Just after it turned two o’clock, she’d heard the warning from Tanya.
Not everyone was safe to report back in, but they all rushed as fast as they could toward the castle.
Tohma, who was the farthest away, only made it because she’d spotted a working car on the highway just after she’d started running. It was a manual Toyota Land Cruiser 40, sitting there in the mist.
At this point in time, whether in real life or GGO, there were few people left who knew how to drive stick.
Nearly half of the new vehicles sold at this point were electric or hybrids. It was hard to even find a manual transmission.
Tohma blazed a path straight to the castle in the Land Cruiser. She was utterly grateful to her father for teaching her how to drive a stick back home. It had finally come in handy—in GGO.
Along the way, she had spotted Sophie plodding along on her own two feet and offered her a ride. They had also found Rosa near the castle rampart, by pure coincidence. She was being followed by an opponent who wasn’t going to make it and was firing like crazy at her, hell-bent on taking her down with him.
If not for Sophie’s PKM in the passenger seat to help, Rosa probably would have died in that pursuit.
With the ground crumbling behind them, they had driven the Land Cruiser straight into the tunnel, racing all the way through—where they made the unfortunate mistake of driving into the town.
They regretted it immediately.
As soon as they were there and got out of the car, they saw the cursors appear, along with names and distances.
Naturally, their own locations were revealed. And coincidentally, there were two other players just on the other side of a wall who promptly started shooting.
It was bad luck, pure and simple. The trio had turned on their heels and run back into the gigantic castle rampart.
They tried to shoot back from within the fifty-yard tunnel, but once a grenade was shot in after them, they were helpless to stop it.
The blast hit them and pelted them with shrapnel, taking about half the hit points from each one. They thought about running back to the exit and circling around to a different tunnel entrance, but by then, the ground outside had totally fallen away.
There was no escape.
With grenade smoke choking the air around them, Rosa and Sophie waited for death to arrive.
But Tohma did not.
“You can’t give up! There’s still more we can do!” she had cried as she removed all her equipment. Suddenly, they understood what she was planning.
✦ ✦ ✦
“They’re gone…”
A man in reddish-brown camo carrying an AC-556F and a man in American woodland camo with an M16A1 and an M203 grenade launcher attached were peering downward, right at the very edge of the rampart.
They were looking at a ten-thousand-foot sheer cliff, the likes of which they’d never seen in GGO before—or in any other VR game. It was such a long drop that it made no sense. It was like looking out an airplane window.
A bit earlier, they lost sight of the three cornered Amazons in the smoke but fired all the bullets they could into the tunnel. Frankly, it was overkill.
They also shot three grenades in. That was overkill, too.
Naturally, they were expecting a furious report back from the tunnel, or perhaps a suicide charge from their three opponents, but nothing happened.
And after the smoke had cleared, and they’d walked all the way down the fifty-yard tunnel, there were no people inside—and no bodies.
“They must have fallen…”
“Yep, they fell. Don’t blame us. Rest in peace,” they concluded, turning around at the edge of the cliff.
They never realized that their three targets were clinging to the wall above the gate, on the outside of the castle.
✦ ✦ ✦
The members of SHINC were teenage girls on a school gymnastics team in real life.
Whether in virtual reality or real reality, their athletic ability was second to none.
Sophie, Rosa, and Tohma removed all their gear, even their boots and socks, leaving nothing except their camo fatigues—and then they climbed up the outer wall, using whatever tiny edges and footholds they could find.
It was a very risky decision.
They nearly fell on multiple occasions, and if their enemies had looked up even once, they would have been sitting ducks. Sophie’s only plan was to drop and land on them, if it came to that.
The girls’ gamble paid off, though. They got past the two men.
Once the men left, they climbed back down and silently returned to the tunnel. Then Sophie and Rosa snuck after their foes, and just at the end of the tunnel to the town, they reached out to strangle them from behind.
“Mrrgl!”
“Aaagh!”
The men squeezed their triggers, firing wildly, but all it did was cause noise and deplete their ammo faster.
Two pairs of thick arms wrapped around their necks, dragging them forcefully back toward the outer edge of the castle.
They had just seen what awaited them there, moments earlier.
Nothing.
“Hey, what—? No, don’t! Please don’t! Please!” the man in the reddish camo pleaded.
“Come on, don’t be shy,” Sophie teased, dragging him mercilessly onward.
“Huh? Stop! Look! Your giant tits are pressing on me! I can feel them!” the man in the woodland camo cried.
“What do I care? Doesn’t hurt me a bit,” Rosa said, unconcerned. Her ample clutches refused to let him go.
“Dammit! A lady’s pressing her boobs on me, and I’m not happy about it at all!”
“Oh yeah? Sorry to hear that, kid.”
“Arrrrgh!”
The men stomped and kicked their feet childishly, all the way down the fifty-yard tunnel.
“Don’t blame us. Rest in peace,” the women said, repeating their earlier words, before hurling the men over the ten-thousand-foot cliff.
“Damn youuuuuuuuuuu!”
“Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!”
They fell and fell, the Doppler effect causing funny things to happen to their voices.
The women watched them go, but the DEAD tag wouldn’t show up over the falling men.
“I guess that means they’re still alive until they go all the way down the ten thousand feet.”
“Hope they enjoy skydiving.”
So that was a new fact to take away from this, useful or not.
✦ ✦ ✦
After all that, the trio had escaped their string of dangers for the moment.
Boss’s orders: “Whatever it takes to survive! Do your best!”
They equipped their gear again, stopping before the exit of the tunnel this time to examine the town carefully.
They could tell from the cursor that one unfamiliar person was a few dozen yards ahead. From this point, they could see the cursors, but once they took a single step out of the tunnel, everyone else would be able to see them.
And the area ahead was a very complicated, mazelike town.
In other words, they would know the direction and distance of any nearby enemies but not how to actually reach them.
“In situations like these, there’s just one thing to do,” said the short woman, PKM held firmly at her waist.
“Yep, only one,” replied the plucky mom, identical PKM at the ready like a part of her body.
“And I’ve got your backs,” said the woman in the beanie, leaving the Dragunov over her shoulder in the cramped environment and holding her unholstered Strizh pistol instead.
Rosa took the first step into the town and said, “We just pick directions at random and hope for the best!”