I visited the Revivalist Church again the next day.

 

“Again, I’m really sorry for taking up your time, which was like, the whole day plus overtime, come to think of it…”

“No, no, please, this isn’t even the first time someone took long in the church—but a whole day, huh? We might have to update the leaderboards…”

 

I was in Director Vernier’s office. The director himself was telling me not to mind it, but as I thought, I really feel too bad.

 

“Brother-director, it may be wise to accept Aoi-sama’s apology, lest we arrive at a Canadian death loop.”

“It is as Brother Adam says.”

Of course, the two were also here. They never really said what their jobs were, but I guess they’re Director Vernier’s aides, at least.

Though…

“Er, please don’t call me ‘-sama.’”

““Of course, Aoi-sama.””

They’ve been addressing me with ‘-sama’ for a while now. I wish that they didn’t. It hurts me on a profound level.

No, I’m also aware that I use ‘-san’ pretty often, but I don’t have a problem with that because it’s a neutral way of addressing someone, which works well with my 21st century social senses—and, well, you know, I grew up in this kind of weebanized culture. On the other hand, ‘-sama’ is a bit…

 

“Then, Aoi-sama…”

 

Director, please cease.

 

He stood up and bowed his head.

 

“Although it is surely no trouble for us, on behalf of the Church and the midnight janitor, I have surely received and accepted your apology.”

“Eh? You have a janitor?”

 

In a virtual world?

 

“For cleaning up bad logouts and fragmented data.”

“Ah, I see…”

 

True. Forgetting to log out, or thinking that you logged out correctly, gets people hacked pretty easily—though I’m surprised they could find someone to entrust with logging out sensitive accounts.

 

“With that,” Director Vernier continued, “How about it? Would you like to join us?”

 

I should be smiling and saying yes, but…

You know…

 

This is still a cult and all…

 

Arc-san also mentioned something that implied that there could be more than one organization that deals with organizing Heroes. I don’t really see why I should settle with the Revivalist Church just because they’re the first ones I found…

 

Yosh! Like most things, I’m putting off this decision for a while!

 

Just as I was going to give my non-answer…

 

 

《 I WON’T LET YOU! 》

 

 

The 16-bit voice of a girl echoed just like that. A wall of red light flashed by us like a laser scanner, leaving us behind in a room filled with red ambience like the emergency lights of a secret bunker.

This was certainly still Director Vernier’s office, but areh?

 

Director Vernier pulled down the projector screen.

… He’s still pulling it down.

… How long is that screen?

 

He finally let go, and when the tail of the projector screen violently shot up, retracting into the hub, it pulled up with it an armory wall of guns.

Not just there, but walls of guns shot up from the other sides of the office, too. Assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, and a slew of handguns were lit up by yellow LED tube lights around the edges of the wire mesh. By the looks of it, the bullets were all standard, so normal duel rules still applied, which meant…

This wasn’t a hacking raid? Don’t tell me…

 

“Director!” Sister Even shouted, armed to the teeth with rifles and grenades, “The Obstructionists have declared a Deathmatch, and have gained control of reception!”

“Acknowledged—Brother Adam, rally the troops near the Teambuilding Spaces and defend it.”

 

‘Teambuilding Spaces’…

As I thought, this place is actually a corporate grindhouse, isn’t it?!

 

“Sister Eve, escort Aoi-sama out of their blockade, then lead a counter-strike against their HQ!”

“Hah! My life for the cause!”

 

It’s not like you’ll actually die, you know?

Ah, well, she’s basically staking Php 20k or so for an organization that probably doesn’t pay her enough…

 

… Rather, doesn’t this imply that cults really are just corporations? It’s just that cults have religious objectives?

Wait, so cults are a subset of corporations?

 

…

 

My heart says no, but my brain says yes.

 

We arrived in a large cafeteria space that looked like it could accommodate 200 employees. It looks like the Obstructionists here were pushing the Revivalists into a corner, which wasn’t surprising, since the Revivalists didn’t have anyone from higher management to strategically coordinate their defense. Bullets were flying, forcing me to spam the auto-evade button.

 

Dodging bullets was cool and all, but instead of me, wasn’t Sister Eve too powerful?

 

Weaving between the Revivalists’ interns and the invading men-in-black, Sister Eve led me to the cafeteria’s bar area, hoping to avoid the center of the fighting, but it seems, we couldn’t avoid the fighting entirely.

Bullets landed around Sister Eve’s feet. Two men had entered the bar area after us. With disgust in her eyes, Sister Eve naturally retaliated, firing off salvos from her shotgun, but the two men were dodging her bullets just as well. They answered with handguns that were dangerously close to becoming submachine guns.

 

I’ve always thought that putting stocks on pistols was a dumb idea. It gets even worse when they get modified to fire in fully-automatic. It’s like, why are you being noncommittal about being a submachine gun? Choose an identity, damn it!

 

Both sides were dodging bullets. Those were fantastic somersaults and floor-sliding gunnery, indeed. They were diving and sliding, over and under the bar’s tables and benches, and kicking up stools to block flying lead or throw of their opponent’s aim. The moment any of them passed directly in front of the bar, they were quickly followed by explosions of glass and alcohol from shots that had missed their mark.

Such a thing happened four times. That’s a lot of wasted alcohol.

The first one to be annoyed by this farce was the other side. One of the men quickly closed in with a handgun in one hand, and knife in the other. He fired several shots to restrain Sister Eve’s movements, just buying him enough time to get within stabbing range.

 

Areh? Is that a pencil?

Eh? She’s fighting off the knife with a pencil?

… Joanna Wick? Is that you?

 

No, I couldn’t believe my eyes, either. There’s two men in a bar, and she’s got a pencil… Yeah, their fates were already decided.

 

After parrying the man’s knife twice, she stabbed the pencil into his gut. The man didn’t even flinch—I mean, pain was disabled in this server, so yeah.

But, Sister Eve didn’t stop there. The man, seeing that Sister Eve had made a committed attack, used the opening to shift his gun barrel a few inches to her direction. Before he pulled the trigger, Sister Eve plugged the gun barrel with a pencil.

The handgun exploded in his hand.

This wasn’t normally possible, but okay.

Finally, she fired her shotgun into his leg, and once the ‘crippled’ status effect settled in, she used the opening to stab him in the jugular with another pencil.

The man’s body slumped down.

“I’m sorry… brother…”

Before his face hit the ground, he turned into pixels, dispersing into the air.

 

“… Yurusanai…”

 

The man with the submachine gun gritted his teeth. He charged, screaming, and firing his SMG at full-auto towards Sister Eve. He emptied the magazine in just a few seconds, but none of his rounds hit her.

That, it seemed, was just a greeting.

“Nani?!”

Sister Eve expressed rare surprise. She evaded the man’s melee attacks, parrying each one with her pencils. Her pencils would break after just one attack, and so she was constantly replacing them, desperately dodging other attacks to create some breathing room to sharpen new points of graphite.

When a distance had finally appeared between them, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Under the man’s bloodshot eyes, his hands held… pencils.

Fucking pencils.

“My name… is Juan Inigo Montoya Mitsa…”

What, it’s been three centuries and someone still makes references to that?!

Wait, a non-weeb name?! And what’s that last word? Let me just look that up…

“You killed my bro…”

He did some weird p*wer ranger pose, with sharpened pencils between his fingers, jutting out like wolverine claws.

He pointed at Sister Eve.

“Prepare to die.”

 

Right before they clashed, TREE Translate finally returned the meaning of ‘mitsa’.

It means ‘wick’.

Juan Mitsa, huh…

 

Before they even clashed, pencils were already flying. Scary.

“Friendly fire! Friendly fire!”

“Everyone, take cover! The Wicks are lit! I repeat, the Wicks are lit!”

I hadn’t been minding the fight all that much this whole time, since I only needed to keep hitting the auto-evade button, but I just realized that the people around me weren’t so blessed. I mean, there’s a Charles on his knees holding the disintegrating body of his cousin, Florida, who’s riddled with pencils all across his chest.

“I’m… sorry… You were like… a brother to me…”

“FLORIDA! NOOOO!”

A scene like that was duplicated across the floor—cousins, lovers, and immoral crossovers in-between, all fell victim to the tragedies that followed in the wake of the pencil-kata happening in front of me. Rather, there’s a lot of brothers here, huh?

“You can never have the Hero-sama! Juan!”

“Joanna! Come peacefully! Also, how could you kill your brother-in-law?!”

“Joanna is dead! I serve only the One God!”

 

Areh? Joanna? Brother-in-law?

 

No way… They’re married? And she really is Joanna Wick?!

 

Come to think of it, wasn’t there a movie about a husband and wife who were actually working for opposing mercenary corporations? But at some point they were tricked into trying to kill each other? Then they suddenly stopped and made out?

I really didn’t understand the plot of that movie. That one scene was the only reason it still stuck with me, honestly.

Given that the premise was “husband-and-wife corporate assassins,” I think it was a pretty on-point scene, though.

 

I wonder, though, how these two ended up like this.

 

The fight intensified. It was a mix of punching and kicking techniques augmented by the raw power of sharpened pencils. Squinting, I could see that they’re using only 6H pencils or higher. It made sense, since H literally means ‘hardness’, so of course they’d want something sturdier to stab with. Rather, what’s amazing is that the sharpened graphite tips didn’t actually chip off, even if they were so thin.

Though, that’s assuming they could even land a decent stab at each other.

At some point, the two of them focused on using thrusting attacks, and they were repelling each others’ thrusts with counter-thrusts of their own, pencil tip hitting pencil tip, exactly on the dot. The ferocity reached a fever pitch when the impact of each thrust was breaking the pencils themselves, and so wooden splinters were getting sprayed all over the place.

That force didn’t stop even when they disengaged. They started running on top of the cafeteria tables—the fight’s completely left the bar and enveloped the whole cafeteria. They threw pencils like bō shuriken, but each pencil had an explosive amount of force put into it that they were detonating at a level comparable to a small hand grenade.

 

Collateral casualties were being produced. There was no distinction between friend and foe. It’s become hard to even just be a bystander. At this rate, no one would be left by-standing.

The screaming of men under the rain of artillery (pencils) while dragging their wounded buddies back into the trenches (under cafeteria tables), there were some who were losing their minds, curling up into shrimps waiting to die.

“None of this makes sense! Make it stop!”

Captains and lieutenants (lower management) desperately barked their orders, but an unlucky some of them merely exposed themselves to the rain of pencils-turned-hand grenades.

Their bodies were not even left intact to be dramatically disintegrated into pixels. They just vaporized.

 

As the violence of husband and wife wore on, the fighting between the main forces of the Revivalists and the Obstructionists ceased almost entirely, as if to pay respects to the true embodiment of violence in this arena. There was nothing left but the constant shattering of pencils, verbal abuse, sudden reveals of dark secrets, and accusations of infidelity. Ah, they’ve started using mechanical pencils…

 

 

《 FOUND YOU. 》

 

That was the last thing I heard—that 16-bit voice of a girl—before I found myself in a new place.