C-Rank Ranked Match — Futile Struggle

Yeah. This one kills me.

It’s not intuition, and it’s not resignation. Just a vague, flat fact. One look at the situation and there’s no mistaking it: no way out of this for me.

But it galls me to just drop quietly like this!!

I twist my upper body aside as the greatsword comes crashing down on me.

“This is the end, Sniper!”

“Not yet!!”

I toss both handguns aside and clamp the solid section of the greatsword between my palms.

“A barehanded blade catch?!”

“…Not yet, not yet!!”

“I knew it, this girl is bad news!”

Kurenai’s right leg twitches.

The foot saber!

I lock both legs around Kurenai’s torso.

“You are unbelievably persistent!”

“Not yet… it isn’t over yet…!!”

Structurally, the foot saber can’t reach me from here. And as things stand, there’s exactly one move left to either of us.

““Thruster!””

We each throw our thrusters behind us and shove. But…

The horsepower is on a completely different level!!

In the space of a blink I’m driven back, through the guardrail, off the roof, and out into open air. Flung clear into the sky.

Twenty seconds earlier.

708 meters from where Shiki and Kurenai were fighting, atop the steel framework of a power pylon 250 meters above the ground, the Crimson Wings’ Sniper, Ren, sits quiet in her firing stance, watching the two of them fight through her scope.

“It is hard to give you covering fire with her skittering about so. And if I shoot, the rest of them will know where I am. If you have whittled her down that far, then finish her off yourself.”

“…No. Ren, take the shot. I don’t care if you hit me by mistake.”

“Ehh~? Is there any need to take a risk like that? You have as good as got her by now, surely. And normally you are the one telling me to keep my hands off—”

“Just do it! Leaving this one alive is bad news!”

“Nghh?! …Honestly. What has her in such a hurry, I wonder.”

Well, if she was going to insist that hard, so be it. Ren settles her aim on the player called Shiki.

“Here, then.”

A shot to the head. And it’s dodged.

She avoided it?! She must have caught the flash. That glare is the one thing a laser type could do without. And still — with Kurenai right in her face, she reacted to that shot. Splendid, for an enemy.

Her balance gone, Shiki clings to Kurenai, but Kurenai shoves her back regardless, and she’s flung off the roof into the sky. In the same instant the two of them come apart; pulling clear, Kurenai carves through Shiki’s left arm with a Foot Saber.

A Space Girl doesn’t bleed when her body is damaged. Her veins are wire, her blood electricity, her bones metal. Sever one and the cross-section looks like the cut end of a cable.

“Well then. Farewell.”

Ren’s shot. Out of thruster charge, Shiki has no way to evade it, and it lands square in her torso, cutting her upper body clean from her lower.

“Split in two. No mistaking it, she has put zero points into Armor. And they do say you want an Armor value of at least 30 to make life easier…”

Her opponent has lost her left arm and her lower body besides. Small wonder Ren lets her eye slip from the scope.

But this opponent is a sniper who once climbed all the way to raid boss, even if that was in another game. So long as she has a finger left to pull a trigger, you don’t look away.

“Don’t drop your guard! Ren!!”

“?!”

Kurenai’s warning, more roar than advice, snaps Ren’s focus back to a single point. A muzzle flash blooms from the prey she was supposed to have killed.

Light?!

Ren fires her thrusters and throws herself aside. A heartbeat later a laser round punches through the space where her head had been.

“That girl?!”

Ren puts her eye back to the scope. There’s Shiki, a rifle leveled and held steady in her one remaining right arm.

“Th-that put a chill in my gut.”

Without Kurenai’s warning, she would have taken that round clean in the head.

“Delete confirmed just now. We made a bit too much noise. Both of us move.”

“Understood.”

Ren clicks her tongue, quiet.

She’s won. And even so, she can’t shake the feeling that, as a sniper, she’s lost.

“That is not the accuracy of a one-handed shot taken in midair. It galls me to admit it… but on marksmanship alone, she may be above me. I will remember you, ‘Shiki.’”

In the end, Shiki retired in 94th place, individually.