“What it is…?” Llenn repeated back to the mystery old man—Fukaziroh.
“Oh-hoh-hoh! I mean, gun bullets can’t get through, but could a person?”
“Oh! I don’t know…”
Llenn’s answer was also M’s and Boss’s and Anna’s answer.
Nobody actually knew if the invisible barriers that mid-bosses and worse put up in GGO could actually keep people out. Nobody had ever tried to figure it out. None of them had ever gone that close to a mid-boss, for one thing.
“This is the problem with folks who only use ranged weapons, I tells ya… You don’t have wings on your back, so your minds can’t take flight.”
“Are you a fairy godfather?”
“From the start, I been thinkin’…if I could get up there, couldn’t I just hop all over the top of the walls? Don’tcha think it’s worth a try at this point…?”
“Yes, I suppose so… But how will you get up there?” Llenn asked, looking up.
The walls were fifteen feet tall, near the upstairs ceiling of a two-story house. They were totally smooth. Without anything to put your hands or feet on, it seemed impossible to climb.
Maybe it would work if you had climbing gloves with claws. But almost any GGO player would not bring something as heavy and bulky as those unless they were going on a spelunking mission in old ruins. And they especially wouldn’t bring them into Squad Jam, where you needed all the ammo you could get.
Did Shirley have them? She was certainly abnormal. QED.
“I would say to unfold your wings and fly away,” Grandpa Fuka muttered, “but…”
She shrugged. Wings did not unfurl out of her back when she did so. Instead, she peered under the rim of her helmet at the large man in the group.
“M…that’s a mighty long gun you got there, eh?”
“Let’s try it,” he said, immediately catching on. M waved his hand to bring up the inventory screen. Boss and Anna kept an eye out while he did so.
What he pulled out was the Alligator antimateriel rifle, like a six-foot-long drying rack rod. He placed the stock on the ground and leaned it against the wall. “You two don’t have to be on watch. Come and prop this up.”
There were no enemies approaching at the moment.
“Okay!” announced Boss.
“Roger that!” agreed Anna.
They returned their rifles to their shoulder slings and held on to opposite sides of the Alligator to keep it steady. It might have been a six-foot barrel, but that still left at least nine feet from the muzzle at the end to the top of the wall.
Fukaziroh repeated M’s gesture and opened her own inventory. Her large backpack and the twin MGL-140s went away into her item storage. Much lighter now, she approached the Alligator and said, “Go on, M, if that really is your name. Toss me from the top.”
“Got it.”
Llenn could tell what Fukaziroh was thinking of doing. And she was certain her friend would do it.
Thump. M lowered his backpack to the ground, placed a foot on the magazine, and deftly climbed up. Anna and Boss did their best to keep the gun barrel steady.
Guns are big hunks of metal. They are tough by definition and won’t break under a person’s weight, but the smaller, more delicate parts might certainly bend or come off. This was not something to do in real life. It was certainly the wrong way to use a gun.
With surprising balance for a man his size, M climbed up the bizarre ladder and turned around when he reached the top. He placed his right foot and ankle over the large muzzle brake at the end of the Alligator’s barrel, let his left foot dangle in the air, and straightened up with his back to the wall.
“Whoa!” Llenn marveled.
A large man was standing on one leg at a great height, supported by two women, with his back to the wall. What kind of religious ceremony was this?
The six-foot-long gun supported the nearly six-foot-tall man, leaving only a bit over three feet.
“Here I go. If I break my neck doing this—no hard feelings!”
She backed away from M by a few steps.
“It’ll be Llenn’s fault!”
She started running.
“Hey!”
Then she jumped. Llenn’s futile cry only gave her an extra push on the back.
Fukaziroh’s foot landed on the Alligator’s magazine. Her next one landed on the bipod—and the next one on the muzzle brake.
“Hi-yah!” She jumped even higher, reaching out.
M’s thick arms, slightly outstretched, appeared to lock firmly with Fukaziroh’s short little ones.
“Sey!”
Then he yanked upward, like pulling out a giant turnip. Llenn thought she could hear the groaning of his back.
“I can flyyy!”
The momentum lifted up her little body, hurling it into the air, her uplifted face getting closer to the invisible barrier atop the wall…
“Wooo!”
…and then she went through, soaring into the air beyond.
“Whoa!”
From the ground, Llenn saw the two women supporting the precariously balanced large man, above which was a tiny figure coasting through the air, her arms outstretched. What kind of ascension into Heaven was this?
M could do just about anything, it seemed. The angle and height of his throw were perfect. Just after the apex of her arc, Fukaziroh’s little feet plopped lightly onto the top of the maze wall.
“Amazing!”
She’d seen it for herself. Fukaziroh had flown right through where the invisible barrier was supposed to be and came out on top, fifteen feet above the ground.
“Uh-oh!” She started to lose her balance, as though she would fall backward onto M.
“Eek!” Llenn shrieked.
“Wuh-oh! Hah! Hoo!” Fukaziroh straightened out and stayed upright.
Did you just do that on purpose? Llenn thought but did not say aloud.
They had the results of the experiment. The invisible barrier that cruelly deflected all attacks did not have any effect on people, just as Fukaziroh suspected.
Llenn had a pretty decent history in GGO by now, but this was a totally new fact for her. Now that she thought about it, however, it seemed so logical. If the barrier’s power did work on humans, then if someone fell from above, they would stop on the barrier itself.
Then you would be able to walk around on top of the barrier; basically, on the air itself. Visually, it would make no sense.
Fukaziroh looked down on Llenn, literally and figuratively, reading her mind. “This is the problem with you old-fashioned GGOers, bound by the earth’s gravity… You are trapped by your own self-created logic. But it’s not too late. Don’t you wish you could be reborn as the new humans?”
“For this one time, we’re grateful to you, mysterious old man!”
“Oh-hoh-hoh, the pleasure is all mine. You can simply wire the three hundred million yen for succeeding at this experiment to my Swiss bank account. Within three working days. Each late day will incur an additional ten percent fee.”
Llenn ignored whatever it was Fukaziroh was talking about up there. M told her, “You’re next,” so she followed suit.
First she removed all her gear to lighten up, waited the split second for the P90 and the magazine pouch on her waist to vanish, then started running.
“Tah!”
She didn’t know if it would work, but even if she failed and fell, she wouldn’t die from this height. And more importantly, she was concerned about the approaching enemy cursors.
Llenn leaped onto the Alligator, using the magazine and grip as footholds and bounding up like a monkey, an acrobatic trick she could perform thanks to her lightness and agility.
She got both of her feet on the bipod near the center of the barrel to make her last jump. She could reach the right height just from that, without needing to climb farther up to the muzzle.
“Hah!”
M’s thick arm caught Llenn’s thin one.
“Whoop!”
She thought her shoulder would be pulled out of its socket. There was a powerful g-force pressing down on her.
Her vision blurred for a moment as she was lifted up atop the wall.
“Yo!”
“Why are you still here?!”
She very nearly collided with Fukaziroh, who was absentmindedly hanging out in the spot where she had landed. Thankfully, it did not lead to disaster.
Llenn stuck the landing.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Whoaaa!”
“Nice one!”
Her acrobatics were captured in great detail on the monitors in the pub, to the delight of the onlookers.
“I give it a ten! A perfect landing!”
“You think so? I’ve never seen anyone do it like that.”
“She looked like a boiled prawn to me.”
“No, like a motorcycle that’s been totaled after an accident.”
“Like a lazy cat lost in the midst of a daytime nap.”
“Or the frame of a pair of glasses that got stepped on.”
“It reminded me of cucumbers that you can’t sell in the store.”
“Hey! Are you trying to level up your simile game or something?! Llenn is beautiful, no matter what form she comes in!”
Finally, someone said, “Never would have guessed you could walk on top of the maze. So how will those greedy bastards respond?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“What about the rest of you?” Llenn asked the other three down below, while she put her gear back on. M had already jumped down from the Alligator, so Boss and Anna were free from their physical labor.
“We can’t make it. You two will have to head for the center together,” M said, packing the Alligator back into his inventory.
“Aw, no!” Llenn lamented.
“Don’t cry. It’s better that way for everyone, don’tcha see?” Fukaziroh drawled behind her back.
“Oh… I guess so…”
The people with dollar and yen signs in their eyes were all going after Llenn—and Llenn alone. She needed to keep that in mind. Everyone else was suffering on account of proximity to her. She felt bad.
Llenn clenched her P90 and spun around.
Her vision was so much clearer now. The wall beneath her feet was about twenty inches wide. It was a narrow path to walk, and very scary being over fifteen feet up, but not so bad that she might cower and be unable to move.
Every GGO player had to cross steel beams in a factory every now and then. Not that it made you want to try the feat in real life.
Since it was a maze below, it was also a maze above, but one where you could figure out the correct answer. It seemed like they could run all the way to the center keep from here.
Llenn glanced at her wristwatch. It was 2:24 and thirty seconds. There was no time to hang around waiting.
“Got it! M, Boss, Anna, thank you! I’ll hang up for now! Meet you in the middle!”
“You bet.”
“Yeah.”
“Later!”
They smiled and waved back to her. She turned off the comm.
“Let’s go!” she called, turning to Fukaziroh. The woman had pulled out her grenade launchers again.
“You bet. I’m with ya, kid!”
✦ ✦ ✦
