“Understood.”
“Also, no strip clubs. And no Prostitute Island.”
“Whaaaaaaat?! Then what’s even the point?!”
“You can go on your own time. I just don’t want you drawing attention before we start a job. As a Magistellus, you can’t even interact with items that aren’t mine anyway. Outside my hideout, it’s not like you can so much as buy a drink from a vending machine.”
“Ah, so what you’re saying is I can still pick up sex workers off the street. They’re Dealers, not items, so I’m not breaking any rules!”
“Tselika.”
With that warning, Kaname turned away. Lily-Kiska was stroking the arm of her glasses with her finger.
“You two seem to get along well,” she noted.
“Is that not what all Magistelli are like?”
“It varies. Anyway, she’s got such pale skin. I’m jealous. And this is coming from someone who has to slather on SPF fifty-plus sunscreen every day. This game can be frustratingly unaccommodating at times. Sometimes, the problem is that it’s too real.”
Kaname entered the limousine. The interior was air-conditioned and, of course, quite long and thin. It was probably larger than a single room at a city hotel. A sofa stretched across the walls, with a glass table at the center. There was even a television and mini fridge.
There were about a dozen men and women already inside, presumably other members of Ag Wolves, along with several Magistelli. One, a yuki-onna, a ghost woman who appeared only on snowy nights. Another, a dullahan. Lily-Kiska must have used this limousine as a mobile base when she wasn’t mowing down pedestrians in it.
Lily-Kiska was the last to enter. She pressed the button on an intercom atop the glass table and spoke to the driver’s seat.
“Sophia. Get us onto a main road. And drive safely, okay?”
“As you wish, Miss Kiska,” she replied.
A gentle inertial force washed over Kaname, relaxing him, as the limousine pulled out of the beachside parking lot and merged onto the road. Meanwhile, Lily-Kiska addressed the rest of the room, getting straight to the point.
“This is our new friend, Kaname Suou. With the capital he’s bringing to the table, I believe we are finally ready to put our plan into motion.”
Several windows appeared across the surface of the glass table. Each member was putting in a buy order for something for the price of 1.7 billion snow. All sitting around this table were on Kaname’s level, paying the same amount of money for the same purpose.
“I hardly think I need to reiterate,” she said, “but Ag Wolves exist to prevent the Legacies of Criminal AO from falling into the wrong hands, and by so doing, we protect not only the order of Money (Game) Master but also the entire world economy. Do you remember the Swiss Depression, Kaname?”
“…More or less.” Kaname Suou took a deep breath and explained. “It was a global financial crisis originating in Money (Game) Master before spreading to the real world. Same old story: Some Dealers trigger a ‘moral hazard,’ there’s a shortsighted money grab, and before you know it, there’s violence in the streets.”
“Well, thankfully, it all managed to sort itself out. It could have been much worse. If somebody had the Legacies, they could make that happen again. It would be child’s play. Millions of people would lose their jobs. Entire cities and even countries could fall into economic ruin. It’d be bad enough if a malicious actor got their hands on the Legacies, but the worst-case scenario is if they fall into the lap of some clueless rookie. We can’t even estimate the scale of the damage that would occur if that was to happen.”
“Okay. So?”
“Here’s our current target.”
An image of a shotgun appeared on the glass table. Except that name didn’t quite seem to fit.
The term cannon was used to describe a gun with a caliber above a certain size. Armies across the world had different standards of what made a gun a cannon versus a shotgun, but they would all agree on this point: This was not a shotgun but a shot cannon. Its overall shape resembled a revolver-style grenade launcher, a brutal orange weapon whose design defied all notions of sensibility.
“It’s known as #tempest.err. One pull of the trigger releases two thousand pellets of buckshot in a sixty-degree angle up to a range of five hundred meters.”
“And that’s just by default,” a large, burly man with a silver crew cut, wearing a tank top and a pair of blue camo-print pants, interjected. “The shot’s guided by an under-barrel beam. Anythin’ caught in the light gets turned to mincemeat. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Sounds just like a big laser pointer. But here’s the catch. You can distort light. Reflect it. If you’ve got a lens, you can focus it all down to a single point. See where I’m goin’? All you need is a disco ball, and you can fill the whole damn room. Doesn’t matter if your foe’s behind cover—they’re toast.”
Money (Game) Master was a game that mixed modern-day finance with urban crime, but some aspects of the game defied conventional physics.
For example, the Magistelli.
And the Legacies of Criminal AO, so overpowered they became known as the Overtrick. Weapons so heavily customized, they exceeded even the preset physical limits of the world. Items that, while through legal means, had broken the mechanics of the game so much that using them felt like cheating.
“Just one question,” Kaname ventured. “Wouldn’t the user be in the crosshairs of the light beam, too? I mean, the only reason you can see walls in the first place is because reflected light from them is hitting your eye.”
The man who answered Kaname’s question was a nervous, fidgety, slouching man with a backpack and a hoodie with some kind of anime character on it. Kaname thought he’d remembered the character’s name was Cyber Rain or something like that. The man looked like he had a room full of posters, light sticks, and figurines.
“Actually, it’s the amount of light that determines the effectiveness. The beam gives about three fifty to four hundred lux…about the same as a fluorescent bulb, I suppose. Walls don’t reflect much light, so the blast will break it down. For a mirror, or glass, or even water, on the other hand, well, then the reflected light takes priority. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if you accidentally pulled the trigger in one of those scenarios, especially if it was pointed to a mirror in an indoor fight.”
“Anyway,” said Lily-Kiska, taking over. “Firing the weapon from on high, like in a helicopter, causes a storm of bullets to rain down, just as the name implies. #tempest.err can massacre everything in sight with just a single pull of the trigger. It’s also semiautomatic, giving you free rein to go on the ideal shooting spree… It’s such a nasty weapon, you start to think it must be a hack.”
The large man with the silver crew cut scratched his head as he joined the conversation. What looked like…dog tags were wrapped around his wrist and appeared to act as a smart health scanner that displayed his vitals like blood pressure and perspiration rate.