Through the Hashioji Desert, where the roofs of buildings and broadcast antennas poked out of the sand, the most powerful team in all of Spacenet Online left their prints behind them, making their way to Node 99…XD.
Not just Evil and Commander Ame, but four of the most OP players of humanity joined them on this quest to restore game balance—four of the most OP Japanese teenagers, who had grinded their way to the top of the leaderboards through pure skill and sheer boredom.
None of them spoke to each other … because this generation of Japanese teenagers was a little less outgoing compared to their ancestors. Nevertheless, they knew each other’s names, if only because of the nametags hovering over their heads: Kouna-san, Yuki-san, Satome-san, and Akatsuki-kun. Indeed, even though none of them spoke a word to the other, the Japanese tradition of instantly establishing a hierarchy, where the youngest one is identified and quickly singled out, was in no danger of dying out.
In this world, however, they addressed each other not with honorifics, but with the appearances of their characters and the nobility of the weapons they carried. It wasn’t just a case of having the fancier gun, either, because in this world, guns were magic.
MP? No. Here, it was AP: Ammunition Points. AP powered a player’s guns and skills. As long as one had large enough AP reserves, even a John with a handgun could defeat a platoon of riflemen.
They reached Node 99-XD: an airport-turned-military base. Disturbed patches of dirt hid pop-up sentry turrets that would shred any assault, and patrols of spiderbots and droids regularly made the rounds. Their weapons hummed blue and purple, even the smallest of them enough to punch a hole through a human main battle tank’s armor.
Their target was in the airport’s last standing terminal. The building itself was hardened by extra layers of reinforced concrete, and auto-cannons generously lined the top.
“Alright.” Evil Ame stepped up. “I have override privileges, so I’ll just go ahead and—”
Four hands stopped her, crowding around her shoulders. A fifth hand—of Commander Ame’s—slowly joined in last.
“Don’t,” Commander Ame said.
“But—”
“You don’t understand.” Commander Ame shook her head. She stepped ahead of Evil Ame, gesturing to all that the eye could see: a no-man’s-land, pockmarked by broken skeletons, burnt vehicles, and smoldering shell craters. She pointed even beyond that, to the swathes of terrible enemies that caused all that destruction. “It’s free EXP.”
“Oh.”
The elite players nodded in unison. This place was a high-level area. It would be a waste to just let all this EXP go.
If Evil Ame had any doubts, she didn’t voice them. The players strode forwards with confidence, weapons bared. Well, they all looked cool approaching the battlefield like that, but everyone involved realized that these four had never played together before. They were all solo players, in the first place.
Akatsuki-kun, who used a marksman rifle, pulled over his desert hood and disappeared when an especially thick gust of sand blew past. He hoped to just hang back and snipe things that were about to kill the others.
Kouna-san, Yuki-san, and Satome-san dispersed as they advanced. If they were going to cooperate, it was better to just stay out of each other’s way. Kouna-san, who used an assault rifle, lagged behind slightly, letting the other two—Yuki-san with a shotgun, and Satome-san with akimbo machine pistols—move ahead with their closer-ranged weapons.
As any good player knew, grenades were your friends. All the elites threw out a variety of smoke grenades, coloring the battlefield ahead with whites and reds, blues and yellows, disrupting not just the enemy’s line of sight, but also their IR capabilities. Even Akatsuki-kun, all the way from the back, used a grenade launcher to deliver his own brand of black smoke.
Still, the combat bots and sentry guns fired blindly. Plasma bolts purified tiny channels through the smoke clouds as they passed, and more dangerous were the lines of minigun fire that swept left and right. It was tempting to take cover right then and there, but the elites knew, if the bots didn’t take them out, the incoming artillery would.
The first shells started hitting the field, but they were unadjusted shots. The three in vanguard ignored them, sprinting with wild abandon, at superhuman speeds that were helped along by concussion grenades they were dropping behind themselves, using the explosions’ knockback effects to propel them even faster. Their own grenades did damage them, but not by much, thanks to a common skill called [Action Rule 13: Explosions Don’t Kill the MC], reducing explosive damage and preventing death by explosion entirely, leaving them with only 1 HP if the explosion should have killed them.
Akatsuki-kun, meanwhile, was strafing left and right, relying on pure human visual instinct to triangulate the positions of enemy bots and sentry guns just from the paths of their tracer rounds. Once he memorized them, he hit the dirt and, taking just a second to put the target under his crosshairs, fired a bullet imbibed with demonic energies threatening to tear at reality. When that bullet hit the sentry turret, the turret spun around and started firing on the other bots and turrets.
AI artillery started dropping accurate rounds on the battlefield, but Kouna-san and the others had already long left that area. Their final concussion grenade boost sent them beyond the last wall of smoke, and smack in the faces of surprised combat droids.
At least, the humans labeled them “surprised,” if that frozen instant of the central battle prediction server recalculating for wildly different conditions than expected, leaving the droids lost for orders, could be called “surprise.”
Yuki-san with her shotgun and Satome-san on akimbo machine pistols were ruthless in their aim, mowing down entire squads of droids in mere seconds. Satome-san played a little more conventionally, independently targeting two enemies at once with each weapon, splitting her brain to “pilot” each hand individually. She did cartwheels and gymnastics over smoldering wrecks and craters, her firearms, never once going silent, and the enemy, never once figuring out what the heck she’s doing all those maneuvers for.
Really, she should have been shot multiple times by now. It just made no sense. Even when a droid took an automatic shotgun and sprayed her down with it, you would think with the randomness of the pellet spread that she’d be hit at least once, but no.
In reality, her AP was being spent to power her skill, [Gymnastic Denial System], which allowed her to curve bullets out of the way from hitting her, but only while she’s doing tricky kinesthetic maneuvers. That wasn’t her only method of defense, either; her offense-defense skill, [Nose to Nose], allowed her to intercept incoming bullets with her own, and if she had a greater fire rate against the enemy, she would score a 100% accuracy rate and deal damage according to the fire rate differential with the enemy.
Yuki-san, meanwhile, was doing quite the opposite. Her skill, [Homing Pelletized Constant], allowed her to target up to as many enemies as she had pellets in the chambered shell. You’d imagine one pellet’s damage to be weak, but what happened if she targeted all those pellets at one enemy…hundreds of yards away? She had a shotgun sniper, in effect, and together with her skill [Belt Fed], she was the most versatile elite, able to play at any range conceivable, and able to continue firing without reloading at all.
She was most terrifying, however, at close range. Her movement skill, [Recoil Physics], allowed her to bend the rules of knockback to a horrifying degree. Upon firing, she could choose to amplify knockback against the enemy, or in her most favorite case, amplify the recoil she experienced. By shooting straight downwards, she could soar into the sky; by shooting to the side, she could dash as fast as a bullet. By virtue of being able to dodge like this alone, she was the only human player known to be able to comfortably solo boss fights.
Finally, Kouna-san…was boring. His entire playstyle revolved around dealing more DPS than he received. He used an assault rifle with, yes, an underslung grenade launcher. He specialized in dumping all his AP into one shot, recovering all that AP in the next second, and dump-shotting the next tankiest bastard he could find. His skills were [Aimbot] and [Wallhack]. Really, no one truly regarded him as an elite … if only you looked from outside.
His true, human talent laid in quickly identifying enemy weakpoints. His initial spray of bullets and grenade-dumping only served to test the waters a little bit. Even with his gun’s ridiculous 1500RPM fire rate, helped along by a boringly conventional [Overclock] skill, his human brain could still process all the damage hit counters spamming his overlay in under a second. He would spot the tiniest damage bonus and dump all his AP into the next shot, right on that specific spot.
The way he used [Wallhack], as well, was superhuman. He had a strategic mind, able to predict enemy movements in response to his own. Really, his real talent laid in information warfare of the highest level, psychologically analyzing the enemy commander and determining their childhood traumas from afar.
Such a shame, really, that most people only knew him as “that aimbot-wallhack guy.”
The elites and Commander Ame knew better, of course. They could tell, from the way he took cover behind an explosive barrel right before an enemy spider tank showed up, and from how that spider tank prioritized firing at everything else except the explosive barrel, just how far ahead that guy’s mind thought.
Looking at such an impressive array of skills, Evil Ame couldn’t help but wonder, “…Why is this a thing?” Commander Ame snickered at her absentminded remark, but in reality, even she didn’t have a clue. As long as anyone did the hard work of practicing a skill enough, the System would eventually recognize it and turn it into a [skill]. That was what everyone knew—had always known. That was just how the world worked.
“Human creative throughput is best optimized by automating abstractions to reality,” Yukai replied into Evil Ame’s System-ear. “Removing effort from tasks and transformations that have been long established is known to free up human creative resources for future endeavors.”
“And this” —Ame pointed to the mess of cartwheeling players using recoil to fly and one-shotting tanks by shooting grenades straight down their cannons— “helps you…how?”
“Human creativity is known to be a volatile process.”
That sounded just like a load of copium to Ame.
Soon, black smoke rose for miles around, and the front of the airport terminal was a flaming scrapyard of turrets, droids, and tanks blown up with well-placed shots—Akatsuki-kun only had pure skill.
No one had managed to level up, unfortunately.
Thanks for the chapter!