『[System Window]

[Mission Line ~Antagonist of the Underworld~ (Main)]

[Description: While your earlier activities could've been excused as coincidence or the opportunism of a Player, your later actions have made it clear that you and your Company are openly hostile to several, if not all, major factions in SBC Glocken.]

[Goal for Mission Completion: Secure all 「Error: Unknown "Named NPC" type」 from all factions with active «Sub-Mission Lines» active against them.]

[Penalties for Failure: Temporary or Permanent loss of the ability to secure flagged NPCs.]

[Faction Retaliation Progress]

Internal Office of Strategic Resources: 4%

(Progress Halted—Permanent. Although some of your more concerning unauthorized Missions fall outside of the IOSR's jurisdiction and policies, ultimately they remain a de facto ally to all Players and your interests seem to broadly align.)

Glocken Defense Force: 24%

(Progress Halted—Indefinite. Made connections with the highest authority in the GDF. While this group's stance to your Company may change in the future, for now, their internal factions are no longer a threat.)

Black Tower Association: 72%

(Progress Halted—Temporary. System currently processing external events for calculation, Progress Bar and Reputation Status will update upon completion.)

(Possibility—Low: Change in «Hostility» status upon completion. However, certain Player actions may influence the outcome.)

.

.

.

Yokohama Universal Industries: 56%

(Progress Halted—Permanent. … … …)

.

.

.

Other Factions: 4% (Approximate from Aggregate)

(See «Details» for further information breakdown.)

.

.

.

.

.

Fuller Corporation: ?%

(Progress—Unknown. Not enough «Intel».)

(Warning! This Faction's actions have always been shadowed in mystery, and are as numerous as their business interests are broad. However, there is little doubt they are still undertaking activities that would directly threaten your objectives.)

(Find out what their latest conspiracy is. Before it's too late.)』

—

Argo was not having a good day. In fact, since she was wading knee-deep through murky sewer water that had long soaked through her leggings and boots, it was safe to say she was having a pretty shitty day.

She took some small consolation that the bandages wrapped around her legs would keep out the more "unseemly" debris from working their way into her outfit. But like SAO, she still didn't have the option of turning off her sense of smell.

It had been a while since they'd picked up the pace. Initially their tempo was fast and silent, a pair of shadows that seeped seamlessly into Glocken's underground waterways. But as time wore on and the ambush they were expecting didn't happen, they gradually lowered their tense posture.

It was exhausting to stay on alert all the time.

They had once again found themselves in the catacomb-like sewer tunnels, eerily devoid of signs of either the dead or the living. But at this point, it had become glaringly obvious that nothing was here.

At first they tried banging the pipes again. Then they escalated to popping explosives and a couple of rounds into the darkness, which sparked off of the walls.

Eventually, Argo herself simply threw caution to the wind.

"What are you doing?"

"Lightin' a torch."

"...From up here?"

"Well, I also wanna see if there's anythin' that's gonna be a problem down there."

Argo tossed the flare into the air a few times playfully. She lit it and let the flare drop into the abyss. A glowing red star, gradually fading out of sight, confirmed to them the sheer nothingness below.

It wasn't even that long ago since they'd left an area of the sewers where they could still hear activity from the wildlife. Now, they were truly alone. And from their original position in the interior, to another of the branching exterior waterways, all they'd seen were piles of detritus shaken loose from the bombardments above ground or the unreadable remains of posters dating back to the earliest days of Glocken.

"Hmmnn~." Argo hummed to herself.

None of this was to say, of course, that either girl was feeling particularly thrilled about plunging themselves thigh-deep into fetid sewer water just to get around. But it looked like that wasn't their choice to make.

Argo gazed upon the "new" section of tunnel before them, glancing briefly at the unhelpfully vague 『Glocken Sewer Tunnels, Industrial District's East Section (Exterior)』 that appeared at the bottom of her HUD.

Something that looked like lumpy gray piles of dirt, but very obviously weren't, had spread throughout the tunnel. As far as they could see these ulcerous gray masses consumed the brickwork into lumpy footpaths, bore cancerous holes into the walls, and it even built up powdery outgrowths on the ceiling, which drooped down towards them like imitations of stalactites.

Even the ubiquitous service lights no longer cast their glow here.

"Nests?" Argo asked in a whisper only loud enough for her radio mic to pick up.

"The remains of them," Sinon said, without bothering to turn her comms on. "They're supposed to be green and glow faintly. They don't lose their color like this unless they haven't been maintained for a long time."

Sinon poked one. The gray structure disintegrated at her touch, and it fell like compacted sand that had been shaken loose.

"«Diver Scarab» nests… No use checking for materials now that they're dry."

Sinon started to lift herself up onto the walkway, then dropped back down into the water once it was obvious that there wasn't an easy path forward. Trudging through water wasn't great, especially if you needed to fight. But at least it was flat, stable ground.

Sinon for her part was still annoyed, but this wasn't much different from how she usually was. Having an extra gun to watch her back, admittedly, was a nice change of pace. It wasn't quite like traveling with Kirito and company, but still, for all the blonde girl's faults, Sinon would still firmly rate Argo fairly well among all the players she'd normally meet in GGO.

"Above average." Which may as well have meant "in the top 10," considering the caliber of person she normally met in pick-up groups.

"Oi. Sinon-san?"

"Yes?"

"Just in case…Ya wouldn' happen to have anythin' else that deals incendiary damage? Bug types tend to be vulnerable to fire."

"The ammo is for armor, not insects." Her answer was immediate.

"Exoskeletons count as armor. For bugs." So was Argo's.

"Then let me know what kind of crafting supplier you have who can pump out box loads of Mk211 ammo in bulk. Until then—Exosuits get HEIAP, everything else gets regular ball ammo and energy weapons."

"...Spoilsport."

"Do you want to get showered in bug guts after I pop one open like a grape with exploding shot? Or are you fine with crushing them with regular 12 gauge?"

Argo thought for a moment. "Nn. Fair point, blue girl."

"I'm not interested in taking a bath in sewer water to wash off either, Argo-san. …Wait. Hold up."

Sinon snapped her light off.

"Do you see that?"

"See what?"

Argo frowned. An enemy?

"The blue torch there. Ahead."

"?"

Argo squinted her eyes into the darkness. Sure enough, her eyes weren't playing tricks on her—there was still nothing different.

"Uhhh… Blue girl, where?"

Sinon pointed with her PDW. "Where I'm aiming, directly ahead of us. Same floor."

Argo snapped her mono-goggle back on.

"The light is bobbing now. Moving left to right."

Sinon's aim swept slowly to the right, apparently tracking the target. But again, in Argo's vision, there was nothing. Not even a faint thermal bloom like she would've gotten from a candle flame.

Argo looked at Sinon's back with an expression that conveyed the meaning: "What kind of nonsense are you spouting right now?"

Nevertheless, Argo readied her gun. The info broker didn't read Sinon as the joking type; the prickly girl very obviously wasn't in the mood for that kind of thing. And with the sewers now empty of their original residents, only hell and the dead could name whatever unknown threats they might face now.

"...It's gone."

"..."

For a moment, neither of them moved. But it was only a moment.

Sinon advanced forward on the right. Argo automatically took the opposite side of the tunnel as they moved.

There was no cover here to protect them. And, turning around was asking to get flanked. No use in waiting to see what happened; the only way was forward.

[I see a closed door on the right.]

[Aye. I see it.]

Argo, being a shotgunner, went ahead and took point. Sinon automatically compressed the formation behind her.

"Ya know how to clear?"

"Angles and comms. Leave the lecture." Sinon whispered back.

A brief discussion ensued.

The plan they decided on went roughly like this: Argo would pop a flashbang and push to the left to clear. Sinon would bring up the rear and swing around the threshold to clear the right side. The room's format wasn't revealed on the map since neither of them had been here, so the importance of active comms was going to be emphasized as they adjusted plans on the fly.

Night vision only, no lights. Nobody willingly used open flames in GGO unless they had no other choice, so if their adversaries were using something as primitive as an open flame for illumination, they probably didn't need to be worried about being blinded by enemy white lights. Night vision in the dark was a more potent advantage than dazzling the other side with their own weapon-mounted lights.

Argo looked behind one more time to confirm Sinon was ready. Her companion nodded slightly in response.

Creak. Tink!

Argo opened the door slightly. She tossed the flashbang in, and immediately slammed the door shut.

Thud!

BANG!

She flung the door open into the room.

[Large room! Pushin' long!]

Sinon was close behind her as she headed to the opposite side.

[Open hallway. Direct front of us.]

She reported calmly. They'd have to check that last.

…Still no contact.

"Wah—!"

Argo's foot caught on something. She yelped, glanced down, grimaced, and then moved on.

[Bodies! Watch yer step!]

They moved fluidly through the room. Weaving their way around standing storage shelves and over foot obstacles, such as corpses or over-turned debris. With Argo working her way clockwise and Sinon counter-clockwise, it wasn't long before they completed the square.

Taking a brief detour to check the open hallway, all they needed was a flash of light to reveal an empty space with a single, ascending ladder before they declared it "Clear!"

Finally. They had a way out.

—

But before they did anything else, they had a scene to examine.

FSSSSHHHHH!

As it hissed angrily at her Argo tossed the burning flare into the center of the room. The room was cast in an ominous, deep red glow; their shadows bobbed and cast long streaks of darkness as they wandered about a scene of death.

The right of the victors was the right to loot. Ordinarily players would've started stripping the room and bodies for any loot not distributed as «Mission Rewards» by a System Window, but even at a glance it was obvious to both girls that this situation wasn't normal.

"That's a lot of bodies."

An observation bordering on understatement. Now that the whole room was illuminated, Sinon could properly take in the whole scene of carnage.

"Ya," Argo added, "total squad wipe."

The signs of a fierce battle were everywhere. Every single wall was pockmarked with bullet holes and energy weapon scorch marks. The bodies they had occasionally tripped over lay scattered across the room, either as single uniformed soldiers or mounds of unidentified, partially scorched insectoid corpses. Punctuated between each other by piles of spent brass and wide, blackened patches on the floor where grenades had been set off.

Sections of the concrete had visibly melted where it had been a plasma detonation instead of a standard frag.

Sinon squinted her eyes. Tired as she was and with the mangled state many of the insect bodies were in, it took a while for her brain to recognize what she was looking at. Her turquoise blue eyes widened slightly in confusion.

"«Granite Spiders»?"

Argo turned. As soon as she said that, it clicked for her as well.

"The gray thick-skinned bastards? Don' they only spawn in the «Abandoned Quarry», east of here?"

"Yeah. They're not native to Glocken. In terms of insect-type mobs, I've only seen «Diver Scarabs» in this region. I've killed spiders on the lower floors too, but those were all «Purple Venom-backs» and we left their territory a while ago. Too far out."

"Ya say that, but distance didn' stop these critters from makin' it over here."

"That's because Venom-backs are prey to Diver Scarabs. In fact they're the only things that can eat Venom-backs. But they probably wouldn't consider something with the exterior of a rock as food.

…But, you're right. How did these stony guys get here?"

'A mystery…'

Sinon was perplexed. But, perhaps more than that, she was intrigued.

Argo nudged one of the uniformed bodies. Now with the mystery of the "invaders" (upgraded from "attackers," now that they knew they came from outside of the city) resolved, they needed to figure out who were the victims that destroyed a room trying to survive against them.

Sinon inquired. "Recognize the uniforms?"

Argo stooped down and rolled one of the bodies face up.

'Goddammit.'

And immediately groaned.

The color was washed out in the red nitrate glow of the flare, but she recognized the square-cut uniform of Fuller's R division, with its signature line running down the sleeves. Plus the equally recognizable integrated combat helmet/goggles combo of their Private Security troopers, who lay further away around the room.

"Unfortunately, I do. Along with an answer fer why these spiders thought it was migration season."

Argo didn't bother elaborating further and busily rummaged through the body's pockets.

Unlike Players who only dropped the high-value sellable materials from their inventory and their currently equipped gear for collection after they died, the bodies of defeated NPCs needed to be manually interacted with for loot. For monsters this meant using a skill like «Harvest» to extract materials, but in the case of humans it just meant searching their pockets and bags for items.

Sinon took Argo as her cue. But…

'This is…'

Thinking it odd, she abruptly moved on to search another body's pockets.

"Anythin' on yer end?"

Sinon shook her head.

"No weapons, no medical. Not even loose rounds in the pockets."

Argo was expecting this but still pursed her lips in frustration.

'They stripped the dead of anything valuable or classified, but were in enough of a hurry that they left the bodies behind.'

Clearly, Fuller Corp was up to something. She unconsciously brought her hand over her mouth as she thought.

This wasn't a big revelation for Argo on its own. In the process of trying to locate「Reincarnators」 around Glocken, she had scoured everywhere from the most affluent heights of the city, to its darkest corners. And inevitably, that resulted in her noticing that an uncomfortably large number of her operations and investigations kept turning up a certain corporate name in her personal notes and her in-menu «Mission Summaries».

The problem was that she had no idea what exactly was Nero's interest in Glocken's underground. His hands were in so many fields of interest and backroom deals, it was genuinely difficult to narrow the list down.

'Something related to Reincarnators? No, he didn't have many of them to begin with, and I made sure they were out of play immediately after I took out Zulu Compound.'

Not to mention all the operations she had—and was still—running to "secure VIPs" from major factions all across the city. She would've known if Fuller Corp, or anyone else for that matter, had made moves on them. Or, god help them, if they'd somehow found more of her missing fellow SAO victims.

'A tertiary interest at best.'

She pondered again, crossing that off the list.

'The electrical infrastructure…is in a different area. They wouldn't need to be down here because of that.

Something related to monster research… possible. It's a big part of their activities, both in their public image and their covert projects, and it would do a lot to explain what we've seen here. Graveyard silence, dead bodies, and the remains of an escort unit large enough to both defeat a tough-shelled swarm enemy, and strip their dead of all of their gear without being slowed down.'

Going through her mental checklist, Argo quickly evaluated and dismissed scenarios based on the information she had. And still, she didn't have a single solid clue what to make of what she was looking at.

In other words, nothing was certain.

It all returned to the increasingly-likely possibility that whatever he was doing was completely unrelated to her Mission Line's objectives. Only that its consequences were bad enough that it would affect even completely unrelated activities.

But as if to answer her, the system's «Mission Window» appeared in front of her with a new update.

'Motherfu—'

『[System Window]

Mission Line Progress updated!

[Started: ~Antagonist of the Underworld~ (Final)]

Faction Retaliation Progress updated!

Fuller Corporation: 90% (Approximate)

(While one plot has been dismantled, the traces of another conspiracy begin to unravel.)』

"..."

Argo stared harder at the system window, futilely willing it to display further information. She sighed and ran a hand across her face.

'I would've liked proper intel to be certain. But, even the absence of information can be revealing on its own.'.

It wasn't a great situation. But, she'd worked with less before.

…Still…wasn't 90% excessive? Wasn't this unfair?

No other faction had a percentage that surpassed 80%, and suddenly there's one that was almost full?

She had killed and destroyed so much of Fuller Corp's resources, including a lot of stuff that wasn't even directly tied to her primary objectives—purely because she figured "Hey, might as well while I'm here. Better now than having to deal with it later." And yet here this shitty «System Window» was slapping her in the face with a message that basically said "Hey dumbass, you're 10% away from failure."

Argo squeezed her eyes tight against the headache she could feel growing from her frustration.

"...Let's get topside. We've wasted enough time stayin' in one spot already. Place gives me the creeps."

"Roger." Sinon agreed with not much resistance.

The sniper's eagerness to leave an area she wasn't equipped to fight in was evident.

Argo frowned slightly at Sinon's immediate response, but then cracked a smirk. Obviously, a sniper wasn't going to be too thrilled about fighting in a CQB environment and would be in a hurry to get out.

This was its own source of unfair amusement for the shotgunner. But more than that, she loved the girl's honesty.

It was refreshing for Argo to hear someone, who seemed to neither know nor care who she was, voice her thoughts unreservedly. It seemed to her like a very, very long time since she'd been spoken to as Argo, the party member. Not the Commander, Argo of the Wolfhounds.

The leader of the last SAO Players.

At this feeling of nostalgia, Argo's mirthful smirk quickly collapsed into a much more complicated expression.

"I'll go first." Sinon said. "I'm the only one of us with a one-handed gun. I can clear the area around the manhole more easily."

Argo stared at the soft-spoken sniper's backside as she mounted the ladder.

"Hey. Blue girl?"

"Yes?"

"Would ya…" Argo opened and closed her mouth once. "Would ya mind holdin' the area fer a moment when yer up there? I need ta make sure we aren' followed."

Sinon stared at her silently for a moment, a moment which seemed to stretch itself into minutes. Her expression was unreadable beneath her muffler.

"...Do what you want."

She turned around just as quickly and ascended the ladder.

'Would you mind working with me again?' The words were left to die in Argo's throat.

'This is a bit dangerous.' The company leader thought. Left to her thoughts in the empty darkness.

Even Argo was aware that she was being very unguarded around Sinon. A non-SAO stranger, no less.

Although GGO was a game, Argo wasn't here for leisure. The very nature of her work—of her guild's work—necessitated a certain kind of posture and mentality. It was only one of the many reasons why the WolfHounds largely only had former SAO players among their ranks… but it was definitely the main one.

Yet in spite of this, she'd found herself increasingly unguarded with Sinon. They hadn't done much, just walked around the "wilderness" of Glocken's underground and talked. But was this much different from the kind of work she'd do in SAO?

'I guess Sinon-san is more irritable than flustered when she responds, compared to Kii-bou. Her straightforward responses to my nonsense are just as entertaining, though.'

Argo rubbed her cheeks.

When was the last time she'd cracked a smirk this often?

Not the real, mirthful smiles that would've hurt the corners of her cheeks if the System bothered to track that. But they were definitely more real than her usual, deliberate affectation to mimic her reputation as «the Rat» of SAO.

The spirited and teasing young girl. Friendly to everyone, yet friends with nobody. Surrounded by people, but alone among a crowd. Whose hazel-gold eyes seemed to stare straight ahead in attentive anticipation of what came next, but reflected in her irises were only the blurry images of a past which stubbornly clung to her present, even now.

Argo went to shut the door behind them. A precaution, although belated, against pursuers sneaking up from behind and shooting them in the back.

She tapped the frame and selected an option from the menu. The outline for where to place explosives for a trip wire trap appeared in her vision, although she was already spawning the equipment from her inventory.

She wrapped her hand around the cold metal and started to swing the door shut.

Creeeeeak.

—She stopped abruptly.

The expression she wore was perplexed, and became increasingly so when she thought of something. A memory so much more recent to her past, yet still so frustratingly muddy as if it had happened hours instead of minutes ago.

'When Sinon-san said the flame disappeared…did we hear the door creak?'

[—]

A/N:

I've been experimenting a bit with how I want to display the System Window. I'll nail it down eventually.

I may pause for a bit to get the next parts ready first. I have an Intermission chapter completed, but I think it would only make sense when taken together with the chapters that come after it.

…Also, please let me know if there's an uncommon "tactical" or "military" term that I forget to add a glossary section for. I've been losing track of those lately and in previous chapters.