Chapter 10

Nyarin picked up the bazooka she had summoned earlier and leveled it at Truck-kun. He activated a speed skill and bounced off one wall and out the nearest door.

Instead of chasing him, Nyarin fired her bazooka and blew out the back wall of the training barracks. Then she fired through the hole before the smoke cleared, trusting the heat seeking projectile to find Truck-kun.

There was an explosion, and Truck-kun cried out in pain.

Nyarin laughed in victory and strode forward, stepping over the rubble of the collapsed wall before the dust had settled. I would have called out to her, telling her that there had been no red damage number indicating Truck-kun had been hit. There had been no damage announcement.

Besides, one should never confidently stride forward before the dust settles. Hadn’t she watched any animated TV shows? But there was a third reason I let the fight go on: I was kind of interested to see who would win.

The instant Nyarin stepped into the smoke, Truck-kun appeared holding an improvised weapon he had picked up outside the barracks. The improvised weapon was an elderly man, actually an non-player-character or NPC controlled by a pre-programmed set of actions.

Truck-kun asked the man with a smile, “How have things been today, gramps?” He turned the man to face Nyarin just as the old man began speaking.

“Well, you know what’s so great about eggs?” The old man asked. Nyarin cursed, reaching up to push invisible buttons to hurry the old man through his scripted dialog.

She had been trapped, stuck talking to a NPC in the middle of a fight. It would keep talking through its preprogrammed script, heedless of the danger to her. I’ve had that happen in games too. Totally stressful.

Truck-kun angled Nyarin’s bazooka, which was still in her hand, at the ground. He used his super speed to bounce away before it fired and the explosion collapsed more of the barracks.

More red numbers appeared. “Incredible! Over three thousand damage!” The voice in the sky seemed genuinely impressed.

The old man, apparently impervious to unfriendly damage as a mere bystander to the fight, flew away while talking about his bunions. Nyarin’s life total was now barely above one thousand. As rubble from the wall fell it dealt even more damage where it struck her.

Truck-kun’s life total was still between one and two hundred.

She pulled out a huge healing potion and moved to drink it.

Unlike skills like disarm or sabotage that Truck-kun could use to toy with Nyarin’s weapons, a healing potion couldn’t be prevented by any skill in the skill book. I knew this, because I had taken my time to read the entire list shortly after arriving while Nyarin stood tapping her foot and checking the time, ears twitching in annoyance.

Nyarin chuckled. She had endless potions, and he had only a fraction of her life. This would be a cat and mouse game of endurance. And she was the cat. Girl. Catgirl.

Truck-kun blurred back inside the barracks and used his superior acrobatics skill to push Nyarin a couple of meters to one side. She ran into the crumbling remains of the wall that had been blown open by the bazooka blast. When she did, something odd happened and the healing potion separated from her hand and fell on the other side of the wall.

“You know that fat Tanuki spirit that we hired last year, in the programming department?” Truck-kun said as he picked up the healing potion that had fallen from her hands. “He was assigned to make this world to imitate the real world video game.”

Truck-kun smiled. “But he’s a hack, so this has all sorts of bugs, especially around broken walls.”

And there was a fourth reason I couldn’t stop the fight. He had used a wall clipping bug in the game to separate an opponent from their healing potion? I had to learn more from the illustrious Truck-kun if I was going to live the rest of my life in this Isekai.

He drank the potion, life returning to his maximum number just above two hundred. He stood, a mocking smirk on his mouth, a mere level one with barely any equipment.

Nyarin roared with rage, a sound befitting a catgirl I suppose, but startling. It was a genuine roar.

She materialized a max level eyepiece to optimize her tactical awareness, two anti-gravity supported dual-wielded gimbal-balanced gatling guns with AI-guided targeting, and a specialty armor that had to be from some sorta Christmas-related expansion pack.

The Christmas armor amounted to a red fur-lined bikini with two tastelessly placed jingle bells. Suddenly I loved jingle bells. With another roar she fired, tracking two columns of hellish fury into the surrounding buildings as Truck-kun dodged this way and that.

The damage announcer went from trying to read building damage numbers to simply babbling about unchecked cruelty and man’s inhumanity to man.

The name ‘Nyarin’ over her head changed to black, the color of rampaging monsters.

She was a goddess of war and destruction, reining fury and fire beyond mere words. Bridges fell, towers crumbled, and buildings were razed before her terrible might and vibrating cleavage.

The damage announcer guy openly wept.

Nyarin roared as the barrels of her gun heated from a faint red up to a nearly white incandescence. She brought doom to all that stood before her. She confirmed to me that this game world had soft physics and jiggle simulations enabled.

The fifth reason I didn’t stop the fight? I was so turned on.

Eventually the roaring guns and catgirl paused. The silence practically vibrated with tension.

After more than half of a sizable town had been obliterated, I noted three things.

First, I noted that neither Nyarin nor Truck-kun seemed to care about the collateral damage.

Second, I noted that despite all of the collapsed buildings there was never any cover for Truck-kun to hide behind. Instead, Nyarin hounded him down with the best equipment one could find in the whole game, drawn from the effectively infinite inventory every player used.

The only limit to what one could carry was their strength. In a flash of insight, I realized that there was rubble at the bottom of the hole made by her bazooka. So why wasn’t there rubble left behind where a whole town had been destroyed?

The third thing I noted was that Truck-kun’s hero-grade strength allowed him to carry almost infinite weight inside his inventory, which now included half a town’s worth of rubble.

Truck-kun appeared in front of Nyarin and slightly above her, with one foot each atop either of her super hot gatling guns. She blinked as Truck-kun unloaded everything in his inventory simultaneously, first his remaining five training grenades which were active, then exactly one half of a town's worth of broken stone, bricks, and wood.

I only managed to escape at the last moment, using the same heroic speed skills that Truck-kun had used during the fight. Rubble completely covered not only Nyarin but the entire training barracks. After about ten seconds, there was a muffled explosion under all of the rubble.

A red damage number appeared over where Nyarin had been buried. It was over a million.

There was a gasp from the damage announcer, who simply said, “Wow.”

A dialog box appeared under the damage number. It said, “A member of your party has fallen. Resurrect for 1000 gold?”

Truck-kun gestured to the dialog in feigned disgust. “It’s so hard to find good help these days.”