Killing Someone in a Survival Game Is Wrong
The first detector to go off was the one at a base set in the heart of the Forest of Fog, out on the far northeastern edge.
It would not stop ringing, which left exactly two possibilities. The first: someone was searching my dummy base with no idea what they had walked into. The second: someone had tripped the detector on purpose, waiting for me to come so they could turn the ambush around on me.
If I had to guess, the first was far more likely. Ashen City is a niche game to begin with, and even inside that narrow player pool the share of men runs much higher. Every player on our server right now was a woman. On raw probability alone, the first possibility won.
"Hmm."
No. There was nothing to agonize over.
I am the Reaper of this Ashen City. Let them lie in wait and try to spring on me the moment I arrive—what of it? A reaper exists to harvest the lives of people like that.
"Let's go, Bucephalus."
I entered the command and called my beloved steed, swift enough to run a gale itself through—Bucephalus. Then I laid back on the saddle I had set aside a little while ago to hunt Namikawa-senpai, and mounted.
With that ringing cry, Bucephalus broke into a run.
I do not bend to smears like that from the chat.
Wait for me, intruder. The reaper's scythe has already set out to pierce your neck.
"I-I'll show you the gulf between us...."
"...Shut up."
I held my breath and pushed on. Before I knew it, the heart of the Forest of Fog—where my dummy base stood—was right in front of me.
The detector was still screaming. That meant that even if they were hiding somewhere to jump me, the advantage was mine. Of course it was. I had the entire layout of the dummy base I had built committed to memory. The scenario I had feared most never came: being drawn in, only for them to peel away from my dummy base the instant I neared the center of the forest and strip that advantage from me.
"Hoo."
Quietly I drew the sniper rifle and stretched my view through the scope. Just as I had expected from the start, my opponent was combing the dummy base without a clue in the world.
And her name was—
My genmate, Utsumi.
"Th-thank goodness it isn't Natsune-senpai...."
I could kill her without a second's hesitation.
"F-from the start, A-Ashen City is th-this kind of game...."
In a survival contest of cold-blooded people, with neither blood nor tears to spare, a heart soft enough to hesitate will never make it out alive. So if that was what survival demanded, I would become a demon if I had to—
A nasty sound of flesh parting—and my character spilled blood and crumpled to the ground.
"...Huh?"
The chat had slammed into the sudden turn and fallen into chaos—some laughing, some trying to parse what had happened, some simply panicking. Under all those different reactions, the reason they were rattled was the same: I had been creeping in so carefully, and then I had simply dropped.
My reason for panicking was not theirs.
Ashen City is a survival contest you can never endure if your heart is weak. I knew that, so the fact that my character had fallen did not surprise me. What surprised me was that I had checked my surroundings as thoroughly as I could, and still never felt a presence until I was already down.
"Th-that can't be...."
I worked the character crawling on the ground and slowly turned her to look behind.
Standing there was—
Aki.
"Aki...."
She said it in a flat voice and dropped an item in front of me. They were the detectors I had hidden in secret at every dummy base.
Not one of them had ever gone off until this time, and yet she had recovered every last one. Which meant...
"D-did you use a signal jammer...."
My detectors were still low in tech level. A single signal jammer was enough to shut them down with ease. In other words, Aki had used a jammer and searched every one of my dummy bases.
"How in the world...?"
The only person I had run into so far was Namikawa-senpai, and that had been chance, so my strategy should not have been exposed at all. She should not have had a single piece of information on me. So how had Aki predicted the way I played, and waited for me here?
"...Eh?"
"D-does that mean you play Ashen City too, Aki...."
"Tch...."
"O-only people prepared to be shot...."
With the crack of the shot, the bullet Aki fired punched through my character's head.
And onto my screen rose a message.
A perfect defeat.
And the chat filled up with the Iztomo teasing me. My vow to make this fun through overwhelming skill collapsed right there, at the starting line.
But.
"Th-this means war, Aki...!"
I had been taunted at the very end. I could not let it finish like this. What filled my head was exactly that heat.
Nekoto, who had put a bullet through Izumi's head without a flicker of hesitation, quietly stretched.
"Yeah. Good thing I didn't throw it away...."
"Well, I figured at least one person would come out playing like this...."
The gear Nekoto was wearing was an optical camouflage coat. It dampened her presence while she walked, and when activated it turned her invisible. It weighed an awful lot—merely owning it slashed movement speed—and the counterplay was obvious, so it was not equipment people favored. But ambush someone who had no information on you, and it was an item that could show them, quite literally, what a one-strike kill looked like.
"I'll dump this for now...."
Judging she had no further need of it, Nekoto discarded the optical camouflage coat without hesitation.
"Nothing really worth picking up...."
Izumi had chosen, from the very beginning, a tactic of surviving by killing other players, so aside from weapons she had almost nothing else. Nekoto knew that and was not expecting much. Still, a disappointment was a disappointment.
"I should head back to base soon and get ready."
"War, obviously...."
Izumi had set player-hunting as her purpose from the start. There was no way she would sit quietly after being done like this. She would throw every force she could muster into pressing her. Nekoto was not fool enough to stay still while knowing that.
There had been a way to cooperate with Izumi. Nekoto's instinct said otherwise. This would definitely be more fun. And as if to prove that instinct right, the Servants in the chat were cheering.
"...W-well."
Honestly, I had not thought of anything. My head had been full of nothing but the determination to beat Aki head-on.
But I ought to think this through. Setting aside the fact that Aki was my genmate, it was a little hard to say we were close, wasn't it? Put plainly, Aki was the one I talked to least among the genmates. And yet I had unilaterally declared war and said we would fight. From her side, it had to feel like a coworker she was not even close with suddenly latching onto her out of nowhere....
Aki had been fine, because she had the cause of avenging Namikawa-senpai. More than anything, Ashen City lets you respawn without end no matter how many times you die, so a war does not mean much, does it? Maybe there really was no need to go to war.
The greatest difference between a person and a beast is reason. Keeping a momentary emotion from running away with you, and thinking rationally, helps a life far more than making a scene. The same held here. You killed me, so I'll kill you was far too one-dimensional. If I considered the distance between Aki and me, and this game's systems....
"A-as I thought, we'll say the war is canceled...."
This was clearly the most rational judgment. It is absolutely not that I'm scared I'll lose to Aki, and running away....
"Hmm.... They've already f-figured out my s-strategy, and everything I prepared got t-taken, so...."
The dummy-base strategy I had prepared was, to be blunt, a freeloader's way to play. Pour every early material into weapons and detectors, turn whatever is left into bases that only look impressive on the outside, draw people in, kill them, and progress the game that way. Even if the trick gets out, once you have already stocked up on materials through player kills by the time anyone knows, nobody can stop you.
But now the strategy was already exposed, and dying to Aki had cut off my progress as well. ...Well, you could argue that a build premised on killing the other players is a strange thing for a survival game. But Ashen City was always that kind of game. Anyway, it meant that trying my old strategy again now would come with a low chance of success, and an even smaller payoff.
"From here on I'll j-just play normally, I guess...."
"Like there's any way I'd have something like that...."
Letting the clamoring Iztomo wash past me, I gathered materials with everything I had. The goal was a home of my own. I was going to build a big, beautiful house.
"Right. F-from the start, in a s-survival game whose whole purpose is surviving, killing other people never even m-made sense...."
Bang!
"...Huh?"
And I died one more time.