Llenn and Fukaziroh were running atop the walls.
They’d been shot at numerous times on this trip from below. But with no damage suffered, of course.
After a while, the unwanted sight of enemy cursors popping into existence simply stopped bothering them. They no longer needed to worry about them. And soon, they reached the edge of the massive wall standing 150 feet high.
There was a large black hole just below Llenn, since she was perched up on the maze wall. It was the entrance to the keep.
It was too dark to know what was in there, but there was definitely something. All she could do was pray that it wasn’t painted with the world’s darkest black paint, so that she ran face-first into it.
They did have a real problem, however. “Um, Fuka…how are we gonna get down? It’s fifteen feet up…”
Only now did Llenn consider the problem of how they’d get back to the ground. A drop of three or four yards was still short enough that you could absorb the impact, but the extra yard made it much scarier.
The hallway was narrow, too, so she wouldn’t really have room to tumble and absorb the shock. Maybe she could try it diagonally?
Fukaziroh’s matter-of-fact answer was, “Well, I guess we just gotta count on some damage going down. We can’t fly, after all.”
“I guess it’s our only option… Please don’t do too much damage,” Llenn prayed reluctantly.
“Hang on, Llenn,” Fukaziroh suddenly chirped. “Don’t be too hasty. Our cushion has arrived!”
“Huh?”
She looked in the direction her partner’s grenade launcher was pointing. Two men were running down the hallway below, toward the dark tunnel mouth.
Both were tall and large, wearing matching French army camo. Llenn didn’t recognize these players.
Both were equipped with an iconic French gun: the FA-MAS bullpup assault rifle. Naturally, they could see Llenn and Fukaziroh, too. But they knew they couldn’t shoot them, so they relied on a different kind of attack.
“Hey, you! Particularly the devil’s million yen!”
It was a rather cruel insult. As well as being grammatically out of order.
“We’re gonna kill the hell outta you later!”
“Yeah, that’s right! So wash your face and prepare for the ax to fall!” they sneered as they rushed closer.
The numbers next to their names weren’t necessary to indicate distance anymore. They were thirty feet away from being directly below Llenn and Fukaziroh.
“Let’s do it,” Fukaziroh said, waving her hand to call up the inventory.
“I guess we have no choice…”
Llenn swiveled the P90’s sling around to her back. Fukaziroh’s MGL-140s disappeared from her hands.
“Here we go, Kni-chan!” she said, drawing the black combat knife from behind her back.
“Ready for combat!” the knife called back.
The men were sprinting closer, down below.
“Bombs away!”
“Hah!”
Fukaziroh and Llenn leaped.
✦ ✦ ✦
The players in the pub got to see it happen on the big screen.
Two little bodies plunged toward two large men and slammed feet-first onto them.
The force of their drop landed on one torso each, knocking the men off their feet. The women’s knees bent and slammed into the solar plexuses of their targets next, cushioning the blow of their fall.
Although there was no sound to the video, the audience could see the faces of the men contorting in unspeakable agony—and some kind of liquid flying out of their mouths.
Immediately after that, Llenn stuck her combat knife in the eye of the man and, perhaps assuming she wasn’t going to get an instant kill from that, promptly stabbed his other eye for good measure.
Fukaziroh kept her knees on the other man’s solar plexus, stuck her M&P pistol into his gaping mouth, and held down the trigger.
Golden cartridges flew out of the gun. She fired fifteen bullets, the entire magazine. The pistol’s slide did not return into place.
He was dead, of course. From the upper jaw on up, it was nothing but red shapes. He was suddenly significantly shorter.
In the now-quiet pub, someone muttered, “Fukaziroh’s really bad at aiming pistols, but that’s one way to be accurate.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Whew… Finally, you’re actually listening to what I tell you… You’ve become mine at last. Guess I’ve got to give you a name,” Fukaziroh purred, placing the reloaded M&P back in her thigh holster as she stood over the dead man. “It’s an M&P, so it should be…um…empee…”
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
“You can figure that out later,” Llenn said coolly, sliding her knife back into its sheath. She grabbed the P90 from behind her back and glanced around.
Someone was very close, only thirty feet away, but they were on the other side of the wall and not coming any closer.
Her clock said it was 2:28 and thirty seconds. Only ninety seconds left until the crumbling resumed.
“Let’s go inside, Llenn!” Fukaziroh said, MGL-140s in hand again.
“What about M and the others…?” Llenn wondered, glancing back at the maze. There were no cursors reading M nor EVA nor ANNA yet. That meant they were all more than fifty meters away.
There had been intermittent gunfire in the distance for a while, but Llenn had no means of telling if it belonged to them. The walls of the labyrinth deadened the sound, so it was impossible to tell the distance and precise type of gun.
In just over eighty seconds, the collapse would begin. It was highly unlikely that such a wide area would fall away all at once, but either way, it wasn’t enough time to travel at least fifty meters within a twisting maze.
Llenn considered connecting the comm again, but her partner said, “Don’t worry. They’ll be fine. No proof of that, but…we should focus on our own survival.”
“Yeah…”
Llenn turned around, held the P90 at shoulder level, and approached the hole in the wall.
✦ ✦ ✦
“They’ll be fine,” Fukaziroh had said about M, Boss, and Anna.
“Urrgh…”
They definitely were not fine.
In fact, they weren’t anywhere close to fine.
“There’s no time left!” Boss shouted, leaning halfway around the corner and spraying fire with the Vintorez. Since it was silenced, there was almost no sound. The clatter of its bolt and the rattling of the cartridges ejecting onto the ground were louder than the shooting itself.
“You jackasses!” cried Anna, the filthiest word she could think of. She was watching the rear with her Strizh in hand.
They were stuck in place at an intersection within the maze.
Around the corner on the left was a very long hallway by the standards of this maze, at nearly a hundred feet. M suspected it was the answer, the proper route to leaving the maze.
At the other end of that corridor was another intersection, this one a T with branches leading left and right. There were five players camped out at the far end.
They were sticking their guns out around both corners and firing incessantly toward the trio. One person would unload an entire assault rifle magazine on full auto, and when they were out, a different person would pick up the slack.
They weren’t aiming, just firing randomly, but when the width of your passage was only ten feet, that was enough to be a lethal threat.
They could have gone ahead to get closer to the castle keep, but instead they were staying here and holding M’s group back, possibly out of vengeance for helping Llenn escape. What happened to trying to get that million yen?
Even with M’s shield, a hundred feet was not a distance they could cross in these circumstances. They would be shot at the entire time. And even if they could close the gap, a single grenade could easily take out all three at once.
“One minute left!” Anna wailed.
M waited for their magazine change, then stuck the MG5 around the corner and added one last burst of shots. The other side pulled their guns and hands back, but now the MG5 was out of ammo.
The machine gun had been salvaged from Pitohui’s body. M put it away in his inventory so that it didn’t get repurposed by anyone else—or perhaps destroyed.
Then he turned his stony face to the two women and said gravely, “Listen close. I have a plan.”