Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — I Don't Want To Talk, So I Annihilate Them

Dispensing with the formalities.

I’m sorry. I got carried away.

“What… is this.”

One morning, a week after I player-killed that trio, I log in to find a crowd has formed.

The front of this Ruined Castle Abyss opens onto one wide stretch of wasteland, and out on that wasteland… more than a hundred players stand assembled. Every one of them has the eyes of a warrior who has made up their mind. For a dead game like this to gather that many people is genuinely impressive.

“Onward, one and all!”

Whoa?! A loudspeaker?! Some old gentleman’s voice is blasting in at full volume!

He’s transmitting to every player in the area, indiscriminately. Make a party channel, would you…

“The sniper who lurks in the Abyss… today, at last, we bring down ‘Abyss Hawk’!!”

Abyss Hawk?! What is that, is that me?!

“Command of this raid shall be mine!”

Ugh. Am I being treated as a raid boss?

Guess I’ll shoot the masked man who looks like the leader, for starters.

“My name is Haalton vi Yu—gwuh?!”

I blow his head off in the middle of his big introduction.

Kill the commander first. That’s just battlefield common sense. He drops in an instant, and I shoot my way through the rest of them while they’re still reeling.

The numbers are on their side, but the ground is on mine. Holding a position that is both elevated and unapproachable, I essentially cannot lose. The only counter is to snipe me back, and outranging my rifle is impossible. On top of that, they’re standing in a wasteland with almost nothing to take cover behind. It’s not as though I planned it that way, but this terrain is a little too firmly on my side.

A few of them have vanished on me with Stealth… but.

Mines trigger all across the wasteland.

“Good thing I planted them yesterday.”

What I planted are shock mines. Step on one and the current locks you up. They do almost no damage, but they will stop an opponent of any level cold, without fail. One by one, I put a round through each paralyzed player.

“Sniping is fun, but I hate standing out~. It was a good game, but maybe I’ll go find the next one.”

Fourteen minutes since the fight began. A hundred and twenty-two players buried. Drop items lie scattered across the wasteland in heaps.

Honestly, there’s no thrill in shooting them. A target I couldn’t drop even from a perfect sniping stance… that’s the kind of target I want.

I put my gun away, trace a finger through empty air, and bring up the system screen. I select Log Out. There’s a penalty for logging out anywhere but a save point, but never mind. I’ve genuinely had my fill of this.

“…Phew.”

Back on the bed in my own room. I take off the headgear terminal.

“Haah… so, what should I do next~”

The model guns crowding my walls and the plastic model kits in their showcase greet me back to reality.

As you can see from the room, I’m a military otaku… or more precisely, a gun otaku. The “gun” in gun otaku is the “Gun” in Gun○am and also the gun that shoots. Not very girly of me, even I’d admit. A hobby that reeks of gun oil.

“Rei! Food!”

My dear little sister’s voice comes through the door.

“Coming!”

Koshiki Rei. That’s my name. The “Rei” is written in katakana¹, which makes me stand out horribly on class rosters and the like. Well, setting aside the standing-out part, it isn’t a name I dislike…

I head out of my room and into the living room, where my beloved little sister is waiting with two servings of food already laid out on the table.

“Morning, Azuha.”

“Uh, Rei, this is dinner. Your sense of time is broken.”

They gave me a name like Rei, while my sister got Azuha, a proper, cute name. Nothing but envy over here.

My sister is a third-year in middle school, but she can do just about anything far better than I can. Cooking, laundry, cleaning, studying, sports, all of it, and on top of that she’s the student council president and a beauty. The only thing I can beat her at is handling a gun.

For a sister like that I feel admiration, but no jealousy, because her competence saves my hide constantly. Take the food, for a start. The ginger pork is far too good. The miso soup is tofu and wakame, nothing else. Simple is best. Pickled daikon on the side. Magnificent. Honestly, I want to marry her.

My mother is a war photographer who is forever flying overseas, and my father vanished without a trace, so these days it’s just my sister and me living in an apartment. A life with no parents around is the default for us, but personally, I find it comfortable.

“So what did you get up to today, Azuha?”

“I went shopping with friends, Rei. You were off playing games alone again, obviously.”

“Hm? What makes you so sure I was alone? Does the possibility that I was playing with friends not even merit consideration?”

“Nope. Because you don’t have any friends, Rei.”

“Urk!”

“A high-school girl in the flower of her youth, spending her day off grinding a game in silence, alone. How is that? Isn’t it a little empty?”

“Stop, Azuha… your big sister’s HP is already at zero!”

I’ve been guns over flowers² for as long as I can remember, and my hobbies never once lined up with my classmates’. While everyone else was playing with dress-up dolls, I was airbrushing plastic model kits. While everyone else was hooked on anime for little girls, I was working out theories about the Universal Century³. While everyone else was collecting glossy photos of male idols, I was collecting AWM (a bolt-action rifle) model guns from every manufacturer I could find.

And then there’s the memory still fresh in my mind. Right after summer break, third year of middle school. I wanted a friend who shared my hobby, so I brought in a model gun I had built myself. One of our summer assignments was a craft project, anything we liked, so I built a model gun and put it on display.

“Whoa! That’s an M1911, isn’t it? You shaved the grip down so it’s easier for a girl to hold. And you extended the trigger so your finger sits on it better. Amazing, amazing! Who made this?”

That’s what I thought someone would say.

In reality, they all recoiled. Even the middle-school boys, at the exact age where boys like guns, were put off. If the gloomy creep who never says a word to anyone hauls a model gun into school, of course people are going to be scared. I understand that now.

I was already a loner, but that was the moment my loner status was perfected.

“Oh, right. Big Sis, you can have this.”

Azuha sets a boxed game down on the table. The title on it reads Infinity-Space.

“Huh? Where did this come from?”

“A friend gave it to me. I have no intention of using virtual space for anything but studying and socializing, so you can have it.”

Infinity-Space… a VRMMO released three years ago, and a monstrously popular one. Three years on from release, it still breaks into the top of the monthly game-software sales charts.

…The exact opposite of dead, in other words. A hideously overcrowded game.

The game systems themselves look like exactly my type of thing, but a popular title comes with socializing attached. Rough on a loner… but then, I don’t have another game on hand right now.

Azuha went out of her way to give it to me. Guess I’ll give it a light try.