“Aw…”
Llenn saw the DEAD tag appear on Shirley’s body.
Visually, it was a grisly amount of damage, but it promptly returned to its original state. It was a video game, after all.
Shirley’s body was now an indestructible object, hanging from its rope. It was immobilized horizontally, perfectly perpendicular with the vertical cliff. Based on the placement of the rope, it shouldn’t have gone horizontal, but that was video games for you.
Fukaziroh observed the surreal image and said, “She’s glitchin’ out.”
“S-sorry! Sorry about that!” Boss said frantically.
“No worries! Happens all the time in GGO!” Llenn reassured her. She didn’t have time to worry about it.
If the grenades hadn’t exploded under Shirley, incidentally, the shrapnel could very likely have hit Llenn, too.
“Rrrraaaahhhh! Vengeance for Shirleyyyyyy!” Clarence growled, getting to her feet with the 1301 Tactical. Since Shirley was dead, she couldn’t tell her off for being stupid.
She pulled the trigger.
Nine pellets shot from the barrel at once, and a single shell fell out of the right side of the receiver.
“That feels good!” she marveled.
The next moment, all members of MMTM trained their bullet lines on her.
“Let me shoot at least one more!” Clarence begged—her final words.
But she did not go out quietly.
Before the bullets tore her apart, Clarence pulled the trigger twice and succeeded at pounding the side of Bold’s body with pellets. They hit the receiver of his ARX160 (also a Beretta) and knocked it out of his hands.
And so Clarence left SJ5, having taken a third of Bold’s hit points and damaging his gun.
“Shit!” Llenn swore, seeing the DEAD tag on Clarence’s body as she climbed up her rope. Once she was at the top, she leaped toward the freshly dead body and hid behind it.
“Vengeance for Clarence!”
Using the teammate she’d just driven to her death as a shield, she stuck the muzzle of the P90 over the top and held down the trigger.
It was a wild spray, sight unseen—blind fire. Pitohui had warned her long ago never to do that, but she didn’t have a better option now. She just had to buy a little time.
She had just emptied an entire fifty-round magazine and pulled the barrel back a tad to load up a new one when a perfectly aimed and timed bullet hit the base of the P90’s muzzle, showering her with sparks.
“Aaagh!”
The force ripped the gun out of her hand and inflicted a bit of damage on her, too, calculating that her fingers would have been broken.
The fingers were one thing, but the bad part was that the gun, sling and all, got yanked free of her tiny body altogether.
“Aaah!”
She lunged with her right hand, but it was already too late.
P-chan, the pink P90, cried, “Good-bye, Llenn! Until we meet agaaaain!”
It crashed atop the stone, bounced twice, and fell over the edge of the arena map.
“Aaaaah!”
She scrambled over the stone and stuck her head over the abyss.
“Ah!”
The sight of the little pink object falling to the ground ten thousand feet below burned itself into her retinas.
“Goooood-bye, bye, bye, bye…”
P-chan’s voice got fainter and fainter.
“Bye…”
And then it was gone.
“Awww…”
She slumped with her face over the edge, feeling weepy.
“What’s wrong, P-chan dumped you?” asked Fukaziroh, who was reloading her MGL-140s. Even though she had use of both hands, you needed to keep your feet firmly planted to avoid losing balance, so it took quite a long time to reload. But from what Llenn could tell, she’d just finished with Rightony, the launcher in her right hand.
“Fuka…shoot me with that… You wanna split the bounty with SHINC?”
“Llenn,” Fukaziroh replied, an uncommonly serious look on her face. She stopped reloading. “You should have mentioned that earlier. If I’d known you were up for it, I would have blasted you to bits with a plasma the moment we reunited.”
“You’re right. I should have said it earlier…,” Llenn said.
But she trailed off, because she had just realized that when they were reunited, she had nearly been evaporated by a plasma grenade.
“No, never mind! I still have the Vor-chans!”
Without getting up, she reached around her back and pulled out her combat knife, using it to slice through the rope around her waist and thighs. The action apparently nicked her skin, too, because she suffered a bit of damage, but she didn’t care.
“What, is that all you need from me?” asked the knife as she tucked it back into its holster. She ignored it and waved her arm to switch out her gear.
A backpack with ammo magazines appeared on her back, and the magazine pouches on her thighs were replaced by holsters carrying her Vorpal Bunnies, the .45-caliber pistols.
Llenn drew them from the holsters, then dragged the rear sight against the corner of a nearby stone to pull back the slide, first on the right one, then the left.
“Wait a second, what are you doing?”
“Once you’ve reloaded, go and help SHINC, Fukaziroh!”
“Wait! My million yen!”
Llenn turned away from Fukaziroh and glanced at the SHINC trio about five yards to her left, prone before the mountain of rubble. Their arms had regained feeling, apparently, because they were busy taking off the ropes.
With bullets flying overhead, Llenn shouted, “Boss! Two requests! One, pull Fuka up after she reloads! Anna and Tohma, protect Boss as she does that!”
“What’s the other one?” Boss asked.
“Bring out the grand grenade for me, just one. Along with a hook to hang it from my belt,” Llenn said.
“Hrrg,” Boss grunted. She understood right away what Llenn meant to do.
The grand grenade was the colloquial term for a large plasma grenade, which was the size of a small watermelon. It had about the same power as one of Fukaziroh’s plasma grenade rounds. In other words, a blast diameter of sixty feet. It was scary, because it meant you had to throw it at least thirty feet to avoid getting killed by it.
It was also heavy as hell, to hold all that power. So while Llenn could carry it around, she couldn’t actually throw it.
Boss hadn’t thrown it at the enemy for two reasons: If there wasn’t enough distance to throw it, they would die, and if it got shot in the air before it reached its target, they would die.
And she wanted it along with a hook for her belt. Which meant…
“You’re going out there…to die…”
Boss couldn’t see any other answer, because there was only one.
Llenn was going to hang it from her belt, then dangle that around her chest or stomach, and rush out there with her Vorpal Bunnies blazing.
With her ultra speed, she might not get hit. Or if she had the armor plates in the backpack and Vorpal Bunnies in her hands, she might be able to run and point her back to incoming fire at the same time, long enough to get into the midst of one of the two remaining teams before she died.
Once she was close enough, the grand grenade would blow up if she got shot. And if that didn’t happen, she could press the switch with a zero timer on it and detonate it before she died.
If all went well, it might succeed at eliminating one of the two enemy squads entirely. As long as they didn’t mind losing Llenn.
“If I get half of them, you and Fuka’s launchers will have to try taking out the rest! Good luck!” Llenn smiled at Boss, bullet lines and bullets whizzing over their heads.
“I suppose there’s no point trying to stop you,” Boss said, opening her inventory. She didn’t want her own hesitation to hold them back until the plan would no longer work.
The enemy was being cautious for now, but she could tell that the source of the intermittent shooting was getting closer and closer. Whether thirty yards or forty, they were very close. If they got any closer, Llenn’s suicide bomb would harm her allies as well.
Boss grabbed the large sphere that popped into existence before her and crawled over to Llenn to deliver it.
“Thanks, Boss,” Llenn said, hooking the heavy ball to the belt that ran diagonally over her chest.
All you had to do with the little hook was bring it close to the belt, and it would attach. It didn’t look big or sturdy enough to support such a heavy object, but once it was on, it was locked. Just another one of those GGO things.
A round object nearly as wide as Llenn’s torso, stuck to her chest and stomach; it was unmistakable. Llenn quickly fiddled with the timer switch and set it to zero. If she firmly pressed the large switch at chest height, it would immediately explode.
“……”
Anna’s sunglasses pointed at her.
“……”
Tohma’s eyes did the same. Neither could muster a word.
“Well, here goes!” Llenn smiled.
She took off on a journey to the land of death.