“Aw, dammit!”
And yet, Llenn was, in fact, half dead and in a pretty hopeless situation.
Getting shot through the shoulder had inflicted damage on her lungs, a critical organ. She had lost 40 percent of her hit points all at once. Llenn could not take many shots.
On her back, with the heavy pack acting as a table on the side of the stone slope, Llenn popped a med kit. Would she still be alive by the end of the minute and a half it would take to heal her its full amount?
“Crap…”
She’d jumped up expecting to die and didn’t make it a single step before being shot and incapacitated.
The only remaining shred of luck on her side was that the bullet hadn’t hit the grand grenade resting against her stomach. If it had, all her friends would have been wiped out. Except maybe Fukaziroh, because she was hanging down below? But no, it would have disintegrated the rope, too.
The enemy’s sporadic shooting was still ongoing. Could ZEMAL be intending to keep shooting in place until it had destroyed all the stone blocks? Given their ammo stock and trigger-happy nature, they might just try.
Llenn stared at the sky and thought, Pito, M, I think I might really be a goner this time.
It was a thought she’d had several times today, but this time felt more serious.
This was definitely the Squad Jam whose special rules messed with me the most, she thought. Even in SJ3, which had the betrayers system, it wasn’t the rules that messed with me, but Pito.
The thick fog, the split-up squad, the collapsing map, the teleportation…
If she was going to be jerked around by the rules throughout the game, they could at least save her butt once. But that didn’t seem likely.
Her eyes brimmed with desperation. The image of Pitohui’s face floated into her vision.
The usual tattooed face, which was hard to read at first glance but ultimately proved to be just that: hard to read.
Next to it, she saw M’s craggy face as well, bounded by the reddish-blue sky above.
It almost seemed like his expression was saying You fought well. Almost. It was just her imagination.
Have their ghosts come to greet me? she wondered. It was the crisp clarity of their faces that made her wonder.
They started out faint, then steadily got deeper and darker, coming into focus.
“Look, Pito’s come to take me to Heaven,” Llenn murmured to herself.
“What?! You see her, too?” Boss yelped.
“Huh?”
Llenn sat up and looked around.
A few yards to her left, Boss and Anna and Tohma were hiding on the downslope of the rubble, staring at the sky, too.
About four yards away from them in the direction they were staring floated the faces of Sophie and Tanya, two of their members who had died in combat. In fact, it wasn’t just their faces, but their bodies as well, hazy but waving happily.
“Aieeeee!”
Llenn felt a thrill of horror zip up her back. Her agility was so high, even the chills seemed to move quickly.
“Oh?” Fukaziroh had finished loading her grenade launchers and looked up from her rope harness. “What’s this? Hang on, I can see Pito’s and M’s ghosts in the air to the right of Llenn. Is it Obon already? I thought the day of the dead was later in the year.”
“Can you see them, too, Fuka?”
“Yeah. I’d recognize the contour of Pito’s ass anywhere. When you’re an assficionado like me, you can even tell a person’s life experience and personality from their ass contour—”
“Wha…wha…wha…?” Llenn ignored whatever Fukaziroh was saying, rolled over, and stared at their inverted faces this time. “What is happening?!”
Pitohui’s face and body were becoming crystal clear now, except for her legs. Most of the translucency of the finer parts of her figure were gone, and Llenn couldn’t see the sky through her anymore.
Between the bodysuit, the KTR-09 in her hand, and the other gear, she was clearly outfitted in whatever she had at the start of the game.
“Huh?”
Pitohui jabbed M in the side with her elbow.
M reached out to Llenn as far as he could with his shield, which was now visible.
“Huh? What?”
Llenn was completely bewildered by what was happening. All she knew was that the shield was being pointed at her, so she squinted at it.
There was a message written all across the surface of the shield, probably in whiteboard marker.
It was in Japanese, so she could understand it.
It said: We set the stage for support. The rest is up to you; keep fighting until you die.
“Huh?” Llenn gaped.
And then, somewhere in GGO, a countdown timer reached zero.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Pitohui, M, Sophie, and Tanya that they could see now had fully visible legs and feet. They slid through the air without a sound until they were standing right at the lip of the arena.
Pitohui and M were about twelve feet to Llenn’s right.
Sophie and Tanya were about twelve feet to Boss’s left.
It was like they had come back to life, but upon a closer examination, their bodies, clothes, and guns were just the tiniest bit fuzzy. It was like they weren’t quite in camera focus. And floating over each of their heads was a conspicuous orange letter G.
“Wh-wh-wh-what is happening here?!” Llenn wailed, practically screamed—when the Satellite Scanner buzzed with the answer to her question.
✦ ✦ ✦
Text appeared on the screens in the pub, and on the Satellite Scanners of each surviving player. It began with the message that appeared in the waiting area at exactly one o’clock.
About the special rules of SJ5: Here are some more! It’s very important! Read carefully! Don’t give up just because you’re dead!
Only those who have died in SJ5 get to read this. We have a very special opportunity for all of you!
You may have died, but there’s still something you can do, right? Yes, you can come back and haunt people.
So…would you like to be a ghost?
✦ ✦ ✦
GHOST, as you know, stands for:
G ranulated
H omogeneous
O bject of
S piritual
T ranscription!
Granulated Homogeneous Object of Spiritual Transcription or, in easy-to-remember Japanese, Konpaku-tensha-ryuujou-kinshitsu-buttai!
Thanks to nanomachine producers run amok, the souls of the dead have fused and taken temporary form again in this blasted hellscape of Earth!
They possess the wills of the dead and have full free movement!”
✦ ✦ ✦
It was a bombastic message.
And what the hell did they mean, “as you know”? Nobody knew that nonsense about ghosts. It was entirely invented for SJ5.
The following text was much more straightforward and descriptive.
✦ ✦ ✦
So with that said, in SJ5, even players who have died in battle will be able to return to the field as ghosts.
✦ ✦ ✦
Super-duper important! Special ghost rules that will be on the test tomorrow!
1. Those who wish to return to SJ5 as ghosts must choose to go to the Graveyard after spending ten minutes in the waiting area. If you do not go, you will be returned to the pub like usual. The Graveyard is set up to be just like the pub, so you can eat and drink and enjoy the live feed as you wait. Dead souls can converse with one another. If you change your mind, you can also return to the regular pub from there, or log out.
✦ ✦ ✦
2. Once there are seventeen or fewer players remaining, a 240-second countdown will begin. If the timer reaches zero while there are still surviving players active, all players in the Graveyard will be returned to the battlefield as ghosts to fight again.
✦ ✦ ✦
3. To the living, ghosts will appear hazy and faded, and the letter G will appear over your head to distinguish you. To ghosts, both the living and other ghosts will be clearly visible, and the letter L will be displayed over the bodies of the living.