Assassin Shiki — Trigger-Happy

“So this is what it looks like out here~.”

My business here done, I step out of the base and stop to take in the sight of it. A white conical tower, ringed by a sky-blue rampart. The tops of the walls bristle with gun batteries, and within them, besides the tower itself, antennas and anti-aircraft guns sprout everywhere.

The inside of the walls is pretty heavily armed too… which makes sense, but something about the layout keeps bugging me.

From the top of the tower, a clear tube stretches up into the open sky: the orbital elevator, the way we came.

“That whole thing’s just a façade,” ChaCha says. “Peel back a single layer of that wall and you’d find some elaborate, tangled-up mechanism underneath. I’d put money on it.”

I sort of get what ChaCha’s driving at. That tower… no, this whole area has some kind of trick to it. That’s the feeling I get.

“Well then! Let’s shake that off and go have a look at the property!”

“Right!”

“So, Shikki, about those conditions you gave me — mind if I run through them one more time?”

“Of course.”

“Condition one: ‘a workspace,’ where you can maintain and build weapons. Condition two: ‘an armory.’ Condition three: ‘somewhere not noisy.’ Condition four: ‘strong security.’ Condition five: ‘buyable for one million chips.’ And then, as a nice-to-have, ‘space to test-fire guns.’ That about right?”

“Yes. Sorry there are so many conditions…”

Honestly, meeting every last one of them for a mere million strikes me as impossible. If I could get even two or three, I’d be more than happy.

“Nooot a problem at all. ChaCha did her homework, and it turns out there’s exactly one property that ticks every single box.”

“Really?!”

“Yep. Only catch is, anywhere near the capital was way too pricey — no chance there. The one that fits is out in one of the mid-sized cities, Jolly Roger. A port town, and the security’s bad!”

“It’s bad?!”

“Well, it’s got pirates and mafia, after all. All sorts of nationalities, too. Best to keep your auto-translate switched on at all times.”

Auto-translate comes standard on every full-dive game, automatically converting foreign speech into your own language. Thirty percent of Infinity-Space’s players are Japanese, and the other seventy percent come from overseas. The auto-translate kicked in when Rikusen and Ness spoke, so the two of them must be overseas players. What with Japan getting the release a year ahead of everyone else, and a Japanese-made game simply suiting Japanese players better, the top ranks skew heavily Japanese. Even so, the overwhelming majority of the playerbase is foreign.

“So a rough area means cheap land, too — that how it works?”

“That’s right. That’s part of it.”

It really is kind of scary. Rather than live somewhere that dangerous, maybe I’d be better off saving up more and coming back some other time.

“No need to fret so much. Rough as it is, it’s a good town. Being a port, the flow of goods is great, and the law isn’t clamped down too hard, so there’s plenty of freedom. Information control’s loose, too, so intel comes easy. If you’re ever aiming to climb to the ‘top,’ Shikki, that town’s not a bad place to be.”

“I see…”

So a lack of law can work in your favor sometimes, huh.

The town we’re walking through now, the capital, Asia, is spotlessly clean, and the people we pass are friendly and well-mannered. Cameras are everywhere, and you cross paths with a security robot every twenty seconds. Fire a gun anywhere in this town and you’ll be swarmed and hauled off by security bots and police on the spot, no question. You never know who’s watching, so you can’t afford a single careless word. As a game, you might call it restrictive. Stifling, even.

“Besides, most things in that town can be settled by force. With skills like yours, Shikki, you can muscle your way through any trouble~♪”

ChaCha really does think highly of me… It’s not as if I’ve got the power to take on just anyone, come on.

“Oh, and — that’s right, there’s a desert nearby.”

“In a tropical colony?”

“Yep. I figure they built it that way on purpose, tuning the rainfall and all. There’s stuff you can only harvest in a desert, after all.”

Huh. So that’s something they can do too.

“How do we get to Jolly Roger?”

“By ship, or by the undersea train.”

“An undersea train?! Wh-What’s that?!”

“There’s a tunnel under the sea, and a train runs through it!”

“Th-That! I want to ride it!”

“Sure, though honestly it’s less exciting than you’d think, y’know? It doesn’t go through the sea — it just runs underground beneath the seabed, so it feels no different from a subway.”

“Even so, I want to try it!”

“Okay! Then let me show you the way!”

And so, in high spirits, we ride an elevator down below and board the undersea train.

It really is barely any different from a subwayyy…

The train is built like a bullet train, its cabin styled to match, with the seats mostly grouped four to a booth. I make my way down the aisle in search of a seat.

“Whoa?!”

“What’s up, Shikki?”

“U-Um, up on the luggage rack…”

There’s someone asleep up on the luggage rack, a Space Girl tucked into a sleeping bag with a sleep mask over her eyes.

“…This person’s headed for Roger too, I guess…”

“Probably.”

“Right. Sounds like a delightful town…”

It leaves me uneasy about the road ahead.

ChaCha and I sit down side by side. The undersea train tears through a dark steel tunnel.

“Still, what a free game this is. To think players can build whole worlds, whole nations…”

“You can really feel the developer’s mad obsession, huh~.”

The developer… Tsukigami’s dad.

To build a game this incredible, all for his daughter’s sake… that has to be more than obsession. It has to be a kind of love, and an extraordinary one at that.

Come to think of it, why is Tsukigami always up on the moon? Her father went to all the trouble of making such a wonderful world, and she stays cooped up on the moon alone — what a waste.

— Bang!! A gunshot rings out somewhere far off.

“Oh my, oh my. Looks like there’s some madness over this way, too. Shikki, can you tell roughly where?”

“…About three cars up.”

Shot follows shot, the sound steadily drawing nearer. Judging by the way it carries and its unbroken rhythm, that’s a submachine gun.

“ChaCha’ll go take a look.”

“No need. The player icons around the gunfire are winking out one after another, and the one icon still left is heading straight for us.”

A kick sends the door between cars flying off its hinges, and a gas-masked Space Girl comes bursting into our car, a fair way off from our seats.

“Hello to everyone bound for Jolly Roger! Sad to say, folks, this train has juuust changed course!!”

She levels the submachine gun in her hands, its barrel carved in the likeness of a goddess.

She’s not going to say something clichéd like ‘This train’s last stop is heaven~,’ is she…

“You lot — your destination is heaven!!”

“…Ahaha. She actually said it.”

I take up my G-AGE.

“My latest work! Become the rust on ‘Crazy Venus’!!”

The gas-masked woman sprays bullets every which way, and ChaCha and I drop low to dodge them.

“‘Become rust,’ she says. It’s not like it’s a sword.”

“Right you are. Haaah… what rotten luck. Running into a trigger-happy gnat in a place like this… well, I suppose the luck’s just as rotten on her end.”

ChaCha curls her lips into a grin and turns to look at me.

“Shikki. Mind if I leave this to you?”

Trigger-happy: a pervert who gets off on pulling the trigger, or an amateur so wrapped up in shooting that they lose track of everything around them. In her case, both.

A fine way to kill the time until we arrive, I suppose. And I’ve been itching to pull a trigger myself.

“Yes. I’ll exterminate the pest.”