Now that Erio and the other children knew Akira’s location at all times, they did not need to search for him anymore. Instead, they started the round by immediately trying to surround him. They kept their distance from Akira and slowly closed in on him while blocking his way out.
Akira stuck his back to a piece of rubble, taking cover from the incoming bullets. He sometimes peeked out and shot back in order to prevent the opponents from closing his escape routes. But that did not stop them from closing in the encirclement as their attack got more and more intense. The walls and the floors were already covered in bullet scorch marks from Alpha’s improved augmented reality, he would get shot if he made even the slightest blunder.
“They just don’t stop shooting, how many bullets do they have?”
“They are also using extended magazines. And since you kept defeating them before they ran out of ammo, I bet the system stopped preserving ammo. It’s better to empty their magazine first before dying. Strategy-wise, it is indeed a viable option for them to throw away the possibility to conserve their fighting strength for defeating you.”
“So, basically, they’re willing to sacrifice anything as long as it’s enough to defeat me, huh? It seems that they evaluate me pretty highly.”
“That’s because you keep winning the mock battles. So I don’t think they’re mistaken though. Do your best so that they don’t lower their evaluation of you.”
“Roger that!”
Akira smiled and then frowned slightly.
“But still, in a real fight, this is the moment where I would use a camouflage.”
If Akira activated the camouflaging feature of his coat, Erio and the children would lose sight of him, or at least, it would make it hard for them to ascertain his position. But he decided not to do that.
“Well, it can’t be helped, they’re using the information from the small information-gathering devices they scattered around the area to collect the data for the test. If you use your camouflage and vanish from their radar, the mock battle would lose its main purpose.”
In order to prevent that from happening, Tabata also warned Akira beforehand not to use camouflage.
“It would be great if they adjust their system to handle that too.”
“In case you lose, you can ask them to do that adjustment. But until then, just think of them as enemies that can detect you even if you use camouflage.”
“I guess I’ll just do that then.”
Right at the next moment, several people jumped above the wall behind Akira with the help of their augmented suit. But before they could aim at him while still in the air, he quickly aimed his SSB rifle above his head and released a barrage in their general direction.
Almost at the same time, another one jumped out in front of Akira and ran at him. Before Akira could shift his aim from upward to forward, that boy was faster to aim at Akira and shot straight at him. Akira dove sideways to get away from the trajectories of those bullets. Unfortunately, someone else already released a few shots at the location where he was jumping to, so Akira forced himself to spring up to evade that too. Now that Akira was in the air and had no control over his posture any longer, he had turned into an easy target. But before anyone could shoot at him, Akira quickly shot them down using the rapid-fire capability of his SSB rifle.
The moment Akira landed back, he immediately ran while suppressing fire by shooting without even looking. And just like that, he broke through the encirclement and opened some distance between him and his opponents.
“…The first ones were decoys, huh?!”
“I guess that’s one way to use people who already ran out of ammo.”
“If it was a real fight, those decoys are dead, you know? So they’re just throwing them away? Are they really okay with that?”
Akira frowned at that thought, but Alpha then replied with her usual smile.
“Considering that they can’t win using the normal methods, that was a fully acceptable strategy to increase their chance of winning.”
“That might be true, but still…. You know…”
“It’s better than getting completely wiped out. Being able to make such a cruel but rational decision is one of the advantages of using that support system. Having to fight it is really troublesome and having it on your side increases your survival chances, moreover, it saves you from making difficult decisions as well.”
Akira understood Alpha’s arguments, but that did not make him feel any better.
After Akira broke the encirclement, Erio and the other children could not recover from it and shifted to more individualistic moves.
Akira won the seventh and the eighth rounds as well. Since he now knew that his opponents were aware of his location at all times, he quickly approached them right after the round started and wiped them out before they could even surround him. Thus winning the round.
In the ninth round, the system finally decided that sacrificing the rest of the team was crucial to defeating Akira.
From the start of the round, all of them came at Akira altogether aiming for a draw. The vanguards purposefully came out in clear view in order to bait him out from his hiding so the others could shoot at him. On top of that, they formed a single file on both sides to corner Akira while shooting at him. The backline used the vanguards as a shield and approached him as well. As the whole team came at him while disregarding their chance of survival, they were able to completely shut off Akira’s escape route.
Akira understood that he had nowhere to go this time, so instead, he came charging right at them. In that intense exchange which would decide the winner and the loser, normally, luck would play a big role. But Akira refused to leave it up to luck. So he compressed his time perception as much as possible to confirm his surroundings and to decide the end result of that battle.
Akira ran straight forward and released a barrage with his SSB rifles. He then slid through the gaps between his opponents, who received the hit signals and incoming bullets, as he spread his shot to his left and right, drilling through the hit notification that wrapped the area.
Akira was already close enough to engage in a melee fight, but even so, Erio and the other children were still shooting at him as if they did not care about hitting their own. Akira gunned them one by one and jumped in between their blindspots to get away from their aims. From Akira’s point of view, the world was running at a much slower pace, he could see the storm of bullets filling the area with the help of Alpha’s support, which indiscriminately killed anything that it could find in its way.
Inside that slow-moving world, a question came up in Akira’s mind.
“For some reason, I feel like their hit notification is late, or does it look late from my point of view because of my time compression?”
In contrast to Akira who was really desperate, Alpha was smiling like usual as she answered his question.
“Nope, you’re indeed correct. That’s just how durable the settings of the augmented suit are right now. I bet they assume that they have their forcefield armour running with maximum output power. Although it shortens the duration in which they can keep using that augmented suit, as long as they can defeat you under that duration, it should not be a problem. After all, the system is also allowed to make the decision to sacrifice the team in order to defeat its opponent.”
“I see!”
Akira compressed his time perception so much to the point that he found himself moving in slow motion. He used the full power of his augmented suit to increase his aiming speed to its limit as he released shots in all directions.
Although Akira felt like the exchange took long, in reality, it only happened for a few seconds. Akira shot Erio who was the last standing survivor and won the ninth round as well.
Tabata, who was looking at the monitor in his trailer, had his jaw dropped.
“Even this is not enough to win, huh?”
A technician gave a given up smile and said.
“What can I say… This guy goes past amazing and went straight to ‘are you effing kidding me’ level. No wonder he was able to defeat a powered suit all by himself. Well, although, you can say that he can only do that because he was using expensive equipment and doesn’t try to limit his expenses.”
“Well, even though they have augmented suits with coordination support, his opponents are all just slum kids after all. So it’s nothing strange, right?”
“Just so you know, that Akira was originally from the slums as well.”
“He’s an exception. Not to mention, he’s also already doing pretty well as a Hunter. So it doesn’t matter where he originated from, right?”
“Well, that’s true.”
Yodogawa did not expect Akira to be this strong. So instead of using him to advertise the company’s product, Yodogawa started thinking of some other way to gain profit out of him.
[Although we ended up paying a lot of money to him for this test, I guess it is worth getting on his good side. After all, we are talking about having a connection with a Hunter this strong. There’s no way it would be useless. I was really worried when Tabata made that challenge, but result-wise, I guess everything is alright…]
Yodogawa shifted his gaze to Tabata.
“Tabata, as expected, I need you to stop here. Since we kept losing, if he wins the next fight, his bonus would be 1 million Aurum, you know. I know that you’re free to decide what to do with the given budget, but as expected I can’t let you continue. This is the end, okay?”
Tabata looked at Yodogawa with a desperate face without saying anything, he then returned his gaze back to his terminal.
“…Not yet, at least just one more time…”
“I can understand your feelings of wanting to win at least one match and I know that the last match was a close one. But, I can’t let you continue just because of that. If you keep thinking just a little bit more, we’ll just keep piling up more losses.”
Tabata did not reply as he was busy on his terminal. Another technician noticed what Tabata was trying to do and frowned.
“T-Tabata-san, this one is simply going too far, you know…”
“There’s not much difference between their posture and the posture of an adult. A small adjustment should be enough to compensate for the difference.”
“That might be true, but still…”
“I’ll do the adjustment in the system, you guys work on readjusting the augmented suits.”
“…Just keep in mind that I tried to stop you, alright.”
The technicians are technically working under him, so it was difficult for them to stop Tabata. The most that they could do was remind him before leaving the trailer to recalibrate the augmented suits. Seeing that, Yodogawa stopped one of the technicians and asked him what Tabata was trying to do.
When Yodogawa understood what was going on, he then asked with a troubled face.
“…Are you sure this will be alright?”
“Of course not. That’s why we tried to stop him. Although, I’m sure different people have different opinions whether you can call it trouble or not. After all, if we are talking about data analysis, information management, and the safety feature of an augmented suit, all of those are in the grey area.”
“Will it get someone killed?”
“Hmm, pretty sure it won’t go that far, chance-wise, it should be not that different from a normal product testing. So looking from that point of view, it should be okay. I’m sure that’s also why Tabata-san pushed through with this idea.”
Yodogawa still looked concerned.
“For now, try to prioritize safety as much as possible while still obeying Tabata’s order. I’m sure he’ll be satisfied after trying that once regardless of whether he wins or loses. If he tries to continue even after that, I’ll tell the higher-ups to stop him. He’s the one responsible here and it’s kind of difficult to stop him at the moment. So let’s just do what he wants for now.”
“Okay. But, I’ll leave the rest to you afterwards, alright?”
“Of course… So then, do you think we can win?”
“I can’t really say for sure. But it’s better than continuing without doing anything differently. I guess that’s basically the gist of it. Alright then, off I go.”
The technician left the trailer, leaving Tabata working alone inside. To be honest, Yodogawa also wanted him to win, that was why Yodogawa did not stop him.
During the break, Erio and the other children were talking about Akira.
“We really can’t even get a single win, huh. Or more like, we couldn’t win even after going that far. Just how much had he been holding back all this time?”
“You know, it might be that Akira-san probably cannot go full power unless he gets paid. Remember that time when he fought those maids? At first, he was losing but he got an easy win in the end, right? I heard that it was because he got paid as a request.”
“Money, huh. Well, he’s a Hunter, after all. I bet he’s pretty sensitive about that subject… But then, when you think about it again, why was he helping Boss back then? Hmmm, is it because he is going out with Boss?”
“Maybe some kind of investment? Considering how much money that we’re earning right now, it won’t be strange if it was a form of investment, no?”
“Ohh, that does make sense, so it all comes down to money, huh?”
Now that they were reminded of how strong Akira really was, none of them had the thought of winning against him any longer. They had completely abandoned the idea of trying to win and just took it lightly as they talked to each other and laughed it off.
But in contrast to the rest of them, Erio had a rather stern look on his face. He had not given up yet. He kept telling himself that if he gave up and relaxed now, he would lose even the smallest chance to win. He would end up throwing away the one in a million chance to win against Akira if it even existed in the first place.
The technicians who came from the trailer called on to them.
“Everyone who will participate in the next round, come here for a bit, we need to do some small adjustments.”
The available augmented suits were not enough for every single child to join the mock battle at the same time. Furthermore, there was a limit on how many adjustments could be made to compensate for the differences in their builds. Thus, the technicians needed to make small adjustments every time there was a swap.
Since they had decided beforehand who would participate in which round, the ones that would participate in the next round came to the technicians.
“Fuuh, that was tiring. I’ll skip the next round. Erio, you should take a rest too. You’ve been participating in all the fights, haven’t you?”
“I’m fine.”
“…I see, well, don’t push yourself too hard. It would be pointless if you hurt yourself. It’s not like we have expensive medicines like Akira-san, and the treatment from that clinic is basically experimenting with your body.”
“I know, I’ll be careful.”
In order not to allow his friends to get worried about him, Erio managed to let out a small smile.
After the small adjustments, Erio and the other children felt that there was something strange with their augmented suit. So one of them asked the technicians.
“Uhmm, it feels like the augmented suit is moving weirdly, like it’s much stiffer than before.”
“…It’s in the middle of testing after all. You might feel like that because of the new settings. Try to walk and move around until you get used to it. We’ll try to readjust the feedback as well, if you still feel weird after that, I’m sorry but you might want to get someone else to take your place instead.”
“I see… Alright then.”
They then started to move around as instructed to get used to the strange feeling. But some of them could not just get used to it and asked for replacements or to readjust their augmented suits. The technicians looked at them worriedly in the middle of that process.
It took some time until everyone could move around normally. After that long break, the next round finally started.
Right when the tenth round just started, Akira was about to come straight at them again when he realized that they were moving differently than before. So he decided to stop hunting them down and hid behind a rock instead.
The rest of the team, except for Erio, formed a support file for Erio who was out in a rather open position. Unlike last time when the system did not differentiate the individual’s strength, this time, there was a clear stratum based on it. And just like last time, they knew Akira’s location at all times.
Although it surprised Akira, he still handled it calmly. Akira first aimed at Erio which made one of them cover for him and disrupt the formation, Akira then used that small opening to shoot them down one by one. As a matter of fact, he did well in picking them out slowly, but even so, he somehow looked a bit troubled.
“Hmmm, not really sure if they’re stronger now. At the same time, it feels like they’re somehow weaker too.”
Alpha quickly followed up.
“Which one exactly?“
“Not sure. Though they do feel weird, that formation, unless they’re stronger than their opponent, I feel like it’ll only increase the number of corpses. I think they need better teamwork for the backline. Although, if they can do that properly, I’m sure that they’ll be super hard to deal with…”
“Indeed. It seems that the formation doesn’t work well for them since they don’t have the skill to support it. But in the end, this is still just a training, it’s a good chance for them to test different formations.”
“Well, you have a point there. I guess they changed their priority to testing new things since they kept losing.”
“For now, let’s just focus on defeating them. It would be meaningless if you lower your guard and get shot.”
“Roger that!”
Akira pushed that to the back of his mind and focused back on the mock battle. After they reduced the number of his opponents to the point where it was difficult for them to provide support for Erio, Akira decided that it might be time to go for the main pivot of that formation, Erio.
Akira jumped from behind the wreckage and aimed his rifle at Erio, but before he could shoot, Erio immediately shot back at him. Unfortunately, the bullets could not catch up with Akira who was moving too quickly.
Checkmate, the moment Akira thought so and was about to pull the trigger, he wavered as he saw Erio carrying rifle with one hand and following his movements. Erio was trying to aim at Akira after he evaded the first few shots which caused Erio’s arm to rotate at a rather unnatural angle.
Akira, by pure reflex, compressed his time perception to its limit and used the full power of his augmented suit to get away from the line of fire while shooting back at Erio.
Right at the next moment, a clearly painful scream echoed.
Erio was actually fully under the mercy of his augmented suit ever since the round started. It was because although his augmented suit was correcting his moves up until now, the level of accuracy of that correction was increased compared to before.
From the way he walked, ran, to the way he shot and even to other finer moves, it was as if his body was forced to follow his augmented suit. The difference between the move that his body made and the move that his augmented suit made put his body under immense stress. He felt uncomfortable since it was not him controlling the augmented suit, it was more like the augmented suit was controlling his body.
While at the same time, he was delighted that he was able to execute manoeuvres that were impossible for him to execute originally.
He thought that he might be able to reach Akira like that, so he endured the pain and continued the fight. It carried him to the point where he was able to almost get a shot on Akira.
As he thought that it was the perfect chance to defeat Akira, Erio focused his whole mind and body to gun Akira down, the gathered focus even caused him to see the world around him running at a slower pace. But when he saw Akira move quickly, he understood that he would not be able to hit Akira.
When his focus was thrown into short disarray, he remembered the pain that he was ignoring till now and that pain quickly spread through his body.
Erio screamed and dropped his gun. Seeing Erio fall down to the ground grabbing his arm, the other children forgot about the mock battle and ran towards him.
“Erio! Are you okay!? What just happened!?”
“I-It’s not like he got shot with real bullets, right? What the heck is going on here!?”
Seeing that, Akira understood that the mock battle was stopped there. So he immediately went to Erio and told the other children who were still in panic.
“Get him off the augmented suit for now, but do it slowly.”
Erio was not able to move due to the pain. So the other children were carefully removing his augmented suit off of him. Erio’s arm was swollen red and his shoulder was dislocated.
Akira took out his medicine and shoved it into Erio’s mouth.
“It’s medicine, swallow everything. And also, this is going to be a bit painful, so endure it.”
Akira only said so before he immediately grabbed Erio’s arm and forcefully fixed it. Erio flailed around because of the pain, but Akira held him down with his augmented suit.
“The painkiller will work soon, just endure it until then. And also, even if the pain dies down, it doesn’t mean that your arm is fixed. So don’t move your arm until it’s properly healed, otherwise, it’ll only slow down the healing process, you got that?”
Erio held back the pain assaulting him as he nodded multiple times. Akira was holding down Erio’s arm for some time, but only after Erio’s expression relaxed, did he let go. Even after the pain was reduced, Erio still had a stern look on his face.
Not too long after that, Sheryl, Tabata and Yodogawa also came. Sheryl went to look for an explanation from Akira, Erio, Tabata and Yodogawa in turns. After a short time to digest the information, she then sent a sharp gaze towards Yodogawa and Tabata.
“Can you explain what happened?”
Yodogawa was flusteredly trying to look for the right words to explain the situation while Tabata was pulled back to reality after someone got injured and ruffled his head.
Seeing that reaction, Sheryl understood that it was not something that was unexpected. It was something that was originally avoidable but for some reason, they did not, or at least, they did not do their work properly to avoid it.
“Is it an accident?”
Sheryl stared at them with scornful eyes. Tabata and Yodogawa were still flustered, struggling to find the right words to say, that was when Akira interjected.
“Rather than an accident, I bet it happened because the support system properly assumed it as a real fight.”
Everyone there immediately focused on Akira, who just voiced his opinion. Some of the kids looked disturbed and one of them asked Akira a question.
“Wait, how does that connect to Erio getting hurt? Even though we’re doing this assuming that this is a real fight, it’s still just training, right?”
“I bet the system is working just fine. The problem is that when the augmented suit tried to aim at me, the real body couldn’t catch up with its movements and then that happened, dislocating his shoulder.”
The system that took the battle as a real fight was unable to win the fight even after sacrificing some of the team members, that might be why the system decided to allow bigger sacrifices for the latest battle. Not only did it ignore the bullets hit, it even ignored the capability of its user as well. For Akira, it was nothing weird for the system to go that far.
“It must be that the system had decided that it was acceptable to sacrifice an arm as long as you were able to defeat me. If it was a real fight, it was not a wrong decision. After all, an arm is a cheap sacrifice if it can save you.”
Hearing that, Erio and the other children looked completely troubled. Seeing that, Akira just smiled bitterly and continued.
“Well, there’s no need to go that far for training. Although, you can also argue that there’s a need to go that far exactly because it’s training. After all, it’s impossible for you to execute something in a real fight when you can’t execute it during training. While on the other hand, it’ll also defeat the purpose if you get injured during training and are unable to perform well when confronted with a real fight. Moreover, even when you get in a situation where you have to sacrifice your arm to survive, I’m sure you won’t be able to make that decision that swiftly. So it’s another advantage of using the support system. After all, that was a close call for me back there.”
“Eh? Is that so?”
“Yeah, I almost got shot after all.”
Erio and the other children started murmuring with conflicted faces. They always thought that it was impossible to win against Akira no matter how hard they tried. So those words which confirmed that was not true, really shocked them.
But at the same time, that also meant they would not be able to reach that point unless they went that far. It was true that the gap between them was getting closer, but that was because Akira came down from where he originally was, it felt like Akira was out of their reach even if they tried to extend their hand.
“Different people take real fights differently. So I bet it’s just a misunderstanding between both of you regarding what it means to take training as if it was a real fight.”
After Akira said so, Erio and the other children looked at each other.
“Now that you mention it, they did say that the system will assume that it’s a real fight. But still, is that what they meant when they said that? Something like our arms or legs might be in danger.”
“No no no, as expected, that’s going too far, right? It’s their fault for setting up the system like that. I heard that this is a test run, so I bet it’s because they’re having trouble in that matter. That’s why they’re making us help with this test, right? As I thought, lending expensive augmented suits to us just for a safe test is too good to be true. Am I right?”
“But Akira-san said that this is normal for Hunters, you know? Hunters often fight against monsters in ruins, so I bet a number of them do this kind of thing.”
“It’s not right to treat us like common Hunters, ah, but this augmented suit is designed for Hunters, huh…”
Sheryl listened to them before once again, glancing at Yodogawa. Meanwhile, Yodogawa, who had regained his composure, used this chance to get on what Akira just said.
“It is indeed as Akira-sama just said. But at the same time, we admit that it’s caused by our inability to properly make the correct setting for the augmented suit, which ultimately caused this accident. We apologize for this and we’ll do our best to fix this issue so that this will never happen again.”
“…Alright, I hope that you’ll get this fixed.”
Sheryl had no plans to argue against Akira’s opinion just to corner Yodogawa. But she gave a smile saying that she would withdraw from this issue to respect Akira, and that would mean they owed her a favour.
In order to shake off the bad mood, Yodogawa raised his voice.
“Unfortunately, someone got injured. In order to focus on fixing this problem, we’ll end the training here for today. Akira-sama, thank you very much for helping out with the training today, we’re really thankful for that. We’ll invite you again for the next training, so please, by all means, join us for the next training as well.”
“Well, sure, if I’m free.”
“Sheryl-sama, although it has been proven that there’s still some fatal problem regarding the product, we’ll do our best to fix this. So we hope that we can still work together. Erio-sama, we’re really sorry for today’s outcome. We’ll give our best to adjust the system such that this would never happen again, so if you…”
“I’m fine like this.”
“Excuse me?”
Yodogawa did not expect that firm reply from Erio when he was apologizing to him. Akira also did not expect such a reply at all.
“I’m fine like this. There’s no need to change it. This happened because of a mistake in the setting and a misunderstanding between us, right? Then it’s well under the domain of testing, so you’ll properly pay for the treatment too, right?”
“Ah, well, of course, we will do that, but…”
“Then there’s no need to change the setting. It’s better for you like this since you can get better data, right?”
Yodogawa’s business face changed to a troubled one.
“Well, it will indeed let us get better data, but… Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I-In that case, we’ll readjust the system to your preference.”
“Thanks.”
Everyone looked at Erio with various expressions such as surprise, exasperation, admiration and suspicion. Even under those gazes, Erio renewed his resolve.
[If I can make that kind of move on my own, I’ll get close to Akira! This is the perfect chance! Like hell I would let it go!]
The gap that separated them as if Akira was standing on top of a building while the rest of them were crawling on the ground, felt like a hopeless gap for them. Even so, Erio still had not given up yet. Compared to before, it did not matter how large the gap was, Erio felt that gap was not unreachable.
Erio swore that he would become stronger as he clenched his fist.
