Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — The White Meteor

When you start Infinity-Space, the first place the game sends you is a facility called the Space Station, a spherical structure that apparently floats out in space all on its own. No armament of any kind works inside it; the station is an absolute safe zone.

It has simulators, and spaceships, and shops. You can supposedly equip yourself with anything you like. A beginner learns about Infinity-Space at the station first, then heads out to the battlefield… or so the manual said.

“Where… is this…?”

The place I’d been transported to was… the lunar surface.

Space Girls crowd around me, more than I can count, every one of them armed and some of them apparently test-firing. There is no way in the world this is the Space Station. Other things are lined up out there, too: giant bipedal robots shaped like the lower half of a human body, mechanical balls a good four meters across, small flying mechs like drones.

Huh? What is this pre-final-boss atmosphere…?

The tension in the air is unbelievable. Everyone has a weapon raised, eyes turned up to the sky.

“It’s here!! The ‘White Meteor’!!!”

Someone shouts, and I see it, clear as day. A white light running across the sky. A white shooting star.

“Take aim!!”

The white light comes down far ahead of us, a good kilometer out.

“Here it comes!! Sniper squad, fire! FIRE!!!”

From atop the giant bipedal robots, the snipers open up. Down on the lunar surface I draw my own sniper rifle and put my eye to the scope.

The white light… is a girl. A Space Girl.

She wears a white blazer and a white miniskirt, for all the world the outfit of a high-school girl. A visor hides her eyes, and white mechanical wings sprout from both shoulders. She carries two single-edged mechanical swords, and I can see no other armament on her.

The laser rounds the snipers fire only punch through her afterimages. Afterimages, yes. Every time she moves, she leaves another one behind.

“It’s no good! We can’t hit her!”

“Those afterimages hold a heat signature until they fade, so they steal the lock! Tracking rounds will actually fly away from the target! Watch yourselves!!”

As the dual-wielder closes in, it isn’t only the snipers firing anymore. Space Girls with assault rifles, handguns, machine guns and missile launchers pile on. The barrage is ferocious, and not one round shows any sign of landing on her.

The mechanical balls turn out to be Supply Units. When one comes near a Space Girl it cracks open and unfolds a mountain of armaments, and the ground forces seem to be using them to swap weapons to suit the range.

For one instant the barrage breaks, and in that gap the dual-wielder sets her wings alight and comes flying. Her speed is off the charts; all I can follow is a white line. The Space Girls thicken the barrage to keep her from closing.

“What is this?! A tutorial?! Nobody told me about this!!”

Right, then: desertion in the face of the enemy!

I pull back from the front line.

“Wh-wh-what do I do…! What do I do!!”

“You’re a Sniper, aren’t you?”

“Huh?!”

A cute Space Girl with a flat, half-lidded stare has planted herself in my path.

This turn of events… don’t tell me this is the ‘Deserters must die. Bang!!’ bit?!

But this girl isn’t carrying any armaments either, and I can’t see any fight in her.

“Y-y-yes… I mean, technically… um… uh… d-d-don’t kill meeee…!”

“I’m not going to kill you. Why are you on the ground? The briefing said Snipers shoot from on top of the ‘Twin Legs,’ didn’t it? From down here the sightlines are bad. You can’t take a proper shot.”

Twin Legs. That must be what those bipedal robots are called. So they really are mobile perches for snipers.

“I don’t… know how to get on…”

I look away as I say it.

“Are you mocking me? There is no way you don’t know. It’s not as though you’re a beginner…”

The flat-eyed girl opens a system screen and frowns.

“Level 1…? Are you actually a beginner?”

“S-sorry…”

“How does a beginner even get onto the lunar sur—Look out!”

The girl kicks me in the gut and sends me flying.

“Huh?”

A stray laser round comes tearing into the spot where I was standing. She must have kicked me clear to keep it from punching straight through me.

“Th-thank y—”

“I don’t really understand, but for now, please do your job.”

“Ngyaaah?!”

This time no stray round is coming at all, and she throws me anyway (a shoulder throw).

“If you are truly a Sniper — if your being here is no accident — then hit it. That meteor.”

I roll to a stop between the Twin Legs’ feet. Light comes spilling down from between the machine’s legs and wraps itself around me. When I come to, I’m standing on top of the Twin Legs.

“Oh. So going under a Twin Legs warps you up top… wait, hold on, doesn’t that mean there’s nowhere left to run up here?!”

Whatever happens, happens!

Like the other snipers, I take aim at the White Meteor from the Twin Legs. I watch how they shoot, copy them, brace, and fire. The first few rounds bore holes in empty space, but bit by bit I get the feel of it.

“I’ve got this.”

I read Meteor Girl’s movement, set myself, and squeeze the trigger. This time the round is on a line that cannot miss.

“Huh.”

The round hits the real body. Or so I think. Somehow, it has gone through an afterimage. I put another two or three rounds into Meteor Girl, and every one of them passes through an afterimage.

No way… is she dodging after the hit lands?!

The instant an attack connects with the real body, she trades places with an afterimage. An afterimage lasts one second, but Meteor Girl is moving at high speed the entire time, and in that one second the distance between her and the image she left behind runs to more than ten meters. Short of a wide-area bombardment, hitting her and the afterimages together is impossible. I snipe a few more times, and every time the damage gets shoved off onto an image.

She really is trading places with the afterimages. But the moment she does, every afterimage vanishes at once.

Generate afterimages → the real body gets hit → substitute with an afterimage → all afterimages spent.

Which means… right after a swap, Meteor Girl can be hit? But in that case I’d have to fire two rounds at almost the same instant…

“Ugyah?!”

A stray round drills through the head of the Space Girl beside me. She scatters into polygons, and only the sniper rifle she’d been holding is left lying there.

Lucky.

I take my own sniper rifle in my right hand and the fallen one in my left. Until now I’d been shooting from a seated stance; this time I stand and brace, putting my hips into it.

Pin the afterimages with the left gun, and shoot the real body with the right.

The problem is which afterimage to aim at. She can trade places with any one of them, and at any given moment there are a good ten out there. Ten options, and I have to pick one. At that point it’s a mind game. Read the image she’ll swap into and put a round there. There’s no other way.

The chance comes out of nowhere. A bombardment. Someone’s missile lands near Meteor Girl and throws up black smoke, and the smoke swallows the great majority of the afterimages.

Now!

Both sniper rifles fire at once.

With the right rifle I shoot the real body. It turns into an afterimage, and the laser round passes straight through.

The left is the real play. I’ve aimed it at the one afterimage the black smoke hasn’t swallowed, betting that she’ll never trade places with an image inside smoke that blinds her.

— Boom!!

The round hits Meteor Girl’s right shoulder.

“I-I hit her… I hit her!!”

But the damage amounts to a slightly scorched uniform, nowhere close to a fatal wound.

“No way. That’s all…?”

— Thunk.

A sound rings out, as flat and anticlimactic as a kitchen knife going through a daikon radish.

And me… by the time I notice, my head has been cut from my shoulders.

“Huh.”

From my head as it drifts through the air, I look at Meteor Girl, who has come around behind me. Fast. That doesn’t begin to cover it. I never saw her at all.

My head rolls to a stop at Meteor Girl’s feet. She sets her right foot on it. Every gauge in my vision is draining away fast; I’ve got maybe a few seconds of life left.

“You. What’s your name?”

She puts the question to the head I’ve become.

“It’s… Shiki.”

“…Memorized. Shiki.”

Then, in a gentle voice, Meteor Girl says:

“Come play again.”

So much for the gentle voice from a moment ago. She stomps through my skull without a shred of mercy.

I never dreamed my First Death would be carved into the record under the heel of a beautiful girl.