“Hey! Just hear me out!”
At that shout from an adjacent passageway in the maze, a new player startled. He had a young male avatar of medium height and build, with short blond hair and blue eyes. But he wore a mask that hid his face.
He was in a black jumpsuit made of leatherlike material, one of those mysterious fabrics that was unique to GGO.
His gun was a Soviet SKS, recognizable by its wooden stock. It used 7.62 × 39 mm bullets, like the AK series, and could fire up to ten shots consecutively on semi-auto.
He recognized the name KENTA on the cursor ahead of him. That was one of the MMTM guys. He’d seen the man fighting (and getting killed) in a number of video clips before.
The name on his own cursor, which Kenta would be seeing right now, was MURACHI.
As for Murachi, he was panicking. “Wh-why are you talking to me?!”
He had seen Kenta approaching for the past minute or two, based on his cursor. He’d fled through the maze but found himself trapped in a dead end now. Walls surrounded him ahead and to the sides. There was nowhere to go.
The distance on Kenta’s cursor grew smaller and smaller. Murachi had no escape. The man was ten feet away now. If they hadn’t been in adjacent corridors, he would have been shot and killed by now.
“Hey! Guy on the other side of the wall! You can hear me, right? Your name’s Murachi?”
“Wh-what the hell do you want? Huh? Y-you want me to s-surrender?!” he shouted back, although it sounded more like a shriek. He didn’t know what else to say.
Murachi had just started playing GGO, as a matter of fact. He was a total noob.
Originally, he’d played a different full-dive VR game. It was called Tekken Seisai Online: We Are the Beatdown Busters, or simply TSO for short. It was a fighting game that involved piloting giant robots in massive, physical melee battles.
Basically, it was like a supersize, online version of those RC robot fighting events. You had three-hundred-foot-tall steel monstrosities engaged in a destruction derby of sorts, and it was very impressive.
There was also a PvE city destruction mode where you smashed up buildings instead of opponents, which was awesome for stress relief.
He had played that a fair bit and gotten pretty good at it, but sadly, it must not have been that popular, because it had been shut down just three months ago. What a shame.
So Murachi was here because a real-life friend who had a long and fairly prominent history in GGO needed him on his team to round out their numbers. He was only temporarily present in the game.
Converting a character brought over your relative strength from the previous game, so his GGO character was still pretty good numerically, but he had never used a gun in a full-dive game before.
He was here in SJ5 without even really knowing how to shoot. But his friend had said, “Don’t worry! You’ll just be hanging out with the team as the holder of my alternate loadout. My teammates’ firepower is seriously crazy! We’ll all keep your ass safe! Just come along for the ride!”
Thanks to the damn rules, however, none of them were anywhere to be seen. And as had just been revealed to him earlier, his friend had already died in battle. What the hell? What kind of crappy ride was this?
That friend was one of the people who had gotten their heads chopped off by Llenn in the neighborhood to the south. Of course, Murachi had no idea what had happened, exactly.
The gun in his hand was only borrowed from that same friend: the SKS, which could fire ten shots on semi-auto, and that was it.
Frankly, it was a piece of crap. A beginner gun, cheap and feeble. The only thing it had going for it was that it was easy to use.
Thanks to its classic look because of the wooden stock, however, the people who liked the SKS really liked it. It was one of those “rare classics” that certain historical nerds loved to obsess over.
But if you weren’t a gun freak, why would you care? It’s the only gun I’ve got. And it’s not even that good.
Alone in the thick mist, plagued by fear and anxiety, he ran and ran for survival, made it to the castle, and promptly got lost in the maze. And then he found himself in the crosshairs of a powerful enemy, of whom his friend had said, ‘MMTM is tough. They’re all tough. I wouldn’t want to fight them head-on.’
He’d had enough for one day.
He just wanted to surrender and get out of this map already. The only reason he hadn’t done so up to this point was because he didn’t want his friend and all the other members of the team to whine and complain to him afterward.
Kenta called out to Murachi, “Surrender? No, I’m not talking about that. I want to send a message to you: Llenn’s in the south.”
“Huh? Who?” Murachi asked. An honest question. He was just trying to survive.
“Have you forgotten? Llenn! The little pink shrimp, a powerhouse in Squad Jam, who has a hundred-million-credit bounty on her head. They’re saying nobody saw her in the pub, but she’s here, all right. She slipped into the castle from the south. She’s probably still hanging around that area.”
“F-for real…?”
“For real, baby. If you finish her off, you get a hundred. Million. Credits.”
“Hundred…million…credits…”
The power of that number coursed through his mind. It completely banished all fear from Murachi’s being.
“Rrraaaahhh!”
Yes, people do act on wonderfully laudable, human qualities like love and bravery and friendship and kindness. They also act on greed for money. Lots and lots of money.
Murachi’s mental CPU was running at full capacity. What could he do with a hundred million credits, which was worth a million yen?
He could go all out and buy himself a phenomenal rare gun that would blow his friend away. (Not literally.)
But forget GGO. He should think about using that money in the real world. This was one of the rare games that actually let you trade in-game currency for real money.
A hundred million credits. One million yen. Nearly ten thousand US dollars. That would be one hundred Eiichi Shibusawas, who was on the ten-thousand-yen bill.
With a million yen, he could fulfill a lifelong dream and go on a luxury cruise. See countries and places on the other side of the world that he’d always wished to see! They would be within his grasp! Flying business class!
Or if he stretched his money, he could complete a backpacking trip around the world. He could totally take some time off from college to do something like that.
He could also stay in school, save his money, and spend it on certain businesses like that offered certain services, and maybe even fulfill a fantasy to do one day. The thought was giving him a nosebleed.
Kenta laid on the pressure even harder. “Hurry and go south! And in just this one situation, if you see folks from different teams, let them know, too! That way everyone can attack Llenn without worrying about wasted conflict elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if everyone else does a bunch of damage, as long as you’re the one who scores the last hit. Easy, right? It’s like you’ve practically won the million yen already.”
“Yaaaarrrgh! I’ll do it! Thanks for the tip!”
He was reborn.
The old Murachi, weak-willed and pliant and helpless and pathetic, had just died.
“C’mon, SKS. I’ll feed you the blood of that pink shrimp…”
No one else could say whether the SKS spoke back.