Each of the hackers had a different Antistrike-inspired avatar, and were each armed with rifles and submachine guns. They fanned out, taking cover behind pool tables and egresses in the walls—all before promptly opening fire.
I’d already vaulted over the counter way before then.
I had to use the upgraded version of Auto-Evasion: Tactical Retreat. It had an expanded perception range and some additional processing to calculate the best place to retreat to. My avatar would then get possessed by the server and move it to safety.
Getting possessed was just so surreal each and every time, I swear.
IRL, this would’ve cost a lot, but here in VR, things were more convenient, so it only cost about Php 5k—which was still on the expensive range for VR magic, actually, but I’ll take it.
By the way, you could ask Metro Manila Online Corp. to port over your realspace magic subscriptions to their VR equivalents for free, at least if your magic provider had a partnership with them, and NanCo did. There were also some magics that were only possible in VR, like teleportation, so I paid for those separately.
The bartender shot back with his assault rifle, suppressing some of the hackers. However, one of their bullets hit him, and for a moment, his avatar flickered, and his very movement stuttered like a game with bad lag. He crouched down to take cover, and he stopped flickering and lagging. He seemed a bit nervous, but overall, he seemed alright.
If he flickered like that, then…
Corrupter bullets?
The bullets being fired weren’t like duel bullets which only brought the participants’ HP down. These bullets corrupted data—the integrity of your account itself was at risk. Even if the victim happened to have data protection enabled, the bullets also interrupted the datastream on top of that.
At best, Metro Manila Online would forcibly log the user out for having an unstable connection. At worst, the user’s data would turn weird in multiple places—and their account would get flagged for suspicious activity and, if they didn’t have a support ticket, it would be eventually terminated.
“Everyone gets data protection anyway, so it’s fine.”
The thing is, it costs nothing to log in, but it costs quite a bit to log out.
The actual amount depends on a lot of factors, but generally, you’d never want to be logged out in a weird place.
… like A Shady Bar.
“Watashi wa… hardboiled Tamago!”
Eh, I really heard that, huh…
In that midst of all that gunfire, you’d stand in the open and shout that line…
The hardboiled egghead vaulted over the counter and pulled out a revolver with a barrel as thick as a man’s toe. He returned several shots to the attackers.
A hacker popped his head out and hosed the counter with Corrupter bullets. Such a thing didn’t faze Tamago, however, and he fanned the trigger so fast that three bullets followed each other in an orderly line, all hitting the same hacker.
The guy lagged so bad that I saw afterimages. Not a second later, he disappeared into thin air.
Ah. Admin-sanctioned Interrupter bullets.
It’s the data-safe civilian self-defense version of the hackers’ Corrupter bullets.
Each time an Interrupter was fired, the system takes a snapshot of the entire scene so that moderators could review the circumstances later on and judge whether the defense was too aggressive. It’s for such a reason that Metro Manila Online’s admins approved the sale of these bullets.
It’s all really high-tech, but it’s useless if you couldn’t hit anything. Especially with Interrupter bullets, you’d need to hit the assailant multiple times in succession to actually log them out.
“Shit! They got Kenny!”
Okay, maybe Tamago-san was a bit hardboiled—soft-boiled?
The bartender, crouched beside me, pulled out a wired telephone.
“Oversight, this is Room wun-zero-fower, we are engaged with six black hat contacts. Requesting Hammer Down, select all avatars over-the-counter. Over.”
“Roger. Firing for adjustment. Over.”
Meanwhile, Fortunate Son started playing from somewhere, and the bartender rose over the counter and deployed a machine gun from an overhead cupboard.
How did that fit in there?!
The thumping roar of the machine gun ripped through the room’s furniture. The initial volley wiped out half of the assailants, turning them into blue dust.
A spent cartridge fell before me. On its side read “AnyCaliber KICK-2 Federal”.
… so you get kicked from the room each time you get hit, huh? It’ll only kick them, though.
The hackers who got kicked easily came back, and they brought friends. As they trooped in, the bartender cut them down with the machine gun, but some of them slipped between the digitally-vaporizing bodies of their falling comrades. The ones who survived and arrived at cover hoped that they could shoot from safety and overwhelm the machine gun with their own volume of fire, but Tamago was there to semi-permanently log out any hero who even tried to peek through a hole in a curtain—putting three right between the eyes.
Still, there were too many of them.
The ones who got hit by the machine gun’s KICK bullets simply spawned right back in, charging through the front door. Because they were the same people, they eventually learned the bartender’s tendencies and overall personality, and after a while, most of the hackers gained a shared understanding of their opponent, and without any coordination, they assumed the same strategy.
Some would show themselves and draw the attention of the bartender and Tamago, while their friends went and scurried forwards behind another piece of cover while shooting, yet again drawing the attention of their opponents.
At some point, one of them actually managed to reach the counter.
Of course, Tamago logged him out as fast as his trigger finger could.
By this time, the hackers had closed the distance, and they were able to fire off even more shots than before. The machine gun needed to cover a wider arc, swinging left and right by almost a whole 90 degrees to engage much different targets. That much rotation introduced a significant delay between attacks—a delay long enough for any hacker to pop up, fire a few shots off, and pop back down.
The sheer number of bullets was beginning to overwhelm the server’s capacity to render audio effects, and the very air turned into an infinite loop of the same sounds.
Both Tamago and the bartender had already been hit several times, but not so much that they got logged out. The sight of them flickering had me clenching my teeth.
I would help, but I was absolutely no good at slugfests like this. My evasion skills also couldn’t possibly escape half a dozen guns going full-auto on me, no matter how hard I tried.
Ah, well, I’ve never actually tried…
…
As I thought, it’s too scary.
The hackers were on us. I could see the end of the machine gun’s ammunition belt. Tamago’s face was cracked and bleeding yolk.
Wait, there’s a cosmetic effect like that?
When it looked like we were gonna get logged out, one of the hackers exploded in a brilliant fireworks glow.
“W- What?!”
“Shit! We need to hurry up!”
The hackers were panicking, and they began to charge. The bartender eye’s meanwhile, shone brightly, and he hurriedly brought the telephone to his ear again, tossing Pixel grenades to the front with one hand, creating a digital mosaic curtain between us and the hackers, and keeping his other hand on the machine gun, letting loose the last of his munitions. Bullets whipped back and forth through the digital mosaic, neither side knowing if their bullets were hitting.
It was then that the bartender shouted.
“… Fire for effect!”
At the end of those words, each and every one of the hackers turned into starbursts, showering the room in technicolor fireflies.
Looks like one of the admins finally landed IP bans on each and every one of them, so they can’t come into this establishment’s server anymore. If they were slightly more sophisticated hackers, they’d probably just spoof new IP addresses and come back in here, but it didn’t look like they were doing that.
So, we’re… We’re in the clear!
Tamago holstered his revolver. His face was somehow not cracked anymore.
The bartender slumped down and leaned against the cabinet under the counter, and he started laughing. Tamago took his seat as a customer once more, and ordered a drink for himself, for the bartender, and for me.
“Watashi wa… so done for today.”
Same, Tamago, same…
