I have a job you don't often see in modern society.
Mercenary.
A professional combatant, paid to fight and to carry out high-risk missions.
Within that trade I'm a contractor: a mercenary attached to no particular PMC (Private Military Company), working contract to contract.
The role I usually take on a job is simple.
Go into enemy ground first, kill the power, remove the sentries quietly, blind the surveillance.
Then pass the real-time intelligence I pick up on the way in to the main force or the client, and lay out a safe route back out—
The role people usually call a covert saboteur.
The pay was huge, naturally, but it was dangerous in exact proportion.
Today was no exception.
"Objective reached. 30 seconds to power cut. Two lobby guards removed. A 3-man watch team is holding at the bottom of the west stairwell. The CCTV main distribution box is in the basement control room. Detection sensors are live in the east corridor, so be careful."
Tucked into a hide I'd scouted in advance, I passed on what I'd gathered coming in, as briefly as I could.
Kzzzt—
A moment later the low, flattened voice of Leclerc, our bald French team leader, came through the tactical earpiece.
[Copy. Secure your exfil route immediately.]
We had 10 minutes.
After that, the cops who'd gorged themselves on the bribe would arrive.
I kept myself hidden in the dark and moved with the minimum of motion.
The knife in my hand caught the moonlight and spat out a bright red gleam.
I was on my way to the exfil zone I'd set in advance when it happened.
[Alpha, do you read? The east patrol route is empty. The site's too clean. I think our intel's been leak—]
Leclerc never got to finish.
KABOOOOOOOOM!
"......!"
The building shook with the blast. Then ragged gunfire came pouring down from the floor above.
My spine went cold.
'They had a trap dug for us.'
Worst-case scenario.
Working out what had happened could wait. First I needed a hide that would keep me out of sight.
I opened my mouth to call the sniper who would be watching this side from the outer building.
But a voice in the earpiece got there ahead of my own words.
A voice I'd never heard before. Cold, with nothing in it at all.
[Sniper down. Overwatch position clear.]
[D'accord. And the mole?]
[Not located yet.]
Fluent French.
For the record, up until then we had been speaking English.
'Walked right into it.'
I dumped the earpiece, the burner, the chest rig, the NVGs and my spare magazines where I stood, and ran for the jungle.
***
"So you hid in the jungle near Kisangani for 2 weeks? What did you do for drinking water?"
Go Tae-min answered Chae Geon-uk's question while chomping through a hamburger.
"Managed somehow. We did CEET training back then, you know."
"Ugh...... the sucking sap out of tree roots thing? Don't tell me you did it again?"
"Try 3 days without water, hyung. Your eyes would roll back too, and you'd probably be digging in the dirt and high-fiving earthworms, wouldn't you?"
"Agh, I don't even want to picture it. Food?"
"African lizard is meatier than you'd think. Shut your eyes through the fishy part and it leaves chicken in the dust. Want me to catch you one sometime?"
Go Tae-min had spent a full 2 weeks drifting through the jungle, staying ahead of the hunt.
The gunfire only lasted the first few days, but the silence that came afterward was more dangerous.
Total isolation, with even outside comms cut.
He took his bearings off the constellations before dawn each day, moved only at night, and got through it one day at a time.
To leave no trail he moved by setting his feet on roots and nothing else, and he slept crouched up in the trees.
Working northeast along the river, he managed to stay hidden all the way to the border.
"I found a broker there and got out into Uganda. Then down to the port at Mombasa, and I slipped onto a freighter."
Go Tae-min said it like it was nothing, but every day of that journey had been one more nerve-shredding fight to survive.
Even after the freighter out of Mombasa reached Naples, he couldn't let his guard down.
A man dodging a manhunt could never enter the country legally in the first place.
The moment he was off the ship Go Tae-min went to ground outside the port, made contact with a local broker, and only after barely getting hold of a forged identity could he even attempt the trip home.
The money that bled out of him along the way came to a full $20,000.
"Nnngh, money I bled for......"
Chae Geon-uk consoled Go Tae-min as he clutched his chest and brooded.
"At least you came back with all four limbs. You've been through enough, so take it easy for a while."
"Come on, if I wanted to rest I wouldn't have come to you, hyung. If I don't want to suffer later, I have to work hard while I'm younger, even by a year."
Chae Geon-uk was a senior from Go Tae-min's own unit, a man he had shared life and death with, and these days he worked as an information broker.
Which was why Go Tae-min often took jobs through him.
Chae Geon-uk set down the whisky bottle he had been polishing and clicked his tongue.
"You want to go out in the field in a situation like this? You don't even know how deep those bastards have their straws in. Are you out of your mind?"
"It's not like it's a trade where I show my face and sell my name anyway. I've got a whole stack of laundered identities."
"Still, kid, this time it went too far. I know your situation's hard. But Tae-min, can't you pace yourself a little? Just how much more do you need before you can crawl out of that mess?"
"It's a long way off yet, if I want to change the way my mother and my younger siblings have to live."
"Ease up a bit, you punk. If you die, you think your family's going to be happy taking that money?"
"Come on, I'm not going to die. Even the afterlife won't take a guy like me. The pay's all wrong. So hurry up and line me up some work."
Chae Geon-uk shook his head, side to side.
The junior in front of him was a man whose stubbornness was tough as ox tendon.
If not through him, Go Tae-min would get hold of a job some other way. That much was certain.
He would have been under an alias with his face covered anyway, so there was no way his identity had been exposed. But even so, going out into the field right now was far too dangerous.
"Why not try some other line of work for a while instead? There's Nova Arena, for one."
"Nova Arena? What's that?"
Go Tae-min tilted his head.
He had spent the last few years working nowhere but the back country of Africa.
There was no way he would know how the world was turning these days.
The moment Go Tae-min showed interest, Chae Geon-uk grinned.
***
2030.
A company called Nova succeeded in developing a BCI system, that is, brain-computer interface technology.
It read the brain's sensory and motor signals, even memory, in real time, and let a body inside a virtual space move exactly as it would in reality.
-A new world has arrived, everyone.
With that technology they created a form of content that had never existed before.
Its name: Nova Arena.
Put simply, a modern Colosseum.
Inside a virtual arena built with BCI technology, participants took up weapons and shields and fought as gladiators.
A place where you came back after dying, but where the terror of death and the pain were no different from the real thing.
And for all that, a contradictory world in which your real body took no injury. It captivated people all over the globe the day it opened.
Crowds poured in to watch Nova Arena matches, and the more they poured in, the more capital flowed into Nova Arena.
The formats varied, too.
Sometimes two fighters took up arms for a one-on-one bloodbath.
Sometimes more than 1,000 participants fought out a siege.
Sometimes they ranged through a jungle to complete a given mission.
Or broke out of a prison built like a maze—
Nova Arena staged matches that left your palms wet.
"Well? Aren't those all things you could do perfectly well? You're a specialist in the trade."
For all the praise, Go Tae-min cared about one thing only.
"They pay a lot?"
"You have to climb some way up first, of course. But you'd still earn far more than in the MMA market, wouldn't you?"
Go Tae-min heard him out, propped his chin on his hand and sank into thought.
'Huh. Better than I expected?'
7 years in special forces. Then 3 years as a mercenary.
He had fought so much that combat was second nature.
And for a covert saboteur, whose whole life was silence, the knife was a tool he had to keep working at in every spare moment, so he could erase his presence and go in quietly.
Because the work had to be carried out inside enemy ground, quietly, without being caught.
'A blade that's a bit longer isn't going to be any different.'
He had never learned to handle a sword properly, but it hadn't caused him much trouble so far.
Most of the enemies he met in the field were men who only knew modern warfare.
They were dangerous once the distance opened up, but once he closed it by any means at all, the rest was simple.
Shove the knife into something vital, or just make sure they couldn't raise a gun. That was enough.
But one thing nagged at him.
"Wouldn't entering Nova Arena actually expose my identity?"
Chae Geon-uk let out a short laugh at the question.
The punk. He had acted like nothing bothered him, and apparently he had been quietly worried after all.
"Don't worry. You connect through a capsule anyway. Put on a mask or something and enter from Japan or America, and who's going to know it's you? You can set a different handle, too."
He didn't have to show his face.
He could operate under a handle, and change the country he competed from as freely as he liked.
Having heard that much, Go Tae-min made his decision.
"So how do I sign up?"
***
"Whoa. This thing's got some size to it, huh?"
The capsule we bought ended up in the small room beside my senior's workshop.
He was glad of a dependable guard in me, and I had gained a hideout where I could work with my mind at ease, so it was win-win for both of us.
"Which country do you want to start in?"
"Which one's good?"
"There are plenty of decent ones."
After talking it over with him, I settled on picking one of three countries: America, Japan or China.
The reasoning was that I spoke a fair amount of English and looked like anyone else from Northeast Asia, which made identity cover easier.
"I'd recommend Japan. It's easier to take a Pro License there than in America or China. And there's no time difference."
I nodded without argument.
"Japan, then."
If the money was the same, there was no need to pick the hard road.
While he filled out the application for me, I looked over the inside of the capsule.
A metal capsule shaped to the curve of a human body.
Just lie down in it and you could connect to virtual reality. It still didn't quite land.
While I had been wrestling venomous insects in the African jungle, the world had gone further than I thought.
"Done! You can play right now. What do you want to do? Give it a try?"
"Already?"
"The system's well built these days. And so many people are going for a Pro License. So the process is simpler than it used to be."
He gave the capsule a couple of taps.
"Get in. I'll help you with the setup."
I slid myself slowly into the capsule.
Once I settled and lay back, cold, heavy metal took my weight.
With practiced hands he sorted out the electrodes and sensors and fixed them one by one to my head and my limbs.
"Heh. Have fun in there. I'd bet you're in for a surprise?"
"......?"
He closed the capsule door with a loaded little smile.
The capsule sealed with a mechanical clack, and in that instant the back of my neck went cold.
To a black operative, a sealed space and darkness meant death.
I forced the tension out of my body and shut my eyes.
'This is really...... going to connect me to virtual reality?'
A moment later the whole capsule trembled, very faintly.
At the same time an electronic voice slid out beside me, almost a whisper.
[Beginning neural synchronization for Nova Arena access.]
[Verifying sensory signals...... 13%]
[Motor nerve group linked...... 27%]
[Electromyography (EMG) pattern sync...... 41%]
[Visual cortex (V1~V4) response confirmed...... 58%]
[Proprioception matching...... 72%]
[Brain-body interface stabilizing...... 89%]
[Neural synchronization complete...... 92%]
[Loading avatar appearance...... 96%]
[Streaming environment data...... 100%]
[Nova Arena access complete.]
[Your battlefield is opening.]
And then—
My vision blacked out.
.
.
.
When I came to again, a new world had opened in front of me.
'Where is this?'
A huge circular structure.
The floor was buried under sand, and the walls rose in tier after tier of spectator seating.
'It really is a Colosseum.'
Sunlight poured down out of a blue sky.
A sense of heat it was hard to believe was virtual.
I picked up a handful of sand.
The texture against my fingers was intensely real.
I brushed the sand off and took slow stock of my body.
The play of muscle, the feel of a joint bending, the response as force went into it......
All of it natural.
Enough to make you forget this place was virtual reality.
'Incredible.'
Even my clothes were exactly what I had worn into the capsule.
The thin leather armor my senior had picked out for me.
A longsword is strapped at my waist, and a knife sits hidden against my chest.
And on my face, a mask shaped like a demon, making its presence felt.
I ran a hand over the mask and let out a disbelieving laugh.
'How on earth is any of this possible?'
It felt less like I had entered virtual reality and more like I had been teleported into some other space.
Then blue text surfaced at the edge of my vision.
[Your assigned participant number is No. 2,749.]
[Searching for an opponent......]
[Match found!]
[Participant No. 1,701 is entering.]
[Record: 3,862 matches, 2,287 wins, 1,575 losses (Win rate: 59.25%)]
The sand across the arena rippled, and a man slowly took shape.
Traditional Japanese dress.
Two scabbards strapped at his waist.
He looked like a samurai who had stepped straight out of a film.
I snorted.
'They say some people run a gimmick to play to the crowd. Turns out it's true.'
Well, I was wearing a ridiculous demon mask myself, so we were even on that count.
[Bout type: 1v1 singles]
[Match class: Japanese Amateur League match]
[Victory condition: Kill the opposing participant]
[Map: Circular Arena (Small)]
[Matchup: 2,749 vs 1,701]
[Current spectators: 13]
[Match begins in 3 seconds.]
The man in samurai dress drew his sword and fixed me with a glare.
I closed my hand slowly around my own hilt.
A tactical short sword, about 50 cm, shorter than an ordinary sword and a little longer than a knife.
The blade carried a matte coating that drank the light, and in place of any ornament there was only a coarse grip that wrapped into every knuckle.
The cold of the metal climbed up through my palm.
'It's been a while since a fight like this.'
[Match begins in 2 seconds.]
The fighting instinct that had followed me like a shadow these last few years lifted its head.
The wind grazing the back of my neck, the coarse grain of sand under the soles of my feet......
I sank into a low crouch, like a predator that had sighted prey.
[Match begins in 1 second.]
Hand position. Toes. Field of view.
Every sense narrowed to a single point.
The feel of a body shifting over into combat mode.
'Here he comes.'
My opponent's center tipped to the left, very slightly.
The signal that he was about to come straight in.
And then—
[Match start!]
The man in samurai dress came at me like a thunderbolt.
The instant his sword swept a half circle and came for me.
'Left shoulder.'
A single red line formed in my vision.
His blade ran along that line without so much as 1 mm of error, like a train on a track laid down in advance.
That was the thing.
The reason I had survived this long, first as a special forces operator and then as a mercenary, was this talent of mine for seeing trajectories.