A few days later…
“I found you!” Llenn exclaimed at the starting area of another new VR game.
She’d screamed it, in fact.
She was in a world with an eerie, apocalyptic sky and jutting ruins of metallic skyscrapers overhead, staring into the mirrored glass exterior of one such building and proclaiming, “I found you… I finally found you!”
She stared at the person in her reflection—not even five feet tall and dressed in green battle fatigues.
“I found you!”
She was a little girl.
✦ ✦ ✦
At last, Llenn had found the game she would call her home:
Gun Gale Online.
As the name suggested, it was a world of guns, where players engaged in shoot-outs amid postapocalyptic wasteland scenery.
✦ ✦ ✦
November 2025.
Three months had passed since she started playing the game. Winter had come to Tokyo.
Karen had few hobbies, no friends in Tokyo, no school club activities, and no permission to take a job, so she went to class every day, studied and completed her assignments, and had plenty of time for the game in between.
In keeping with her regimented personality, Karen had decided how many hours she’d spend in GGO on weekdays and how many she’d spend there on her free days. She limited her time before tests.
Like Miyu had said, VR games were beautifully constructed virtual spaces. They were just like real life in their use of all the bodily senses, but virtual was still virtual. It wasn’t possible to match the sheer amount of information in real life, so there was never a moment where she asked herself, Wait, which side am I on now?
Or in other words, she never had to question which of the two was reality, which, in Karen’s mind, perhaps meant that this game was carefully constructed to avoid such problems.
✦ ✦ ✦
GGO was set on a decrepit, dilapidated Earth after a devastating war—a place without the first hint of beauty. The sky was always some smeared combination of red and yellow paint, no matter the weather or the time of day, like a sunset gone madly awry.
The default terrain consisted of deserts, wastelands, and ruined cities. It had only the bare minimum of greenery—the polar opposite of ALO.
The players of GGO were all supposed to be people who came back to Earth on spaceships. In this desolate setting, players hunted grotesque mutated monsters, killer machines, and on occasion, other groups of players. That was the game in a nutshell.
Karen would never have picked GGO out of the plethora of games if it hadn’t been for the avatar she’d wound up with.
✦ ✦ ✦
If it wasn’t obvious from the name, guns were the central weapon.
In GGO, they came in two main categories. The first was optical guns.
Blasters, ray guns, beam rifles, laser guns—the names were varied, but the concept was the same. These were guns with science-fiction names and appearances that shot amplified light energy rather than bullets.
Even with their energy packs, optical guns were light and compact, with long range and considerable accuracy. At the same time, the damage a single shot inflicted was low, and in PvP battles, there were “anti-optical defense fields” that lowered the damage even further.
Those laser guns looked like classic sci-fi weapons with all straight lines. According to the game’s background, they were used on the spaceships.
The other kind of weapon was live-ammo guns. These were explained to be the surviving guns still found on Earth, or perhaps new guns built from the plans for such models. They were actual, real-life guns, re-created within the game thanks to the blessing and cooperation of the gun manufacturers.
Unlike the optical guns, these ones rattled off actual bullets with proper mass—well, virtual mass anyway. They benefited from each bullet having great power and from there being no defensive fields to stop them. On the other hand, they were susceptible to wind and other environmental factors, and the ammo was heavy.
The common practice among players was to use optical guns on monsters, and live-ammo guns against other players. But given how many gun fanatics played GGO, many people said “To hell with efficiency!” and used their ammo guns on everything, monsters included. Pitohui was one of them.
✦ ✦ ✦
Anyway, Llenn had wound up with the tiny avatar she was hoping for. Characters under five feet tall were quite rare in this game, apparently. Both players and computer-controlled non-player characters (NPCs) seemed to come from an endless stock of burly and menacing types. She couldn’t have stuck out more if she’d tried.
When she walked through the neon-drenched sci-fi city nestled among the high-rise buildings, everyone seemed to notice her.
“Whoa! She’s tiny!”
“What is that…? Is that a girl or a boy?”
“Did you see that? There’s a kid here…”
“Heh, that’s kinda cute.”
“I didn’t know GGO had avatars that small.”
“Is that an NPC?”
With each comment, it became harder for her to keep her mouth under control, and she didn’t like people seeing her grinning like a madman, so she started covering her mouth with a bandanna.
Just being a virtual shrimp was fun on its own, but Llenn was nothing if not principled, and since she had started playing this game, she was going to figure out how to do it right. And what could be cooler than being a tiny and deadly fighter?
Most games have a tutorial feature that teaches new players the ropes of its controls and functions. In GGO’s case, this was an NPC drill sergeant that offered a variety of lessons on how to fire a gun, how to hide behind cover, how to recognize and exploit various types of monsters, and so on.
Miyu once said, “You don’t need to bother with tutorials! You’re just wasting your time! Ask a friend, and you’ll pick it up naturally! Just learn as you go! It’s called on-the-job training!”
But if anything, Karen was better suited to soaking in a lesson on her own. And she had no friends here to ask.
This was how Llenn, who’d never expected to touch a gun in her life, mastered their use in a virtual setting.
She also learned all about GGO’s unique “bullet circle” assistance tool. It was an aid to the shooting process that told the player where the bullet would land. Placing a finger against the gun’s trigger generated a light-green circle visible to the player. When fired, a bullet would land somewhere within that circle at random, no matter how big or small a space the circle covered.
The bullet circle’s size changed depending on the target’s distance, the qualities of the gun, and the player’s skill. The pulsing of the circle as it grew and shrank was synchronized to the player’s heartbeat.
In other words, a nervous player whose heart was jackhammering away would have a wildly fluctuating circle with no stability. That might not be the biggest problem in a close-range shoot-out, but to snipers it meant everything.
One of the tutorial lessons was about learning to snipe, and it was this process of calming her heart in order to aim that Llenn found toughest. She got horrible marks, and the NPC sergeant was all over her for it.
“Yeah, I’m not going to use a sniper rifle,” she said. Everyone was suited for certain things and not suited for others. She would move on from this one without regret.
On the other hand, her lesson in snap shooting, where she took quick aim at close-range targets, was a surprising success. The instructor said, “Nice work! You’re best suited to using a submachine gun!”
And so she had received her recommendation.