Idol Gunner [Yuri Villainess LitRPG]

Walking down the stairs, Kana could feel the weight of every footstep in front of and behind her. Like the rush of a busy train station, her ears were tuned to the precision of every breath and whisper that left Jina. They pricked up to catch the whimpers of Hiromi and Hanae, and the murmured words of comfort that Marie tried her best to offer.

But amidst all that noise, she could not find herself. To Kana, it felt like she was gliding down those stairs. The deaths didn’t matter to her. The bodies meant nothing. It was the cruelty they had been subjected to and the person who had been behind it that made her blood rush. Every downward movement made her feel like she was falling deeper into a darkness she had never anticipated.

Akiko Hara was a psychopath.

Never, for even a moment, had she considered that to be a false statement. But now, as she reached the end of the stairs and waited for the girls in front of her to make way, she felt the true weight of her conclusions. All that time ago, when she had burnt Aharu’s time capsule, Kana had allowed herself to get angry at the woman’s cold, robotic heart. Now, she did not know how far that justification could be taken.

Did she hate Akiko Hara merely because of that one incident, even now? Or did she hate her because she was, indeed, a murderous madwoman with some crazy plan? Had she killed that drug dealer back then because he was a bad person, or because he had caused Naomi to suffer? Had she killed that journalist because he was the scum of the earth, or had she done it because Risa Ueno had been his victim?

Kana did not know the answers to her own questions, and they finally made her suffocate. After so long, she had dared to ask herself a question that she was afraid of answering. A truth that she dared not utter, lest she be slaughtered like Caesar by those walking around her.

Nobuko Kimura was the first one to see the city, and Kana only got an opportunity a little bit after that. But both of them stood side by side with their awestruck expressions. Kimura did not have the urgency to keep moving as she took in the sight, and Minami expected that she would be there for much longer, too.

Stretching on forever was a honeycomb of buildings under the surface of the Monster Dimensions. Square, rectangle. One-storied, two-storied. The variety of the structures was not particularly wide, but it was still disturbingly fascinating. Every wall had been constructed with the very orangish-red stone that made up the ceiling. Perhaps the rocks that had been mined to clear this cavern out were repurposed as the habitats.

“That’s a bit…human.” Jina voiced the opinion everyone had, but was too afraid to make known.

“It’s efficiency, right?” Atlas tried her best to justify it. “I mean, it’s how all the civilizations made their early houses. That’s just the best, easiest, most reliable method. Yeah?”

Why were they so worried? Because it made the monsters feel too human? Too close to who they were? Kana scoffed at the possibility. If they wanted to feel bad about killing these things, they should have felt bad on the first day. Almost a decade later, now, these girls had no right to be worried. They did not have the permission to care about morality.

“Quiet,” Nobuko noted. Kana looked at her with admiration. Despite her barely disguised personal disgust at everything, she had somehow made the most important observation yet.

It was quiet. Strangely quiet. This was supposed to be a city, wasn’t it? If so, then where were the people who lived here? It wasn’t abandoned, since the buildings had been maintained well. Yet, for some reason, there was no monster in sight. Either all of them had evacuated very recently, or…they were all hiding in ambush.

“Should we separate?” Atlas propositioned. “Could cover a lot more ground like that, and then we can meet up towards the end of the city. Make your way north, and we should eventually all meet.”

“Sounds like a pla-”

Interrupting Hiromi was Marie, who clicked her tongue and started walking first. “Of course not, Sumimori-san. You cannot be serious about that question, can you? We walk together, or we don’t walk at all. This is no time to be playing games by separating into smaller groups.”

“She makes a good point.” Kana followed after her, but soon overtook the girl to be first. Once she started moving, the other girls knew that they would not be able to decide on anything else. And so, they started to follow them, too. “If Akiko is in here, it will be easier to catch her if all of us work together.”

“That’s assuming that she does not kill us first.” Nobuko characteristically added a hint of pessimism.

“Now, now, Nobu-chan.” Jina walked up to her, walking shoulder to shoulder. “Don’t doom us all like that, please. Remember when you used to be very confident and loud? Let’s go back to that!”

“She was never confident and loud…” Shoko argued, mumbling something under her breath before being glared at by her leader. Her eyes met Nobuko’s, and she let out a small yelp before moving to the back of the group.

Megumi Ishida, her remaining teammate, did not care to console her. Letting the girl remain by herself, muttering stuff as she shifted between the others to keep herself out of danger, Megumi continued to walk beside Nobuko with her hands behind her head. Even in the face of danger, she was not fazed by the idea of death. Or that was what she wanted to show, at least.

The city was not quite as maze-like as Kana had expected at first. It was logical and repetitive. The structures were not randomly square or rectangular, but on purpose. The former were taller to make up for the smaller floor size, while the latter were the shorter ones. Together, they made up smaller rectangular or square blocks that were then separated by two different forms of alleyways between them.

Larger ones helped separate the entire blocks from each other, while smaller ones helped make some space between the buildings, which had been arranged together. The further they walked, the more Kana noticed that this idea of expansion also applied to the blocks themselves. If a rectangular block of buildings was made of four square and two rectangular buildings, then the block itself acted as one of those ‘rectangular buildings’ when compared to the other blocks.

It was disturbing. More than she cared to admit. She knew that she had no right to be worried now, but it was fine. After all, it wasn’t the morality that bothered her. The thing that made her confused was why the monsters always seemed so…brainless. If they were capable of creating cities like these, why did they not have any combat capabilities or knowledge? Why did they do nothing except scream, charge, and die like husks?

“There. Footsteps.” Marie noticed them first and ran up to them. Looking down, she nodded. “Two of them. Human shoes.”

“Akiko and Yuko,” Neptune stated the obvious, followed by an actual observation. “But you would assume that they would have left footprints even before this. It’s not like there’s any rough winds down here.”

She was correct, but Kana had to weigh in with some common sense beyond that.

“Long dresses.” She explained before continuing to move. “Their trains probably cleaned up the sand-like dirt after them as they walked. Then it settled on its own because of gravity.”

“Great. And now they suddenly started appearing because…?” Marie looked up at her, now that Kana had reached her position.

“Fuck if I know.” She shrugged and continued to walk forward.

As if to answer her question, however, something close to one of the smaller internal alleyways caught her attention. A bright, light purple fabric was lying on the ground. Two of them, in fact. Jina ran up to them first and picked them up, bringing them back for the others to see.

They were the trains of their dresses, and had been taken off. They all looked at them one by one before Hanae was given the duty of walking with them. It was certainly strange to find something like that out in the open, but Kana could not be bothered to think. All she knew was that they had been left here for some reason. She wanted to know what.

It was moments after that thought crossed her head that she was interrupted by something more important. They entered the latter half of the city and were met by three guards on patrol. They looked at the girls and hissed.

Three monsters, all decked out in proper armor and helmets with swords at their waists. These ones were also more humanoid somehow, and not a version that Kana had ever encountered before. Longer arms, longer legs, more defined facial features on their slightly-scaly, slightly-muscly red skin. She took out and raised her grenade launcher in response.

One of the three, after talking to the others, ran away from them and slipped into one of the alleys. The other two looked at them and growled, but only until Kana shot a grenade and it hit one of them on the face. The explosive fell down, and the timer started to tick. The two of them looked at it with confusion for a moment before realizing what it was.

An explosion rocked the underground city, but it wasn’t enough to cause any real damage to the cavern. The monsters had jumped out of the way and protected themselves. Marie picked her assault rifle and started shooting along with Neptune, but they dodged those, too. Rolling away from the bullets, they withdrew into the buildings and disappeared before they could get shot.

“So, they can use their brains. Who knew?” Kana sighed and despawned her grenade launcher.

Not all of them were mindless, after all. That just made her more confused. Why not send your smartest soldiers to the battlefield? Why keep them reserved for these places? The only time Kana had ever had trouble fighting these demons had been with those four special ones, and they had only chanced upon those four. If not for that, they would have never revealed themselves to the humans.

These monsters, smart as they were, were purposefully sending weaker soldiers to the idols. But why?

Now, the girls started running. More monsters appeared from the roofs and the alleys, poking their heads out and looking at them before disappearing back in. As they ran towards the end of the city, hoping to find Akiko before the situation got out of hand, they quickened their pace.

The monsters sometimes shot an arrow, but missed. They threw daggers, but Jina and Atlas knocked them down. Hiromi got shot in her palm once, but Shoko was quick to heal her with haste. All eleven of them, quick-footed, navigated the now-predictable layout of the city to get to its hypothetical endpoint. The footsteps that Akiko and Yuko had left were their guides.

Left, right, left, straight. There was no explaining why they had picked the route they did, but that didn’t matter. The faster they ran, the closer they would get to the girls. The closer they would get to the truth. Even the monsters had started to question their decisions, as they found it difficult to keep up with the messy path the girls had picked.

From their vantage points on the roofs of the buildings, or from sneakily hidden crevices on the ground, they shot and threw and tried to delay the girls. Saturn opened her barrier, helping counter some of the projectiles around a smaller group at the front. It wasn’t smart for all of them to huddle into the barrier, after all.

Kana did not care about the enemies. The more pronounced the footprints became, the faster she got. Soon, she had crossed Saturn’s slow-moving barrier and was heading the group along with Nobuko Kimura. The two of them were followed closely by Jina, who did not want to be left behind, and Marie, who had first made sure that Hiromi and Hanae were safe inside Saturn’s barrier.

The four of them hastened to the end of the city and did not stop until a large crowd of monsters finally came into view. Monsters that they were used to. No armor, fleshier, and just vaguely humanoid with their weird anatomy. A bunch of them had gathered in a circle in a wide opening.

Beyond that opening was a larger building than the rest. Not necessarily taller, but more sprawling. If the others had been houses until now, this one was closer to a mansion or a palace. Two floors, and spread across the entire width of the cavern. This was the place where the ruler of the city probably lived. That or whatever the chosen name of these monsters was.

The crowd of monsters looked at them and started to groan in their usual, brainless manner. Kana raised her grenade launcher to get them out of the way, shooting. Before the grenade could leave the barrel, though, Nobuko kicked it down to the floor. The projectile bounced on the ground and rose up, which she kicked once more, letting it fly towards one of the roofs.

As it exploded and killed a monster hiding on top, Kana turned to Nobuko, fuming. She wanted to know why, but did not need to actually ask.

The crowd of monsters slightly dispersed at the sudden sound and revealed why they were standing in a tight circle. Between the monsters, standing without hesitation were Akiko Hara and Yuko Suzuki. Both of them, in their ankle-length gowns, looked back at Kana in surprise.

Akiko smiled at her and waved, while Yuko clicked her tongue and looked away.

“Akiko!” Kana screamed, putting her weapon away and beginning to speed towards her.

“Did you kill those girls?” Nobuko asked, preparing her revolver and aiming it at the girls.

“Oh, please calm down,” Akiko said in her soft, sultry tone. “Yes, I did kill them, but it was for good reason. Give me a chance to explain myself, at least. But after my meeting, I’m afraid. I’m glad that you are here, but there are other things that I need to give all my attention to right now.”

“I’ll show you fucking attention, you insane bitch.” Kana did not think twice before spawning in her railgun and holding it up. “How’s this for starters, huh?”

Akiko chuckled, looked at her with pitiful eyes, and then turned away. Deciding to look at the mansion behind her, she completely ignored the girls who were ready to attack. Yuko did the same, pissing Kana off even further.

Kana prepared to load the railgun, but the mansion suddenly began to groan. Its main doorway suddenly got some color with yellow banners unfurling on its sides. From the other end of the mansion appeared three monsters wearing what looked like clothes. Lavish, layered, and elegant. Even in their hideous forms, they felt like royalty.

The three of them walked up to the very front of the mansion and waited until the ground started to rumble. The area right beneath them started to rise in the air, putting all three on a pedestal that looked down upon the rest.

Kana put her railgun down, unable to comprehend the scale of what she was seeing. Nobuko did the same as Jina and Marie caught up to them. In the back, the other girls had also slowly reached the end and were finally witnessing what was going on. The demons who had once been attacking them now got down on their knees and bowed before the three royals.

One of them, the one in the middle, looked down at Akiko and croaked. “You. Meeting? Why?”

Broken English, but it got the point across.

“Yes, your majesty.” Akiko smiled, putting her hands behind her back. “I wished to talk to you, sir.”

“Ok. Come up.”

Easier than expected, the monster gestured by moving his hand up, and the ground beneath Akiko began to rumble too. It shook until both she and Yuko were also rising up in the air on a stone pillar. One or two demons got caught in the moving platform, but jumped down before it got too high. Even then, though, it did not go as high as the royals. It stopped right before it could meet their height, leaving Akiko to stare up.

“I’m sorry, but please forgive all of the others below.” She kept her smile up. “They are far too ignorant and far too foolish. I suggest that you send them back where they came from, and release them into the wilds.”

“You. Suggest, no. Why here?”

“Ah, my apologies.” Akiko shook her head. “I overstepped my boundaries. They are yours to do what you want with, and I forgot. As for me…I’m here to strike a deal. That is something we say to start an alliance with another. So, in this context, I guess I am trying to say that I wish to join you, your majesties.”