episode_0005

The city of Eclipse Point itself was a demon realm where the lives of the poor held no more value than a fly, but that was merely in terms of its social structure.

A battlefield where people died physically like flies, with bullets and blades infused with all sorts of advanced technology flying around, and heads soaring through the air every minute, was uncommon.

No, in fact, it might have been common.

It could simply be that Eclipse Point had no interest in the conflicts between mercenaries and gangs, to the point where they didn’t even make the news, or that corporations were actively suppressing media coverage of such incidents.

“Two from the front! Get ready!”

“Damn it!”

JQ, Raleigh, and Blake were dealing with the Neo Shinsengumi who had set up a defensive wall, while Luna broke through the defense line, protected by me.

Was she wearing high-performance combat eye implants? At her shout, indicating she’d spotted approaching enemies I hadn’t yet detected, I sped up and stood in front of Luna.

Just as if they’d been waiting, two Neo Shinsengumi members blocked our path, pistols drawn.

*Bang bang bang!* As the muzzles spat fire, I felt a searing pain in my side and abdomen and screamed.

“Aargh!!”

Fortunately, thanks to the bulletproof coat Luna had given me, it didn’t pierce, and with the subdermal armor plates inserted inside, I wouldn’t have been seriously injured even if I’d just taken the hit, but it felt like getting struck by a hook from someone wearing professional boxer shards.

“These damn Japs…!”

Of course, most of the Neo Shinsengumi members were mixed-race or had Western physiques, but I didn’t care about that.

The adrenaline, surged from coolly blowing off one guy’s head, prevented my body from collapsing from the pain and allowed me to raise my shotgun.

*Boom!* The thunderous report of a shotgun shell, incomparable to the mere pistol shots, spread out.

At this range, no aiming was necessary; I could just point and shoot, cleanly embedding all the pellets into their torsos!

Following the combat assist program’s guidance, shells fired in succession, spitting acrid gunpowder smoke as they flew into the air, and dozens of steel pellets battered the Neo Shinsengumi members.

“Aarghhh!!”

“Die!”

*Crack!* Those who had paid dozens of times over for lodging lead pellets in my belly staggered as if they wouldn’t die from a single shot, but their jaws shattered and they collapsed from the shotgun stock hitting them directly in the chin.

I kicked one who was trying to regain his stance, knocking him forward, and then blasted another shotgun shell into his head.

*Thwack!* With a muzzle flash, the guy’s face turned into a pulpy, burst rotten tomato, making me want to vomit, and splattering the ground, becoming work for the morning road cleaners.

“Gah! Huh! Both dead!”

“Good! JQ! Keep them suppressed with the drones and break through directly to the target location!”

“I can’t leave my beloved ride behind!!!”

“Then die here!”

“Can’t help it if it’s flipped over. Guess I’ll have to call a tow truck later.”

Listening to the fierce gunshots and screams behind me, I scanned my surroundings to prepare to shield Luna with my body from any surprise attacks as she ran off again after the regrouping order.

“Have you adapted already? You’re already showing signs of being a mercenary.”

“Shit..! I was always a badass!”

“The guy who whines about having no money, gets drunk as he pleases, and then gets a boner for his friend?”

“Fuck you!”

Next to Luna, who was cackling like a madwoman, Luna and I succeeded in breaking through the Neo Shinsengumi’s encirclement, taking ignorant amounts of bullets.

***

The scene of a recent battle.

On the road, piled with corpses whose heads were blown off and others dismembered into limbs, torsos, bellies, and heads as if an insect dissection had taken place, a man in a transparent haori over a vintage-style suit—quite rare in Eclipse Point—stood, a synthetic cigarette in his mouth, gazing at the horrific scene.

“One, two, three, ten… quite a lot dead.”

“Director Gondo Layton..!”

A subordinate who had been left in charge of the scene approached the man called Gondo Layton, who had given up counting the corpses, his arm missing.

Though he was bleeding a bit, in Eclipse Point, losing a limb was a minor injury that could be resolved with an implant anyway, so neither Gondo Layton nor the subordinate who came to report paid much mind to it.

“How many were there?”

“…There were only five, but skilled mercenaries were among them.”

“Skilled mercenaries, you say.”

“Although Decker was present, most of our members didn’t use combat programs, so there wasn’t a problem, but there was a sniper and, ridiculous as it sounds, a samurai there too…”

As he received the report, the cigarette Gondo Layton held burned down quickly.

He wasn’t outwardly showing much anger, but internally, he must have been serious.

“If you know shame, commit seppuku.”

“…!”

The subordinate bowed his head, sweating profusely, and Gondo Layton walked past him without even looking.

“How much did we get from the EPSB for this? And you failed this easy task of simply preventing them from entering the building. You trash.”

*Click, click, click.*

Behind the sound of his dress shoes crossing the road, which flowed like a river of blood, came the sizzling sound of a plasma blade searing flesh.

“Gah..!”

*Slice!* One more corpse for the cleaners to dispose of.

They’d probably just curse and clean it up.

Gondo Layton spat out the burnt-down cigarette indifferently and ordered the remaining members to surround the former EPSB director’s residence.

“Don’t directly storm the building until the security system is shut down. It’ll get troublesome if the SSG arrives.”

-“Yes, sir!”

The Neo Shinsengumi members, burning with fervor to make the mercenary vermin who brutally massacred their families commit seppuku, prepared to draw their katanas, their very souls, as Decker and the combatants moved towards the villa where the former director resided.

***

“Hahh… huhh… huhh…”

Having barely escaped from the crazy samurai, I breathed heavily, keenly feeling the need for synthetic lung implants.

Running like a casual jog was entirely different from fighting while taking direct gunfire in terms of stamina consumption.

“Haha! For a rookie, you were quite fiery! Been shooting guns somewhere before?”

“I’m a model citizen, so I didn’t do things like that.”

“So you were a wimp.”

As JQ fiddled with his cyberdeck, *whirr* the protective barrier lowered, isolating the villa from the outside.

Unlike rat nests like mega-apartments where the lower classes crammed together, such luxury villas were protected by security systems contracted with private security firms that ensured building protection and a response within 5 minutes of an incident, making them places gangs usually found difficult to meddle with.

That’s because security personnel, whose job inherently involved shootouts once a situation arose, were far better armed than regular EPSB agents and sometimes even used military-grade implants.

However, those crazy samurai didn’t seem to be giving up, instead fiddling with something while encircling the building.

“They probably plan to disable the communication network connected to the security company and force their way in.”

“They can do something like that?”

“Of course, not a chance as long as I, JQ, am here.”

The fact that they would attempt such drastic measures showed just how tenacious those guys were.

JQ, who had boasted confidently about his skills in electronic warfare, connected his cyberdeck to the barrier panel, sat down, and linked up, pausing. Bloody Blake, who had been fighting excitedly, and Raleigh, who was relatively clean but had blood streaming from his nose under his mask, also let out a sigh of relief.

“So, how is it? Being a mercenary isn’t so bad, right?”

“In what part, exactly?”

Luna, who was flapping her clothes as if hot, grinned at my reply and gestured for me to follow.

As I stretched the collar of my T-shirt to cool down the sweat, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the massive, swaying ‘waves’, licking my lips as I followed Luna’s lead up the stairs, a beat behind.

“By the way, is it okay to leave just three of them there?”

“Didn’t you see them fight? They could probably cut down hundreds of you, even if you were all there.”

“…Damn it.”

“Well, still, it was cool that you followed properly and performed your role as a guard.”

Guardsman. In other words, a meat shield. But knowing that she assigned me that role because she knew I wouldn’t die, rather than sending me to my suicide, all I could do was click my tongue again.

“By the way, I seemed to have taken quite a few bullets, but they don’t seem to have pierced me?”

Even though we’d quickly escaped the battlefield, dozens of bullets had struck me while protecting Luna from dozens of assailants.

But my body was fine, with no holes anywhere.

Though it hurt like hell.

“That’s because what’s on your body is the highest-grade subdermal armor available commercially. Do you know how much that costs?”

“How much?”

“Don’t be surprised when you hear this.”

*Whisper whisper* Luna told me the price of the bioware and implants inserted into me.

“…Fuck.”

“So, be good to me, you idiot.”

It was so much that even if I hogged all the pay for this job, I wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

I shouldn’t have been happy that 20,000 credits was a lot. No, to see Luna’s micro bikini skin, it was 10,000 credits.

To Luna, who was grinning and urging me to give up, I held my ground and was called crazy.

And so, chatting about such miscellaneous things, we passed through the neatly decorated corridors of the wealthy residences and arrived at the elevator for the top-floor penthouse, which required biometric authentication or a permit to enter.

“The item you ordered has been delivered.”

“You’re talking like a real delivery. Are you going to say pizza’s here too?”

“I’m not joking, okay? And it is a delivery.”

As we bickered in front of the intercom, a crackling sound echoed through my ear.

More precisely, a very subtle static during connection was caught by my enhanced hearing.

[“These delivery people are quite aggressive.”]

The voice from the speakerphone was slightly modulated but was that of a young man, too youthful to be a former EPSB director seemingly around Luna’s or my age.

By absolute standards, he might not have been too young, but if someone with that voice swaggered around as the EPSB director, I might have told him to stop messing around and go play, kid.

Since Luna, a professional fixer, vouched for him as the former director, his identity was surely confirmed, but I felt quite a bit of distrust.

“Haha, still, the item arrived properly, so we’d appreciate it if you could open the door.”

[“Alright. Please wait a moment.”]

To Luna, who was shaking a bag containing a red-tinged crystal chipset towards the camera, the voice fell silent for a moment before granting entry.

Simultaneously, the elevator doors opened, revealing an interior that finally looked like a proper elevator, not a jumbled mess of scrap iron.

“The floor and walls are upholstered in leather. Just how much money do they have…?”

“This is a person who was a director of a megacorp, after all. Living in a lower-tier city like this is already considered frugal for them.”

“Frugal, my ass…”

Leather now virtually meant artificial leather, not natural.

And even that artificial leather was sold at disgustingly high prices due to a premium, which was the reality.

Things like this, whose prices corporations had raised to suck the lifeblood out of commoners, were also used by the wealthy as displays of extravagance.

[“Excuse me for interrupting your tirade about the rich, but that is indeed genuine leather, not fake.”]

“Then they’re being incredibly extravagant, aren’t they?”

“…Shut up.”

“Aargh!”

Luna stepped on my foot, silencing me.

My body was clearly fine even after taking bullets, so why did my foot feel like it had been crushed?

*Ding!* Whether I writhed in pain or not, the elevator announced its arrival at the top floor and opened upwards like a maw, revealing the penthouse.

In front of it, as if he had been waiting, a man with neatly combed-back, streaked white hair, appearing to be around my age, greeted us.

“You’ve finally arrived. And with all those bothersome burdens tagging along.”