Debriefing
"Ah, Rubinstein… hey, Rubin! I'm dying over here too! This doesn't feel like a game — it feels like that Marine Corps camp I dumbly signed up for when I was a kid!"
She exhaled hard as she shouted, and her mint-colored hair — dulled of its usual shine by soot and concrete dust from countless firefights — swayed gently with the motion.
Even so, for the editor to come right out and wave a carrot via donation… at this rate, she really did look like the evil employer that donation made her out to be. And she'd been generous with the caffeinated drinks, too.
Anyway, she wasn't exactly in a position to sit there and clear her name. Staring through a scope for so long had left her eyes dry and her head foggy, even though it was only a game.
In short, she was mentally wiped.
A walkway ran along the wall. The floor was perforated steel grating, and beneath it a film of ice skimmed over rust-green sewage that filled the entire underground level.
An unstable noise rattled somewhere ahead, and when they reached the end of the path, a small room packed with machinery greeted the two of them.
Thanks to a touch of scripted interaction, Harmony opened the breaker panel like she'd done it a hundred times and started pressing buttons. A grinding, reluctant groan of rusted machinery turning over filled the air, and a vibration rolled out beneath the water's surface.
The water was draining.
And the enemy was closing in.
> Water depth decreasing. Opposing water level: 94%.
> Estimated time remaining… 5 minutes.
> Multiple hostiles approaching.
"Ugh, this goddamn game, I swear!"
"Our exit route's looking pretty sketchy…"
"…If I start losing ground, you're just going to shoot them all anyway, right?"
"If it comes to that, yeah."
Her half-resigned remark and his answer fit together a little too well.
From far off came the sound of multiple bodies splashing through water, followed by thick curses and slang rolling in behind them.
Both of them whipped their heads around, eyes scanning, reading the terrain. The paths opening wide on either side of the control room meant, put simply, that each of them would have to hold one direction and deal with whatever came.
The receding water left rings on the walls. What had started at waist height was down to the thighs, but the enemies didn't care — they kept coming.
Their pace was slow, though, and the water still deep enough to make cover that much harder to find.
A belated turkey shoot began.
"You pieces of shit, eat th— aaagh!"
"Fuck, I can't see! Where the hell are they!"
Eardrum-splitting muzzle blasts and the whipcrack of rounds cutting air.
Red bloomed across the slowly shrinking green surface of the water, and a beat later the corpses face-planted into it never lifted their heads again.
But for every one they dropped, more poured in, and the ticking clock — at least to Harmony — crawled with cruel, spiteful slowness.
While Eugene stacked bodies into a wall on his side, the direction Harmony had taken — relatively green as she was — kept receiving reinforcements until the enemy numbers swelled past anything she could handle alone.
Even thrashing resistance with grenades thrown in, even blind suppressive fire, lost half its bite once there were enough hostiles that random rounds alone became a real threat.
In the end, she had no choice but to call for Eugene-mon.
"Teacherrrr───! It's getting bad over here!"
The next instant, Harmony watched Eugene come tearing toward her position at a monstrous speed.
The image that flashed through her mind in that split second was closer to a charging rhino than a superhero, but she wisely kept that observation to herself.
He planted himself in a good spot, and a sharp report — filtered once through a suppressor — split the air. Every time the Geissele trigger broke, hostiles in the line of fire sprayed blood from neck and skull and drove their faces into the water.
Before long the water, stained a vivid red, was being sucked down the drain pipes, and the heads of corpses that had looked ready to stay submerged forever broke the surface.
Enemies swept away like autumn leaves in a gale. Harmony nodded as if she'd expected nothing less.
"…I knew you'd pull that."
"What are you doing? Shoot with me!"
"Ah — right!"
Of course, there was no rest for her.
I had never once stopped thinking of myself as special forces. But at the same time, I had never once thought of myself as someone who truly belonged at the SOF level.
It was complete nonsense on the face of it, but the reasons behind that feeling were complicated… Strictly speaking, I had been an official operator in that other world.
But if you asked me whether I'd climbed the ranks through every proper channel and legitimate process to become special forces, I would have had to answer no.
In reality it was more like… I'd caught a shark's eye, somehow ended up with the gear, and somehow ended up joining.
On average, producing a single U.S. special operator costs at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and demands years of brutal training. Endless live exercises on top of that.
The higher the tier, the more the budget and education poured into one person grew exponentially, and the only people left in those units were ones with at least seven years of service under their belts.
In other words, only the strongest people in the world remained.
Back to me.
I was… something of a special case.
Bottomless stamina that never ran dry as long as you fed me on time, the endurance to move for a minimum of three nights and four days under a hundred-plus kilos of kit, and a body that absorbed every scrap of muscle memory the moment you taught it.
All of that stacked into an absurd synergy, and after joining the task force I reached parity with people who'd been grinding through war zones for decades — in an impossibly short time.
After joining, I got thrown into live ops to extract the MP company my mentor commanded, then New Haven, then the northeast of Manhattan, and then, and then… honestly, I'm still a little fuzzy on how I'm even still alive.
Probably a case the world will never see again. Anyone else would have been dead and rotting a long time ago.
It wasn't as if only one or two task forces had gone under that way, either.
Anyway, the reason I was thinking about all this… wasn't anything deep.
"Hwaaah, I'm dying…"
It was simply that, exceptions like me aside, I had just been reminded how genuinely hard it is to take one ordinary person and forge them into someone comfortable in a firefight.
People have a way of unconsciously projecting their own standards onto a situation even when they know, intellectually, that they shouldn't. Maybe I'd been doing the same.
Honestly, it didn't even have to be like this. Adapting to anything — game or not — inevitably takes time.
From that angle, like I said, there was no real need to put this person through the wringer just to get her combat-ready fast. But…
"Guys. Is this mission supposed to take a few dozen minutes? Huh? The average is twenty-five? I feel like I've been at this for an hour — is it just me?"
"It only took thirty-five minutes. Time always feels like it stretches when you're in a fight."
"Oh, really? First I've heard of that. But I did pretty well this time, right? I shot better than I expected, didn't I? Hey chat — we ran a four-player recommended mission with two people and only came in ten minutes over. That's basically average, right?"
…The moment you gave her even a little slack, this person puffed right back up again.
There wasn't some profound reason behind it, but looked at another way, she'd chosen me over other people. That meant I owed her something in return.
In short, as long as she kept looking for me, I planned to help her get comfortable in this game as fast as possible. I'd just mix in a little strictness along the way.
So—
"You still seem to have energy to spare. Want to rest a bit, then hit the second mission?"
"Nononono, that's not it! I misspoke. I'm so wiped I can't even lift a finger. No more bluffing from now on."
"You're being more honest than necessary."
"Ahaha…"
She really was an easy person to read.
"Still, since you said so, let's take a longer break. We can debrief while we're at it."
"Debrief?"
"A process where we talk through what went well, what didn't, and how to fix it. Something you absolutely have to do."
What would you call that in plain language? An error log? A written apology? The truth probably sat somewhere on the border between those two, but finding the exact spot wasn't my job.
After returning to base, we held a short discussion near the firing range.
"During this mission, was there anything that felt off to you? Be as specific as you can — just one thing."
"Uh…"
She seemed to think for a moment, then opened her mouth with some difficulty.
"Just… the enemies were harder to spot than I expected, and finding a position to shoot from was tough too. In other games, the enemies come right at you. Not here."
"Good catch. That's a positioning problem. And that doesn't get fixed in a day or two."
"But when I get an order — go here, do this — suddenly the enemies are easy to see. The second I try to do it on my own, though, it all falls apart again…"
"When two people push in sync, the enemy's position can shift based on what either side does. Simple version: I lay down suppressive fire, pin them in place or drive them out, and the person who went the other way finishes them."
Only then did she nod.
Which was another way of saying that killing the enemy wasn't about marksmanship — it was about how you shaped the overall geometry of the engagement.
A lot of people think a firefight is just putting the reticle on a target and pulling the trigger well. The second they actually drop into combat, that idea shatters into pieces.
You don't wait for the enemy to walk into a convenient shooting lane. You make them walk into one. That was one of the core principles of every engagement.
"It's a lot like the roles of a hunting dog and a hunter. That's probably why this game runs missions in teams. The more people you have, the easier it is to break a locked front line."
"Ah… I kind of get what you're saying…"
"Do you really?"
"Yeah. You're really good at explaining, so I understand the words. But the second we get back in-game, it won't go the way I want it to, will it…"
"Haha."
That part, as I'd always said, ultimately had to be learned through a lot of live practice.
Reading the flow of a fight, using animal instinct to jab at the enemy's soft flank, herding them the way a drive hunt does until they have no choice but to move into your teammate's cone of fire. Even when it fails, forcing variables into the engagement to secure a stable exit…
It wasn't just about clearing a corridor and standing at the tip of the spear to eat incoming fire. That was the true face of a point man.
"If you want to get a feel for positioning as fast as possible, learning how to push aggressively first would be better."
"Sounds hard."
"Combat always is."
Keeping yourself from catching a bullet while unilaterally taking the enemy's life — that was exactly why it was difficult.
I was about to stand up to restock ammo, leaving Harmony behind with not only her body but her brain gone completely soft, when she added one more thing.
"Looks like I've got a lot to learn. Want to rest ten more minutes and run the next mission together?"
To that, I only let a faint smile touch the corner of my mouth.