Five sets of footsteps enter the rusty bridge of the ship, projecting outward at the front of the ship. No bigger than a classroom, it doesn't possess much within; there's six chairs, a three-sided section that make up the controls, and monitors above them. One of those chairs is the captain's chair, raised higher than the others. Further up by the windows is the helmsman chair, the ship's wheel in front of it.
It doesn't surprise Pitohui much that the ship is primarily automated, but to have a small crew is shocking.
As she and Team Betrayer scans the area, the LED lighting and the monitors flicker on. The ship, back to sailing, still has electronic life. Stepping closer to the console, another surprise is granted to the players: the voice of an AI. "Human response detected in bridge."
"Hi! I'm Pitohui."
"Greetings, Pitohui and company. This is the main computer of 'There Is Still Time'. I have been given a nickname. Please call me Clara. I welcome you to our control room. Please give me any instructions you have."
"Well, isn't this interesting," Anni says, crossing her arms. "Not often is there a machine that obeys human commands instead of attacking."
That is true. GGO's PvE element has human-made machines from the pre-war era that attacks players. The exception are Rei, Lievre, Daisy, and their fellow Arfa-Sys - to a degree, since Lievre did once conjure an Arfa-Sys army - but in general, they're allies. Aside from them, this is the first time in the environment that she's encountered a AI that isn't looking to kill them.
"Hi, Clara. Can you sail us?"
"I can. The engine is fully operational. I detect a large amount of water in various locations along both port and starboard sides of the ship, but the impact has been minimized by shutting the internal leak containment walls."
"Okay. Then raise them again. I, Pitohui, give you, Clara, a direct order: Raise all leak-containment partitions. No matter what happens, do not prevent the ship from taking on any further water."
"Understood. Opening all containment walls. Walls will not be closed until further orders." On one of the monitors, a diagram of the ship flickers. Doors that were once green switch to red, and the blue coloration begins to expand. The doors were the containment walls opening up, the blue representing the rising water levels.
Yes, Pitohui plans to sink the ship.
"So it'll follow any order, huh? Even one that sinks itself."
"It just means it prioritizes human commands over self-preservation."
"Are you insane? Why would you sink the dry ground under our feet?"
"...How long will we hold up, Clara?"
"Predictions will change depending on sea conditions, but at the present rate of water intake, I would estimate between two hours and two hours, twenty minutes until stability is premanently lost."
Winking to Eva, Pito, she answers, "We're in a death match here. It's not going to that that long, is it?"
"Miss Pitohui! I have a request!" Ervin, speaking louder than he has before, opens up his helmet. With faint mechanical sounds, it opens up from the jaw upward to his temples, revealing his character's face. A young man with a complexion shades lighter than her captain and with desparation featured on it, like a high school boy confessing his love on the school roof at sunset.
"What is it?"
"This ship still works, right? Please, pilot it to the northwest!"
"Ah, I see. You want to help out your old teammates who are stuck on the roof of the building over there, right?"
"Yes!"
Eva makes a grunt. David's face goes frim. Anni smirks. All three, as well as Pitohui, understands what will happen if Ervin's teammates get about the cruise ship. T-S might not have overwhelming power to eliminate the other teams but they have the incredible defense to survive attacks. As a matter of fact, Kureha got lucky to bypass their armor last time with armor-piercing rounds (created with the same method of modification Shirley made her bursting bullets) and a high firing rate. That alone gives T-S an advantage against most. Their defense is also movable, and in indoor combat, that's a boon.
"Sure, let's do it," Pitohui announces. "Clara, put us on, heading three-one-five degrees, full speed ahead. There should be a tall building breaching teh water, so infomr me when we are approaching it."
"Understood. I can perform this order."
"Th-thank you! Thank you so much!" Ervins bows in thanks.
Immediately, the ship starts to adjust its course. First there's a sensation of moving backwards, then a broad swing to the left. That's how it felt in the ship's interior as it turns hard to the right.
Pitohui looks to the other three. Eva and David both have an implied question on their faces. She shrugs and says, "The more the merrier, isn't that what they say? All right, what will happeen with the scan, now that we're on the ship?" Might be time to check this bad boy out..."
"What does this mean?" A new message is displayed on the Satellite Scanner that reads, "There are places within the ship displaying a large, lowercase 'i' mark. By swiping this device near them, you can temporarily access the ship's systems."
Fuka points to a side wall about fifteen feet away from us. "It'll be obvious when you try it. Like right here, for example." On the wall is the aforementioned mark between a dark monitor and a broken phone, right before the hallway creates an intersection.
My leg healed, I follow Llenn and the others to the mark. The short woman swings the terminal over the mark, then sets the holograph to be viewable to all of us. The result is a map of the There Is Still Time, cut into vertical slices like a axial CT scan of a body. Each slice represents a deck, and there's twenty in total.
Decks 1 through 5 were the quarters for the guests and crew. At the front and back of each end, stairs like the one we climbed were available on both starboard and port sides, while two smokestacks were present between the staircases. The stairs and smokestacks continued upward in the same spot on the upper decks.
Deck 6-7 had the same map structure, so they were moreso an upper and lower level. Present on the map is is a recreational area towards the bow, a large skating rink in the middle, and a restaurant at the stern end.
Deck 8 featured the restaurant again, but the central and frontal area changed. The front is the lower level of a opera house theater, while the central length of the deck is labeled the lower promenade.
Deck 9 featured the upper levels of the opera house and restaurant, the lower level of an outdoor theater at the stern, and a training gym that sits behind the opera house, closer to the tip of the ship. Rescue boats line the perimeter, though those boats are debris in thfe sea now.
Deck 10 completely fills the diagram of the map. From the bow is the helipad and the upper level of the training gym. A courtyard spans the length of the ship from the gym to the upper level of the outdoor theater. Within the courtyard are cabins, pools, shops, playgrounds, and other structures indicated by a colored legend.
Decks 11-17 had more cabins, with Deck 17 also featuring the ship's bridge. Decks 18 and 19, which started to be the roof of the ship, had more pools, jacuzzis at the bow, and basketball courts towards the stern. Deck 20, the smallest of the decks, was a oblonged area with more pools.
We're on front starboard side of Deck 1, the lowermost part of the ship if we don't include the ship's bottom. We can't see the place of the other teams, but I suspect MMTM and SHINC are on the same level as the rest of us. I wonder how we'll see the other teams in this new version of the Satellite Scan, and as if Zaskar knew my internal thoughts, the terminal answers my question.
"Scans will happen every five minutes and display all player names and locations for sixty seconds."
Checking the time, it turns to 1:19. Sixty seconds until the next scan. "Okay, we'll settle here, see where everyone is, then - Woah!" In the middle of my orders, the ship suddenly moves. Well, it was moving before, but the new movements are different.
"What is this? Are we moving? Where are we going?" Llenn wonders.
Her best friend replies, "Who knows? Doesn't really matter, does it? Where do you want to go, Llenn?"
"Wherever Pito is...if that's okay with you, Jaymes."
I look to M and Kureha. Neither protests, and if I know Pitohui, she'll be coming for us anyway. "Fine with me. But let's take care of anyone who comes between us, okay. We're here to win."
Thirty seconds later, the first scan within the There Is Still Time proceeds. Starting from Deck 20, it scanned the deck from prow to stern in a single second, then moved to Deck 19. Two individual deck sweeps later, the first positive scans come from Deck 17, within the bridge.
Obviously, it was the members of Team BTRY. The six-member team, however, was not shown with the leader's position, but the position of each individual member, much like how Battle of Bullets' scan operates by showing each participant's posiiton. In this manner, we can see the identities of the players. The scan proceeds to the sixteenth deck, the overlapping dots remaining on the map, giving us time to see Pito and her four companions.
"Well, well, first-class seating," Fukaziroh lazily states.
"Pito's right there! And Eva!" Eva, aka Boss and SHINC's leader. Llenn's rival in Squad Jam and her target today in SJ3. Interesting, but that's Llenn's concern. I continue my investigation of Pitohui's teammates. There's David, the leader of MMTM. Ervin, a name I don't recognize, but I suspect that was the armored bully from earlier, meaning he's T-S's traitor. And there's a fifth, either the traitor of ZEMAL or DEVA. Their name is...Annihilator.
My legs, the left one having healed minutes ago, buckles without cause. Falling on my butt, I feel all sensation to my face and extremities fall. That...cannot be. There;s no way... No, I'm just overthinking things. There are many people who could take that name. It's just a coincidence that someone with that name is here now.
After all, I watched Annihilator die in the town of Lindarth on the forty-ninth floor of Aincrad. I caught him just before he attacked Lisbeth. I forced him into a zero-health duel setting, disabled him by countering his attack, stabbed him with the dagger he used to paralyze his victims, and crushed his head under the waterwheel outside Lisbeth's blacksmith shop. I took his life in revenge for the lives he took, including my partner Koharu.
He cannot have survived.
"Jaymes? Jaymes, are you okay?"
"...Um, yeah, I'm good. Just felt weird for a moment." Strength returning to my knees, I take Kureha's hand and stand up. She eyes me skeptically, knowing me well enough that I'm lying. But she doesn't interrogate me now. I don't know what I'll tell her later. I did promise to tell her the truth of my story in SAO, what my friend Lueur omitted in his publication of the two years in Aincrad.
But how do I start the conversation of my darkest moment in SAO?
Back to the scan, it made its way down to the lower decks. MMTM made it on the ship, situated on the eighth deck. Four of the six-member team are present, meaning they lost one prior to boarding the ship along with David joining Pito. From that moment on, there were negative scans on the seventh deck, on the sixth, and on the fifth...
And all the way down to Deck 1, where my team, present near the front of the ship on the starboard side, is located...and we're not alone. On Deck 1, present near the front side of the ship on the port side, is the four-member team of SHINC. We're parallel to each other, both standing at the end of our respecitve hallways, right at the intersection.
Fifty yards separate us.
"Get across the intersection!"
"Hya!"
"Yo!"
"On it!"
"Raaaah!" Dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut!
Yelling those orders to the girls, I take my photon sword out and barely intercede the onslaught of bullets from a machine gun. I can make out Rosa, who owns a PKM machine gun, and its' only my expert ability to deflect bullets that majorly protect the girls. Had the four of us moved a second later, they would have been turned to swiss cheese.
I wouldn't know until a moment later that Fuka's backpack had been hit, right in the pouch where the plasma grenades used to be. Let's just saw I'm thankful for M's foresight, even though he had a different reason for Fuka to load those grenades.
Once the girls were across, I retreated back to the fore side with M, waiting for the hailstorm of red lines and bullets battering the wall at the horizontal hallway's end to cease. Once it does, I disengage the Ameno Murakumo's blue blade and strap it back to my waist, trading it for one of my SPB Night-Sky MK4 pistols. I lean into the intersection.
Rosa is still there, her MG now mounted on a bipod. "Now go!" Bullets zip across the hallway again - and this time, it would be foolish of me to intercept without hurting myself first. But I do watch as one of Rosa's teammates, Tanya, trots down the same hallway, adjacent to the line of fire.
M notices and understands their strategy too. The men are cut off because of the gunfire, and though I could make it down to Tanya with Hyper Awareness, that momentary lapse in dodging to attack Tanya conversely opens me to be damaged by Rosa. I can't attack and dodge simultaneously, only in succession. I could go after Rosa, but SHINC's two hidden members are there as well.
And I'm not some space wizard, so it's difficult enough to deflect the firepower of a machine gun. Kirito and I might have developed the skill but it isn't perfect. Judging the perfect timing and positioning of each bullet is good for a short time.
So there's only one thing to do: trust the girls. "Incoming!"
Llenn nods and turns to Fukaziroh. "Fuka! Shoot one into the hallway!"
"Hell yeah!" Fuka grabs one of her MGL-140s from the ground, dropped from her flopping to cross the hallway, and crawls back to the intersection. She lets the launcher's muzzle poke out around the corner and shouts, "Take this!"
"Wait!" Kureha's call comes too late. As for why she shouted, there's two reasons: One, none of us besides Fukaziroh knows Rightony from Leftania, so Kureha was wary of the plasma grenade going off. The second is the mechanic of the launched grenade.
Shooting a grenade from a launcher is different from throwing one by hand. In the former's case, a grenade will not go off until it is beyond seventy-five feet from the shooter, determined by a certain number of rotations by the system. But even if it doesn't explode, the projectile could do some damage by physically hitting a person.
If that was Fuka's aim, then it failed by a hair. The grenade avoids knocking out Tanya by an inch, then continues onward in a perfect arc towards the other end of the hallway. It doesn't touch the side walls and it passes Rosa's head, colliding with the back wall on the port side fifty yards away from us.
Kureha's warning was for good reason: Fuka had fired a blue projectile from Leftania and she had not truly aimed at Tanya. And if you need help converting yards to feet...that's 150 feet, double the range of safety of a grenade launcher.
"Oh shi-"
The plasma grenades explodes, naturally incinerating anyone in its vicinity. Rosa, along with Anna and Tohma, disappear behind the blue blast. Tanya is well outside the blast radius of sixty feet under normal means, but everyone knows what happens to a grenade in action movies when thrown inside a structure: it becomes much more forceful. That's why Tanya's body is punched throught the air, colliding with the starboard wall of the hallway.
And the force split down the intersection too. Lightweight Llenn flies backward while the heavier Kureha and Fukaziroh tumble on their backs.
"Oh nooo! I shot Leftania by mistake!"
"I told you to wait!"
"You dummyyyyyyyyyyy!"
While the girls tumble down their end of the hallway, M and I collapsed on our side. M didn't move much since he was more interior than I was, but even the big man was caught. I recall being launched into a wall back first, then landed flat on my face about fifteen feet away from the intersection, just shy of two yards away from M, and groan in annoyance.
I now understand why Kureha says I built a team of psychos.
"Damn youuuu!"
"Rnng!"
"M!"
Confused, I lift my head up. There's Tanya, still alive and standing, her Bizon pointed at M. She shot him in the leg, But that's all I can do as the residual effects of the blast throbs in my head and arms. I can't even feel my right arm...another injured limb? Crap.
So I set my head down on the ground, left-side down and watch as Tanya - who for some reason only shot M in the leg and nothing more. The Bizon is a SMG that can be switched between semi-auto and automatic modes, She could have killed M with ease.
But instead of shooting him, Tanya leaps above the big man as he tries to stand. She latches on to his huge backpack, then pulls out a thin string of nylon and wraps it around M's neck. She then drags M towards the side wall, putting M between her and the rest of us on both sides of her. Only Llenn and Kureha are on their feet, P90 and Draque L Shamal up and aiming.
"Hey! M!"
"Dammit!"
"Rrrgh..." M tries to fight back as he tries to wriggle free of Tanya, but she's got a good hold. He tries to grab the rope at his neck, but it is so tight that his large fingers cannot slide underneath the string. As a matter of fact, the only reason he's losing health now is because the system determined his scratching is breaking through his skin.
"I'll never let go, even after death!"
"Grugh..." M starts to suffocate and his HP is dwindling at a steady rate. If we do nothing, he'll die in a minute or less.
"Wh-what should I do?"
"He's obviously saying 'Forget me, just shoot!'"
"Shut up, dumbass! We'll hit M and M only!"
"Huh? You mean the bullets won't go through him?"
"They might, but he's got the backpack with the shield inside right behind him!"
"Oh yeah, that's no good. M's guardian spirit has ruined the day. The thing that protects him will be his downfall. Cruel, cruel irony. Really encapsulates the whole tragedy of the human condition in one image."
"Stop acting so nonchalant!"
"Hey, you want me to finish the job, then? That's the only surviving Amazon, right? We could pull back, then I'll shoot six grenades once we're a few dozen yards away. They'll both die."
"You'll hit Jaymes as well, and he's injured!"
"Oh Jaymes is still alive? Eh, he can do his dodging thing and be fine!" Well fuck you, Fukaziroh. Just because she's right doesn't mean I want to waste Hyper Awareness for something like this. It'll be eight minutes before I could activate it again. Meanwhile, I'm still downed, though my head and arm are feeling better.
"M..." If only I could help him, but shooting or impaling him at this point to reach Tanya will not be to his benefit. I rather not add "friendly firer" to my reputation. So all I can do is watch his falling health point speed up towards the final third its original value. He drops to his knees, slumping down.
At that moment, I decide to settle on my own knees, say screw it, and grab my sword in an attempt to scare Tanya off him, but then the unexpected happens: M jumps towards the ceiling. He gets high enough to sqiush Tanya between him and the ceiling, and puts enough power to damage the tiles.
And he does it again and again and again to our amazement, causing Tanya to gasp each time. He kept going and going that Tanya started taking physical damage, but she did not let go for a good while. And when she does, M immediately removes the rope from his neck.
"Bwahhh!" His body screaming for air, that prevents further falling of his health now lingering at twenty percent. Nearby, Tanya lies on the carpeted floor, half dead and alive. I see her reach for
"Ha!" I fire the Ultra Fire Gun/Gauntlet and latch the tether to Tanya's back. I use the strength of my healthy left arm and yank Tanya far behind M and I down the hallway. I don't look at where she lands, but we hear the explosion. and both M and I take damage from the shrapnel.
"M! You're all right!"
"Yeah...somehow."
I collapse against the wall, glancing at M as Llenn, Fuka, and Kureha come to our aid. Kureha kneels beside me, her question on my face. I shake my right arm to answer her. Looking ahead, I lock my eyes on M, with Llenn and Fukaziroh around him. "You good?"
"Yeah..."
"Way to go, M! I knew you would do it!"
"Hahaha..."
Doubly annoyed by Fuka's nonchalant nature about the last two minutes, I slide up the wall to stand and glare at her. "Thanks for nothing, Fukaziroh."
"You're welcome, Captain. I think I definitely exemplifed the words of 'high risk, high thrill, heartless game." Three tongue clicks echo in the hallway, but Fukaziroh ignores us anyway as she addresses M. "You know, I was wondering, though... Why didn't you just turn around, M? Then either Llenn, Kureha, or Jaymes could have shot her from behind."
"..."
"..."
"..."
Three silent glares come from me, Kureha, and M, while Llenn vocalizes the words on our faces. "Why didn't you say that earlierrrrrrrr?"
Sighing, Kureha shakes her head and faces me. "Well, forget that. We got another issue."
"What?"
"Fuka blew a hole in the wall." As if to emphasize the reality of the situation, the There Is Still Time starts to tilt to the left.