Nick could see clearly through the observation scope. The girl opposite had obviously been so annoyed by him that she laughed. She stood there stunned for quite a while before picking up her writing board, lowering her head, and scrawling a long string of words.
"My name is Dahlia. Today is my birthday, and I'll do whatever I want!"
Fine, then. Nick shrugged indifferently. He could hardly hold it against a young woman who looked barely into her twenties, and he wasn't actually that clueless about women.
Although he hadn't made much of an emotional connection with women over the years, he was the only one who hadn't fallen in love. It wasn't as though no Western women had wanted to settle down with him, considering he owned a car and a house and could touch them "deep" inside.
Take his beautiful neighbor Juliet, who walked past his window in tight yoga pants almost every day. Practically the entire neighborhood knew she wanted Nick to be her Romeo.
Nick simply had never entertained the idea, nor did he intend to lose the property his original body's parents had left behind in a moment of hotheadedness. After all, the West was the early-access server. Divorce basically meant financial ruin for men-especially white men.
So most of the time, Nick didn't understand what girls were thinking simply because he didn't want to. When he actually needed to, he wasn't some blockhead.
Even if he'd never studied psychology, surely he'd heard that woman Eileen Chang's famous line? Something about "the best passage to a woman's heart." That approach worked especially well on Western women: sweet-talk them into bed first, then leave the rest to affection developing over time.
The trouble now was that they were separated and couldn't meet. With certain parts of him out of reach, he could only resort to a little psychological warfare.
Nick knew perfectly well that his attempt to "strike up a conversation" that rainy night had failed. Back then, all he'd needed to do was make up some excuse and sweet-talk the girl a little, and they could have gotten a conversation going.
Instead, he'd played the clueless man and, having failed to get her name, simply turned around and gone back to sleep. Playing hard to get was the whole idea.
After all, he'd already made the first move, and his assignment here lasted a full year. Unless the girl opposite wasn't a normal person, she would surely find an opportunity to approach him during that year. Then he would have the psychological advantage.
Sure enough, after a month-long "stalemate," Nick's little scheme had finally worked.
"My name is Nick. Nice to meet you. Happy birthday!"
Nick held up his writing board for a moment, then raised the aluminum hip flask JD had given him and drained the remaining hundred milliliters of liquor in one go.
Then, through the observation scope, he saw Dahlia pick up the vodka bottle on her table. She likewise raised it high for him to see, then tipped her head back and chugged it straight down.
The way she drank gave Nick a bit of a scare. He couldn't see how much was left in the bottle, but a bottle of red-label vodka usually held 700 milliliters. Even half a bottle would have been at least 350 to 400 milliliters.
Although it was only forty percent alcohol, it still wasn't something you could casually drink like water.
Sure enough, after draining the bottle, Dahlia staggered back two steps and disappeared into the room. When she reappeared, she was bouncing around, carrying two large speakers, which she hung on the terrace railing.
Music started playing. Although the distance meant Nick could only hear it faintly, he still recognized The Ramones' classic "Blitzkrieg Bop," the one whose lyrics kept repeating "Hey ho, let's go."
Seeing the girl opposite open another bottle of vodka and keep bouncing and dancing, Nick slapped his forehead. That's it. She's completely drunk and acting up.
After entertaining herself for a while, Dahlia held up her board again. It read, "Let me see your dance moves!"
For a moment, Nick didn't know how to react. Although he couldn't carry a tune, dancing wasn't much of a problem. After all, back when his high school prom was approaching, the girls at school who thought they were reasonably pretty had fought quite a vicious battle behind the scenes over teaching him to dance and being his date.
But he really wasn't an extrovert. The music from across the gap was so faint that he couldn't get into it at all. It was just too damn awkward.
After some thought, he wrote on his board, "Sorry, I'm a terrible dancer. Almost every girl has complained to me about her sore toes after I stepped on them."
But Dahlia still wouldn't let it go. Before long, she raised her board again. "You must be good at something, right? Tell me?"
"Plenty of things. Cooking, growing vegetables, helping people work through their feelings. If you're having trouble with any of those, you can ask me for help anytime."
As Nick held up his board, he deliberately pointed toward the sparsely planted vegetable patch beneath the East Watchtower. His meaning was obvious.
Dahlia's shoulders slumped as though she'd deflated, and she looked dejected. But then she seemed to think of something and lowered her head to scribble away. "How's your shooting? I saw you adjusting that Barrett earlier."
"Average. Actually, I'm learning how to use this Barrett." Nick told the truth. Since he'd given her his real name earlier, he hadn't intended to use the identity of "Rivi" in front of her.
After all, marksmanship was far too easy to expose. If you couldn't hit something, you couldn't hit it.
"Then how about I teach you to use the Barrett?"
Reading that, Nick couldn't help raising an eyebrow slightly. It wasn't that he looked down on Dahlia, but her build really didn't look suited to handling an anti-materiel sniper rifle.
He instinctively thought of that glimpse of pale skin he'd seen earlier. The girl's delicate little waist didn't even seem as thick as the necks of those gym warriors built with chemical enhancements.
Perhaps Nick's hesitation had annoyed the girl opposite. In the brief moment he turned around, a bullet whistled over and sent the aluminum flask he'd placed on the railing flying, leaving a white mark on the hard concrete wall as well.
Nick jumped, nearly dropping prone on instinct.
Her cheeks flushed, Dahlia held a long-barreled Dragunov-an SVD sniper rifle-and gracefully performed a courtly curtsy in his direction.
This girl's a little crazy, but she really does seem to have some skill.
Nick noticed that her SVD only had an ordinary red-dot sight mounted on it. Hitting a palm-sized flask from more than three hundred meters away was almost miraculous.
Even "Rivi," the Marine reconnaissance sniper whose identity he'd taken over, probably couldn't have managed a shot like that.
Nick picked up the punctured flask from the ground and glanced at it, then casually tossed it over the cliff and applauded her.
But as he clapped, his hands stopped moving. His gaze settled on the cliff below the opposite watchtower. After staring blankly for a moment, he rushed to the observation scope.
Once he was certain he hadn't seen things, Nick turned, grabbed his M4A1, and pulled the trigger repeatedly toward the other side.
Bullets whistled across, making a dark figure climbing the cliff jerk all over and drawing Dahlia's attention.
The girl unplugged the speakers, grabbed the railing, and looked down beneath the watchtower. After noticing the dense mass of dark figures on the cliff, she turned and slapped a button on the wall, raising a machine-gun platform identical to Nick's, then stepped straight onto it.
However, the East Tower's two machine guns were even more powerful than Nick's "Lao Gan Ma." They were the renowned DShK heavy machine guns, the design on which the Chinese-made Type 54 anti-aircraft machine gun was based.
The 12.7 × 108 mm machine-gun rounds these heavy machine guns fired had slightly better ballistic performance than Lao Gan Ma's 12.7 × 99 mm rounds.
Before you continue