The Kortes-class Isarot starship was a transport vessel with a total length of three hundred and forty-four meters. Because of its role, its defensive performance was far better than its offensive power.
But by defense, that meant thicker armor, stronger propulsion, and better reconnaissance. It did not mean the ability to counterattack.
That missing counterpunch was exactly why, not long after departure, the enemy found it. After a desperate struggle, the starship crashed into the ice field in its dying state. The virus samples and experimental bodies onboard spread out of control, and the soldiers who had not died in the attack were slaughtered in the chaos inside the ship.
As the deepest and final area of the Isaro Ruins, the Isarot starship was basically GGO's current highest-difficulty PvE zone. Considering that reaching it also required wandering through snow for an hour or two, this place would probably stay almost empty for months.
The corridors, once full of futuristic design and cold technology, were now ruined from end to end. Green, ominous liquid had frozen into crystals inside the broken cracks, with what looked like insects sealed inside. The lighting equipment that had once done its job faithfully was long since damaged. The straight ship corridor stretched dark and deep ahead, giving the place the eerie feel of a cave.
It was quiet too.
So quiet that the world outside might as well have been the silent, endless starry sky, not a snowstorm raging across the ice field. The farther they went, the more it felt like walking through dim, heavy darkness. The end ahead was hard to see. When they looked back, even the way they had come from was starting to blur.
The visibility was awful enough to make every step feel like groping forward.
After putting on the night-vision goggles Samuro had prepared, all that blackness changed into a clear green view. Even so, some shadowed corners remained pitch-dark, while sparks from damaged wiring flared painfully bright now and then. If anything, the atmosphere became even more frightening.
The two of them walked in single file, like those doomed characters in horror movies who get bored and decide to explore a haunted castle.
Sinon hunched her shoulders, frowned a little, and stayed close behind the person leading the way.
A foul smell drifted through the air. It was like burning plastic, but not quite as sharp. If they followed the setting of this place, it was probably meant to be the scent of the virus that had spread through the ship.
Inside the broad corridor, the only sounds were their footsteps. One after another, they echoed like droplets falling into a lonely pool, then sinking straight into the depths.
People were strange sometimes. They disliked being trapped in small spaces, but they were also afraid of vast emptiness. A grand, gorgeous building, once night fell and the human voices disappeared, became nothing but gloomy shadows and a breeding ground for ghost stories. Sinon's rented room was usually too cramped to move around in, yet at night, she was glad it was that small.
Lying quietly on her bed, listening to the low hum of the air conditioner, she could feel the wall whenever she turned over instead of empty space. For someone who lived alone and had few ties to other people, that gave her a little comfort.
Without thinking, she kept glancing at those black corners, always wary that something might leap out of them. Human imagination was probably the greatest source of fear.
"Your breathing has been a little heavy for a while now. Are you scared of places like this?"
The person walking in front of her, who had been silent until then, suddenly spoke. His voice was oddly clear in this place.
"N-no, I'm not," Sinon said stubbornly.
Samuro chuckled.
"I'm not laughing at you. It's just that the environment here is designed really well. Whoever built this area knew what they were doing. It almost leans toward horror-game design. The atmosphere is pressed way down, and every tiny sound gets exaggerated on purpose. They didn't even have to add much. They left the rest to the player's imagination."
"Compared with cheap gore, this kind of gloom is much better at raising tension... Once something jumps out, all that tension ignites at once."
"Works like Cthulhu stories seem to use that kind of tone too. They never show you the horror directly, but somehow it still feels scary."
Sinon did not care about his little horror-game lecture. Only one point mattered to her.
"Is something going to jump out...?" she asked bitterly. She was terrible with this sort of thing. Back when she went to amusement parks, the attraction she hated most was always the haunted house.
"Not sure. The map designer and the game-mechanics designer don't seem to be the same person. The last few times I came here, monsters just blocked the path normally. There weren't any clever scare timings. This time feels different, though. We haven't run into anything for more than ten minutes, right? That means the odds are going up."
Samuro sounded thoughtful.
Sinon had no choice but to focus harder and avoid embarrassing herself.
But she clearly had not understood what Samuro meant earlier. In a stage like this, whether you were careless or tense, if something came out of nowhere...
You were going to jump.
"Screeech!!"
"Wah... waaah!"
Two sharp cries rang out at the same time inside the ship corridor. The first was full of malice. The second was a cute, high-pitched scream forced out of a startled throat.
From the blackness around the corner, a crouching shadow drove its limbs into the floor and lunged at them. Its disturbing movement looked like an adult human deliberately imitating a reptile. Through the green view of the night-vision goggles, Sinon caught a rushed glimpse of its shape.
Its jaw had split wide open, all the way to the roots of its ears. Its broken teeth and gums were packed with bits of shredded flesh. Only its tongue had not withered. Instead, it had grown thinner and longer, hanging outside its lips like a soft blade. Its eye sockets had collapsed too, leaving round eyeballs bulging horribly outward.
Shreds of clothing that looked like a uniform still clung to its body. On its mangled limbs, bloodstained white bone stood out clearly.
It was an outright mutant zombie design. Even Sinon, in her panic, forgot for a moment that this was an online shooter, and that with her stats, she could kill this thing.
"Eeeeeek!!"
Backing away again and again, the girl let out another uncontrollable cry, her voice rising into an embarrassingly cute pitch.
The zombie's agility was shockingly high. The moment its limbs touched the floor, it could spring high into the air. In just two bounds, it closed a ten-meter gap and was almost on top of them.
That was how it should have gone.
But before it could make the second leap, Samuro moved.
His dive was even faster than the zombie's. Moving after it but arriving first, he rushed straight in front of the creature while it was still low to the ground. His left foot stomped down on its split-open spine with brute force, using his not particularly high Strength stat to pin it in place. At the same time, the muzzle of Blue Rose rose in his right hand.
Pressed against its back, he fired hard.
The low gunshots roared like a beast. In the silent corridor, they sounded more like thunder. Two bursts of muzzle flash meant four large-caliber bullets had torn open inside the zombie's body. The zombie shrieked in pain. Its pinned head bent backward at a grotesque angle, and its long, dangling tongue stabbed upward toward Samuro like a rapier.
Samuro tilted his head just enough to let the tongue scrape past his cheek. He seemed completely used to this kind of counterattack. His left hand reached out, caught the tongue, and Blue Rose fired into it.
The bullet cut like an unstoppable blade.
The zombie's tongue snapped apart with ease.
With no extra way left to resist, the zombie could only struggle in place until Blue Rose's fourth blast arrived a moment later.
As its HP hit zero, the ugly body scattered into glowing shards. Samuro casually flipped open the cylinder and began reloading. His response to the ambush had been so easy that it almost looked careless.
His teammate behind him, however, was having a very awkward time.
Sinon stood there blankly, staring at the shards of a zombie that had not lasted ten seconds under Samuro's hand. It felt as if her earlier scream was still echoing through the corridor. Maybe it was only her imagination.
Still.
It was embarrassing.
"Um..." Samuro tried to speak to her.
"I'm fine!"
"I know that..." Samuro thought for a long moment. "A-actually, your voice is pretty nice."
"Do not keep talking about it!"
"R-right. Sorry. I just didn't know what to say for a second, but it felt like I had to say something." Samuro scratched his head. "Let's keep going. Want to stay a little closer this time? If you're really scared, you can hold on to me..."
"I! Am! Not! Scared!"
"Oh. Okay."
The aura of the Ice Sniper was slowly building.
Ever since she started following this guy, Sinon felt like the famous sniper everyone praised and admired had somehow stopped being her.
She took one firm step forward.
Then, without warning, another creepy humanoid shot out from her side.
"Eee-wah!"
That embarrassing and impolite sound echoed again.
...
About thirty minutes later.
The two of them had more or less cleared the front half of the Isarot starship and gradually reached the rear section near the core. Here, light finally began to appear. That only meant the place was even more dangerous. The front half had been an abandoned area roamed by infected crew members. This was the virus hold, packed with mutants.
Several powerful mutants had absorbed all of the starship's energy. According to the official explanation, they could generate power on their own until the very end, which was why there was light here.
After reaching this more troublesome area, a section even he had not been able to push through easily alone, Samuro finally let out a long breath of relief.
Behind him, Sinon glared coldly at his back when she heard it.
As if he could feel the heat burning into him from behind, Samuro gave a few coughs.
"Past this point are the ship hold and the bridge. There's a lot of space, enough that even a sniper rifle works well. The lighting is good too. Inside the starship, there's no snow, and not even the slightest wind. Bullet stability here is comparable to a gun shop's shooting range."
"No wonder," Sinon said, clearing her throat and forcing her voice back to calm. "There were plenty of places on the way here that completely shut down snipers, and you didn't seem bothered at all. So this is where you planned to let me work."
"The ship hold doesn't need much explanation. It's just a little more troublesome than those humanoids earlier... and the monsters are pretty standard types. They won't be that ugly."
He seemed to feel that last sentence was necessary, so he forced it in.
All he got from the girl was a cold snort.
"The real point is the bridge. Clear that, and the Isaro region's exploration is finished." Samuro sighed. "There's a very large boss over there. Its attack power and HP are exactly what you'd expect. The annoying part is that it keeps summoning mobs nonstop. There's almost no break. You have to deal with the mobs and the boss at the same time."
"But if you have to watch the mobs, you can't focus properly on the boss. It's basically the kind of design solo players hate most. It isn't about skill or raw strength. You just can't cover everything."
"So that's why you specifically wanted a ranged support player?"
"Yes. I can tank the mobs by myself. They won't interfere with you. You just stay far back and use the Hecate II to hit the boss, one shot at a time." Samuro sounded perfectly calm.
"Let me ask one more thing. Is there anything I need to watch out for with that boss...?"
"It's very strong, but it's attached to the bridge core. In other words, it's a stationary target. It has a lot of attack patterns, but its range won't threaten a good sniper at proper firing distance."
Sinon thought for a moment.
"Then the hardest part of the bridge is just the waves of mobs, isn't it...?"
"Right. The design is probably that a terrifying swarm of mobs rushes you while the boss supports them from behind with heavy fire." Samuro folded his arms. "And they seem endless. Last time I came here, I spent a full two hours fighting them."
"..."
Thinking about it carefully, the final area of the Isaro Ruins having a stationary boss meant it was a concession from the designers. They had decided that if the boss could move, it would be impossible to fight. But the boss had not been weakened because it was too strong.
It was because of the endless mobs.
If they could block the path of a pure AGI player, how many of them were there, and how strong were they?
Looked at another way, this guy had a pure AGI glass-cannon build and still lasted two hours while being pincered by mobs and the boss.
How strong was he?
And how bored?
Also.
Sinon's face went flat.
"So, to put it simply, my job is just to aim at a boss that doesn't move and can't threaten me, then shoot it over and over?"
"The stage's difficulty is all in the mobs. If you can't hold back that horde, those little bastards pouring out can bury dozens of players in an instant, whether they're frontliners or rear-line damage dealers." Samuro nodded.
In short, this guy had taken every hard part for himself.
It sounded incredibly arrogant, yet he said it like it was completely natural.
No wonder he had only asked about her sniper range earlier and had not said a word about accuracy or anything else.
In the end, he had only wanted to give her a target-practice job.
No. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. Couldn't any random sniper do this?
Without realizing it, Sinon puffed out her cheeks.
"Ah, sorry. Sorry. You came here to train, didn't you? Giving you something with no real difficulty kind of goes against the point." Samuro sounded apologetic. "Then how about this? Everything the boss drops goes to you. What do you think?"
"Don't treat me like someone you can settle with loot..." Sinon said unhappily. "Besides, you've been here so many times. If you beat the boss and don't take anything, wouldn't that be strange?"
"That's because I'm not actually after the boss's rare drops." Samuro smiled. "Field bosses in high-level ruins like this probably respawn every two weeks. Their drops might be extremely rare. They might even be better than your Hecate II."
"But that's not what I want. What I want is the material behind the boss."
"Material...?"
"I told you, the boss is attached to the bridge core. There's actually another map section behind it. Last time, when I forced my way through the mobs, I caught a glimpse of it. It's the bow section of the Isarot starship, and the passage is blocked by the boss's huge body."
"On a starship like the Isarot, every deck is a source of material. The bow section is higher grade. As deck material from the current highest-difficulty starship, and the part built to hit the hardest, it has to be exceptional." Samuro spoke very seriously. "That's all I want."
"But... it's just deck material. It can't be worth more than the boss's drop, can it?"
"Of course not. But something being valuable doesn't mean it's what you want, right?"
Sinon decided not to ask what he planned to do with it.
This guy occasionally revealed strange little obsessions.
She sighed with mild regret.
"I'm not going to keep all the drops for myself anyway. There's no point standing here. Let's hurry up and take down the strongest boss in this version."
"Thanks a lot."
Samuro kept smiling.