Vol 2 Chapter 1 (2/2)

Having received the simultaneous answer from the six girls, Karen ended up inviting friends (?) from Tokyo to her place for the first time.

The girls came over on their way back from club activities, which was why all six of them wore uniforms on a day off.

Karen prepared a large quant.i.ty of sweets and tea. After eating a little, Saki asked ‘Can we borrow the TV?’.

Karen gave her consent, but to her amazement, the girls chose to watch a recording of their battle on the Net-connected TV.

The game’s management had compiled the highlights of the SJ battle broadcast into a video that was around an hour long.

It was possible to watch it either while playing GGO, in other words, watching it from within thegame world after diving in, or by watching it in the real world via a Net connection like this.

Karen was considerably surprised, but having given them permission, she could no longer take back her words. 2 weeks had pa.s.sed since the end of the SJ, but she had not seen the broadcast video yet.

In the first place, she had not even been to GGO since then.

The reason was complex: having gone that wild in SJ, she had a strong 〝I’ve had enough〟 feeling, and she ended up being reluctant because of the incident with M mid-way.

‘Then it’s the perfect time to do it! Let’s watch it for research!”

Having been forcibly persuaded by the younger Saki, she had watched the digest thus far.

“Saki-chan, you and the others sure are serious, huh……”

Seeing Saki and the others watching the battle that they had lost many times over, reflecting on it, and using it as material for research, Karen remarked like an old lady,

“Well of course! It is a part of our club activities after all!”

“Come again?”

‘GGO and rhythmic gymnastics have some sort of link?’

Karen tilted her head at those unexpected words. Saki stopped pressing the video playbackb.u.t.ton, and,

“Come to think of it, we have not told you about it yet, huh ──”

Began talking as the representative of the club.

“Around last April, in other words, after the three first-years joined, our teamwork was horrible”

“Is that…… so?’

Seeing the currently close group of six, this was extremely surprising, thus,

“I can’t imagine that at all……”

Karen remarked honestly.

“It was awful. It wasn't on the level where we would fight upon seeing each other, but whenever we had to perform together, we’d all fall apart…… Under the university’s coach’s instructions, we underwent training using FullDive technology── Karen-san, do you know about 〝FullDive Sports Simulators〟?

“No.”

Karen could guess what it was based on the name, but shook her head. Saki then explained.

“It’s training with an avatar with your physique using an AmuSphere. It’s currently popular among open-minded coaches, as there’s no danger when suddenly trying risky techniques.”

“Wow……”

Karen felt admiration. Thus far, Karen had only used VR technology to play (GGO), but in essence, it should be used for something like that.

“Of course, in the end, it’s just a simulation in terms of real physical strength, but it could be used to practice moves. It would be different if there were in-dive tournaments, but there aren’t any yet. Though there are rumours that they might eventually be held.”

“It’s educational. So your moves are so splendid because you've had training like that, huh.”

“Ehehe. But, astounded by how bad our relations.h.i.+p was, or more like how poorly we matched each other(6), our coach had to throw in the spoon(7) on technique coaching in the simulator!”

At Saki’s words, Kana, who had been listening quietly to her story from behind,

“Po~n!”

Ill-manneredly tossed a marshmallow that was on the table, as she made the sound effect for throwing,

“Okay!”

The boku-girl Risa opposite her easily caught the marshmallow that flew for a long time, barely moving her face.

‘Bravo!’

Karen applauded in her mind.

As expected of a rhythmic gymnastics club. The thrower had excellent aim, and the catcher also did an excellent job. It did not feel like they would miss no matter how many times they did it. It also appeared that they could do it at longer distances.

That was probably how they managed to pull off the stunt of loading their pistol by catching amagazine thrown from afar.

“Hey! This is another person’s abode!”

Saki rebuked them in an old-style speech pattern, and then continued explaining.

“Astounded, our coach told us. 『First, become a 〝team〟. We can talk then.』. When we were troubled by how we should do that, the answer that came was──”

“I see. Games.”

“That’s right! With VR game party play, we would aim for a single goal, right! Besides, since we can have avatars in a different world, we can temporarily forget RL restraints, we thought.”

“I see……”

Karen listened, half in surprise, half in excitement.

〝RL restraints and so on〟 described Karen perfectly. A woman who could not look at her exceedingly tall self and had thus escaped to a virtual world was right here.

“We played a different VR game at first. It was the kind where you could have boisterous adventures on an unpopulated island. But, we ended up losing interest after around a week. And there was no improvement to our relations.h.i.+p. Eventually, just when we began to think thatgames were useless, we discovered GGO, and thought 〝Why don’t we try a slaughter game that is extremely different from our real selves then?〟”

“I see. And then, when you tried it, it all turned out w──”

“That’s right! Using guns to exterminate monsters and killing others is so exceedingly unrealistic that it wouldn’t come to mind, right. Nevertheless, all of us got into it── we formed a 《Squadron》 by the name 〝s.h.i.+nkura〟(8) and became engrossed in playing as much our free time allowed.”

Squadron was the name of teams in GGO. A group formed together with a.s.sociates. It would be equivalent to a 《Guild》 in a fantasy-type game.

“And so, although we still quarreled a lot along the way, lots of things happened, and the result is as you can see. After fighting monsters or other players, and going through numerous experiences of being on the verge of death, all of us became friends.”

“That’s lovely!”

Saying this with a smile, Karen pondered.

Although they began playing to unify their team, they became the runner-up of SJ, so it was considerably important to them as well. She herself was winner of the tournament, but that was entirely because of M’s support and because luck was on their side.

“And so, we are aiming to win the second SJ that might be held, and we will continue to do our best!”

“Huh? ──Not, your club activities?”

“That too! Thus, we hope to receive Karen-san’s, no, the 〝pink slaughterer girl〟LLENN’s unforgivingly harsh commentary about the following battle scenes, and how we died, please!”

‘Please!’, the chorus of five followed,

“O-okay……

LLENN acquiesced with a bitter smile.

For the next hour or so──

Karen watched how the battle to the death between her and the six high-school girls’ avatars unfolded.

The video was rewinded again and again, changing the camera angle at times, and she answered Saki and the others’ questions.

At the lake that became the stage for their first battle,

“Yeah, I thought I was done for when I was sniped by Tohma. That sniping was truly magnificent. If it had been just a bit higher, an instant death would have been registered. I was saved by M-san’s rapid action here.”

After disembarking in the wilderness,

“Eh? The internal discord……? Ehm, how should I put it…… He had his circ.u.mstances, but couldn’t tell me about them clearly, so we ended up quarreling over a petty misunderstanding, you see; he was no longer able to continue with SJ, and tried to bring me, the leader, down to be able to drop out of the tournament. But, we resolved the misunderstanding afterwards. In the end, he did show up like he was supposed to, right? It wasn’t really a plan to use the leader as a decoy, but result-wise, that was the cause of our victory; strange, huh……”

At the first battle in the wilderness,

“As for the battle with Tanya, I believe that I probably won because I was much smaller than her. It was really a close call. I heard the sound of bullets coming from behind.”

At the scene where she was shot by Boss,

“I was startled by Boss’s silent gun. What a scary weapon it was. I didn’t notice it at all, , and let my guard down completely falling for your trap back then. I would have died there if mymagazine wasn’t hit instead.”

At the point when she ran away from the machine gun shower,

“I had no knowledge about plasma grenade barriers. I just didn’t have any other options, so I tried it out……”

After she began counterattacking and took down Anna,

“When I was glared at by Rosa with her machine gun pointed at me, I thought that I was done for. I wonder how many times I had that thought that day…… As for M-san’s sniping later on── it didn’t produce a Bullet Line. Since he sniped by manually aiming. Sly, but it can’t be helped.”

After the beginning of the grand one-one-one fight against Boss,

“The fact that that I was shot in the chest but the bullet hit the scan terminal, saving me, was…… a complete fluke. I think I’d probably be NG(9) next time. Because you all would have followed suit.”

And, at the scene of the final conclusion,

“Ah, yeah, 〝P-chan〟is the name of the P90 and── Ah! Don’t worry about it! I used it as a s.h.i.+eld myself! I’ll probably buy another identical one! And dye it in pink!”

After the end of the video and Saki’s group’s review meeting,

“There’re still some sweets left── want some?

Karen enquired, and

“Su~re!”

Carefree smiles and a fully in-sync answer came from the six. There wasn’t the slightest deviation. They were awfully close.

Karen offered the remainder of the heap of sweets that she had bought.

She thought that she had bought too many of them and figured that she would just give the leftovers to her niece or eat them herself, but it seemed that they would be cleaned out today.

Despite their small bodies, all of them a were big eaters. Even so, none of them put on weight. Typical of a sports club.

Holding consommé-flavoured potato chips in her right hand, Saki enquired.

“Karen-san, I’ll ask frankly. If a second SJ is held, do you plan to partic.i.p.ate?”

“Hmm……”

Halting her hand that held some s.h.i.+okombu(10), which she had bought a large amount of as it was her favourite dish, though the other six hadn’t really touched it, Karen pondered.

She had magnificently won the first SJ. Considering herself back then, it was a most spectacular victory that was beyond her imagination. All the more so, for her feeling of satisfaction.

At the same time, there were a lot of issues. Getting into situations where it seemed that she would die many times over, due to carelessness, losing her P90 and so on.

The belief that she will try to do better if another one was held went up into smoke in her mind. There were no other team battle tournaments on that scale, and she had many dreadful experiences during the tournament, but she could not deny that she got the fruits of battle, the chance to go wild and had enjoyed it.

‘If I get an invitation from Pitohui, or team up with M──’

She had thoughts like that as well, but when she thought about M’s strange behaviour near the end of the last battle in the previous SJ, and Pitohui (in RL) who was probably the cause of it, she hesitated recklessly partic.i.p.ating with them.

No, truth be told, even if she was invited this time, the possibility of her rejecting the invitation was high. Though she believed that she would not end up quitting GGO.

As for Pitohui, the next day after the SJ,

『Yay, congrats！』

She received this excessively short congratulatory message, but no other messages thereafter. Was she busy with work?

She had not received any contact from M either; well, he probably had nothing to say, so he kept quiet.

“A second one…… unless something really extraordinary happens, the chances of me partic.i.p.ating are low, I guess…… Although some issues still remain, I can’t deny that I’m feeling like 〝I’ve had enough〟. Also, the team I had formed with M was only for that time.”

After Karen answered honestly,

“I see…… We are half happy, half disappointed. The thing that makes us 〝happy〟 is that a formidable enemy will not be taking part. But the thing that makes us 〝disappointed〟 is that we thought ‘We’re going to beat you next time!’”

Saki replied, representing her group's opinion. Feeling the fighting spirit of the girls staring at her fixedly from behind──

‘Your motivation is greater than mine. If we have another battle, I believe I’ll definitely lose……’

Karen thought, but kept quiet. Instead,

“But, if a second one is going to take place, is it really going to be held this quickly?”

“Hmm, I don’t know. But, if someone contributes money like what happened for the first one, I think that it can be held relatively easily.”

“I see, it’s sponsor-dependant, huh.”

At that point, the discussion on SJ was over, and thereafter, they continued with girl-talks until around 1700 hours.

The topics kept jumping from RL to GGO to RL again in succession.

The rhythmic gymnastics club girls talked a lot about themselves, and, at the same time, asked about Karen as well.

Meanwhile, Karen told them the story of her height complex and even how she began playing GGO relatively easily.

She also told them about how she had got over it; how it resulted in resolutely cutting her hair without telling anyone anything, and surprised her elder sister’s family, who lived above, so much that they jumped in surprise; and then how they suspected that she suffered a broken heart, and had thoroughly questioned her about it.

‘I probably haven’t told anyone aside from my old, close friends about my height complex that had tormented me for nearly 10 years’, Karen thought.

‘And now I have no problem telling it to younger girls that I have just met.’

Karen was once again surprised by the changes brought about by GGO and the SJ.

『Worries will torment you for as long as you are worried. Just forget them. Just abandon them, like throwing out old things. If you throw them out, there will no longer be a need to worry whether you should throw them out.』

Karen had heard such words somewhere. And her personal experience showed that they were right.

“Hey, that’s… a P90, right! Can I see it?”

“I want to see it too!”

“Me too!”

The six of them that pestered Karen into showing them the P90 air gun hanging on the clothes hanger,

“This is the first time I’ve touched a gun-shaped object in RL!”

All said unanimously.

‘True, it’s not something that high-school girls would buy, huh’, Karen replied.

In the first place, it was a toy meant for people who were at least eighteen years old.

And in the first place, it was not really something that female university students would buy.

Thereafter, they started talking about RL hobbies, and Karen asked the six girls about 〝Kanzaki Elza〟, the singer-songwriter who was currently her favourite.

As expected, all of them knew of Kanzaki Elza, who was in the midst of a sudden rise in popularity.

And of course, the girls told her that they did not have all of her songs, thus Karen set Kanzaki Elza’s alb.u.m as the BGM(11).

“I want to go to her live performance, but there are few tickets. I can’t get my hands on them no matter how many times I try to order them.”

Karen complained, and Saki,

“We could buy them if they were still on sale! The tickets for live performances have been excessively expensive lately! We want to spend our allowance on some other things as well, so it’s impossible for us to spend that much on tickets! We already spend quite a lot on GGO’s connection fees!”

Complained like a high-school girl would. The others nodded while making *mhm mhm* sounds.

Indeed, 3,000 yen(12) every month on GGO alone was quite the amount of money for high-school girls. Karen only now recalled that her parents were affluent.

The topic then changed,

“Karen-san, it’s already spring break for you, right? Being in university is nice, huh……”

Saki and the others, who still had lessons for at least another month, until the last third of March, gave bitter expressions.

At any rate, these girls will go to the same university in another 2 or 3 years. In that case, they would become her juniors.

“It is spring break for me. I plan to return home to Hokkaido within the week.”

“I’m so jealous! You can dive as much as you want to!”

Said the j.a.panese beauty with a bob cut, s.h.i.+ori, but Karen shook her head,

“Since I’ll be going back home, I won’t be able to play games during that time. I won’t be bringing my AmuSphere either.”

“Oh. Is that so?”

“It would be bothersome if my parents saw me playing. Since they probably know about the SAO incident. I’ll be taking a break from GGO for awhile.”

“You do know that we’ll be training even more during that time and become stronger?”

s.h.i.+ori said, peering into Karen’s face.

‘Well, you’re all already quite strong.’

Karen thought, with the face of the machine gunner Rosa, s.h.i.+ori’s avatar, floating in her mind.

“Do your best. If it is all of you, you can aim to win the next SJ!”

Karen said with a carefree smile, thus,

“Mmm…… Truth is, I wanted you to partic.i.p.ate……”

Saki spoke out what she truly thought.

NOTES

1. ^ A jō (畳, tatami mat) is a traditional j.a.panese unit used for measuring the size of a room. It is equal to 1.653 square metres (the size of a Nagoya tatami mat).

2. ^ Common orient clam (Meretrix lusoria).

3. ^ Milana uses the first-person p.r.o.noun watas.h.i.+, but in katakana. This is probably because Milana is not a native j.a.panese speaker. I wanted to use a weird font to account for this, but blogger doesn't really give me much to work with.

4. ^ Boku (ボク) is a first person p.r.o.noun usually used by boys.

5. ^ This one was actually ojama s.h.i.+masu (お邪魔します, lit. (excuse me for) disturbing you), a set expression used when entering someone’s home. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure how to translate it to keep the nuance.

6. ^ The original text used a modification and negative form of the expression uma ga au (馬が合う; lit. to suit a horse, to be a good match with one’s horse), which is used in the sense “to get on well with someone”.

7. ^ Throw a/the spoon (匙を投げる, saji o nageru) is the j.a.panese equivalent of “throw in the towel”.

8. ^ s.h.i.+nkura (新クラ) is made from the first kanji of rhythmic gymnastics (新体操, s.h.i.+ntaisou) and the first two kana of club (クラブ). That’s where s.h.i.+NC came from, but I decided to leave the romaji version here because the name is in j.a.panese in this case, and no mention of the alphabet version is made.

9. ^ Abbreviation for “no good”.

10. ^ s.h.i.+okombu (塩昆布) are thin strips of kombu (edible kelp from the family Laminariaceae widely eaten in East Asia) cooked in soy sauce etc. then dried.

11. ^ Abbreviation for “background music”.

12. ^ About 24 US Dollars / 23 Euros / 16 Pounds Sterling. Depends on the current exchange rate.

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