Chapter 153: Which One Is the Detour?
Commentator: "Aaah! Metius lands the combo!"
What the hell was that? Amdrava's response had been perfect. He'd guarded against the aerial kick, held off Metius's approach with a grab, and tried to safely block a high-power but high-commitment move… and Metius landed the hit before the guard even registered.
Commentator: "No, that… Did he just slip it through the gap in the guard? Hahaha, is that really humanly possible? Even knowing it's coming, there can't be many people who can pull that off…"
Just as the commentator said, that wasn't something you could handle with reaction speed alone. It was the kind of fatal strike so precise you couldn't even call it acrobatics—something you'd only pull off if you knew the scripted sequence from the start. That was insane. Even if I'd been the one piloting Amdrava in that situation, there'd be no answer to a blow slipped through that perfectly.
Commentator: "Amdrava gets launched into the air! And Metius's Gauge is maxed! Is it coming? Is it coming… It's here! Metius's Super slams home! KOOOHHH! Even 'K' can't win! She's too strong—far, far too strong, the undisputed queen Silviiiii!!"
The rest went without saying. A full combo executed with zero mistakes, capped off with the Super flying kick… finish. Sure, Metius had lost half her HP, but this was a crushing victory—a complete domination you could easily call flawless. I closed the video, titled "K vs. Silvi," and felt the truth of Katzo's words sink in.
Rakuro: "The techniques themselves seem imitable… but her reads are so beyond the pale it doesn't even make sense…"
The match—recorded a year ago, between Katzo and Sylvia Something-or-Other—had Sylvia taking the first round, Katzo fighting back to claim the second. Then in the third, with Katzo's Amdrava at seventy percent HP against Sylvia's Metius at half… Metius's movements suddenly transformed. Until that moment, Katzo had been the one reading the flow of the match. But from that instant on, Sylvia accelerated. She neutralized Katzo's attacks as if she had a permanent parry-success buff applied, managing HP against the lava arms' chip damage—a carryover from the previous game—with precision that bordered on calculator-level. And above all, that guard break—forcing a rock through paper with the fastest, most optimal, highest-level execution. How many save-scums did you reload to land that perfect RNG? You did it live? Hahaha. Bullshit.
Rakuro: "Actually, I looked it up—he's zero wins, eight losses, one draw against her in official matches alone. He's getting slaughtered."
And yet he still hasn't given up on winning. The guy's a sore loser to the core. Come to think of it, back when I beat the crap out of him in "Constipation," he went so far as to buy the physical version just for a rematch… That kind of fighting spirit might be the fundamental prerequisite for a pro gamer.
Anyway, our job in the end is to set up the Katzo vs. Sylvia matchup—we're the undercard of the undercard, so to speak. Which means what I should be researching and preparing for are the three muscleheads. Like the three little pigs… though they look a lot sweatier.
Rakuro: "Alright! Time to cram some countermeasures overnight!!"
I gave up after forty-five minutes.
Rakuro: "Aahh… what am I gonna do…"
Right now, I'd taken off the gas mask and headed to a 24-hour convenience store outside the hotel—a stalwart ally for all-nighters and late-night food runs. If I'd walked into a convenience store wearing a gas mask, it might've set off some farcical chain reaction where Katzo's invitee ends up getting the cops called on him.
An unexpected discovery had raised the possibility of an all-nighter, so I needed to restock on energy drinks. Plus… I just kind of wanted to breathe that cheap, junk-food-scented convenience store air. That hotel was not the kind of place you crashed at like you were going to a friend's house to play games.
Rakuro: "No overseas energy drinks, huh… Well, chugging two for a double charge would fill me up to 200% caffeine and hit just right, but… I'll keep it tame with one tonight. Hmm, but if I crack open two, the bladder issue, y'know…"
In a way, it's like a trump card for short decisive battles. Normally one tank is enough, but you make up the power shortfall by loading up a ton of lower-spec parts due to supply shortages or whatever. That's got a real mecha-series hype moment feel to it—I'm a fan. I just wish it didn't reproduce the part where your bladder timer speeds up too.
Normally, I had a decent amount to do: watch match footage of the Star Rain pro gamers, rough out countermeasures for their likely characters, practice my own character picks, and run various system tests. But while I'd been casually tinkering with that new-model full-dive system, I'd found it.
That's right—the download version of Shangri-La Frontier…!!
See, Shangri-La Frontier fundamentally only lets you create one save file. User data is stored on what you could practically call the SLF world server itself. To authenticate, the system references three things: the hardware code of the full-dive system the user owns, the user's own biometric authentication, and a typed password. Only then can the user exist as their other self in the world of SLF. But, for example, if your full-dive system got damaged in some accident, there were means to log in from a different system.
…All those grandiose words boil down to: once you meet certain conditions in SLF, you can play with your own data even on a system that isn't yours. Which meant that, contrary to my assumption that I'd be locked out of SLF for three days or so, I could unexpectedly log in.
My own full-dive system—the model just before the latest (and most expensive) one here at the hotel—wasn't damaged, so this time I'd be doing a peaceful alternate-system login. You link your phone—which is paired with your own hardware—to the target system as a relay point, transfer the hardware code, then do password authentication. Put simply, you just connect your phone and wait a few minutes, so my phone is sitting back in my room. When this stay ends, I just reverse the process, so no issues later. I could play SLF. No problem whatsoever. I could play it.
Rakuro: "I did impulsively set everything up to play SLF, so…"
I had watched the Star Rain Muscle Trio's match footage, and we were doing real practice tomorrow anyway, so just tonight… right?
I was looping that excuse in my head for the fifth time, aiming it at no one in particular, when a voice—startlingly bright and energetic for a late-night convenience store—rang out.
Well, "rang out" is relative. The only people here were a sleepy-eyed female clerk, probably on the night shift, me, and the source of said voice.
???: "Coffee! Black! Strong! One cup!"
What the hell kind of shady order is that?—was what I wanted to say, but of course I couldn't just shout a retort at a total stranger. If those words had come out of Pencilgon's mouth, I'd have torn into her without mercy and then taunted her on top of it…
As I thought that and headed to the register with my energy drink, what I saw was a female clerk with a strained smile and, for some reason, a blonde woman standing there with her chest puffed out in triumph. Though she was decked out in suspicious-person chic—hat pulled low, sunglasses on, practically screaming "I don't want my identity known"—the base model's APP was so high that it weirdly suited her. That was the impression I got from this blonde foreigner.
Clerk: "Ah, um… coffee is, well, mostly all black, so…"
???: "?? Coffee, black, strong, do-pyutto?"
Rakuro: "I don't think you need to force the 'black' part into Japanese…"
Crap—I'd hit my limit and spoken out loud. The clerk, who'd been so thrown off by this suspicious person's utterly confounding word choice that her responses had missed the mark entirely, seemed to realize from my words that the woman was trying to say "give me a strong black coffee." She gave me a nod of thanks and hurried to the coffee server. Which meant that, under these very specific conditions, I was now effectively alone with the suspicious person.
???: "Ah—thanks! Azassu?"
Rakuro: "No, no, don't mention it. No problem, you're welcome?"
I activated the special skill "Obligatory Smile"—acquirable at a high rate by any Japanese person—and responded to the suspicious person, who had addressed me with a level of communicative assertiveness you didn't often see from Japanese people. She was, how to put it, an incredibly textbook example of a "foreigner using pseudo-Japanese," especially in her oddly suggestive word choices.
???: "Hmm, me, that maker, favorite! But this one, not strong…?"
Rakuro: "(Maybe she doesn't know the word for 'thin'…?) Yeah, it's a bit low on caffeine."
Clerk: "S-Sorry for the wait… um, here's your black coffee. And, um, your total…"
???: "OK! I've been waiting for this moment!"
That wait was under a minute. Your comeback was fast. There are times in life when staying quiet is a virtue. The suspicious person, who'd apparently paid with some sort of glittery card, waved cheerfully at me and the clerk, then left the store. What remained were me and the clerk, both equipped with Japanese sensibilities.
Clerk: "…Well, that was a very… high-tension foreigner, wasn't it."
Rakuro: "Ahaha… Oh, I'd like to buy this."
Rakuro: "Ah, I'll pay cash."
Her steps were light. Beneath a night sky where the stars were relatively visible, she laughed. Laughing as she ran.
She knew. She knew. Ordinarily, she shouldn't be doing this. Even if it was the same series, she shouldn't be taking a detour like this—she should be acclimating to that game, built on a system entirely different from the traditional colosseum format.
But that was that, and this was this. A game title that had blown past Mother USA—once the leader of even the global gaming industry—in a single stroke… A game she'd never touched, partly due to work keeping her busy, partly due to a personal aversion to lag: the pioneering of a paradise.
She was a gamer. Having come all the way to Japan, of course she'd want to try it. She felt a little bad for her teammates, who were fired up and preparing countermeasures against the "him" she'd publicly, unashamedly called her rival—the only one to ever force a draw against her in official competition. But she wanted just a little detour.
I'll work hard tomorrow. So just tonight… okay? Making excuses to herself in her heart like that, she—Sylvia Goldberg—stepped into the hotel elevator and pressed the button for the top floor, where the suites were.
Oh? That boy from earlier is staying at this hotel too… Is he coming to the 'festival' the day after tomorrow?
Just before the elevator doors closed, she briefly caught sight of the kind boy from earlier, walking into the hotel while stifling a yawn. A few seconds later, the memory was washed away by anticipation for the still-unknown paradise, Shangri-La.
That day, two people set off from the city of chaos, journeying toward paradise.