Loner High-School Girl And The God-Tier Game — Loner Vs. The Giant Centipede

Centipede or not, the thing has the texture of a machine, so the revulsion never really lands. Plenty of women can’t stand bugs, and on that front too, making every last enemy a machine was the right call.

I leap clear of Miss Centipede’s charge, steady myself on the thrusters, and pump three rounds into its head. Call it 3% off the head’s durability. Ninety-seven percent left. Ninety-seven more rounds and it goes down.

“Here it comes.”

Miss Centipede opens up the distance and sends violet energy racing through the cannon in its mouth. Charge time: 3 seconds. Then it fires, and the mass of energy comes at me. A sphere of the stuff. One hit would send me flying, but it’s slow, and easy enough to dodge. I hop sideways out of the firing line, keep driving straight in, and chip away at the head’s durability with the Colt Gov in my right hand.

A Sniper’s Armor value is low. Getting hit is not an option.

“Gigiii!!”

With that shrill cry, Miss Centipede dives into the sand, and its icon vanishes from the MAP at the edge of my vision.

“Oh dear. It’s gone and hidden.”

A tremor rolls toward me, and I kick in the thrusters to pull away from the source of it. — Goooon! Miss Centipede erupts out of the middle of it, its body climbing up and up. Its head lines up with the sun.

The light’s washing it out… I can’t see the cannon in its mouth…!

With its head fifteen meters up, Miss Centipede spits a beam from its mouth. It’s fast, so I let it graze my right arm.

“Got me.”

The damage itself is nothing much. The problem is the status ailment (bug) that attack just handed me.

Poison Virus. A bug that deals damage at fixed intervals. A Space Girl’s body carries a durability value for each body part, what other games would call HP, and the durability on my right arm is dropping in front of my eyes.

Losing my right hand would tank my damage output. Stop… stop!

The drain stops with my right arm’s durability at 1%. So poison damage can’t take a part all the way to zero.

And that’s what a mere graze does.

“…Nice. A fight right on the edge… This is what a game is supposed to be.”

M1911 in my right hand, Army Knife in my left, I square up to Miss Centipede.

The player named Shiina was searching for a certain Space Girl on Space Station, Channel 2921.

“Not here either. She said she was a beginner, so she ought to be in one of the Channels around here.”

The management added Space Stations as the playerbase grew. The Channels had started at 1, and by now they ran to 2,922.

“Hey, Shiina! She’s not over here in Channel 2920 either!”

“Shii, Channel 2922 is a bust over here too~”

“Understood.”

Shiina kept the call open with her friends and pressed on with the search.

“Look, seriously, is that Sniper really worth spending this much time hunting for?”

“She is. I saw it with my own eyes… the moment she put a bullet into the Meteor.”

“Wooow! And she’s a beginner, right~?”

“See, that is what is weird! There is no way a beginner was up on the lunar surface!”

Yes. It was strange. Shiina agreed on that much. The moon was an ultra-high-difficulty Planet, and for a beginner, reaching it was practically impossible. There was no reason for a beginner to go there, either. Anyone who went was killed on the spot by the White Meteor or a Machine Beast, and that was all.

But Shiina had checked. The girl’s level had come back as 1, and nothing in the way she carried herself rang false. In a place like that, nobody had any reason to lie.

There really had been a level-1 Sniper up on the lunar surface, and that Sniper had put a bullet into the White Meteor. Into something that moved with the speed of a meteor itself.

“In any case, there is no other Sniper with that kind of instinct. Our team needs her.”

“We do want a Sniper~ This team’s shooting is terrible.”

“Quite. After all, there is a certain someone among us who misses a target five meters away.”

“Ngh…! Fine, fine, I get it! But if we have zero leads an hour from now, I am out, all right?!”

“…Yes. That is fine by me.”

There was almost nothing to go on. She had the girl’s appearance, captured by the auto-record function, and she had the name, ‘Shiki’. Both were already shared with her friends. What she did not have was the one thing that mattered: the Player ID. With a Player ID there were any number of ways to find someone. Without one, there was no way to search at all.

“That is it. Shall I go dig through the Ship Dock’s logs?”

Shiina made her way to the Ship Dock and had one of the Guide Girls show her the spaceship usage logs. Player name, Player ID, destination, landing coordinates, all lined up in a row. The logs could be switched off entirely, and they could be deleted after the fact. Or rather, deleting them was what people normally did.

But a beginner might well not have set any of that up.

“Bingo. Shiki… four hours ago, departed for the Sand Planet. It could be a different Shiki, but this is the only bet I have.”

Shiina contacted her two friends and began preparing a three-seater spaceship.