The Time of Truth (3)
Lieutenant Polman was an elite soldier who had graduated from West Point. Naturally, he understood far better than Jinwoo the importance of enforcing or relaxing military discipline. Yet with civilians mixed among the group and the battlefield being another world entirely, he had wrestled with whether rigid military order was even necessary here. After surviving more than a month in this other world, he had reached a conclusion: some stress relief was essential. Killing with cold steel instead of firearms created a different, heavier kind of strain. Everyone knew that death here meant the soul vanished, just like Greg, leaving behind nothing but a living corpse. That knowledge demanded an outlet. If that outlet was marijuana or sex, then allowing it seemed the wiser choice.
***
“…Aah… help me…”
A faint woman’s voice drifted from the shadows between two rooftops. The spear-wielding vigilantes moved first. Lieutenant Polman and I followed, already knowing what we would find.
“You bitch, we’re not done yet! What are you looking at? We’re not done! You took the money, so earn it, you whore!”
Aoyama was still moving on top of the woman beneath him, ignoring the fact that we were watching.
“Get off her! It’s over already!”
“Please, save me. I’ve already done it twice!”
The woman’s face was already bruised. Seeing the violence, the vigilantes could no longer stand by. Two of them leveled their spears at Aoyama while the other two pointed theirs at Polman and me.
“I paid for this!”
“When you buy a woman, it’s once unless you negotiated otherwise. And you used violence on one of our villagers.”
“That’s not how it works! If she took forty thousand yen, she should let me do whatever I want!”
Aoyama shouted with veins bulging in his neck, yet his hips never stopped moving. He was clearly trying to buy time for one last thrust. It was infuriating.
“Aoyama, stop. Once is the standard. If you didn’t agree on multiple times, it’s once. Pull out and put your pants on.”
Lieutenant Polman’s voice was sharp with irritation.
“Damn it! This is disgusting. Japan isn’t like this!”
“Say that in Japan. When in Rome, follow Roman law. Jinwoo, would you heal her?”
I nodded. Aoyama shuddered violently, then finished with a groan. He stood up, pulled on his pants, and roughly shook the woman by the hair.
“Hahaha. At least I got some fun out of it. It’s just a game, after all.”
Polman sighed, handed a silver coin to the vigilantes, and pressed another into the woman’s hand before dragging Aoyama away.
“The light of healing will touch you. Think of this as nothing more than a bad dream.”
I cast the spell on the sobbing woman, then left the alley with the vigilantes. Sitting by the campfire, watching Aoyama laugh and sip fruit wine, I felt as though the worst kind of human trash had attached itself to our group. The military had warned that unchecked personal indulgence would eventually cause problems. Here, the problem had exploded on the very first attempt. The rest of the journey suddenly looked far more dangerous.
“So you’re saying it feels even better if you smoke that while doing it?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
Aoyama, Lucas, and Sergeant Hobbs swapped stories about the women they had bought, passing around marijuana and trading crude jokes. Lieutenant Polman looked troubled for a moment, then gave up and assigned the night watch before going to sleep. His apparent indifference bothered me. Was this how American soldiers normally behaved? I wondered if Patrick had been here whether things would have gone differently. Even then, I doubted anyone could rein in men who had already lost all self-control.
***
Once Aoyama’s first incident went unpunished, the others began to assume that buying women was now acceptable. Following Aoyama, Hobbs, and Lucas, the Tamer Bortas and Archer Sergeant Taylor joined the group after some hesitation. All of them started smoking marijuana. Lucas, despite being a Spearman, had an uncanny talent for finding wild cannabis, and he even managed to purchase properly dried leaves from the village. Sergeant John Low, the Dual Swordsman, asked whether they weren’t worried about disease, given how rarely the local women bathed. They ignored the warning. Instead, they claimed that while they could buy women outside the village, doing so here was practically free. The fact that less experienced women were available only made it better. They tried to pull John Low into their circle, but he simply shook his head.
Then, in another small village, Aoyama and Sergeant Hobbs caused trouble again with their violent behavior. This time Lieutenant Polman finally stepped in.
“Every time you cause an incident, we have to pay silver to smooth it over, and Jinwoo and the Antarian priest have to heal the women. This is draining our strength. From now on, buying women is forbidden.”
“What? No way.”
The five men who had already tasted the freedom refused to listen. Polman’s order came too late.
“We need to relieve stress like this to stay combat-effective. If we can’t even do this in a game, what kind of game is it?”
Aoyama openly rejected the restriction, insisting that regulating behavior inside a game made no sense. When Lucas echoed the same argument, Polman had no reply. He could not tell them this was not a game but another world. After that, he stopped trying to forbid them outright.
They still had enough sense to restrain themselves in the next village, but two days later, when they reached a larger town, they ignored all caution. Aoyama headed straight for the red-light district and the others followed. They openly smoked marijuana in the streets.
***
“Aoyama had his capsule installed in his own room. He even eats his meals there.”
At the condo manager Eil’s words, everyone grew curious about Aoyama. They had heard he was a hikikomori, yet inside the game he played a completely different character. They wanted to see what he was really like. Especially Bortas, Sergeant Taylor, and Lucas, who now partied with him regularly, decided there was no reason to wait and headed for his room.
“Hey! Aoyama! It’s Lucas. We’re going to smoke. You coming or not?”
The room was silent, as if no one were inside. If Eil hadn’t spoken, they might have believed it was empty. They knocked again and were about to leave when the door cracked open.
“Aoyama?”
The man peering through the gap had pale skin and long hair typical of a Japanese otaku, hanging down to his cheekbones. His small stature, delicate hands, and complete lack of muscle made it hard to connect him to the two-meter-tall, powerfully built martial artist he played in the game.
“…Yes, that’s me.”
“What the hell? You look completely different.”
“Living the opposite life in another world from reality is part of the fun, isn’t it?”
The men at the door accepted the sight of the scrawny twenty-something otaku without much difficulty.
“We scored some good stuff. Let’s go.”
At Lucas’s words, Aoyama’s gloomy expression lifted into a smile. He stepped out to join them.
After that, Lucas and Aoyama grew close even in reality. The four of them began frequenting the condo’s common areas together, talking about their exploits in the other world. They had become best friends both in and out of the game.
“Let’s hit that club in the west district today. I hear they’ve got girls with incredible asses. The ones we usually go for are a little lacking in that department. I’ll tell Eil.”
“Aoyama seems to prefer the other type, though. What about girls with huge asses?”
“…I-I’ll try anything now.”
After the noisy group left the condo, Eil had no choice but to obtain permission from above.
“They may go out together on the condition that they return by six in the morning.”
Once the outings were approved, the four began returning drunk and high almost every day.
***
“They’re getting bored of just buying women. They want to try something different.”
Aoyama grinned at Lucas’s words. Among the users, the two of them were perfectly matched in temperament, like friends who had known each other for decades.
“Instead of buying them with money, how about targeting well-managed noble or merchant daughters?”
“Rape, huh… That could work. The problem is avoiding Polman’s eyes.”
“We can work around that. But why is Polman acting like this? It’s a game. Why is he trying so hard to control us?”
Hobbs, standing nearby, smiled faintly. He wanted to explain the truth to the two men who still believed this was merely a game, but he knew he could not. Instead he said only,
“You’ll understand why Polman is doing this soon enough.”
“Must be something from the military.”
Lucas and Aoyama were curious, but since they were told it would be resolved soon, they let it go. Besides, four beautiful South American women with ample chests and hips were already approaching, leaving them no time to think further.
“There are four of you and four of us. Want to have some fun together?”
“How about it?”
“Hell yes!”
Bortas and Hobbs agreed without hesitation. The eight of them moved to a private room in the club, drinking and smoking marijuana. When the women offered them pills, claiming they were vitamins that would make them feel good, none of the men refused.
“This was too easy. Are these really participants in a secret U.S. Department of Defense project?”
The curvaceous South American beauty found it suspicious how effortlessly the four men had been drugged into unconsciousness.
“We were told the photos and footage confirmed their identities. We just did what we were paid for.”
The women dragged Aoyama and the other three out of the club. Four black sedans pulled up, loaded them inside, and disappeared into the night.
***
“What do you mean four of them didn’t return?”
“They’ve always come back by six in the morning. Today they didn’t. We sent people to the club immediately. They said the men left with some women and never came back.”
“Damn it. CCTV?”
Yasuke Yamashiki was irritated. He knew American clubs rarely had proper surveillance, and even if footage existed, the targets would already be long gone. He reported to Elon Busker and immediately contacted Major General Michael as well.
“For now, the remaining personnel should log in and protect those who cannot wake up.”
Yamashiki’s mouth went dry. He had no idea what would happen if someone stayed logged in for an extended period.