No. I'm a Nekama?
When people realize the player they're matched with is a woman, they tend to show you quite a range of reactions.
I've never been on that side of it myself, but I've heard that two women meeting in a lobby might bond over the shared experience—or just as easily end up at each other's throats. So what about a man meeting a woman? In my experience, it usually came down to three reactions.
The first: they take no interest at all and focus only on the game. That was the type my past-life self belonged to. Gender barely registered. You simply did what you came to do. To people like that, the player beside you matters less than the objective the game itself is asking you to finish.
The second: they decide, just because she's a woman, that she must be bad. Convinced women play worse than men, they shove every problem that comes up onto the female player.
And the third: men who are simply insane about women. The moment they learn she's a girl, they strain every nerve trying to get close to her. You can't tell whether they logged on to play or to go on a blind date.
Of course, I understand the numbers. Far more men play games than women, so a female player draws eyes just by existing. Even I, in my past life, never actually spoke when I ran into one—but I did think it was a little novel. Still. Letting something as petty as gender get in the way of a match is clearly crossing a line. More than anything, I may be living as a woman now, but my mind is closer to a man's, and I play better than most men besides.
So when I heard that, of course the urge to dodge hit me. From everything I'd been through, the people who asked that question were almost always the second type, or the third. One of the reasons I'd quit Bloody Night in the first place was that in an FPS built around voice chat, three matches out of five turned into a spectacle the moment a woman spoke.
Even so, I didn't actually want to dodge. One dodge in Bloody Night meant a full ten minutes of queue penalty, and my MMR was already high enough that finding a match took forever. I had no desire to eat another ten minutes on top of that. Silence, though, might make him throw on purpose. In a spot like this, it was better to step forward with my head up.
I cleared my throat, dropped my voice a shade lower than usual, and said, "Ah, no. I-I'm a nekama, so I'm, um, using a voice changer."
The Iztomo were right. There is no such thing as a nekama who admits he's a nekama. In other words, what I'd just said was no different from announcing that I was a woman. I'd done it on purpose, though—a twisted little warning. Yes, I am a woman. Don't get any other ideas about it.
"Right..."
Fortunately, he seemed to catch my meaning at once. The select timer ran out, and the match began to the roar of jet engines. Our characters were the ones we'd locked on the select screen: Lina for me, Luke for him.
Luke and Lina had been a bedrock pairing since Bloody Night launched. Lina had the best mobility in the game, and when she was in danger, Luke's Night Arc—a skill that let him move to an ally and throw a high-value shield over them—fit her perfectly. That was why the combo had caught on.
"...S-sure."
Downtown. The name dragged up the bad memory of that collab with Kurokami-senpai. She'd known a swarm of stream snipers would be on them from the first second, and she still refused to avoid the fight. The result was more than five matches stuck at the very bottom.
But it was fine. These were placements, and I'd been matched into Diamond. My MMR hadn't fallen all that far. There probably wouldn't be many snipers, and this person wouldn't just brawl from the opening drop, either. Downtown wasn't popular—the loot sat so far apart that farming was miserable—but for a hyper-mobile Lina, you could fairly call it the best place on the map. Another character starting in the same Downtown would take about twice as long to clear it.
"Thank god..."
Learning that, besides us, only one squad had dropped Downtown, I let out a breath of relief.
"Then I-I'll go W..."
Downtown was a wide map, so splitting as far apart as we could while looting was the efficient play. Early on, even if you bumped an enemy and a quick fight broke out, fighting all the way to the death was extremely rare. And luckily, the other team that had landed here didn't seem to be sniping us.
"...Nothing but healing kits."
We were a tank-and-damage pair, so a pile of healing kits was welcome—but seeing almost none of the gear we actually needed was not. I'd found a weapon, at least. The light armor Lina needed was nowhere in sight.
"Ah..."
In the end, I never found light armor, and combing every leftover pocket of Downtown wasn't realistic either. Like every other battle royale, Bloody Night's zone shrank with time, and anyone caught outside it took continuous damage. Your HP would tick down, and the moment you stepped back in, enemies who had already taken ground would gun you down one-sidedly. He was right. It was time to move.
"Um, I— I still don't have light armor..."
So I told him where I stood.
"...Eh?"
The chat was sprouting fresh rows of laughter, as if his line and my reaction were the funniest thing they'd seen all night.
"No, um, th-that's genuinely disgusting..."
How could someone say that like it was nothing? My brain refused to process it.
What was I even supposed to say? One line like that, and even his ordinary speech had started to feel creepy. Enough that I wanted to shut the game off right then.
"Ugh..."
Creepy or not, his skill was sharp. To someone who had once sat in Night Raid, there were holes—but in Diamond, he felt like the very top of the rank. Thanks to that, I survived the first fight even without light armor, and I took a set off the enemy we knocked. Before I knew it, only one enemy team remained.
They were running Kurokami-senpai's mains: the tank Arsen, and the support Gale. On pure role matchup, we were at a disadvantage. The gap, though, was small enough to flip. Arsen's passive gave him high shields and defense, which made him weak to Luke, who absorbed an opponent's shields and armor. Because of that, we didn't have to cling to the standard plan against a tank-and-support duo—kill the support first.
While we stared each other down, we burned healing kits and topped off both shields and health. The enemy had surely done the same. All that was left was a straight fight.
"Urk..."
Should I just lose?
I seriously considered it. But we'd come this far. I couldn't.
I opened the fight by popping Lina's Night Arc, Full Burst. Luke answered at once with his E skill, Venom Smoke—a grenade that blinded the sightline and dealt continuous damage to anyone who stayed inside it. Even in Bloody Night, Lina was the fastest thing on the map, and because of that she preferred close-range fights, a pretty alien character for an FPS. That was exactly why she meshed so absurdly well with Luke, who could stick to her side in an instant and scramble the enemy's vision.
"Ah, okay..."
Sure enough, the guy was creepy enough to be infuriating—but his skill, at least, was the real thing. At the end, the enemy Gale's Night Arc nearly put me in danger, and he popped his own on the spot to pull me out. Even without that I probably wouldn't have lost, but having a teammate who knew exactly how to move for the situation made everything easier.
Not that any of that made me want to queue with him again.
Absolutely not.
I skipped the victory screen at once. Just as I was about to drop back into the solo-rank lobby, another voice came through.
"You were an Iztomo, you bastard!"
After the game with the creepy Iztomo ended, I drank some water and queued again.
Once it came out that the guy had been an Iztomo, the chat filled with reactions like that. I didn't bother answering. It was obvious they were doing it because they wanted one.
"Hmm. It's been a while, so maybe I'll try a d-different character..."
I waited through the usual chatter, and then a heavy thunk announced another match. And the one teamed with me this time—
—was, of all people, Aki.