Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — Golden Age (3)

After 121 retries, a way through is finally taking shape.

Every enemy placement is memorized, down to the last man. Three snipers, and I know exactly where each one is standing. Landmines, tripwires, every other trap: completely mapped.

But the most useful thing I picked up isn’t where the enemies are or where the traps are. It’s a single spec.

Friendly Fire: disabled.

This mission runs on a spec where you can’t hurt your own side. Which sounds like it has nothing to do with me, seeing as I don’t have a side. The part that matters is that the Friendly Fire lockout applies to the enemy team.

A bullet an enemy fires disperses the instant it hits another enemy. Traps like the landmines behave the same way. An enemy who steps on one takes no damage whatsoever; the blast simply flings him into the air.

I’m going to use that spec to beat this mission.

“There she is! Over here! Gwaaah?!”

First, out into the back alley. Six enemies down. One of them I only disable, shooting out both his shoulders, and take hostage. Holding him up as a shield, I push on through. Every shot they fire, I can deflect with this hostage (shield).

“Taking a hostage? That’s dirty!”

“Demon!”

“Devil!”

“You’re a disgrace to the human race!”

“You absolute scum!!”

The NPCs hurl abuse at me. Ignored. Once I’ve bought enough distance, I break out onto the main street.

There’s a stretch of the main street where the landmines are packed in tight. I hurl the hostage at it, and the instant he sets one off, I leap onto his back. The blast carries me up into the sky. Because the mines belong to the enemy, the explosion doesn’t destroy him; he goes on being the ground under my feet. Human surfing. Reminds me of Eu○eka.¹

A sniper is posted on top of the church at the 1.5 km mark, and I pick him off from up in the air. Then I jump off my human surfboard onto the church roof. The hostage dies of fall damage. I take the sniper rifle (a Mosin-Nagant) off the dead sniper and snipe with it for as long as the ammo lasts.

Final sprint. Whatever enemies are left, I clear out with the M1911. And this endgame piles it on like nothing else. The NPCs move better, there are a decent number of them, and they even work in ricochets. Demonic design. I’ve run this last stretch alone thirty times already.

The endgame is a pure gunfight, and the only way through is raw player skill. Ricochets punch straight past a hostage shield, and this far in the blast-jump is useless too, because they shoot you out of the sky with bazookas. They react to sniping like a pack of New○ypes². There’s nothing for it but to gun them down with the M1911.

The one saving grace is that there are no ‘spawns.’ No NPC reinforcements. Wipe out the enemies who were there at the start and the mission is as good as cleared. So long as I don’t walk into a trap.

No two enemies move the same way, and each of them has his own tells. One’s good at the quick-draw, one’s good at precision shooting, one’s good at ricochets. All sorts. And by now I’ve read every last one of those tells. I work through them one at a time, cleanly.

Fourteen left! Right, from here…

I take an M1911 off an enemy and sweep up the remainder with dual pistols. Firing one-handed with an Armor value of 0 eats into my arms’ durability. Ten percent per shot. Which means the dual-pistol style has a strictly limited number of uses, so I saved it for the very end, for this climax.

7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2—1!!

“…I-It’s over…!”

Every last icon winks out.

I-I won…!

Almost everything is spent, including the ammunition I stripped off the enemies. Rounds remaining: three. That was close… If I hadn’t saved ammo on the human surfing, I’d have run dry somewhere in the middle, no question.

“Carelessness is the great enemy… The one thing I refuse to do is trip a landmine and die right here…”

I’ll make for the destination along the rooftops, where there are definitely no mines.

The city has gone completely still. All that racket a moment ago, and now this quiet. It gives me chills.

“Haah. Everything up to the endgame, I basically bugged my way through. Someday I want to clear the whole thing head-on.”

Nine hours have passed since this mission started. Three, in the real world. It’s getting on toward noon and I didn’t eat much breakfast, so the Hunger Alert is a genuine worry. The ‘Hunger Alert’ and the ‘Brain Fatigue Alert’ log you out by force, so I have to be careful. Had I set out to beat this properly, it would have taken twice as long.

“This is it, then.”

I arrive at a musty old ironworks.

“So you made it!”

A middle-aged man in work clothes comes out of the ironworks. He’s wearing a cap, and the shadow of the brim hides his eyes.

“Um, here.”

“Ahh, I’ve been waiting! Now I can finally build it. Hand it over, quick!”

GOAL is written above the man’s head. Give him the attaché case and that ought to be the clear. I materialize it out of my item pouch and hand it over.

He carries the case into the ironworks and opens it on a workbench. I peer at the contents over his shoulder.

“These are… M1911 parts, aren’t they?”

“Impressive. You can tell already, at this stage. But they aren’t just any parts. Every material in there is first-class. Ivory, rare metals, that sort of thing.”

The man sets about assembling the gun.

“In the world you came from, this M1911 has surely long since rusted into an antique.”

“You’re…”

This voice… it’s the same one that came out of that cathode-ray television…

“But with my hands on it, the M1911 lives again.”

He finishes the gun and puts it in my hands.

An M1911. But the color is different from the one I’d been carrying right up until a moment ago. Not black. Silver. The barrel carries the words ‘G-AGE.’

“‘M1911 G-AGE.’ You made it this far — I’ve no doubt you can master it.”

“Thank you… very much…”

So this is the reward.

I stow it in my weapon pouch and pull up the details.

An awfully long description. The developer absolutely baked some personal feeling into this thing. Heh… Not that I dislike that kind of playfulness.

“Farewell, then. I look forward to seeing what you do.”

“Yes! Thank you so much!”

Before I know it, I’m back in the forest where I started.

The cathode-ray television is smoking, its screen cracked. A forlorn-looking thing. Doesn’t look like I’ll be getting in a second time.

“Cleared it, cleared it. And I got an interesting weapon out of it, too. It’s already past eleven, and this is a good place to stop, so I’ll log out once and go eat lunch.”

I fly back to the Space Station by spaceship and log out in a capsule bed.

Hm. Feels like I’m forgetting something…?