Part 1: Deception Signaled By Smoke and Red Berets
July 5th, 2026, Kureha
"You sure it's fine you're here? Does Mister Kikuoka know about this?"
Jaymes sighs, hinting he's annoyed, but it seems directed at the person Kureha spoke of, not herself. "Yeah, he knows about it. Granted, there isn't much to do except oversee Kazuto's progress and the Underworld's."
"How's that going?"
"...He's alive, for all that's worth. The harder thing is lying to Asuna and the others. This will get my mind off of it for a bit."
Kureha nods and eyes their surroundings. "I understand. Don't push yourself too hard, then."
"I won't. Thanks, Momiji. I owe you big time for troubling you with this secret too."
"Just know it will be the best outing for me and the worst for you," she responds with a smile. As the start of the tournament approaches, Kureha and Jaymes gather in a large pub with the city of SBC Glocken, GGO's central hub. Calling it a pub may be underselling it. To Kureha and Jaymes, Americans by birth, it feels more like a saloon-styled entertainment center with all the screens hanging from the ceiling and the number of people it could accommodate. That's just the ground level of this place.
Not only are the participants here, but so is the audience who'll watch the live feed. Ten minutes after their deaths, players will be returned here to join in the festivities of seeing their team dominate or be dominated - if they aren't wiped out at the same time as them.
Kureha, who scans the bar, has already identified several teams, two of which are seeded. She spots the group that eliminated Llenn and Fukaziroh moments before she and Jaymes won the game. That team is T-S, decked out in science-fiction armor. They almost seized victory in a way that would have made no one happy. For the entirety of the match, they stayed in one around, a castle region, and rode their bikes along the wall. ZEMAL and the two girls were eliminated from long-range fire atop those walls, which became T-S's downfall. Jaymes and Kureha snuck up on them, and the former used his unique evasion ability, Hyper Awareness, to draw their fire while Kureha, holding on to his back, eliminated half the enemy with gunfire. Then they split off to eliminate the remaining half.
They did not appear in the pub after the match ended, knowing their near-victory would have been slighted, and it was. Online forums have called them cowards for their tactics. Hopefully, they'll actually fight this time.
The first-seeded team is called LPFM, containing members of LF, the prior champions (Llenn, Fukaziroh, Jaymes, and Kureha), and the third-place members of PM4, Pitohui, and M. LPFM is the official team name of the group, named by Pitohui, and last night was the first time four of the six teammates have heard of it, and there were some protests to it.
"Ell-Pee-Eff-Em? It's too hard to say, Pito!"
"I'm glad you noticed, Llenn! That's part of the plan! Every time an enemy team reads our name off the scanner, they'll have to say the entire 'Ell-Pee-Eff-Em' name! Who knows, maybe they'll bite their tongues and suffer damage! Not all combat happens down the barrel of a gun!"
"Oh, really..."
"That's not the issue!" Kureha growls. "There's six of us! Why is only four people represented?"
Pitohui chuckles. "I couldn't find a suitable spot to put 'Jay' and 'Kay.' Besides, Momiji, you're technically represented with the 'Em' there."
"Hmm... You know what, there are four girls, who say that isn't for - Wait, no, don't confuse me by using my real name!"
Since LF and PM4 were merged for this round, that left only one more team to be seeded, belonging to SHINC, the so-called "Amazons". To Llenn, Fukaziroh, Jaymes, and Kureha, they're only teenage gymnasts. Beyond those three, fifty-four other teams competed for the remaining twenty-seven spots in one-on-one matches the previous evening. Memento Mori, fifth in SJ2, qualified the fastest. So did other SJ vets, such as ZEMAL, who placed right behind Memento Mori in SJ2 after a dismal performance in SJ1.
As more squads enter, the audience's murmurs would reverberate with them. Kureha, wanting to scout the competition beyond the more likely competitors that she arrived far earlier than most of her team, keeps her eyes frozen on the entrance alongside the captain of Crimson Squad.
There's the team that MMTM wiped out on the snowfields the last round, and one of them had a camera that uploaded the whole thing with live commentary. That guy somehow got popular off that, and he promises to provide more live commentary this round.
Next is the team that Fukaziroh bombarded in a railroad section in SJ2. The problem with them is that they use an optical gun that fires lasers instead of live ammunition, which is virtually useless in PvP combat as the vast majority of GGO players have anti-optical defense fields. Just to emphasize that, only Kureha has an optical weapon, her Deneb Kaitos rocket launcher, which is helpful against large environment enemies but can bypass the defense fields of players too. She only uses it if the situation calls for it.
Will they change things up or keep the optical weapons but come up with new strategies?
There's NSS, short for New Soldiers, a group of war history-buffs. They dress the part, too, with outfits ranging from American during Vietnam, Imperial Japanese, and other wars in history.
Then finally, another of the big players arrives. The saloon gets quiet as the six-man team of Memento Mori appears, all wearing their trademark Swede camo. Kureha can't see their loadout right now, or anyone's for that matter, but she's fifty-fifty on MMTM. Having come close to victory twice now, she expects they'll change something up, but prior experiences tells her that they may stick to the status quo on weaponry. Five assault rifles, one machine gun that could be a sniper of sorts in semi-automatic form.
MMTM has a score to settle with Kureha's group. In SJ1, they lost to Llenn and M; in SJ2, moments after Jaymes' solo elimination of two teams and nearly a third, they had LF caught by surprise, but SHINC interfered. Later, MMTM had Pitohui's team cornered in a log house and eliminated all except M and Pitohui. Pitohui put on a performance that rivaled Jaymes' own massacre, if not more impressive and brutal.
Following them is the team led by the sole survivor of Jaymes' massacre and eliminated by MMTM when they snuck up on LF, but more famously, the person who Llenn kissed live between both events, Clarence. Not many people know she's female, giving her avatar's androgynous appearance, but those that do, like Jaymes and Kureha, feel sweatdrops on their foreheads. Not only is she a wildcard in personality, but she's also one in presence, for she comes in a two-person team.
Kureha unconsciously growls in annoyance. They hadn't seen Clarence, and by extension, the woman in the group to enter next since late May's excursion in the newly released White Frontier map. Following Clarence is Shirley's group, KKHC, the team in hunting jackets. She hears someone murmur about how Shirley was the only other person besides Llenn to nail Pitohui. Shirley shot Pitohui in the head. While it may have seemed to onlookers that PItohui was grazed, Pito and M knew the truth: Shirley had almost eliminated Pitohui with only a sliver of hit points remaining.
KKHC barely passed the prelims, for their weapons are unlike any other. Instead of using machine guns or some other rapid-fire weapons, they all use bolt-action rifles that must be reloaded manually after each shot. Shirley's excellent sniping without the use of bullet lines got them through the ordeal, but that's a one-on-one fight. Kureha has known the woman since she, Jaymes, Rei, and Zeliska met her (and Clarence together) last November in a dungeon, but back then, she was adverse to hunting players. There was nothing different in the wintery lands in May. But after yesterday evening's preliminaries, Kureha figured Shirley's hiding something fierce.
KKHC enters a private room, and soon after, a video showing an interview of the sponsor, a gun-loving novelist in his fifties. Inspired by Kirito and Sinon's teamwork in BoB III, he sponsored the first Squad Jam. Apparently, he didn't do so the second time; it was taken right under his nose but returned for the third one. Llenn and M received his autographed books as a grand prize for winning the first bout, as unwanted those rewards were.
He gives no clue what the special rule is, and if nothing annoyed Kureha, that did it.
Five minutes later, the time is 11:40 am, and the air of the pub is getting festive. Bets are being placed on the number of shots, both live rounds and optical rounds, that will be fired in the game, an impossible number to guess. Most of the teams are present, and the audience is larger than ever, and that's just in the pub alone. Who knows how many people are watching it live from across the Seed games, like Jaymes' friends in ALO, or the real world via livestream.
With the restriction on participants' arrival being ten minutes later, three teams had not made their arrival at the pub, two of them being T-S and SHINC. Kureha isn't too worried about the former, though the fact they got Llenn and Fukaziroh at the last bout's end kinda irks her; she awaits the Amazons and, most importantly, the other four members of her team. They are, after all, the only reason she's here.
Six minutes later, SHINC strolls into the bar as if they own the place. The camo-clad group is greeted with cheers that would have rivaled that of LPFM had they arrived later than they did. But SHINC is well-deserving of their reputation as one of the more solid teams present-maybe more solid than LPFM. And like LPFM, they have a secret weapon.
While Kureha has more GGO experience than most of the team, the most experienced fighter in LPFM is Jaymes, a survivor of the SAO Incident and a main component of the Assault Team who sought to beat the game. He was partially involved in the Death Gun incident that troubled GGO just before Christmas, though on his part, it would end in a trap set for him, Kureha, and Zeliska by Itsuki. After that, name a gaming incident, such as the Ordinal Scale Incident, and both Jaymes and Kureha had some involvement in it with his friends. But his experience and skill with a blade are not the danger when facing him, but his Hyper Awareness evasion skill. He's invulnerable to damage for nearly three minutes with some limitations, but it comes with a catch of a long cooldown time. It works even when he's carrying another person, as demonstrated when he and Kureha cruised around T-S last time without taking damage. And unless you know to look for the strange waviness of air around his body, one will never know it's activated.
But SHINC's weapon is beyond one man-it's a monster of a gun. It's the PTRD-41 Anti-Tank Rifle. Seven feet long in size and firing massive 14.5 mm bullets, the gun was used in SJ2 to demolish M's armored shield. LF was there to watch it in happen in action, shocking them and the audience. Whispers float around about the anti-tank rifle as the team's leader, a woman of massive size commonly called Boss, enters the pub.
SHINC's usual outfit is a silenced Bizon SMGer, two semiautomatic Dragunov snipers, two PKM MGers, and Boss' silenced sniper rifle, Vintorez. It's not silenced by a suppressor or silencer but is built to be a silenced weapon. Their common strategy is to box in their opponents with a torrent of machine guns and sniper firepower from a positional advantage. If the enemy survives that storm, they cannot move, allowing Boss and the small, speedy Tanya, the owner of the Bizon, to finish them off. If the situation demands it, it'll be the anti-tank rifle held by the buff, PKM-toting drawf Sophie that makes an appearance. She didn't fire it last time; that was tall, black-haired Tohma, one of the Dragunov snipers.
Of course, Kureha's seen the opposite strategy occur. Sophie, Tohma, the other PKM holder Rosa, and the other sniper Anna, could simply fire into empty space, making the enemy believe they're safe, and end up under fire from Boss and Tanya. Crimson Squad, or LPFM in this game, has no coordinated and calculated strategy that extensive. If it weren't for the fact Llenn and Fuka knew their real identities, Jaymes and Kureha only knowing they're high schoolers, it would be a mystery how SHINC pulled their moves off.
They, Memento Mori, and LPFM were the favorites to win. As SHINC walk through the pub, they cross paths with MMTM's table, and the team's leader greets them. "Hello there, ladies."
"Oh, hi there," Boss replies with a brief pause.
"It was a shame we couldn't square off properly last time. It just never seems to be in the cards."
"Indeed. Well, that's lucky for you." When SHINC unintentionally came to LF's rescue, MMTM scurried away before the newcomers and their regrouping prey could pin them down.
"Let us endeavor to attract luck's favor this time, then. By the way...Let me be honest. Our greatest enemy in this fight is not you. If we end up as the last two teams, then yes, but not until that point. The same is true of you, isn't it?" Kureha may be distant from the two teams, but one of her passive skills enhances her ability to eavesdrop on conversations. Jaymes, too, possesses this skill, so they both have their heads turned towards Memento Mori and SHINC leaders' as they walk from their table towards the entrance to the pub, aware of who their true enemy is. For a moment, she believes MMTM's leader returns the glare, but it is interrupted by the murmuring crowd announcing their teammates' arrival. It wasn't needed, though, as the two watched the other four walk in.
"Why does it always have to be just in the nick of time?! It's just getting ridiculous at this point! It's bad for my heart! You've got to be kidding me!"
"Geeeez, I'm sorryyy! Listen, I'll buy you an iced tea. And any snacks you like!"
"As if we have time for that!"
Two small figures in brown robes enter the pub. One is decked out in pink combat gear and a matching hat, the other in camo. Behind them is a woman in a body-fitting suit, and a large man wearing a t-shirt.
"Oh, what's the harm if we're a little bit late?"
"Looks like we made it in time."
"Ugh... You know Kureha's gonna-"
"Why are you four late?!"
"-gonna yell at us..."
If Kureha could fire lasers from her eyes, it would incinerate the petite blonde in front of her.
Last time, Jaymes, Kureha, Zeliska, and Rei were early to the saloon while Llenn and Fuka nearly made it in time. According to them, Fukaziroh had a stomacnache because she ate ice cream before diving in. Now, once again, Fuka is the reason they're late. Until moments ago, she was in the game Alfheim Online with her friends on a nonstop gaming marathon. Having gone through this recently with Jaymes, Kureha scolded Fukaziroh like the older woman's a child.
"Fuka... Did you learn nothing from when Jaymes wasted a whole weekend almost without logging out? It's idiotic, unhealthy, and...just idiotic! How are you older than me?"
"S-Sorry, Kureha, I really am!"
Kureha sighs and looks toward Llenn. "You could have sent a message..."
She gazes pointedly at Jaymes. "I sent you one, right?"
He nods. "Yeah, I read it. That's why I wasn't worried until time began winding down, but I figured you'd show up in the nick of time again... Yes, I should have said something, Kureha, but stop being angry at us. Save your rage for the enemy."
"I will..." As the team gathers together, they're fully welcomed with praises from the audience. If Memento Mori and SHINC weren't someone's favorite to win, LPFM filled that spot. How couldn't they? Llenn's speed and advantageous size, Fukaziroh's firepower with her trusty twin grenade launchers, Pitohui's all-around combat ability and loose screws, and M's formidable sniping capabilities and powerful shield make them a strong group alone. Add Jaymes and Kureha, their names projected across Glocken as the third and tenth-ranked players of the previous Battle of Bullets and the ones who won the last SJ for their team, and what is seen is a frightening team of six, even more so than when LF revealed it had six members instead of two.
As Kureha scans the room as time winds down, she notices that the other participants, not just Memento Mori and SHINC, have their eyes on them. While Pitohui soaks in the cheers of the audience like the famous star her real-life persona is, and Llenn looks around for someone in particular, Kureha gets into a competitive frame of mind. She heard from SHINC and Memento Mori that they're the real enemy. Everyone would love to knock out LPFM as quick as possible, and whoever does so would be seen as a potential favorite for a moment.
"Thank you for your patience, contestants. Teleportation to the waiting area will begin in thirty seconds. Is everyone ready for battle?"
"Hey." She feels a hand touch her shoulder, the touch alone recognizable by her without her having to see who it is. She's known it for half her life. She turns anyway, looking into the reddish-brown eyes of the swordsman. "We're going to win again, got it?"
She nods. "Of course, I'd expect nothing less from Lucky Red, the Pink Princess, the Pink Devil, and Satan herself." She glances past him towards a table at the far side of the room, where a few members of Crimson Squad sit. Rei, Zeliska, her Arfa-Sys Type-X Daisy, the Type-Z Lievre, Itsuki, Bazalt Joe, and Sinon. Except for Lievre, they send reassuring nods and cheers to their teammates when the teleportation process begins.
In ten minutes, the third Squad Jam begins.
