Chapter 35 - Point Nemo (part 4)

I reload my photon shotgun with another tube of photon shots. Since I can loot other players' items, I can destroy this drone.

Fortunately, the other mercy the rich can offer commoners like me is that I can see hostile units on the map, except for other players. The drone is patrolling on the other floors, so after I get out of my hiding spot, I decide to go find it instead.

As soon as I reach the other floor, I switch my photon shotgun to damage mode. I find the drone in a room that looks like an office. As stealthily and swiftly as possible, I use the chairs and tables' terrain and approach the drone. Before it registers my presence, my barrel is already pinned to its offensive module, and I fire my whole rounds of pure electromagnetic damage, breaking its gun with brute force.

As expected, the whole tube of ten rounds vanishes within a few seconds, just making sufficient damage to break down the most threatening part of the drone. The drone, unable to attack, tries to make its escape, but I just grab it like a toy. I dismantle its battery with my bare hands and then put the dead drone inside my inventory. It takes one slot.

The table pops up in my vision, saying 'Level 1 Hunter Drone', with its current state and related statistics. That is the weakest unit in the game, according to the instruction manual I read through before the match. My odds are effectively close to zero.

Anyway, I must play my cards carefully. I still do not know what worse things can happen. I try to fill half of my inventory with shotgun shells and ammunition for the photon sniper rifle SR-12, another primary weapon I recently loot.

I get out of the building again and start searching for players. Except for me, those affluent players technically have the same wealth stats, so the edge they have over each other is just their brains and muscles. But I will outperform them with just this.

I start to see one player looting in a clear, unobstructed field. I pin his position with my spectacles, which miraculously works even though it should not. I find a high ground with sufficiently covert and strategic hiding spots, attach a specialised muzzle to hide the flash of the photon bullet, pull the bolt, open my scope to aim at the head of the player who is still meticulously looting items, and press the trigger. With perfect accuracy, the photon bullet flies undeviated in the air at lightspeed (literally lightspeed, because it is a burst of photons), without the player even realising...

... just to see a white-coloured hit marker, which indicates that the bullet hits an invisible protective barrier surrounding the player. In front of my eyes, a line appears as coldly as ice, registering that I have successfully broken the person's Force Field. Even though it has been nerfed compared to what I have used, the wealth buff still makes it a nuisance.

The player is aware of my existence and tries to make his way out of the empty field for a hiding spot, but before he escapes, I make another accurate shot, which shows another hit marker that tells me I have damaged the Force Field. And no, the Force Field is not supposed to follow a player.

At this point, I would have likely exposed my hiding spot, so I switch to another strategic location, while continuously tracking the player.

I have found another spot and quickly return to the sniping mode again. I see that the player is using some kind of telecommunication device, so I scope in and make another shot. With the last shot, the Force Field is disabled, and a not-so-delightful notification pops up in my view.

The item Force Field will regenerate to full after thirty seconds.

Which is also not supposed to be a feature of the Force Field I am familiar with, which is a one-time use item.

The broken armour should make him vulnerable, so I must take the chance to push forward. Like a wind, I leap through the different spots, utilising the city terrain and approach the pitiful player who is sitting in a corner, waiting for his shield to heal.

Unfortunately for him, I take less than fifteen seconds to appear right behind his back. The moment he turns around, I relentlessly fire my burning rounds of infrared shots from my photon shotgun at him. Getting caught off guard, the player barely has enough time, before his wealth stats reduces the damage he takes to only half of his health bar after ten consecutive shots and buys time for his Force Field to recover. My shotgun runs out of ammo, and I need to reload them.

The player takes out an assault rifle. It looks like the model Mirai uses in combat, except the stats are much more overpowered. I only have a Compact Shield and a few tactical grenades.

He starts firing. I move back and forth, avoiding his shots while actively trying to stay within his blind spot to approach him.

He is only ten metres away, and the shield needs five more seconds to start recharging. I take a long shot. Right when he notices and turns around, I unload my whole tube of photon birdshot right in his head because the game mechanics says that a headshot deals four times the damage output.

The health bar on his head falls quickly as I see constant hit markers and numbers popping up that paint my vision with a monotonous red tone. And as if the god of fortune has smiled with me, after the four-second bullet discharge spree, the inexperienced player that cannot keep up with my movement, added with the flinches from getting shot that disrupt his aiming and getting shot, is finally killed. His body transforms into a loot box, and I bring the box to a safe area to start looting items.

He has an assault rifle with ammunition worth two extra magazines. I check the stats of the gun. The base stats of the gun have been adjusted for the wealth level, but they still leave some numbers which seem to be higher than usual, as a reward for killing a player with a wealth gap. Besides that, there is another item that intrigues me.

- Well, well, what do we have here? - I take out a small box from the loot box and inspect it.

I lightly tap on the box. The table appears in my right eye vision, with a lengthy description of the item.

It says that this is a wealth gap reduction module. Against wealthier players, firing the first shot at them will temporarily reduce the wealth gap by half for one minute. However, it can only be attached to one single item to permanently add this trait to the item, and to perform the attachment process, I must reach an underground lab structure. The safe battle zone starts to shrink in the direction of the underground lab, so it is killing two birds with one stone. I take my time looking at other items in the dead player's inventory and loot more items before I start proceeding to the safe battle zone.

Yet, something feels odd. I remember seeing several players landing in the city area, but I make it out of the area with only one kill and a drone acquired. This player I kill does not seem like he is the one who can clear the whole area since he cannot even react when I use the most basic and luck-based strategy of direct charging. There must be another professional player who has wiped out the whole area before it comes to my turn, and that player has soon left the area to get to the safe battle zone before I do.

Well, it is a survival game, so I think that I should just be fixated on the survival aspect and try to keep a low profile. I use the city and forest terrain to hide as I make my way to the lab.

The number of players drops to half the initial figure and is still dropping, and yet the path I go seems oddly peaceful. I have heard no gunshots throughout my journey. This gives even more concrete evidence to support my hypothesis that some "ghost" players are blending in with the two hundred players, who possess superhuman skills and affluence, and who are so threatening that they induce and spread fear among the rich players. I mean, I do not have anything to lose anyway, but if I am unfortunate enough to encounter them, the cardiovascular warm-up will turn into a full-fledged simulated boss fight with an overall rating of at least sixty. It is a good session, so I am in no way complaining though.

After some time, I reach one of the entrances to the underground lab area. I happily enter it and use the stairs to descend twenty metres deep into the ground...

... just to find out that the place is nothing different from a graveyard. Opened loot boxes are everywhere, piling up like the graves that symbolise the players' deaths themselves.

Now, that is a frightening vibe right there.