“Boss. Any response from the others yet?” M asked without turning back to look at her. They were carefully proceeding down the dark, fifty-yard tunnel.
The group was going down the middle because being closer to the walls made ricocheting bullets more dangerous. If a bullet struck the wall, the deflection tended to stray closer to the wall as well. In other words, the angle of reflection was smaller than the angle of incidence. So being in the middle, rather than along the wall, was ever so slightly safer. Just a little life hack to follow. Or battlefield hack, rather.
These were the bits of knowledge that GGO players picked up from the tendency to get shot while walking along walls. You know, things that no one in modern Japan would ever have to worry about in daily life.
The gorilla in pigtails known as Boss had her Vintorez pressed snug against her shoulder, ready to fire at anything that crossed the light at the end of the tunnel.
“Nothing yet,” she murmured through heavy lips.
Boss and Anna were the two members of SHINC present. Tanya was higher up in the castle.
The others were Sophie and Rosa, the two PKM machine gunners, and Tohma the sniper.
She knew from the status readout in the corner that they weren’t dead, but they weren’t responding at all to her messages over the comm.
That left only one possibility.
The three of them were in a situation that left them absolutely no room to speak.
In other words, there were enemies so close by that talking would blow their cover.
In yet other words: big trouble.
Anna recognized that. She looked pensive as she took her position behind Boss. Even with her trademark sunglasses on, she could still see fine in the gloomy tunnel. The sunglasses were purely cosmetic; their vision would adjust automatically.
In the rear were Fukaziroh, holding an MGL-140 launcher in each hand, and Llenn.
Llenn was the rear guard, meaning that she was walking backward, facing the rear. All that she could see was the bright, shining exit of the castle gate, where the earth had fallen away—but that didn’t mean no one could get in. They could lower a rope down from above.
Or because the surface of the rampart wall was so rocky, they could practice free climbing and make their way over using handholds and footholds.
Of course, even though it was a game and the stakes were low, nobody would bother when the price of failure was instant death. But perhaps someone out there was desperate enough to gamble on the chance to win a hundred million credits.
The last thing Llenn wanted was to get herself and her whole team slaughtered by a freak like that, so she made sure to keep her eyes on their six, as unlikely as that threat was.
Her eyes were peeled; she knew that her allies wouldn’t dare do something so foolish, so anything that moved was an enemy, and she was ready to shoot.
Her weapon ammo and energy were fully replenished as of two o’clock.
P-chan and the Vor-chans were all topped off. After all the slicing and dicing she’d done, her backup twin photon swords should have had all their energy restored, too.
As the special rules suggested, Llenn and her teammates had their remaining ammo displayed as a percentage—or in dual mode along with a bullet counter. She hadn’t taken a shot yet, so naturally, it said 100 percent.
From this point on, there would be no more automatic refills. Only when she got a killing shot on someone would she receive some bullets back, based on the percentage of her remaining ammo.
According to what the rules had said, if you had between 0 and 10 percent left, you would be replenished to 50 percent. In a similar fashion, under 30 would get refilled to 60. Under 50, to 70. Under 80, to 80 itself. And if you had over 80 percent ammo already, there would be no extra.
It wouldn’t make sense to shoot a whole bunch and run out of ammo just to get a little back, so scoring some last hits was the plan, but she still didn’t know yet if the combat she ran into would allow for that level of strategy, either.
Also, while it would be pointless to have teammates fighting over who got the last shot on a kill, it also might be arrogant to assume that they’d have the wherewithal to pull back and allow the player with the least ammo to score the bonus. Things rarely worked out that cleanly.
When M had inched his way up to the last hundred or so feet of the tunnel, he spoke into the comm. “Clarence, are you somewhere safe enough to talk?”
“Hoh-hoh! Ahoy-hoy,” she replied, sounding carefree. So it seemed talking wouldn’t be a problem for her.
“Can you tell what’s going on in the castle from up there? We’re about to come through the gate from the south entrance.”
“Yeah, I can tell. What the what? Did I not tell you earlier?”
She hadn’t. And the others hadn’t asked. They had needed to reach the castle before the ground gave out beneath them, so they hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask.
“Please, tell me whatever you can see from there.”
“Okey-dokey. Well, the castle is very round, and according to the map, the diameter is almost two miles. It’s big. Almost like a whole town. Inside of the big thick outer wall, it’s like a donut hundreds of yards thick, where the pathways are twisting and turning with dead ends and stuff. It’s like one of those, um, whatchamacallits. A maze from a theme park. You can’t tell which way to go to get to the middle. Tanya and I wandered around in it inside the fog, and then we just somehow got here. Either we were lucky, or it wasn’t such a complicated maze before now,” Clarence reported back. The others tried to paint a mental picture based on what she had said.
According to her, once they got through the tunnel, it would be a theme park. Yay, how fun. Was it going to cost them to get in?
Also, the maze not existing until a certain point in time was just one of those things that happened in games. You couldn’t get that mad about it. That was just how things were.