Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — The Loner Enjoys Herself, Solo

No matter how hard I rubbed my eyes, there was still nothing there but a charred wreck. Never once had it crossed my mind to protect the spaceship. No, even if it had, how exactly was I supposed to protect a spaceship from a laser round like that?

And with that, my only means of getting back to the Station under my own power is gone.

“You bastards… shall not be forgiven.”

I’ll take this rage out on the doggies in front of me. Sword Doggy charges in, spinning as it comes.

Can I pull this off?

I focus my attention on my back and fire up the thrusters (the propulsion system) mounted there. They vent energy, and I accelerate. I flash past Sword Doggy, striking at its neck with the Army Knife in my left hand as we cross. The neck must count as part of the head region, because the gauge beside its head drops by 7%.

“Did it. Thruster Boost!”

Using the thrusters lifts me off the ground for a moment and accelerates me. On my status, Thruster Output sets the maximum velocity those thrusters can reach, while Thruster Capacity sets how long they can keep firing, which is to say your sustain (or so the Guide Girl tells me). Put simply, raising Thruster Output makes you fast over short distances; raising Thruster Capacity makes you fast over long ones. Capacity × 0.01 gives the seconds of thrust you get, so with mine sitting at 80, that’s 0.8 seconds.

A Sniper’s Thruster Output is low, but even so, that was a fair turn of speed. If a Role built for Output pulled a Thruster Boost, they’d be moving at some ridiculous velocity.

With this kind of acceleration…!

I work the thrusters and slip the enemies’ attacks. I build the fight around the Colt Gov, chipping away with the Army Knife whenever I have room to spare. When I take the durability of Sniper Doggy’s right foreleg to 0, the leg smokes and breaks apart. With that leg out of action I pour concentrated fire into its head, and the moment the head’s durability hits 0, it dissolves into polygons and vanishes, leaving behind a silver case like an attaché case.

Durability at 0 destroys that part. And destroying a part that counts as a vital spot takes the whole thing down. That silver case is a drop item, I’m guessing.

Combat time: 1 minute 30 seconds. Rounds expended: 39. Both units are finally down, and two silver cases lie on the sand. I open Sniper Doggy’s first.

Parts? What are those, exactly? Shape-wise they feel like circuit boards. I stow them for now.

Next, the ammunition. This one makes me happy. But going by the reaction of those rude girls, hardly anyone actually uses .45 caliber… I can’t see the game deliberately setting it as a drop item.

I pull up the manual the Guide Girl gave me. Ah, here we go. This is it.

‘When you defeat a Machine Beast using live rounds, it may drop ammunition of the same type as the rounds you used. Note, however, that Machine Beasts which do not use guns will not drop ammunition.’

Looks like a little mercy system for the poor, neglected live-round guns. I’m happy.

Next, Sword Doggy’s case.

A Repair Kit is a consumable that restores a Space Girl’s part durability. What a normal RPG would call a salve, an herb, a healing potion. It would have been nice to get my hands on the rifle or the saber these doggies were carrying, but I guess life isn’t that sweet.

“Takes a while to bring down a single unit, but you know, this is its own kind of high~”

The M1911’s fidelity is great! Other games tone the recoil and the report way down, but not this one. The kick lifts the barrel properly, and the muzzle climb feels just right. If the target were a person, a round to the chest would leave the muzzle sitting right around head height, which makes a double tap (putting one round each into the chest and the head) easy to pull off¹.

The one letdown is that the grip safety is purely decorative. You can fire without squeezing it in at all. Well, customizing an M1911 usually means taking the grip safety off anyway, so from that angle it’s fine, I suppose… but on a no-custom M1911, I would have liked them to leave it working.

“Aah… I’m happy. I know I’ll be switching over to a laser gun before long, but getting to have a gunfight with the gun I stan, in a place where there’s nobody around, is happiness itself…! And if I think of the total loss as what brought me this happiness, it doesn’t sting one bit~. The spaceship business, though? Unforgivable!”

When you’re alone, the conversation really flows.

I’ll think about the spaceship problem later. I can’t imagine you get softlocked this easily, and there has to be some kind of relief measure. For now, I’ll give myself over to this excitement and… enjoy the hell out of it!