by Yuu Kamiya
—And then she noticed a “bomb” appear in Sora’s hand. The hurled bomb flared pink. With a moment’s delay, a roar, and vmm—the impact from the shock waves.
“—?!”
It shook the building where Izuna was hiding. Jumping up like a startled cat, Izuna watched her surroundings closely, her ears pricked.
(…They identified my location, please?! Don’t shit with me, please!) After the game started, Izuna had immediately taken her distance from Team Sora and watched them carefully. Without Werebeast senses—no, even if they did have them, they shouldn’t be able to find her. But Izuna’s hearing—her ears that picked up everything in a hundred-meter radius like a radar. Did in fact catch footsteps, slowly coming up this building. (Those footsteps—are Shiro’s, please.) Constant pace, small steps, light weight. The player Izuna had judged the most inconsequential. No—not just Shiro. Sora and Steph, too—the Immanities hadn’t even been a factor in her battle picture. The reason Izuna hadn’t attacked right at the start was just her wariness of Jibril, the Flügel. No matter how much they excelled in games, no matter how much they’d uncovered about the game, it wasn’t possible that an Immanity could approach her or sense her approaching—there was just no way their response could be quick enough.
—And yet. What was it about that bomb and these approaching footsteps that gave her the creeps? Suddenly, something felt off. She knew from the sound that this building was crawling with girls. Meanwhile, the footsteps were jogging through them at a calm, even pace…?
“—!”
Izuna jerked, flapping her kimono, thrusting her barrel toward the door of the cramped, dust-filled room. The one entrance and exit of the storeroom where Izuna hid. Outside the slightly ajar door ambled a mass of girls. The little light footsteps, heading straight up to the eighth floor and reaching it, then. Ft—stopped.
(—?) Izuna raised her ears suspiciously and searched into the situation—and, the next moment. The footsteps went faster all at once. The speed an Immanity child could run shouldn’t pose any threat—shouldn’t, but—
(—What the hell, please?!) The girls ambling outside—on her floor. Went away, one for every gunshot, without exception. A chill ran down her spine. The footsteps, shooting again and again with stark precision, still, without the slightest hesitation or disorder. Without dropping speed, only dropping countless girls, went straight—(Bitch’s coming here—please?!)
There was no longer any doubt about it: her location had been compromised—! How they’d figured it out—at this point, who cared? Working her Werebeast senses to the max, out of the storeroom—toward Shiro, running down the floor beyond her vision. She pulled the trigger. With a bang and a flash, the bullet that flew from the muzzle, with stark precision, threaded through the crack of the slightly askew door, flew into the wall, scattering hearts, and bounced. To pierce Shiro’s forehead without fail—Yes, an acrobatic shot using the rebound, even accounting for Shiro’s movement, from a spot invisible to her. But—this starkly precise bullet. Whizzed by Shiro’s cheek as she just moved one step to the side and went past.
(—This is bullshit, please!) Yes, bullshit. To be able to dodge a bullet fired at the subsonic speed of three hundred meters per second. For an Immanity, even if her awareness could keep up, her body—her movement couldn’t possibly be fast enough. To say nothing of the fact that we were talking about the physical abilities of an eleven-year-old girl—but. That’s talking about dodging. Shiro’s footsteps, which had so far come running through countless girls without breaking pace. Led Izuna to the answer. (Could it be—!) Just to check, she fired another bullet, this time rebounding twice, toward Shiro—but.
“…No, use…”
A bullet Shiro had already fired—intercepted it, after rebounding four times. (It really—is true, please?!) At this late hour, Izuna’s understanding was revised.
—With certainty.
This Immanity—this eleven-year-old girl. Was moving with a total grasp of all objects around her.
—Neither bullets nor NPC girls would suddenly come out of thin air. In the case of a bullet, one would check the position of the target, extend one’s arm, line up one’s sight, and pull the trigger. In the case of a girl, she would see you, then move, and then try to hug you. They attacked with a series of countless steps—through a process, deterministically. Which meant—you didn’t have to dodge. All you had to do was not be there.
—As a matter of fact, the gamer “ ”, who had become an urban legend in their old world—in other words, Sora and Shiro—in the FPS genre, crushed with hard-core gamers from around the world. The one who had set the unbeatable records—was not Sora, but Shiro. Her grasp of enemy movements thanks to her diabolical powers of calculation, combined with her deductions therefrom regarding their movement patterns and firing opportunities, gave her target-leading and attack-dodging abilities approaching precognition. She truly gave her opponents the illusion that the bullets were dodging her and chasing them.
(—I can’t believe this shit, please!!) Of course, Izuna had no way of knowing such stories of Sora and Shiro’s old world. What led Izuna to this conclusion was her Werebeast sense—yeah, right. It was her game sense that told her—this girl is more dangerous than that Flügel. Panicked, she looked around. She was hiding in a narrow space buried in stock. Facing an opponent who had intercepted Izuna’s launched-from-out-of-sight ricochet—with a ricochet. This position—was bad.
(—I gotta beat it, please!) To open her escape route, Izuna threw a bomb through the crack in the door.
—But before it could even fly out. A bullet that penetrated from outside—exploded it! (Wha—?!)
Booooomm—it went. From the blast roaring through the room, she quickly hid behind the stock and made it through a perilous moment. But the interception—that could only mean it had been known beforehand she would throw the bomb. Shiro’s running footsteps, unfazed by even this, finally approached the storeroom, as Izuna’s hair stood on end. (Bitch’s coming, please!!) Still running, she leaped—and kicked the door. Slicing through the smoke, Shiro flew into the storeroom. But, as a nearby rack crashed as she pulled it down at the same time, Shiro’s landing was obscured from Izuna’s ears. Listening for breathing—none.
(—No choice but curtain fire, please!) Still under the cover of the stock, she took rough aim and fired madly. Countless bullets flew. Ricocheting, they made the room a force-field hell. But—shortly.
She heard Shiro slowly exhale—and a chill jolted down her spine. Izuna jumped immediately. Kicking off from the floor with crushing force, she smashed through the little window and flew into the air outside the building. Looking back, in the room obscured from vision by bomb smoke, Izuna sensed. The sound of her entire bullet hell having been intercepted. And beyond that, the sound of bullets that bounced back and converging upon Izuna’s hiding place.
(—W. T. F., please?!) If she’d waited to flee another moment—even one second—the bullets would have rained straight through her body. But Izuna’s eyes were opened farther. Not by Shiro who had pulled off this series of events.
—But by something approaching overhead.
“Welll, it’s a pleasure to see you. ”
(The Flügel—Jibril, please?!) Timed to irrefutably suggest that she’d known Izuna would jump, an aerial ambush.
—When did she get on the roof?! Wheezing with astonishment. She might be a Flügel, but in this game, she was bound by physical limits. She couldn’t use tricks like magic, and she shouldn’t be able to fly, either. But, if she’d walked with her own two feet, there was no way she could have failed to hear—! In consternation, still, Izuna kept her thoughts and senses moving. She caught that a bomb was descending from Jibril’s hand.
(—It’s for cover! Please!) She decided on the spot. Even if she were to intercept the bomb, bullets would assail her from the cover of the explosion. Which meant—never mind the bomb. Shoot Jibril first and take it out second! In a judgment that took an instant lit
erally too instantaneous to be called a moment, she pulled the trigger. But.
“Your aim could use some work.”
Though her magic might have been sealed, the physical prowess of a Flügel still was neck and neck with a Werebeast. The bullets were fired in midair at short range, but Jibril dodged by sight, twisting her body. The bullets grazed Jibril’s belt and scattered hearts as they shredded and vaporized her clothes. The bomb intercepted next exploded with a flash and a boom. Jibril’s eyes, lining up her sight to fire a bullet through the smoke—
—Recognized the approach of a third bullet and went round. The bullets Izuna had fired—were three. The gunshots heard had been two—but the first had been to lead Jibril in evasive action. The second had been to take the bomb Jibril had thrown for cover and use it for cover herself. And the third was the real one—
“So—ah? Oh, right, I can’t fly?!”
Jibril, abruptly flapping her wings to dodge, yet her wings freewheeled in vain. Unable to right her posture, she took an inescapable strike to the forehead—
Just before that. Jibril definitely saw it. Izuna, disjointedly—turning her eyes in panic to a faraway building.
Suddenly—Izuna twisted her body and took evasive action as profound as was possible. Her hanging sleeve billowed and was pierced by a bullet from afar—which destroyed it. A hair’s breadth later, a second bullet from the same direction stabbed Jibril, who had just been shot by Izuna.
—This fact worked her beastly intuition. A blow that took back Jibril immediately after she’d been shot. (What if they planned this all, please?!) Fp—she lifted her head. To see Shiro, in the window of the building Izuna had burst out of, pointing her gun. But—(This posture is useless for attacking, please!) Just like Jibril just now, Izuna, forced to evade by the first shot, had no way of intercepting.
—However fine Werebeast’s physical abilities might have been, she couldn’t fly. To dodge a bullet in the air with no foothold—to accomplish this absurd feat, she’d “pulled out” her center of gravity. That was all she could do—it was too late to right herself. As she tailspinned down, Shiro’s barrel aimed coolly. Counterstrike: impossible. Evasion: impossible. Then—! Detonation. At the bullet rushing on through an inescapable trajectory, Izuna (—!!) grit her teeth loudly and flung up her arm. Her second hanging sleeve that she flapped up in the way of Shiro’s bullet was sharply pierced and annihilated. But, at the point of entry, the bullet scattered hearts—and disappeared.
“…That’s…you can, use clothes…as a shield…”
Never heard anything about that rule, Shiro muttered, impressed. Ignoring the girl, Izuna, using all four limbs, finally touched the ground. In the same motion, she bounded away in a sprint in the manner of a true four-legged animal. And Jibril, who’d been shot in succession, crashed headfirst into the asphalt.
—A moment’s silence. But she bounced up as if nothing had happened. With a gaze turned to hearts, Jibril looked afar.
“Master… Ahh, my lord…please be by my side! ”
Then she charged, smashing the asphalt in her wake. Charged—the three hundred meters toward the place from which Sora had sniped her.
—The exchange took place in only eleven seconds from Shiro’s original attack.
“…Hff…hff…”
In the storeroom, still clouded with smoke, Shiro was terribly out of breath.
—No matter how much like a precision machine she moved, how much she put a computer to shame with her calculations, her body was still that of a mere eleven-year-old Immanity girl, nothing more. All her real stats were reflected in this game as is, including her stamina. And on top of all that, just like her brother, she was a shut-in. Cursed by her eternal lack of exercise—her stamina was devastatingly weak. Going limp to speed up her recovery even by a little bit, just waiting there for something, she whispered.
“…I didn’t…hff…finish…her…”
“It’s not your fault. Anyway—”
Responding, three hundred meters away just a minute ago, was Sora. It had been exactly fifteen seconds since Sora’s bullet had hit Jibril. Jibril, having come to her senses, carried Sora into the storeroom on the eighth floor of the building where Shiro waited.
“Looks like it’s fifteen seconds until you regain control…also…”
Descending by Shiro’s side, Sora asked.
“…Jibril, did you confirm it?”
“Yes, with these very eyes.”
Ffp— Jibril bent by Sora and spoke.
“That she turned in your direction before you fired, unmistakably.”
Sora answered this report with another question.
“Hmm, I was lying still in wait, and I fired under the sound cover of the bomb’s explosion while holding my breath. But she dodged. A shot that took her completely by surprise, a subsonic projectile from a blind spot, during a diversion—”
“Jibril—could you dodge that?”
It was pretty much one of those Zen questions: Can you detect an unknowable attack?
“—That would not be possible. Might this be Werebeast’s sixth sense?”
But Sora smirked at this.
“Don’t be ridiculous. If they could do that, that wouldn’t be a sixth sense—it would be precognition.”
The so-called sixth sense was just advanced intuition made possible by the combination of five senses. If they could detect things about which they had no foreknowledge whatsoever, they wouldn’t have to lie that they could read minds. They’d be able to hold their own with Elven Gard without playing games like this.
“—In that case…”
“Yeah, no question about it—cheats.”
Sora scratched his head.
“Man, these are some lame-ass cheats they’ve got built in here. If we coulda finished her off in one blow while she was treating us like cake, that woulda been sweet—oh, well. All troops to Point Gamma. Jibril, grab Shiro so she can rest. I’ll go by a different route.”
“Yes, my lord.”
VIEWING FLOOR
“—Wha…”
Ino and Chlammy were dumbstruck at the sight on the screen. The crowd that exceeded one thousand, even forgetting their suspicion of Sora and Shiro, let out a great cheer. It was true they hadn’t finished her. But it was clear to see—Team Sora was owning the girl of the Eastern Union.
(What…was—that?)
But Chlammy was beyond surprise, doubting the spectacle before her. Taking a game the opponent presented and spinning it as if it were their own. With movements and tactics calculated too deeply to fathom, they’d led their opponent just as they liked.
(Shiro, the one the enemy was worried about the least, overwhelmed her in a head-on fight. They forced her into emergency evasion, then used Jibril, the one she’d been most worried about, as a diversion, and then, after getting her off-balance in the air without a foothold, sniped—)
[…Wow… Why, it’s just incredible…]
Even Fi, sharing Chlammy’s vision, interjected as if moved from the heart.
—Yes, tactics so perfect they were scary. But this raised innumerable questions. Though the answers might be somewhere in the countless signs that were in Sora’s memory but whose meaning escaped her—
(—How did they identify the enemy’s location? How is Shiro so overwhelmingly skilled in combat? And they acted as if everything went according to their plan. How did they grasp—no, control the situation so…?)
But more important, most important—
(—How did that Werebeast evade that…)
[Just as Sora said, why, that must have been an unknowable attaack.]
Yes, even if she had predicted she might be attacked at that time, to know the position—The words Jibril had spoken to Sora.
(She reacted before the shot…did she?)
[—It’s a “cheat.” A trick—why, they’re playing foul.]
(I see, cheating you can’t prove… They can just say it’s a “sixth sense,” and that’s that.)
Fi’s statement expressed how impressed she was while, with just a twinge of hostility, Chlammy quietly checked out Ino. No expression could be divined from his face—but it had to be the case he was shaken. But still, no sign to indicate that he was playing foul.
(I knew it—they knew this game. More than we do!) Still expressionless, Ino howled inside. How they could have known it so well? How they could have strategized so far in advance? It shouldn’t have been possible for anyone to know the Eastern Union’s game better than the Eastern Union—the questions had no end—but.
(…Calm down… Even so, it’s no use.) Yes, even so. It wasn’t as if they had a chance.
IN-GAME
“…Still, I must say.”
Jibril offered.
“—To corner the enemy with mathematics… Quite the novel approach.”
Point Gamma—i.e., the park Sora had found with a bad view. The park, surrounded by buildings, closed in by barriers entirely except for the sky and the front, was their new base camp, and Shiro was using its ground as her blackboard, furiously scribbling out equations. She screened through the locations Sora had uncovered where Izuna was likely to hide, applied curves of pursuit and backpropagation to calculate Izuna’s location probabilistically, estimated the diffusion using the Dirac delta, and then made generous use of particle filters and linear discriminant functions to further deduce even her expected movements. Jibril’s comment was praise from the heart for Shiro’s equations and Sora’s tactics, which had cornered Izuna. But Sora shook his head with a frown.
“…It isn’t some bold trick or anything. It’s necessary.”