- Ahhh! So boring! I want to lay hands on those bastards. How long has it been since we last engaged in a head-on battle with the Intruders? I think my shooting skills have deteriorated beyond return. - What do you mean? First, the guns have aim assistance, so except when you have both myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism and blindness simultaneously, you cannot miss. Second, besides the occasions when they destroy our drones and I assassinate their units, we must avoid being excessively belligerent. The time comes when it comes. - How the hell do you get all of them at the same time? - Exactly. So please treasure your life. Logically, we are a year away from being fully prepared. However, emotionally, I feel myself on the brink of death due to boredom. After the hardships have passed, the waiting is even worse. I lie on the bed. Mirai is sitting on a chair next to it, scribbling something on the tablet. I complain merely to get her attention, b

Sandstorms. Depending on the severity of the sandstorm, players' vision is drastically lowered from half to almost blindfolded. Several items allow players to look through the sandy turbulence, but people have to find them. Otherwise, unproperly geared players are on the edge of elimination. After victoriously surviving in the area with the richest loot and resources, each of us has a pair of electromagnetic goggles. I can see the fuzzy outlines of the obstacles in the environment and players, but every minute of usage comes with a three-minute cooldown. However, somebody is beating the system by carrying four pairs of goggles. As a sniper, she does not need to engage in close combat, thus her inventory only has a photon sniper rifle with the highest quality attachments, sixty bullets and some grenades. The developers intentionally design the sandstorm-resisting items to occupy plenty of inventory space, but they would never be able to anticipate Mirai's build. On the other ha

- Anything significant? - Nope. The play zone has shrunk so small, yet I see no traces of the final player. Anyway, let's keep moving. If he is a camper, we can outnumber him. If he is moving, he will accidentally be careless at some point. The match clock has shifted to the twentieth-thirtieth minute, meaning the endgame is near. Most, if not all, players will be equipped with the rarest and most powerful weapon and armour, reducing the effect of modifiers to the borderline. Lingering outside the play zone will result in an almost instantaneous health depletion to death, so the scenario that he is still outside is crossed out. The current play zone is a two-hundred-metre diameter circumference, situated outside an obscure building ground with cranes, containers and construction materials. The ground is even, and with no significantly tall buildings around, sniper rifle camping from high ground is out of the question. Keeping a two-hundred-metre distance fr

Suddenly, he remembered them. Those who beat him up badly in their first encounter, also his final mission. Those who held the utmost importance in retaliating against the Intruders, whose heads may have been placed a bounty on by the relentless extremists. And most importantly, when he thought that would be the last time he saw them, they met again as he brought them for a visit at the Huntly Mine. Although he did not observe them from the start, he knew that something big had happened while he was unconscious. He immediately realised that they had taken down one of the organisation's facilities at Huntly Mine only when police investigations resulted in the retrieval of samples he knew by heart just from the first sight. At the age of superior physical condition coupled with a turbulent state of mind, he quickly recovered from the bar explosion that day, but his unconscious cognition could not remove the image of them. After years of the organisation leading his nose, then sa

The sun is yet to rise from the dune afar. In the early morning sky glowing in a mystically red hue, a hovering motorcycle carrying three people breaks the stillness of the no man's land at the speed of a sprinting cheetah. Everywhere they move, clouds of sand are blown to the back by the powerful wind motors, creating a pattern similar to high-speed canoes riding waves. On the rider seat is no other than Mirai Sasaki, also the person who built this motorcycle, thus the only person who can ride it. Behind her are the two cowards, Yuusha Takahashi and Maric Mileva, each hugging the person in front of them tightly, their legs holding on to the body of the bike with their dear lives. The gusts passing through them are so strong, that without a pair of high-grade motorcycle goggles, their vision would be no better than being blindfolded. Unlike the pathetic riders, Mirai's auxiliary processors automatically filter out winds captured by her visual sensors, and thus she is the one enjo