Chapter 7

"…I knew I should have asked…"

Sinon lifted the end of the pelt she had wrapped around her body to look

outside.

What had been dry grassland just minutes ago was now a field of pure white.

She reached out and scooped up some of the white stuff, letting the fine

particles trickle between her fingers. It was piled-up hail pellets, not snow.

When Fikki the Ornith girl had given her this pelt cloak, she'd said, If a comes,

use it. The word Sinon couldn't make out because of her lack of language

proficiency was probably something like hailstorm. Or maybe it was blizzard

from hell. It certainly felt like one when it swept over. She'd dived into a little

hollow beneath a boulder and wrapped herself tight in the pelt cloak, but even

then, it'd taken away nearly half her HP bar.

Once she'd confirmed that the freezing Debuff icon didn't activate when she

took off the cloak, Sinon emerged from under the rock. She now stared in

wonder at the world of silvery-white around her, reflecting the light of the

moon.

She'd run as much as she could in the hour since leaving the Ornith village and

probably covered twelve miles before the hailstorm arrived. Looking at how

much hail was covering the earth all the way to the horizon, she was worried

for the village. There was no turning back now, however. She didn't know how

many miles it was to the Bashin village, but if she didn't get there tonight, she'd

have to log out in the middle of the wide-open Giyoru Savanna. The current

situation in Unital Ring was the biggest emergency in the VR gaming world since

the SAO Incident in 2022, but Sinon wasn't bold enough to use that as an

excuse to skip school.

She sat down again at the foot of the rock, resisting the urge to go on the

move again. The pelt went back into her inventory, replaced by Fikki's hard

bread. It was indeed teeth-breakingly hard, and it didn't have much flavor, but

she put up with it because she didn't have time to start a fire. Her HP and SP

slowly began to recover. Once she got her HP up to about 80 percent, she drank

from her canteen. She'd used up quite a lot with all the running, so she needed

to look for fresh water soon…

"…Oh! Unless…"

She scooped up some of the nearly infinite supply of hailstones and trickled

them into the canteen. After a moment, the ice melted, and the level refilled a

bit. After a couple repetitions, the container was full again. The temperature

was rising, too, so the hail on the ground would melt soon. As long as she had a

container, she could refill as much water as she wanted. But of course, there

were no canteens or water jugs just lying around on the ground, and Sinon had

neither the materials nor the necessary skill to make one.

Sinon examined the details of the Ornith canteen closely. It seemed to be

made of waterproof leather. Though she hadn't thought about it before, it

occurred to her now that the light and sturdy canteen was probably more

valuable than the life-giving water inside it. Between the muskets and the

contemporary-looking buildings, the Orniths seemed to have quite an advanced

civilization. Too bad she wasn't likely to visit them again for quite a while.

For now, she drank from the freshly chilled water to refill her TP bar, then

sloshed more hail into the canteen to top it off. If she ran quickly, she could

probably use it up and refill it one more time before all the ice melted.

Sinon picked up the musket from the side of the boulder, slung it over her

back, checked that her laser gun was still on her hip, then began sprinting

across the silvery plains.

Out of the fifteen ability points she had acquired, Sinon spent ten to take the

Swiftness ability and its two offshoots, Gallop and Dexterous. From Swiftness,

that gave her a bonus to ranged-weapon damage, small-melee-weapon

damage, and jumping distance; from Gallop, reduced rate of SP and TP decrease

when running; and from Dexterous, a bonus to ranged-weapon accuracy and

lock-picking change. She was curious about the offshoots of Gallop, Sprint, and

Acrobat, and the offshoots of Dexterous, Vital Aim, and Adroit, but she held off

for now because the third-tier abilities cost three points each. Saving five points

was probably more cautious than she needed to be, but she had a feeling she'd

soon want abilities from outside the Swiftness tree—particularly from the

Toughness tree.

For now, the effect of the lower TP/SP cost from Gallop was huge. At just

rank-2, she could already tell that they were draining slower. She couldn't have

run twelve miles in an hour without it.

Sinon ran persistently, eager to make up the time she'd lost because of the

storm. Before now, she'd had to avoid monsters as well as their likely hiding

places. But now that the storm had passed, it seemed as though all the

creatures had burrowed underground, because she couldn't see a single moving

thing anymore as she hurried southeast. Eight inches of hail on the ground

made for a crunchy surface underfoot, but unlike snow, it was tightly packed

and did not slow her down.

After fifteen minutes, the ice began to thaw. It was melting as the

temperature rose again. She stopped, drank from her water supply to refill her

TP, then scooped up more ice. More of it was melting even as she did this, so

the next time she drank, she'd need to find a new source to fill up her water.

Hopefully, that'd be after she was out of the savanna.

Up ahead near the horizon, lit by dim starlight now that the clouds had blown

past, she could see the dark outline of mountains…or a cliff. She'd crossed

eighteen miles of the flat expanse, and up ahead it was split with a giant wall of

a cliff.

Was that the end of the plains? Did that mean the Bashin village was close to

the wall?

With hope in her heart, Sinon gazed at the foot of the cliff from north to

south. But at no point did she see any sign of man-made light. It was a bit

before nine PM, which seemed early for lights in a village to be out, but she had

to have faith.

The ice was melting all around her now, returning the grassland to its regular

state. The beasts and insects that had burrowed to get away from the chill

would be active again soon. She reminded herself that she'd need to be wary of

monsters once more, and she continued her run.

As she got closer, the scale of the cliff was far bigger than she realized.

It was easily over 150 feet tall and almost entirely vertical, so climbing it was

out of the question. She couldn't tell whether to go north or south around it

because there was no way to tell which side of it ended sooner.

Sinon had never seen them for herself, but in the Underworld, there were

giant barriers called the Everlasting Walls, which split the four empires into

separate territories, and not even the nobles or emperors themselves could

cross them. That kind of absurdity existed because it was a simulation, not a

game. And because Unital Ring was a game, there had to be some way to get

through this wall.

She looked around and found a large rock with a flat top, which she climbed

for a better vantage. Once she was sure there were no monsters around, she

opened her inventory and materialized the Hecate II.

Sinon knew it was pointless, but just to be sure, she tried to lift the heavy

antimateriel gun. It would not budge. Even though Sinon was level-16, it was

over her Equip Weight limit. She sighed, then got down and peered through the

scope. She could pull it off the gun and use it as a mini-telescope by hand, if she

wanted, but then she'd have to realign and adjust it again after reattaching it.

The process was much easier in virtual reality than in the real world, from what

she'd read, but you also needed to do a test fire to confirm it was right, and that

was a waste.

So she painfully realigned the Hecate's direction until she could look through

the scope for a better view of the wall. The blackish surface was so smooth that

it didn't even look natural. Free-climbing that wall would be suicide. There were

little trees growing here and there out of the surface, but there were not nearly

enough of them to climb all the way up. Examining the northern side of the wall

turned up nothing more of interest, so she slowly spun the Hecate on its bipod

to point the other way, to the south, and looked through the scope again.

"Ah…"

She zoomed in on the scope. There was a slope carved into the wall at one

point, like a set of stairs. Following the trail, feeling her heart beating in her

throat, she saw it vanish at the top into a tunnel, its mouth black and yawning.

There was an unpleasant mixture of excitement at finding the passage

through the cliff wall and anxiety about heading through a tight area, the bane

of all snipers. In any case, she had no other options. The Hecate went back into

her inventory. Sinon stood up; her HP was full again, thanks to the hard bread,

and her TP and SP were almost 90 percent full. She wished she could put some

of that perpetually full MP to practice use, but for now, she had no idea how to

gain any magic skills.

She still had her Sniper Rifle Mastery skill from GGO. What if she could

become not a magic swordsman—but a magic gunman? That would be cool.

With that enticing thought in mind, Sinon resumed running toward the titanic

wall.