. They’re trapped in the northwest corner like rats.”
“There’s still six teams in that big alliance.”
The crowd’s view of their chances was grim.
“Eugh, I think I’m going to be sick,” said Fukaziroh, shaking back and forth on M’s shoulders as he stomped along. She had her right arm clamped around his head.
When there was no word for at least thirty seconds, she yelled, “Llenn! Are you still stuck?”
“Yes! They’re shooting at me, and I can’t even hear it!”
“We’re almost out of batteries.”
“It’s okay! Go back!”
“You idiot! We can’t just leave you behind!”
“Fuka…”
“What I mean is that we don’t even have the juice left to fly it back.”
“Are you kidding me?!”
Dammit…
At this point, Llenn was just a pink ornament brightening up the underside of the bus.
She’d retreated back to the middle to protect against a lucky deflection off the road surface, but that was all she could do. In the meantime, enemy snipers could be advancing on her, so she turned around, worried that she’d see approaching feet.
The only silver lining was knowing that her teammates were escaping to the west because she had attracted the attention of at least two Wrong Lancers.
Does that mean I’ll stay here and be a sacrifice for the rest of the group, like a true leader? Llenn wondered, rolling onto her back and staring at the long drive shaft on the bottom of the bus.
Then the intro to Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” started to play in her mind, Pa-pa-pa-paaaa, pa-pa-pa-paaaa, accompanied by the image of a priest in a tracksuit.
“No!” Llenn shrieked, and she tried to leap to her feet, only to smack her forehead on the drive shaft. “Ulgh!”
“Where shall we ‘drop’ the drone, M?” asked Fukaziroh. It was a rather cruel question to put to the owner of the device.
The battery was nearly gone. Sadly, the supply regeneration that had taken place at two o’clock hadn’t extended to the charge of a drone already in flight.
Still, they didn’t need to drop it on anything. If it crash-landed somewhere with dead batteries and stayed there, they might be lucky enough to get it back at the end of SJ4. Of course, Fukaziroh had no intention of relying on a plan so dull.
“I’ll just buy another one!” Pitohui said. That was all the permission needed.
“Okay, drop it wherever you want,” M stated.
“That’s what I like to hear!”
The man from V2HG behind the Minigun watched the pestering drone shoot straight upward, high out of sight, and wondered, “What the hell is it doing…?”
He hadn’t been able to shoot it down, and it had gone off somewhere, but it had come back into view just moments ago. The next chance he had, he was going to blast it out of the sky.
“Hmm?”
Suddenly, the little speck of the drone was getting much larger.
“Mmmm?”
Now it was big enough that he could accurately make out its shape.
“Dwah!”
It landed on his face.
“What’s up? Did you get shot?” asked the driver in a panic.
“Owww! Dammit, no, the drone just slammed into me!” exclaimed the gunner, pressing a hand to his face. It had struck him on the eyes and nose, so he lost about 3 percent of his hit points, but that was nothing.
However, it did hurt like hell. The sunglasses he wore to match the rest of the team got knocked off.
“Dammit! Huh…?”
The drone was stuck on the exterior of the Humvee’s bulletproof plating. Of course, the propellers were damaged and would have to be replaced for it to work again, but the thing hadn’t been completely destroyed yet.
Peeved that both of their own drones had been knocked out and loath to let the enemy recover this one so that they could use it again, the man said, “I’m gonna bust this thing.”
He leaned out over the side of the vehicle’s armor and lifted up the drone. The man saw his eyes reflected in the camera on the underside of the device.
“You won’t be needing this anymore,” he said, and he threw it down onto the street surface.
The drone’s body cracked and burst into 3D graphical shards.
Then the man’s head exploded.
“You won’t be needing this anymore.”
On the street, about five hundred meters to the south, Shirley lay in the shadow of a car. In her arms, of course, was the R93 Tactical 2.
She’d made good use of her one opportunity to snipe when it arrived. Her bolt went back, expelling the empty cartridge, then forward again to load the next explosive round.
On the other side of the car, Clarence peered through binoculars. “Another hit on the first try! What are you, some kind of sniping angel?!”
“Shut up.”
Through her lens, each girl saw the driver turn around. When he witnessed his headless teammate toppled over inside the car, he froze.
“Let’s get the driver next!” said Clarence.
“No, that glass is bulletproof… Even my explosive rounds won’t work.”
“Then I’ll approach and get into the vehicle!”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course!”
Shirley stared blankly at Clarence’s confident grin.
“Fine. Do whatever you want.”
“Whoo-hoo!”
The pair stood up and went around to the “vehicle” they’d parked behind the car. The one that had silently brought them here.
“They got Grant! Headshot! Enemy location unknown!” the driver of the Humvee reported, staring at the corpse of his former teammate with the head blown clean off.
He went ahead and offered the best guess he had. “It was a sniper. Probably to the south. You don’t think it’s them, do you?”
“We’ll check, just to be sure. Come back over here.”
“Got it.”
The driver put the Humvee into gear, circled through the intersection, and headed east. It slowly made its way toward the primary vehicle—where his leader waited.
At the same time that Shirley was taking out her target, Llenn got caught in someone else’s scope.
It was one of the Wrong Lancers, equipped with a Model 98B. He’d been hiding in the bed of a truck earlier, but now he was resting on top of it. That gave him a bit of height and just the right angle to aim under the distant school bus.
The gap underneath the broken-down bus was little more than a narrow line when viewed from four hundred meters away. However, the man got his aim right on that spot, put his finger to the trigger, and pulled.
His bullet rocketed forth and disappeared beneath the body of the bus as though sucked into it.
Bsh-gank!
The sudden burst of sound caused Llenn to jump with shock.
“Hya!”
Once again, she smacked her head on the underside of the vehicle.
I’m being shot at! They’ve got a bead on me!
Llenn understood what had happened. The bullet had gone under the bus, bounced off the concrete, then bounced off the bus, creating a tremendous racket.
There was a bit of smoke coming off some part that was dangerously close to the fuel tank.
Oh no, oh no, bad, bad, bad.
Llenn rolled, moving toward the front of the large vehicle, trying to get behind the front wheels so she could use them as shields.
“Found her. She’s back in pink. I can hit her.”
The man with the Model 98B had Llenn dead to rights.
Rushing closer to the front wheels had put her right in the man’s sights. The bus’s wheel wasn’t big enough to completely hide her body, small as it was.
She was rustling and doing something, but her lower half was exposed.
“Sorry, gang. This one’s mine,” the Wrong Lancer stated, steadying his aim.
From this angle, the target wouldn’t see his line. He placed his finger on the trigger, waiting for the bullet circle to appear.
With his sniping ability and powerful gun, the bullet circle was tiny. Even at its largest, when his heart beat, it still remained full on Llenn’s lower half.
It didn’t matter how he pulled the trigger, the bullet would find purchase. He couldn’t miss.
All he needed to do was move his finger a millimeter.
“Everyone, listen up. The Humvee’s been sniped. The guy on the Minigun is dead,” said his team leader.
The man stopped, pulling his finger away. The bullet circle vanished.
“They think it was our mistake. I very much doubt that, but we need to be sure. Did any one of us accidentally shoot him? I won’t be mad; just be honest and admit it if it was you.”
The man laughed and heard his teammates laughing as well.
“Okay. I didn’t think so. I’ll pass on the message. That means there’s an enemy in our midst. Be careful out there,” the leader cautioned one last time.
The man put his finger back on the trigger. Once he’d made his shot, it was time to get up and escape to more secure ground.
Just when he was about to pull the trigger for good this time, the bus exploded.
But shortly before that…
Staying here would be bad. Like bad-bad, not good-bad.
Even as she hid behind the wheel of the yellow school bus, Llenn was aware that it didn’t change her predicament much. There was no guarantee the next bullet wouldn’t hit her. Even if it didn’t, there was the possibility it could strike the fuel tank.
She had to get away, and she hadn’t a moment, no, an instant to lose. Getting indoors was the only thing that could save her.
Is there any way, is there any way, any way, any way…?
Llenn’s mind buzzed and rotated at ferocious speeds.
It landed upon a quote she’d read once, though she couldn’t recall where: “When people see their life flash before their eyes before death, it’s nothing other than the mind desperately seeking a way to avoid dying amid sudden peril.”
Now was that moment—although Llenn had already experienced as much several times in GGO and the Squad Jams.
Stuck in a place where she couldn’t move, bullets bearing down outside? That had happened in the very first Squad Jam. In the midst of her battle with SHINC, in fact.
That time, Llenn had been hiding behind a boulder when she came under powerful machine-gun fire. If she left her spot, she’d get hit, but if she stayed right there, they would get her anyway.
A plasma grenade had saved her. And it just so happened that Llenn had a few of those with her now. Previously, she’d used the explosion as a shield and escaped in the opposite direction.
Can I do this? Will it work?
It felt like her panicked flashback had given her the answer.
No, wait. It won’t work…
Back during that battle with SHINC, Llenn had known where the shooter was and which way to flee. Plus, she’d been on her feet.
This was different.
Llenn could see a building ahead of the bus, but she was practically in the center of the intersection, so it was at least thirty-five meters to the structure. With a sniper already training on her, she didn’t think she could make it over safely.
So much for that! My pre-death recollections must be out of ammo or something! Llenn lamented. Suddenly, she remembered something from SJ3, during the first battle on the cruise ship.
The image of Tanya, blasting through the air like a cannonball.
All the Wrong Lancer snipers in position to aim at Llenn, including the man with the Model 98B, saw what happened next—a plasma grenade blast lifting the bus.
The hefty vehicle floated upward, rear-first. The thing’s underside was swallowed and crushed by a surge of pale blue five meters across, but the blast was strong enough to lift the entire back end of the body. It almost looked like someone had attached an invisible rope to the rear bumper and hoisted it.
Next, the fuel tank ignited. The yellow school bus was immediately wreathed in a crimson explosion.
“What the…? She blew herself up…,” muttered the man with the Model 98B as he got down from the truck bed.
“Wait, no! She got away!” called a voice in his ear. It was a teammate positioned high above on a building.
“Oh? How?”
“The blast! She used the explosion she caused to hurl herself away!”
Llenn was inside the burned-out building, covered in dust and glowing red from the scrapes all over her body.
“It…worked…”
She crawled farther back into the darkness, away from the light of the bus’s fire, keeping herself safe from sniping for the moment.
It had been a very reckless bit of inspiration.
The plasma grenade went off at the back of the bus, about five meters away from her. The force of the explosion burst through the undercarriage, pushing her away from the vehicle.
And she went ahead with it, having no idea how much damage it would cause her.
Her entire body was covered in fine scratches. The med kit she’d used earlier was still going; by the time its effect was complete, she’d have about 80 percent of her health left. She’d sacrificed about 20 in that little stunt.
But it’s better than dying! I can keep going now!
Den-de-de-dehhh, duh, den-de-de-dehhh, duh, den-de-de-dehhh, duh, den-de-de-dehhh.
Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” gave way to Wagner’s gallant “Ride of the Valkyries” in Llenn’s head.
“What’s up, Llenn? You okay?”
“Yep! I got away from the snipers, and I’m inside now!”
“Nice job, partner. We’re all on the run and unharmed for the moment! Ah!”
“Fuka?”
“Correction. Anna got shot. That’s pretty bad,” Fukaziroh replied, her voice overlapped by the low sounds of weapon discharge. Probably Rosa’s PKM.
The noise abruptly stopped.
“Ah, Tanya’s hit, too. I hope she’s not dead…”
“Arrgh…”
“Don’t worry about us. Just focus on surviving and getting out of there!”
“Awww…”
“This extra info is only going to complicate things for you. I’ll shut off the comm until we’re safe.”
“All right…”
Llenn pressed her finger to her own ear to turn off the radio, and the world was suddenly quiet.
The only sound was the eerie burning of the bus, echoing through the building.
When the sound of Llenn’s explosion reached Car Two, now without its gunner, the driver stopped the vehicle.
Using his side mirrors, he checked to see if he was being attacked. But there were no enemies on the road running east to west, and all he could see around him were buildings and rubble blocking the way.
“Good.”
He stepped on the gas again, moving the Humvee east to rejoin his comrades.
Something was galloping along after him.
“The hell is that horselike thing?”
“A horse.”
Someone in the audience did not come off as very intelligent.
One of the screens displayed a Humvee busily weaving its way around obstacles as it traveled down the street while a horse gave pursuit.
The steed had come from a side alley to the south. Two women were riding on its back.
“Huh? Is that seriously a horse?”
“You just start playin’ GGO?”
“Uh, yeah. About three months ago.”
“Can’t blame ya for not knowing, then. I don’t mean to be patronizing, but I’ll clue you in. That’s called a robot horse. It’s a mechanical mount, but not a monster; it’s an item a player can ride.”
“Ohhh. You can ride them?”
“No.”
“What?”
“Normal players can’t. You’ll get thrown off. Happened to me. And there’s no skill you can pick up that just magically gives you control.”
“But they’re riding it.”
“You gotta be able to do it in real life.”
“This is wild, Shirley! Is there anything you can’t do?!” Clarence whooped, clinging to Shirley’s back as she bounced on the racing steed’s back.
From this position, she was screaming directly into Shirley’s ear, so the other woman grimaced and replied, “I wish it was enough to shut you up!”
“Heh… You can’t kill me.”
“That’s not what I meant. Oh, wait, that’s a good idea.”
“Aw, c’mon. Aren’t we teammates?”
“Just cram it, before you bite off your tongue!”
Shirley had the R93 Tactical 2 slung in front of her body, her hands busy clutching metal-wire reins.
The helpful mount that allowed them to move quickly without making much noise was a metal horse about the size of a thoroughbred.
It had all started nearly an hour earlier.
After failing to snipe Pitohui on the highway, the duo had searched for a convenient vehicle so they could get around quickly. This was the best they had located.
There’d been a large SUV parked diagonally across the highway. A trailer had been hitched to it, and inside was the steed.
The trailer was on its side, so Shirley and Clarence had thought the horse broken at first, but when they approached, the metal horse’s eyes lit up in response. Slightly awkwardly, it kicked its legs until it could stand up, then rotated its neck toward the door to look at Shirley and Clarence.
“There, there. Hey, you wanna go for a ride?” Shirley asked the steed gently, but the robotic thing just shivered and shook its head.
“It’s saying no,” said Clarence, who was carrying the backpack full of explosives.
“C’mon, come on out,” coaxed Shirley, pulling the horse out of the trailer. “There you go. Your legs are just fine. You’ve got a very nice body.”
Softly and kindly, Shirly stroked the silvery beast’s forelegs, then its back ones. The robot steed was easily over seven feet from head to ground.
“A-aren’t you frightened?” asked Clarence, trembling at a distance of twenty feet or so. She looked ready to point her AR-57 at the creature at a moment’s notice.
“Don’t stand right behind it. It’ll kick you to death,” Shirley threatened with a rare smile.
“Eep!” Clarence moved back to twenty-five feet.
As Shirley adjusted the saddle and stirrups to proper positions, she explained, “It’s fine. GGO horses and real horses are the same: If you act gentlemanly, they’ll respond in kind.”
“But we’re ladies.”
“I don’t mean literal gentlemen. Also, would you really call us ladies?”
“That’s up for debate. So can you ride it? I’ve heard it’s tough.”
“That’s correct, which is why I practiced horseback riding a lot in the game. Lots of the people in my squadron are into equestrian stuff.”
“Are you serious? What are you people even doing in GGO?”
Shirley was still technically a member of the Kita no Kuni Hunter’s Club, the team that had entered SJ2 with the tag KKHC.
The squadron consisted of Mai Kirishima (Shirley) and some fellow hunters licensed in Hokkaido. Their actual sharpshooting and tracking capabilities were quite considerable.
In addition to shooting real ammo and dismantling prey, they could do backcountry skiing, use snowshoes, and drive snowplows and snowmobiles. Some of them could also ride horses.
Mai was especially enamored with horses; when she’d lived in Tokyo as a girl, she had traveled quite a long way to visit a country club. As a college student in the outdoors club, she had ridden as often as she could.
Even now, making a living as a nature guide in Hokkaido, she borrowed horses from a nearby ranch for the occasional ride. Her guide activities involved riding tours and trail riding at that very ranch.
When KKHC learned that there were (mechanical) horses in GGO, they’d started practicing.
Robot horses were extreme, high-performance mounts, in ways both good and bad. It was like riding a top-class racing Thoroughbred, with maximum marks in both speed and surly disposition.
Walking and trotting weren’t so bad, but moving at full gallop took everything Shirley had.
She and the other members of KKHC had fallen many times, sometimes landing on their heads and dying before a respawn—a valuable experience that a rider could only have once in real life. Thankfully, it had all paid off in the end.
However, it had never come in handy during a PvP battle until today.
The horse charged onward.
It was in a full-on sprint, at a speed it hadn’t exhibited until now.
The target was the Humvee ahead, short one passenger after their recent sniping.
“You’re so cool, Shirley! Dammit, I wish I knew how to ride a horse!”
“I can teach you sometime!” Shirley replied with uncharacteristic excitement.
“What? No, it’s too scary,” Clarence shot back. Shirley’s glee turned to dejection. “Anyway, what now? Shouldn’t we be going after Pitohui?”
“These guys are preventing us from doing that. So we’ll take this one out first.”
“How?”
“We’ll…we’ll…”
Shirley hadn’t thought of anything.
“Oh boy, you really are hopeless, huh? Then leave it to me! I’ve got a great plan in mind!” stated Clarence with no shortage of confidence. She waved her hand to bring up her inventory and stowed not just the backpack full of explosives but also the AR-57 that was her primary weapon, its magazine pouches, and even the thigh holster for her Five-Seven sidearm.
“Huh? What are you doing?” asked Shirley, glancing back at her.
“Bring us up alongside! I’m gonna do an action flick move!” answered Clarence, now lightly outfitted in just her black combat fatigues and boots.
“If you fall off, I’m not going back for you!”
“Aw, that’s so mean.”
“What about your weapons?”
“Right here.”
“Huh?”
Shirley turned back to look at Clarence again and saw that she was pressing a hand to her chest.
“What?”
“Hey! Humvee! Behind you! They’re right behind you!” shouted the spectators in the bar, not that anyone could hear them.
“Aaah!” yelped the V2HG driver of the Humvee. “What the hell…?”
He had noticed his bizarre pursuer. Looking closer at his side mirror, he muttered, “A horse?”
It was indeed.
He spied two players on top of it, and it was clear at a glance that they were not his friends.
“You’re kidding me. I’m not dealing with bandits on horseback.”
Deciding that this was not the time to be fighting while on his own, he stomped down on the gas pedal, then on the brakes again, as he wove left and right around the rubble, then the gas once more.
“Awww, crap!”
He drove as fast as possible back down the street he’d just taken so much care to pass through.
“Yah!”
Shirley kicked with spur-less boots, nevertheless urging on her robot mount and charging headfirst toward the rubble. That left the horse with two options: speed up and leap over the wreckage or stop and throw off its two riders.
“Jump! You can do it!” Shirley urged sincerely. The robot horse responded in kind.
“Hyaaaa!” Clarence screamed as the horse bounded effortlessly over a pile as tall as a human being.
Before leaving the ground, Shirley made sure to hover forward over the saddle, lifting Clarence with her, so that she could smoothly return to her seat after landing.
“That’s it! Good girl! You did it! Wasn’t that fun?”
“Hell no! I felt like I was going to die!” yelled Clarence.
“I wasn’t talking to you!”
The robot horse’s hooves, clad in shoes of an unidentified metal, clacked loudly on the asphalt as it gained on the nearby Humvee.
“We’re almost there! What did you want me to do?”
“Line up on its left side!”
“If you’re sure,” Shirley responded, pressing her heels into the horse’s flanks and tugging the reins a bit to the left. “It’s your funeral!”
The mount sped up a bit more and came up level with the Humvee’s flank.
“Yaaaaah!” Clarence shouted. Now it was her turn to jump.
She soared awesomely through the air and landed horrendously on her stomach against the bulletproof armor plating.
“Gurgh! Ghoof!”
The stunt proved fairly damaging, sapping 20 percent of her total HP. She could have ruptured an internal organ doing that in real life.
“Owww!” Clarence winced. She crouched on the rear portion of the vehicle’s roof, outside the armored turret, then waved her hand. It brought up her player window, where she hit just one button.
Then she jumped down inside the Humvee.
Thump! The driver heard someone land inside the vehicle.
In the center of the Humvee was a pantograph-style standing platform for the gunner. It was pretty noisy when someone was stomping around in it.
Obviously, the dead body wasn’t going to be making footsteps, so the sound had to be from an enemy—one who had boarded the Humvee.
The driver slammed on the brake pedal and swung to his right, reaching with his left arm for the HK433 assault rifle he’d placed between the front seats.
He straightened out the rifle’s folded stock with a smooth and practiced motion, disengaged the safety, pointed the barrel behind him, and stopped.
“Huh?”
A woman was standing in her underwear.
In the place where his headless teammate had previously been, there was now a woman showing a shocking amount of skin.
She was a willowy creature with short black hair and pointed facial features.
Her figure was slender, without much shapeliness to it.
The only things hiding her blindingly white skin were a few patches of black cloth.
The top was a sports bra.
The bottom was a short thong with a tantalizing triangle between the flesh of her thighs. However, because of how she was standing, it was hidden by her curves so that it looked like she wasn’t wearing anything at all.
Below her bewitching smile, the lines of her neck met the deep crease of her smooth collarbone, followed by the slight slope of her upper chest, the subtle swell of her breasts beneath the bra, the faint outline of ribs along her sides, the narrow tuck above her waist, the bulge of her thighs, her slender fingers, her delicate ankles, her…
All these details instantly seared themselves into the man’s mind, frying his brain. Hot blood pumped through his entire body. Let’s not talk about where it was going.
He could sense it. There was a wonderful scent inside the Humvee.
The woman grinned at him and leaned over, putting her face and chest closer to the driver’s seat.
“Hey…you wanna touch my boobs?”
“Huh? Uh, yes,” the man replied with a knee-jerk reflex. He put the gun down and reached out toward the black fabric over her chest.
She took his hand gently with her own.
“Ooh!”
“Right here…”
She guided it toward her breast. Meanwhile, her other hand moved behind the driver’s seat.
The man’s hand was getting closer and closer to her.
Gulp.
Just a few more inches, and he’d make contact. He’d know what it was like.
And it was in this dreamlike haze that the woman’s left hand snuck around the back of the seat and fired a Five-Seven pistol at his face.
From less than an inch away, the muzzle spat out a bullet that passed through his forehead and out the back of his skull.
Despite the hole in his head, the man’s body continued to twist, reaching even farther. It was his last vestiges of life, clinging to one purpose.
Tits!
His fingers just barely brushed the surface of the black material.
“Aaah…”
The man’s hit points ran out, and he died.
Between the mask and the sunglasses, his expression remained a mystery.
Shirley spun the robot horse around.
“Here you go!”
From the roof of the Humvee, which had plunged directly into a pile of rubble, Clarence tossed out a man’s body with a DEAD tag floating overhead, as casually as if hurling a sandbag.
She was in the furthest possible state of undress for an avatar to be—in her underwear.
“And another!”
There went the second body, soaring through the air with ease.
Shirley offered her honest opinion on the matter: “You’re pretty strong.”
“Eeeek! Don’t look at me, Shirley! You perv!” playfully shrieked Clarence.
“You don’t have to run through the clichés with me. I can see exactly how you did it. Not that I could do the same.”
“Huh? Yes you can. Just hit UNEQUIP ALL GEAR AND CLOTHING.”
“It’s not an issue of knowing how you did it.”
“But you got bigger tits than me.”
“That’s not the problem, either.”
“You gotta use every weapon at your disposal.”
“I think we need to sit down and have an honest talk later,” Shirley stated. She glanced around and pushed the robot horse forward. From her high vantage point, she could see down into the Humvee.
In the turret space surrounded by armored plating was the impressive six-barrel Gatling-style machine gun, the M134 Minigun. It puzzled her.
“What is this part for? Is it a water hose?”
“What?! You play GGO, and you don’t even know what a Minigun is? You’re so behind the times!”
“Sorry. Is it powerful?”
“The most powerful!”
“The most powerful gun is the one I have.”
“Yeah, yeah, we all think that. Hey, that horse is scary. Keep its face away from me!”
“Good grief,” said Shirley.
If she hadn’t pulled back on the reins at that moment, the bullet would have gone through her thigh.
Instead, the sniper’s shot hit a joint of the robot horse’s front left leg, gouging out a chunk of its mechanical body.
The startled creature reared back. Shirley immediately slipped her feet out of the stirrups, let go of the reins, and leaped off the horse to the right.
It was standing upright on its back legs. If Shirley hadn’t jumped, it probably would have fallen backward and crushed her underneath.
Instead, when its front hooves landed on the ground again, the instability in its damaged left leg caused it to lose its balance. In the meantime, another bullet passed over Shirley’s head.
“Shit!” She tried to bring her R93 Tactical 2 around to aim.
“Just get inside! This car’s armored! You know how to drive, right?” said Clarence, throwing open the driver-side door from inside the Humvee. The bulletproof metal and glass protected Shirley.
“Why should I—? Shit!” Shirley swore. She tossed the long rifle inside to Clarence, then hopped into the driver’s seat. As she did so, a bullet struck the neck of the fallen robot horse to put it out of its misery.
It was something Mai had done many times to deer she’d hunted.
“I’m sorry!”
The horse’s head fell limp as Shirley shut the car door.
“Oh, it’s cool! No worries!” said Clarence.
Shirley settled into the driver’s seat and said, “Not you—the horse. Say a quick prayer in thanks. And put on some damn clothes!”
“You got it!”
Clarence brought up her inventory, then pressed the EQUIP ALL button. Black combat fatigues wrapped around her body, magazine pouches popped over her limbs, and lastly, an AR-57 appeared in front of her. It was like a magical girl transformation.
Clarence tossed the backpack filled with explosives into the back as soon as it took shape. Thankfully, that weak impact wasn’t enough to set the contents off.
The Humvee’s roof was low for such a large vehicle, which made the space feel a little cramped. Especially with the Minigun’s bag full of batteries, the ammo feeding rail, and the boxes containing thousands of rounds of ammo taking up two full seats in the back.
Glank!
A bullet hit the windshield, leaving just the tiniest gray mark. If not for the reinforced glass, the bullet would have hit Shirley. She’d only seen the bullet line for the briefest moment.
It wasn’t lineless sniping like Shirley and M could do, but it was precise aiming done on the circle’s very first contraction. That said a lot about the shooter’s skill. Under ordinary battle conditions, it would be nearly impossible to avoid such shots.
“Very sharp,” praised Shirley, reaching into her waist pouch for the binoculars so she could peer ahead.
About five hundred meters away, there was another car of the same sort pointed toward them, with a man inside the turret holding a sniper rifle behind a shield of bulletproof glass. He looked ready to kill.
“Oh, I bet he’s mad. Sorry we killed your friends.”
“Hey, Shirley! What happened to your noble goal of killing Pitohui?”
“I haven’t forgotten. C’mon, let’s get out of here…”
Shirley put the Humvee into reverse and hit the gas pedal.
“Shit! It didn’t work…”
The leader of V2HG realized that it was pointless to shoot at another Humvee just as protected as his own. He pulled back inside the roof. “Lucky bastards,” he swore.
He set down the L129A1 he’d been using and got back into the driver’s seat. The gun was an automatic sniper rifle that fired 7.62 × 51 mm NATO rounds. Like the Heckler & Koch HK417 and Knight’s Armament SR-25, it was an ArmaLite AR-10 derivative developed after the patent expired. Therefore, all three of those guns looked alike. Anyone not well versed in firearms would have difficulty telling them apart.
The L129A1 was the name given to the weapon when the British military adopted it. The official model was the Lewis Machine and Tool (LMT) LW308MWS.
Gun names could be tricky because a gun possessed a product name given by the manufacturer and an official name assigned by the military force that purchased it.
This man, the team leader, was the very player who’d shot Boss and the other members of SHINC in succession on the south side of the airport. Naturally, his teammate had been lying when he’d said, “We took care of the DOOM sniper who shot you guys.” Just a little acting to smooth things over with SHINC and get them into the alliance.
However, even a sharpshooting sniper with an excellent rifle stood no chance against an armored Humvee. The leader of V2HG thought that was unfair. Maybe he’d forgotten that he was also in such a vehicle.
“This is Car One. I’ve got bad news and bad news. What do you want first?”
“I know Johann’s already down! I’m on my way! Let’s get revenge!” answered the man who’d been shooting the grenade launcher earlier. Despite losing his teammates, it sounded like he was enjoying himself even more than before. This was what people who played GGO were like.
“Okay, bad news it is, then. Two ambush troops from an unknown team took over Car Two and the Minigun.”
“Fu—”
That one knocked the grenadier for a loop. But he recovered quickly. “All right, fine! Forget about cornering LPFM and SHINC; let’s take it back!”
“No. We’re abandoning Car Two. We’ll head west a different way.”
“I’ll follow your orders, Leader, but I want to know why.”
“Even with a Minigun, we’d have difficulty breaking through that armor to get to them, especially if they’re on the move. And those snipers have to be pretty tough to survive this long. Like the original plan, we’ll push the target northwest and surround them. Once we’ve eliminated LPFM, our contract with Fire is over. Then we can do whatever we want.”
“Got it… This is just a side comment, but what reason does Fire have to want to wipe out LPFM so badly?”
“This is my own side comment—I don’t know, either. I made sure not to ask. But as long as he’s hiring us, I intend to give this job everything I’ve got, to the point of death.”
“To continue the side comments, how much did he pay you for this? I’m really curious.”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha! When this is all over, or at the last possible moment, I will reveal all. You guys’ll be shocked, I bet. Oops, that’s a side comment, too.”
Gagonk!
The Humvee smashed into a block of concrete.
“Uagh!” Clarence’s body rocked from side to side, her right shoulder smacking hard against the door. “Ouch! So you can do everything, but your driving sucks! Does this really count as knowing how to handle a car?!”
“Shut up! No comments! Just watch!” Shirley snapped, her hands on the wheel. She took her right hand off to move the gearshift and put the Humvee into reverse.
Grunch! She pushed it too hard, and the right rear corner of the vehicle smashed into a junked car behind them.
“Oh, come on! This isn’t how you’re supposed to play GGO!”
“Ugh! Shit!”
Mai Kirishima had a standard driver’s license, a necessity in the relatively spacious Hokkaido region. However, while she loved and had mastered riding motorcycles and horses, her appreciation of four-wheel vehicles did not carry over into skill.
Her usual set of wheels was a 4WD car she’d bought for cheap from a coworker. And she tended to drive slowly and carefully.
Not long after she first got her license, Mai bumped another car in a parking lot. It wasn’t a lot of damage, but the owner was furious, and her insurance had to cover the repair bill. From that point on, she tried not to drive whenever possible. Since you had to use a car to be a working adult in Hokkaido, she did it anyway. There was little other choice, especially in winter.
“This thing is too big! It’s like a giant truck!” Shirley ranted, smacking the steering wheel.
At over seven feet wide and nearly sixteen feet long, the Humvee was huge. The average city car in Japan was under five feet wide, and a compact vehicle was under six. Even a full-size SUV was barely more than six feet wide. So the Humvee was massive in that sense.
Mai had never driven anything this big. And she wasn’t used to the wheel being on the left side, with the shifter over on her right. There were also armor plating and bulletproof glass on the side windows, which really stifled her peripheral vision. She couldn’t see anything behind her.
The Humvee scraped rubble on the right side but managed to get free of the tight space, only to proceed toward another obstacle in the road.
Shirley sighed. “I guess that guy was a really good driver…”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have killed him. But if we wanted to make him our slave, you needed to get in on the action, too, Shirley.”
The pair headed back west down the road they’d taken with the robot horse, but the going was very slow. At least the other Humvee that had shot at them had decided they weren’t worth pursuing, giving them one less thing to worry about.
“It’s this road’s fault. Let’s look for a better one and go west. That’s where Pitohui’s group is. We’ll push them into the northwest corner and attack!”
“Seriously, Shirley? You’re just going to run them over?” Clarence asked.
“Huh? I don’t know… I’d rather not,” answered Shirley, suddenly feeling a surge of her real-life fear of driving.
“No, you should! You’re not honor bound to only play as a sniper!” urged Clarence, helpfully misunderstanding the other woman’s hesitation.
Shirley drove on a bit, then turned right at the next opportunity, moving into a narrow alley. The path was only sixteen feet across, but fortunately, there was almost no debris in the way. The course continued straight north.
Shirley pressed down on the gas to accelerate. At last, she could drive normally.
About a hundred yards ahead, there was another intersection with a wide-looking street.
“That’s it! That’s the victory road of triumph that we were promised!” howled Clarence, pointing.
“Let’s hope. Also, victory and triumph is redundant.”
“So we’ll turn left! The direction you hold your teacup!”
“Good thing I’m right-handed. We’re coming for you, Pitohui!” snarled Shirley. Her hatred for Pitohui got the best of her, and she plunged into the left turn without applying the brakes first.
“Hyaaaa!” Clarence shrieked from the other seat as the vehicle headed for the building on the opposite corner of the intersection, unable to complete its turn at this speed.
“Ah! Crap, crap, crap…”
Shirley slammed on the brakes as hard as she could, closed her eyes, and prayed. The tires screeched and skidded, sending the vehicle sliding sideways until the right rear side of the Humvee crashed against the building.
Grchank!
“Gaah!”
“Daa!”
Clarence and Shirley were jolted by the impact.
The side of Clarence’s head slammed against the frame of the bulletproof window, leaving a glowing damage mark on her skin. She’d lost 5 percent of her hit points. Shirley had clutched the steering wheel and had managed not to get hurt.
Clarence pressed on the new welt on her temple and turned to complain. “I told you, it’s not that kind of game! Should I drive instead?”
“Sorry… I’ll be more careful.”
“Sheesh. C’mon, let’s get going!”
“Fine, fine…”
Shirley carefully pressed on the accelerator, and the Humvee crunched and scraped as the dented corner came loose from the building.
As the vehicle drove away, it left behind a dead body that had been crushed in the impact. Next to the man with the DEAD tag floating over his body was a Barrett Model 98B rifle.
The Wrong Lancers’ first casualty had been from a car accident.
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