“Pito’s ideas scare me,” Llenn said with equal parts admiration and exasperation. Even after death, Pitohui was still Pitohui. “If she hadn’t died earlier…then I would’ve lost back there.”
In the distance, Llenn could see Lux’s ghost suffering unspeakable things. Pitohui’s and M’s ghosts, along with all the other ghosts who’d gone along with Pitohui’s plan, were ganging up on him.
She couldn’t see the bullet lines the ghosts were producing, but she could faintly see the tracers from their shots. M’s MG5 emitted a beam of light that struck Lux’s long sniper rifle and destroyed it.
She didn’t know what would happen to a ghost’s weapon if they lost it, but she could only pray that the item wasn’t gone forever. That was an expensive rifle.
✦ ✦ ✦
“God damn youuuuu!” Lux howled with rage, his voice resounding across the arena.
Of course, only the ghosts nearby could hear him, so only those ghosts bothered to respond.
“Don’t blame us!”
“It’s nothing personal, man.”
“It is for me. He beat me up in SJ2.”
“And he sliced me up with a knife in SJ3.”
“Okay, mess him up, then.”
The ghosts around Lux were switching off taking potshots at him. It was really rather cruel.
They were all Greedos. Greedy folks who didn’t want anyone else to claim the hundred-million-credit bounty. They couldn’t stand the idea.
So they attacked anyone who was an enemy of Llenn’s team.
MMTM was wiped out, so they really didn’t have any reason to beat up on Lux, but their thought process was very pure and simple: Make everyone who served as any kind of impediment to Llenn disappear.
Despite getting shot by Pitohui and M, and beaten up by Team Greedo, Lux was still alive. Well, ghost-alive.
Since his hit points were ten times as high as usual, he just wouldn’t die. He couldn’t die.
When he got shot, it still hurt as much as it did when he was alive, somehow. But because he had too many HPs and couldn’t die, he was helpless to do anything but suffer.
“Agh!”
A rifle round went through Lux’s head. Ordinarily, this would be an insta-kill shot, but his hit points only went down 10 percent.
His FD338 sniper rifle had already been shot and broken, and while he could repair it, it was unusable for now. He pulled his Beretta APX from the holster and shot at the ghosts surrounding him, but there were so many, and all with ten times the health, that of course he didn’t stand a chance of killing any of them.
The ghosts swarmed him, all shooting. Some of them got hit with deflected bullets, but they didn’t care.
“I hate that stupid sponsor! I’ll come back to haunt you as a ghost, you hack!” Lux bellowed. Despite the fact that he was already dead.
At long last, with over fifty players chasing and shooting him, his times-ten HP was gone, and Lux moved on to the afterlife in a most ignoble way.
“Damn youuuuuuu!”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Thanks. You two are free to do as you will,” Vivi said to Tomtom and Shinohara. They couldn’t hear her, but the two ghosts grinned and dispersed all the same.
Knowing them, they’d probably shoot the other ghosts until they ran out of ammo. It would take ten times the bullets to finish off their targets now, which sounded like a whole lot more fun.
The remaining members of ZEMAL survived because the other two ghosts had warned them that it was dangerous over there. They had heard Pitohui’s plan and promptly used their ammo to spell out a message to Vivi.
Run away.
She saw it, understood, and immediately made the decision to move south.
She also warned David, but their team did not survive. She didn’t know why.
She had no idea that David had been trying to act cool out of a growing infatuation with her—and that he and his team had happily thrown themselves into an unwinnable situation as a result.
✦ ✦ ✦
After beating MMTM, Llenn’s group finally had the chance to rest.
It was just turning three o’clock. They’d been fighting without a break for nearly ten minutes.
At the two-hour point, people started getting full-dive fatigue that steadily dulled their abilities and decisions. If it got bad enough, the AmuSphere’s safety functions could kick in and auto-shutdown the unit. Fortunately for Llenn, she’d gotten used to it in past Squad Jams. At the very least, she was fine while she was playing. Afterward, she might get a headache.
From her seat atop the PM, Llenn switched Fukaziroh’s second loadout. The PM promptly vanished, and the MGL-140s returned to Fukaziroh’s hands.
Llenn returned her Vorpal Bunnies to their holsters and materialized the backpack that held her magazines for easy reloading.
She couldn’t wear it inside the PM because it was too big. It was even hard to shoot the P90 in there. That was the biggest drawback of their defensive vehicle: It limited Llenn’s firepower.
“Fuka. Did you get your plasma grenades back?” Llenn asked.
It had been on her mind. If she could have gotten back up to 80 percent of her ammo in plasma grenades for having kicked the grand grenade over to David, that would have been nice.
“Nah,” Fukaziroh said, however. “I never went below eighty percent in the first place.”
“Ohhh…”
Well, that settled that. Fukaziroh had too much strength and brought too many grenades to actually run out of them and earn a refill.
“You stay here,” Boss said to them. “We’re gonna focus on ZEMAL and—well, not ‘eliminate’ them, but at least lower their numbers!”
She, Anna, and Tohma were about to take off, with the other two ghosts in tow.
Immediately, Llenn cried, “Noooo! Stay and fight with us!”
Boss had been marching off in a cool, manly way, but that made her stop.
She’d sent Rosa to her death to protect LPFM, which was more than enough to repay what had happened with M.
“Hmph… I guess we could do that. Until we’re the only two teams left.”
“That’s right! We’ll beat ZEMAL together! Without losing anyone! And then we’ll have a real true duel again!”
“That sounds perfect. But how do we attack them? We don’t know how many of them are left, but whatever the number, they’ll have the advantage in firepower,” Boss said.
She was correct. They didn’t know who aside from Shinohara might be dead. Certainly not Vivi.
How to beat those firepower-obsessed knuckleheads? Was it possible?
Llenn could run around alone at max speed to draw their attention, but if more than one of them started shooting at her with machine guns, she probably wouldn’t be able to evade them for long.
Also, no one else was fast enough to pair up with Llenn anymore. And most important of all, she didn’t have her P90 either.
Fortunately, they did have a firepower-obsessed knucklehead of a different sort in Fukaziroh. She would be a good linchpin for their attack strategy.
Could Llenn be a decoy and help the sniping support from SHINC put pressure on the enemy? That seemed difficult…
Llenn’s mind was racing a mile a minute. Suddenly, fifteen feet ahead of her, Llenn saw an unfamiliar ghost waving at her. It seemed to want her attention.
More people were gathering, joining the group that had already shown up. The numbers had swelled to probably eighty or more by now.
Meaning that nearly half the ghosts had been suckered—er, inspired—by Pitohui’s passionate speech and were coming to her aid. There were so many Gs over their heads that the wavering effect was slightly nauseating.
Their support was appreciated, of course, but she had to ignore them, because they didn’t have time for that now. She focused on coming up with a strategy.
The SHINC members didn’t have their backup gear anymore. Or more accurately, they didn’t have their partners to trade with, so they couldn’t change weapons. They had to use what they had on them now. Fortunately, Boss had another five or so grand grenades…
The ghosts were flocking to Llenn, waving and smiling. They were extremely distracting.
“Shut uuup!”
She started sprinting at them.
By plunging into the pack of twenty or so ghosts, she went within the danger zone of nine feet, which hurtled them all far away.
The ghosts who got hurled away stood back up where they fell, with big smiles, and flocked back to her, as though to say That was fun! Again, again! She decided to ignore them. She wasn’t in the mood to play fetch with dogs.
“Hey, Llenn, wouldn’t that work?” Fukaziroh muttered.
“What would?” she replied.