“Man, it makes regular guns look stupid,” he griped. “It’s like a superweapon out of some cheesy space movie.”
“If this weapon gets out there,” warned Lily-Kiska, “the balance of the game will be in tatters, make no mistake… And yet, despite that, we’ve got some idiot auctioning it off to make a quick cash grab.”
She looked down at the glass table, controlling it with her gaze, and an image appeared of a beautiful woman in a green dress. Her long black hair was held at the back by a pair of ribbons that stuck up like rabbit ears. She looked heavily made up, and the slits in her revealing clothes offered glimpses of her chest and thighs. She gave the impression of being out of her depth, a little insecure, still a rookie.
The man with the crew cut looked displeased and slapped his head a few times. Perhaps he’d chosen that hairstyle because he liked the way it felt more than the way it looked. Kaname got the impression the player might be a woman in the real world.
“The chick’s name is Pavilion,” he explained. “She shouldn’t give us any trouble. It’s the auction site itself that’s the problem.”
“True,” replied Lily-Kiska.
The next image was not of a building but a large ship.
“This is the cruise liner Tropical Lady. Owned by the AI conglomerate White Queen Tourism, it has a two-thousand-person staff and a maximum displacement of one hundred thousand tons. It’s powered by four diesel engines…but I suppose the specs aren’t what’s of interest. The important thing is that while it’s at sea, it’s out of the reach of us land dwellers.”
“A-and that’s not all.” Shrinking himself up even in the large limousine interior, the man with the backpack and hair over his eyes slipped into the conversation. He was covered in anime buttons and pins that rattled as he spoke. “The Tropical Lady is escorted by an army of AI-controlled PMCs. God, even if we had a helicopter or a submarine to get on board, they’d fill us full of holes. Going up against them will only turn out very, very badly for us.”
“We’ll be blown to bits before we even get close, with mines or something,” the crew-cut man concluded. “White Queen Tourism is an AI conglomerate. There’s no chance in hell they’d ever employ an actual human… Seems to me like they must have taken on this Pavilion chick as an external contractor. That would make the Tropical Lady just another toy they’ve given her to play with.”
Conglomerates differed from ordinary companies in that all the top jobs were filled by family members. The concept of an AI conglomerate, then, might sound a bit odd, but basically, they could be thought of as run by a group of NPCs who didn’t follow normal protocol. Obviously, human players should not be able to get a job at an AI company. It would be a boring game if the only way to rise to the top was to get a cushy job and work for some company.
Which is all to say how exceptional this treatment was. Lily-Kiska took a quiet breath and spoke up.
“To the AI management, Pavilion is like a hunting dog. She has a skill they don’t—a flexible mind—and that’s why they need her, which makes her a Dealer backed by the power of an AI conglomerate. She’s in a fragile position, though; one wrong move and they’ll cut her loose. As long as she continues to prove herself worthy, however, she’ll be able to enjoy a position of relative authority.”
One mistake and you got the sack. Talk about high risk. Perhaps there were game-related factors at play. It was more fun to keep the players moving around, like a round of musical chairs.
The backpack man spoke next. “It seems that White Queen Tourism has simply drawn up a list of the biggest transactions and is reaching out to the Dealers involved one by one. They’re at about 1.7 billion per person, s-so if Pavilion loses her seat, they might contact one of us Ag Wolves next.”
A troublesome opponent indeed. She would also be authorized to give orders to the AI PMCs. Of course, their activity would be limited to the territory of the AI conglomerate itself, but it would still be extremely powerful to command a force designed to indiscriminately slaughter any and all intruders.
Kaname tilted his head slightly. “So then those things we bought?”
“Right,” said Lily-Kiska. “We can’t fight them head-on, but we can take the PMCs out of the picture entirely by exploiting their weakness. Work smarter, not harder. Such is the way of the Dealer, is it not?”
“…”
“The 1.7 billion snow we’ve all contributed will not go to waste. It is merely an investment required to take even more valuable steps.” Lily-Kiska flashed a sly grin and once again operated the glass table without touching it. “There’s only one way we can get onto the Tropical Lady. Hard Engage Bridge. It’s the sole place the ship can return to port here on the peninsula from the open sea. There’s no other point along the ring road capable of accommodating a ship that size. They will, of course, be expecting attacks from atop the bridge, which means there’s one more thing we need to do.”
Lily-Kiska continued to explain her tactic, though at this point it was more like filling in the gaps. Afterward, she had one last piece of information to share.
“Now, this is all unconfirmed, but we have identified a Dealer who may be related to Criminal AO.”
“…”
At Kaname’s silence, Lily-Kiska continued. A photo appeared on the glass table and expanded to fill the whole surface. It looked like it was taken with a telephoto lens.
“Her name is Midori. We know nothing about how strong she is or even what she wants #tempest.err for. But given that she’s related in some way to Criminal AO, we ought to consider her a dangerous opponent both in terms of strategy and power. In fact, considering this is all the information we have even after our tireless research, we ought to be on maximum alert.”
From the pictures, she just looked like a cute little girl. Long black hair with even bangs, pale skin, and twin tails. She wore a black bikini top that covered her flat chest and a matching miniskirt, both adorned with frills. A pair of short gloves covered her hands to the wrist, and black socks extended up past her knees. On her head, she wore a headdress decorated with blue roses. The white lace everywhere lent the ensemble a very gothic-lolita feel.
However…
“If she’s related to Criminal AO, she may know more about the Legacies than anyone else. Perhaps she’s even familiar with #tempest.err. Worst case, she could be the one controlling Pavilion from behind the scenes.”
The girl, the ultimate wild card, sat astride a large motorcycle painted bright red with a pattern of autumn leaves. The gloomy shadows of that one photo taken in a brick-lined back alley told Kaname all he needed to know about the world she inhabited.
“Should we run into her, deal with her as you would an enemy. That way, she can’t shoot us in the back.”
Their path was clear. Kaname looked around at the faces of everybody in the limousine. He had just one question.
“When do we start?”
“Immediately.”
✦ ✦ ✦
I apologize for making you put up with this. Well, I suppose I shouldn’t treat you like a stranger.
I bought this snowman-themed letter-writing set on a whim, because it looked so cute, but it has more envelopes here than I expected, so all my letters are going to look like this for a while. I know texts and social media are so much faster these days, but I prefer this. Analog, not digital. They say that even the act of putting a stamp on an envelope and placing it in the mailbox will soon be a thing of the past. I just want us to keep trading letters for as long as possible.
Today, I looked up how to grow a melon.
Whenever I eat grapes or watermelon, I always hold on to the seeds instead of throwing them away. It’s an old habit of mine. I know it’s a lot of effort to grow them until they’re edible, but I can’t help it.
Do you have any strange habits?
I eagerly await your response.