“Llenn’s number keeps getting lower! She’s coming this way!”
Some of the men surrounding the team, a trio who were bunched up in the maze, began to liven up with excitement. The number next to Llenn’s visible cursor, representing the distance between them, was getting smaller. Twenty meters. Fifteen meters. Ten meters.
“What? How is that possible?”
It was not the speed of someone feeling their way through a labyrinth. It was not the speed of someone rushing up to an enemy, either.
“She’s gone desperate and made a mad charge! She thinks she can get by on speed alone! She’s ours!” blurted one of the men, grinning widely.
“Huh?”
The color pink was visible. So was the cursor.
It was not in front of them, however, but above and to the side.
“Whaaaat?”
Llenn was running—on top of the wall.
The cursor position had seemed oddly high to them. Now they understood why.
But their minds were just a bit too slow to actually do anything about it.
Llenn glanced down at them. She saw them, noted their presence. But she did not stop running.
As she rushed past, followed by Fukaziroh, the man’s eyes lit up like gold. “That million yen is miiiiiine!” he yelled, pointing the Beretta AR70 assault rifle upward and promptly opening fire.
He did not call out to the men behind him, whom he’d only met for the first time today, to let them know he’d spotted her. He wanted to eliminate the target and collect the hundred million credits for himself.
““Huh?””
The other two noticed Llenn when he started shooting, but it was already too late.
The bullet circle in his field of view was perfectly placed over the running target. The 5.56 mm bullets he was firing at full auto would hit her, guaranteed.
They did not hit her.
“Huh?”
All the bullets stopped at a height of fifteen feet and dropped back to the ground.
“Dammit!”
He knew, of course. He had just forgotten out of a temporary, greed-induced amnesia.
One of the two stragglers started blasting wildly with his M870 Tactical Remington shotgun. Boom, cha-chuk. Boom, cha-chuk.
Fire, pump. Fire, pump. He had nine cartridges of double-ought buck in the gun to shoot, but Llenn just passed right over him on the side, and the shot scattered harmlessly to the ground.
“Sorry! It’s an invisible barrier! Hey! Hey! C’mon, shoot at us some more! Waste your money! Hey, hey!” Fukaziroh taunted, her voice changing pitch from the Doppler effect as they passed above. “Hey, hey!”
“Give it a rest, Fuka.”
“No, see, in one of my favorite classic manga, there’s a middle-aged man who runs on top of a wall and says ‘Hey, hey,’ because hei is the word for a wall or fence! I’m so delighted that I finally get the chance to copy him! Hey, hey! Do you mind if I talk some more about that manga? It’ll only take nineteen minutes.”
“Do it later!”
✦ ✦ ✦
“She got us! They’re running on top of the walls!”
Someone elsewhere had more wits. He had instantly figured out what Llenn and Fukaziroh did by noticing the change in the distance numbers.
“Huh? You can climb these things?!”
“Dammit! Let’s do it, too!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! How?!” someone asked.
“I’ve got an idea!”
One of the men coincidentally happened to have an answer. If you had a variety of people, they would come with a variety of knowledge. Too many cooks spoil the broth—errr, not that one. Two heads are better than one, or however it goes.
This man, who wore the camo style of the Marines, and used a standard-issue M16A2, took a look around and confirmed that there were eight people present.
“Three of you! Form a scrum against the wall! That’s the base! Two of you form the middle row, hunching on the shoulders of the base! Two of you form a step support in front of the scrum! Cross your arms and let them step down, then lift them up on top of the middle row! Then the middle row will stand up straight! You should be able to reach, so clamber up there! Then the guy on top will use a sling to pull us up!”
In other words, a kind of human pyramid, which was an old-fashioned exercise during school athletic festivals in Japan. There were still a few schools that practiced it.
“Yeah!”
“I think it’ll work!”
“Nice idea!”
They started working together, certain that a failure to act quickly would let the million yen slip away. Soon they had created a two-level human structure.
“I’ve got a sling! It’s leather, so it should be nice and tough,” said a man who used a Remington M700 VLS bolt-action hunting rifle. He held up the sling he had attached to the gun.
“Great! Climb on up!” said the man who proposed the idea in the first place. He helped push the other man upward and on top of the second level.
“Here goes! One, two, three!”
The second level, with the sling man standing on their shoulders, stood up. With the man now standing an extra ten feet tall, he was able to reach for the wall and use his arm strength to pull himself up.
“Whoa!”
“He did it!”
The men cheered with delight. By cooperating, it was possible to conquer a wall an individual could not. It was beautiful, beautiful teamwork.
“You go next!”
The man with the M16A2, who had come up with the idea, clambered up next and managed to make it to the top of the wall. Now the M700 and the M16A2 were both on top. A third man was making his way up.
“Here!”
A hand reached down to him.
It was the man with the M700. In his hand was a grenade. It was a round plasma grenade. The activation switch had been pressed, and the indicator light was blinking.
“Huh?” bleated the man who had just gotten on top of the second row.
“Sorry.”
The hand dropped the plasma grenade. It clonked off the head of the man trying to get to the top.
“Ow!”
Then the man with the M700 pulled his hand back. Above the invisible barrier.
“Fire in the hole!” he warned his friend, turning around.
“You son of a biiiiiiiitch!”
“Evil bastaaaard!”
“You’ll pay for this!”
“Dirty motherf—”
The furious bellows of the six men left on the ground vanished, swallowed up by the blue fireball caused by the plasma grenade.
The invisible barrier absorbed all of the explosion’s force, and the walls were designated as indestructible, so they didn’t budge. The blast simply funneled down the maze hallways instead. When it had calmed, there were only two men alive, standing atop the wall.
“You beat me to the punch,” remarked the M16A2 man with a little smirk.
There was a detonation grenade in his hand, but he hadn’t pulled the pin yet. Instead, he put it back away in the pocket where he kept his grenades.
“To think I’d be teaming up with you once again. We’ll split the cash.” He grinned.
“You never know what’ll happen in life. Half-and-half sounds good to me. There’s no point in competing over it at this point.”
So the two men knew one another.
With a grave expression, the M16A2 man said, “By the way, about that girl I ended up stealing from you? Turned out she was super high-maintenance and selfish. It was straight-up hell being with her… In the end, I got an ulcer, and she broke up with me when she found herself another man.”
“Yeah, I heard the rumors. I warned you not to do it!”
Sounded like it was a very complicated relationship.