Five gray dropships and two much more alien looking spacecraft flew in confident formation over the shore. They approached an incongruous mountain coast, with three distant towers shining a beam into the sky.
"We hit these three generators, and the barriers will fall?" a commanding woman said.
"A small section, yes," a robotic voice answered.
Puffs of blue plasma flashed in the air. A stubby alien in triangular armor swiveled its head to the formation of intruding ships and panicked at their approach.
The rear hatch of one of the dropships opened, revealing a space marine in green, cybernetic armor. "Good enough. Johnson, drop the Chief at the first generator then head to the third. The Elites will punch right down the middle."
"Roger that," Johnson's gruff voice said. Over snowy slopes, the flight broke formation, as two dropships split toward the right side tower, onto a clearing in the trees. The flashing plasma waves recurred faster and faster above the two ships' intended landing zone.
"Charlie foxtrot!" one of the pilots said. "Tower one approach has active triple-A!" The two ships followed close, nearly nose to tail. A shot from a ground based battery struck the rear dropship and sent it hurtling into the fore.
A mounted armored car dislodged from its hook and crashed into the ground below. The rear ship rolled out, plummeting down after it. "Mayday! I can't control her-"
"Pelican down! Pelican down!"
"Brace yourselves! We're going in a little hot!" The green armored Chief grabbed a laser cannon from its rack. The open back dropship descended fast. Engaging in three, two, one…
In a quiet Shibuya apartment, in the dark not long before sunrise, a small television glowed in the living room. Light blue interface elements popped up on the screen, a shield bar, a minimap, an ammo indicator. Across the room, Ryuji Sakamoto, a boy with unenviable posture, tangled with the cord of a headset connected to a game controller.
A gray alien walked onto the middle of the screen, and a microphone icon the same light blue color as the rest of the interface blinked over its head. A soft spoken girl's voice said, "You didn't skip?" Her name, or at least her screen name floating over the alien's head next to the speaker icon, was Chiaki.
"Was I supposed to?" Ryuji said. He spoke with a hushed voice, but it wasn't that late into the night, as far as he could tell. Or, if it was, they were pretty far into the game. A minute wasn't going to make the difference whether they finished or not.
"It's fine," Chiaki said. "It is a pretty cool cutscene." She switched weapons, from a long barreled laser rifle to a bizarre purple coil that fired green tracers, clearing the space immediately around the landing zone. "Just to make sure, you don't have the skull from this level already?"
"Uh…" Ryuji couldn't think of which skull was in this level, so probably not. "I don't think so."
"Alright. We can pick it up this run," Chiaki said. "I'll show you when we get there." She turned to the river, the first landmark to cross.
Ryuji sprang into action after her, sweeping around the area only to find alien corpses covering the grass all around him. They piled up with the rhythmic pulse of Chiaki's tracer gun, faster than he could look. He followed her wake of destruction, up to a formation of rocks that provided cover from a turret on a watchpoint over the coast.
Chiaki crouched behind cover on the right flank. "Laser for those," she said. Ryuji stepped out from the rock and charged a blast from his laser cannon that punched straight through the turret.
The turret exploded into a cloud of plasma and metal debris.
As she pushed on to engage the next post of defenders, Ryuji stood back and destroyed the remaining fortifications before linking up with her at the next drop site. A third dropship, diverted to the Tower One advance, brought an armored car with a minigun turret.
"Hey, can I ask you something?" Ryuji hopped on the back of the car with the turret. Chiaki got in front and drove into the ravine towards the tower. "Is Chiaki your real name?"
"Yeah," she said. It was rare for someone to get a screen name without any numbers or random symbols at the end, much less their real name. A moment of muted laughter leaked over Chiaki's microphone. "Is thunderdragon99x yours?"
"Wh-? N-No," Ryuji said. "My name's Ryuji."
"That'd be a pretty awesome name, not gonna lie." They passed several hovercraft in the ravine, trading fire all the way up to a clearing before the tower grounds.
A large, hovering tank patrolled the open approach and locked on to their car with a crackling burst. Streams of rapid fire tracked them too, from a secondary gun on the tank, and a plasma turret above.
Chiaki circled to the right, slowly opening one angle at a time for Ryuji to clear an enemy outpost with the rattling minigun. She exited the car. "Take it back around." This time the diversion was his role, and Ryuji hooked the car back across the clearing.
The whiz and static behind him gave Chiaki her window to eliminate the alien gunner on the turret and in front of the tank. And the next time Ryuji looked its way, the tank exploded in a flash of pink and blue. The stakes were night and day apart, but the act, the deception, the shock…
It was almost like taking Kamoshida's crown.
They pressed on, into another firefight inside the tower, shooting across each other. Ryuji tried to follow her positioning, but Chiaki made all her moves and all her decisions too fast, and he couldn't keep up until she was waiting for him on the elevator.
At the top of the tower, a miniboss with a huge hammer guarded the control panel they were trying to reach. "How did you get so good at this?" Ryuji said as they engaged the last guard.
"Lots of practice." Chiaki fired a stream of pink crystals across the control room. "I've played shooters like this for a long time. That's how you get good at anything, you know?"
"Yeah, I know what that's like." Ryuji charged forward and bashed the hammer wielding brute in melee. A clean final blow.
"Something you're good at?" Chiaki said. "As long as you don't mind sharing."
In another cutscene, the shield generator in the first tower powered down. The second tower shut down too, blue light fading away. But the third tower still stood.
It was uncanny how much the game seemed like the Metaverse. Or how the Metaverse seemed like a huge game. Ryuji actually felt himself come close to saying it out loud. "I used to be really good at track," Ryuji said.
"What happened with that?" Chiaki led the way back to the elevator. Outside the tower, two VTOL fighters landed closer to the coast, and they took those, flying toward the third tower.
"I… I broke my leg. Couldn't keep running after that." He didn't much want to talk about the whole incident with Kamoshida, explain the whole thing again, and she didn't need to know.
"Sounds like this happened a while ago," Chiaki said. "Has it healed? Oh yeah, the skull! This way!" Her chopper suddenly veered off to the right toward the center tower.
The platform was clear, and after they landed their choppers, the skull was right up the ramp at the end of the rat's nest. "Wait, it was right here the whole time?" Ryuji said.
"Yep, that easy." The room brightened, just a bit. Ryuji looked around at the morning twilight pouring in. "So, what are you doing in the morning?" Chiaki said.
"Ugh! Don't remind me," Ryuji said. "I don't wanna think about exams right now." The last day of exams was tomorrow, or, maybe today. In just a few hours. It was already today, wasn't it? On some restless nights, halfway from midnight to dawn, there was a dead hour without any traffic on the streets, but Ryuji couldn't remember exactly now but he must have missed them.
"You too, huh?" Chiaki said. It was some small relief to know that he wasn't alone in his exam struggles, that there was someone else in the same boat. "Nervous?"
"Nah, it's not that," Ryuji said. "My grades suck anyway. And the exam's almost over. Too late to do anything about it now."
"I guess that's up to you to decide," Chiaki said. "If you don't like studying, it can be hard to do for its own sake. That kinda goes for everything else, too."
Track came naturally to him, back when he first started. He liked it, and he was good at it, and now Ryuji couldn't tell which came first.
"But even if something's hard at first, I wouldn't want to give up on it right away," Chiaki said. "At least, I wouldn't want to make a habit of giving up, because that could spread to the things I do enjoy. Do you know what I mean?"
"I think so." It wasn't that long after Kamoshida broke his leg that his grades started plummeting. It wasn't that long after Makoto started hounding him that he started ditching classes completely. It really did spread like a disease. He didn't hate school so much before then. He wasn't such a poor student before then.
He wasn't so mired in despair before then.
As they finished the level, and as they said their goodbyes and both got ready for school, Ryuji kept those thoughts with him. Kamoshida broke his leg, but he didn't tank his grades, and he didn't keep him out of school. Ryuji gave those up himself. Was it too late to change that?
That was up to him to decide.