C-Rank Ranked Match — Loner Fire!!

All three are kitted out with Wings, mid-range weapons, and Sabers. High-mobility Balancers, more or less.

Even against just three, I can barely keep the tension in check. Not my best condition, but my body still moves the way it should.

“Golden Triangle, activate!”

“Roger, Big Sis!”

“Roger.”

The three of them shrug off their mantles, fire up their Wings, and pull back from me. They mean to keep me pinned at the center of their triangle, holding perfect distance on their Wings’ mobility while they concentrate their firepower. That’s the plan, I figure.

“”“Delta Fire!!!”““

I work through the encircling fire, using the laser-reflecting crystal and my Shield Pieces for cover. I try to pick off the nearest one with my assault rifle, but she blocks it easily with her own Shield Pieces.

Good teamwork. Not too close, not too far — they keep me pinned dead at the center of the triangle. If there weren’t any cover here, I might have lost.

And there’s more.

They’ve got a read on the crystals’ deflection angles, too. Even when I duck into a crystal (blind spot), they reach me with ricochets.

But they’re not that skilled with ricochets. They can steer one bounce, it looks like, but from the second bounce on it’s pure guesswork.

I slip behind a crystal pillar. A crystal slope rises in front of me, so I’ve got cover front and back.

“…When it comes to ricochets, I won’t lose.”

From behind the pillar, I rapid-fire laser rounds at the crystal slope ahead. They ricochet off it and bear down on the enemy. My target is Beta. The rounds bounce once, strike the four crystal pillars around her, then bounce again. Pillar to pillar, pillar to ground, the lasers keep closing in on her from every side.

A triple-ricochet solo encircling fire (Loner Octagon Fire). No way she reacts to all of it.

“Beta!” “Big sis Beta!”

“I can’t block them all!!”

The rounds catch Beta in the head and legs. But her durability only drops by about 20. Still…

Her feet have stopped.

I burst out from behind the pillar. At once the other two swing their guns toward me to cover Beta, so I spray laser rounds into the crystal formations around the pair. The rounds bounce again and again and catch both of them square in their gun hands.

“The hell… is with this girl…!”

“Pinpoint ricochets, right to our hands…!”

A ricochet from my assault rifle wrecks Beta’s Wing, choking her movement down further still. And in the instant Beta, stripped of her mobility, locks her guard down with her Shield Pieces…

Now!!

I draw the G-AGE with my right hand and fire. The round splits Beta’s Shield Piece and bores clean through her chest (vital point).

“It went… straight through my Shield?!”

Beta, deleted. And just like that, my chips jump by 40,000.

So PKing someone hands you their chips. Given that the death penalty is losing half your chips, I’m probably taking half of whatever the one I beat was carrying.

I see. That clears up a whole lot.

This place is crawling with Machine Beasts that drop money. Which is exactly why there are so many bandits. Gangs of them, hunting down the beginner players who’ve scraped together some cash, harvesting chips nice and efficient. That’s why Shiina warned me: ‘Don’t rely on your Radar,’ and ‘depending on the situation, the difficulty can run higher than what’s listed.’

Basically, in any game, a dungeon’s difficulty is worked out from the monsters and traps inside it. The other players never factor in.

“How dare you—!!”

Alpha loses her cool and comes barreling in, saber in one hand. A straight-line charge. I duck under her horizontal sweep, clamp the G-AGE between my teeth, and rapid-fire the assault rifle two-handed. She believes she’s slipped the rounds, but the wildly ricocheting lasers snare her all the same, grinding her durability down head to toe until her right Wing shatters and she drops to the ground.

“Th-there’s no way. Do you have any idea how long it took us just to get the hang of these reflecting crystals…!!”

If all that time only bought them a single steerable bounce, then they never should have made ricochets their weapon. Using them half-baked is exactly how they went and taught me the reflection angles of these crystals themselves.

By now, I can plot four bounces ahead.

I press the G-AGE up under Alpha’s jaw.

“—Leave your gold and get lost, please.”

“—?!”

I fire the G-AGE. It blows her head clean off, jaw and all.

Alpha, deleted. My chip total climbs by 70,000.

“One more…”