The same night, a long distance away...

===Judumai Waka===
Pianist
Specialty: ♧

The three of us drove along a bumpy road, with Chihaya behind the wheel. I fiddled with my fingers in the backseat, avoiding the dark, towering buildings that stacked in my peripheral vision. I swallowed hard; there was no need to worry. Chihaya and Niko were both veterans; I would be fine alongside them.

Chihaya pulled to a stop outside a large, high-end, apartment complex, which was bathed in light. This would be tonight's venue.

Chihaya Korinsu - Management Council
Freelance DJ

The network of apartments was huge. Four high-rises towered into the darkness of the night sky, each at a corner of a square plaza. Each high-rise was L-shaped, with stairwells at the ends. Rows upon rows of doors lined each floor. I counted eight floors.

"Such a large venue..." Niko muttered, opening the car door. "Wonder what game it could be."

Niko Cheney - Food Council ♛
Chef • Foreign Exchange Student
Specialty: ♤

"Look at that sign." I pointed, avoiding an ant pile on the overgrown lawn. In a grass planter was a white wooden sign. It had likely been the name of the apartment, but now had instructions embedded onto it in ornate block lettering.

Once four people are present, equip one of each device, and climb onto the roof of apartment D

"Oh... Four." Chihaya said. "Guess we need to wait?"

"No need." A voice said, creeping from behind us. We turned around. It was Zakū—he had on a dark blue blazer and long black pants that seemed a size too big. His clothes were dirty, and his hair was a mess, matte and stuck out in places as if it hadn't been washed in days.

Zakū Raksunei
High School Student
Specialty: ♢

Despite that, and despite what he did in the Five of Hearts, Niko offered a smile. "Hi, Zakū. It's nice to see you again. Now we know for a fact we'll clear this game." He chuckled.

His stern gaze softened, and one corner of his mouth rose into a slight smile. "Yeah, nice to meet you guys too. Let's just get this game over with."

He walked over to apartment D without further comment, and we followed him. The plaza was well-lit, made of even stone tiles and well-trimmed bushes that lined each first floor walkway. On the first floor, the railing was just the stone, which could easily be hopped over. On all higher floors, an additional wrought iron fence lined the stone, so that it'd have to be climbed to bypass. Near the entrance was a table, and on it were four gloves, four headsets and four vest-like devices, each embroidered with a large 'D'.

"The hell is this?" Chihaya questioned, picking up the vest and spinning it in his hand. There was a cup attached to the front, and something clinked inside of it.

"A coin." I said, reaching in. I held it against the light, rubbing my fingers over the ridges on its edge and the indentations on the faces. It was a shining blue, and had a D-50 minted on its surface.

Zakū was the first to put on the glove and headset. They both clicked into place, and he tilted his head, as if surveying the world under a new lens.

"What do you see?" I asked.

"Nothing yet."

On the back of the glove was a screen that jutted out, which remained a solid white.

Chihaya was next to equip the devices, as me and Niko followed suit. After we were done, we each strapped on the vest, which hooked around our shoulders with clasps that clicked and locked into place. Zakū took off his jacket to do so, placing it around his shirt but putting his jacket back on after. At the chest of each vest was the container, which each held the fifty-point coin. The holder had another screen displayed on its metallic base, showing a '50'. There was also a button the the bottom of the container.

"Such a strange game." Niko said, analyzing the equipment. "Can't tell in the slightest what it's going to be."

"All sixteen players have equipped the devices. Everyone has three minutes to make their way onto the roof of their building."

"Sixteen?" I exclaimed. "The hell? I've never played in a game anywhere close to this many players. Just what kind of game is this?"

"It's going to be a team game." Chihaya said. "Though I'm a veteran, I actually haven't played in a Clubs game like this before, but I've heard about them. Some Clubs games are team versus team, instead of everyone working together. This might possibly be one of those types of games."

"So four groups of four all pitted against each other?" Niko questioned. "Sounds intimidating. Let's take this game seriously, and be careful, alright?"

Me and Chihaya nodded, as Zakū began the climb up the stairs. The stairwell had cast in near-total darkness, illuminated only by the glow from the glove and cup's screen. The dead  silence was accompanied only by the sound of our footsteps and the drip from leaking pipes..

Dusk light soon penetrated the stairwell; we had arrived at the roof. The door was open, and in the distance was a table with a pair of binoculars. Chihaya walked up to grab the binoculars, but paused as he turned to his side, his face screwing in confusion.

I followed after him. He was looking at a giant prison cell. It was bathed in a neon pink light from overhead bulbs, with its bars made of bars of glowing luminescent tubes. At the top of the cell was a billboard that lit up with '1,000'.

"Ugh, I feel like I'm DJ-ing for a party." Chihaya said, shielding his eyes. Zakū grabbed the pair of binoculars, adjusting the lens as he honed in on the other towers. In the darkening sky, the other roofs were undetectable by the bare eye. They were, however, all connected through long, sturdy bridges that were closed off via a locked gate.

"See anything?" I asked.

He shrugged, handing the binoculars to me. I gasped at their magnification; this must've been an expensive, high-quality pair, for the distant details shrouded in darkness became crystal clear. I focused on the tower furthest from us; a man in camouflage handed his binoculars over to a man in a suit with glasses. As the first man left, he took out a knife, sharpening it. Their cell had '1,000' on it as well. Cinder blocks and boards were assorted into piled stacks off to the sides. As I handed the binoculars to Chihaya, the speakers rang out a blaring, deafening siren. I flinched.

But it wasn't coming from a speaker, not a physical one at least. It came from within the headset. The filter in my eyes flashed, and a card popped up.

The Eight of Clubs.

"So we thought." Niko said, taking the binoculars from Chihaya.

"Ha... Haha!" Chihaya laughed. "A new card!"

"But... A hard game." I muttered. The rules flashed into view on the glasses.

The game you will be playing in is...
Cops and Robbers.

"Cops and Robbers?" Niko questioned. "How will that work?"

Me and Chihaya turned to him, and I raised my eyebrows, whilst Zakū picked up some scattered wooden boards, examining them.

"Oh, it's a popular children's playground game in the west." Niko said. "Players are divided into cops and robbers: the latter try to steal something and take it into a home base, and the cops try to tag them to send them to jail. A robber can free someone by tagging them in jail."

"So who will be the robbers and who'll be the cops?" I asked.

"Let's read the rules and find out." Chihaya said, his eyes fixed beneath his lens.

Each door of every apartment has a coin value. A person can only know each door value of their own building. It'll appear both on the glove screen and in your vision interface.

The goal of the game is to steal the coins of opposing teams. To steal a door's coin, put your glove to the doorknob. The glove screen will go from your building's point map to a loading bar. Keep your hand on the knob for fifteen seconds, and the coin or coins will slide under the door.

After a room has had its coin stolen, it will be barred and appear red on the interface. The coin cannot be put back into the room if obtained by its original team.

Store collected coins in your inventory: the cup attached to the vest. In order to leave your building, you must have at least one coin of any value inside your inventory. Players are allowed to use violence to steal the coins out of opposing players ONLY when that player is outside of their own apartment. The inventory can be reached into to steal coins, and there is a button below that completely opens the hatch.

If the value of your inventory ever reaches zero when outside your building, you become a prisoner to the building you're in. You have one minute to make your way into that team's prison at the rooftop, or else it's Game Over. Prohibiting someone from making their way into a prison will also result in a Game Over.

A person can free all members of their own team within a cell by making contact with the cell. Once prisoners are freed, the cell team and any potential buffer team is prohibited from obstructing them from traveling back to their own building via the rooftop skybridges, which will unlock only for that duration. The freed prisoners have one minute to do so.

Whichever team has the most points by the end of ninety minutes receives a Game Clear. Coins are added to a team's point total when it's inside the team's base, which is the first floor lobby. Coins do not count towards a team's total if it's within an inventory within the base.

"God damn." Niko muttered. "This game is gonna be an utter bloodbath. Twelve people will die."

There's many different coin values, including 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, and 2,000. Each team starts with ten 100 point coins in their base. Each team has the same sum of total coins within all their doors. Each door may give one or multiple coins of varying values.

If two teams tie, they will both win. If more than two teams tie, then whichever two teams arrived at the tied value first wins. All other teams receive a Game Over.

"Oh..." Chihaya nodded, in a cloud of understanding. "So depending on the course of events, this may either be a four-party free-for-all, or a two versus two."

All teams have ten minutes to strategize, then the game shall commence. Good luck.

A timer appeared in the corner of my interface. I audibly shuddered, as a cold sense of deja vu enveloped me–this felt too similar to Demon Hunters. All the other doors outside of our building became white through the lens, signifying that those coins have not yet been claimed yet. The glove screen had changed too, displaying the coins and total value of each door.

"So, my first thoughts," Chihaya began, "is that this game is quite complex. One of the most complex I've played, probably."

"There's so much to dissect." Niko said, his eyes glued to his glove screen, as he scrolled through it.

Zakū had been collecting and sorting through a pile of wood, a hammer in hand, and extracting the nails off of spare boards. There was lots of scattered trash and debris throughout the roof, as if the roof was still undergoing construction.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Making weapons." He said under his breath. "You heard the game: violence is allowed. Why would it be that this venue has so much materials scattered everywhere if this is meant to be a high-end apartment? Think about it–the game is literally urging us to do this. You saw the other rooftops too; everyone has access to these."

"Wait... You're right." Chihaya said. He turned to the other side of the roof, surveying the piles of bricks. "Bricks... What can we do with these?"

"We can use it as a barrier." Niko said. "Didn't they say the first floor lobby was the base? We should go there–see what it's all about."

Zakū stood up, one hand holding a short wooden pole and the other holding a fistful of nails and a hammer. "If you hammer the nails into the pole, you'll get a pretty lethal weapon. Niko, I think this'll interest you. You seem like the best fighter out of all of us."

Niko nodded, taking the equipment from him. "I'll hammer the nails downstairs. Let's check out the base in the meantime."

We climbed back down the steps, and I took the opportunity to zoom out on my glove display, turning the projection with my fingers whilst zooming out, so I could view the entire apartment complex. Chihaya kept the binoculars in his hand, fidgeting with its magnification.

As we passed by each floor, I peered into the halls. A wide array of things were scattered or lined against the railing barrier: bikes, rope, cement blocks, bricks, trash bags, and planters, just to name a few. While the variety of objects in each hall differed, the structure and lighting was identical–each a dim, narrow strip of concrete. We arrived back on the first floor after a minute; the plaza was well-cast in light by lampposts, and the lobby was completely lit up by its ceiling lights. Niko dumped off the pole and nails.

Zakū tilted his head up, observing the ceiling. The lobby was empty, save for a table in its center that contained the ten 100 point coins. He raised a leg, getting onto the table, then pushed the ceiling tile. It popped open.

"Interesting." He muttered. "I wonder if this will be useful."

"So these are the coins, huh?" I said. "We obviously need one person to protect these. Who's gonna be it?"

Niko raised his hand. Chihaya nodded.

"Yeah, I think Niko is the best candidate. The strongest should be the guard, and the swiftest should be the coin-collectors. Also, let's talk about the coins." Chihaya collected the ten that were scattered across the table, then set them on the floor, each spaced out across the white tiles.

"What's the point of that?" I asked.

"That way the coins aren't just in one place." He explained, grinning. "If anyone gets past Niko, they'll have to scavenge across the entire room to collect the coins."

"Smart." Niko praised, as he began work on his makeshift bat.

"So then the rest of us focus on stealing coins?" I asked.

"Shouldn't we have a hallway patrol too?" Niko suggested. "They survey the halls to try to catch anyone who's attempting to rob one of our own rooms." He turned to Chihaya. "I figure you'd be the best candidate for this. Plenty of resources are scattered about, and you'd be great at utilizing their potential."

Chihaya nodded. "Yeah, I can do that. So that leaves Judumai and Zakū for stealing coins.":

"No." Zakū said.

"What?" Chihaya asked.

"No. You guys are forgetting something important."

"What is it?"

Zakū sat on the table, his feet swinging and scraping against the floor. "Chihaya, let's say you're the patroller and are on floor seven. If someone was one floor two or three, you'd have no idea."

"Hmm, then I'd just stick to the stairwells, and do one sweep of each floor just looking from the stairs."

Zakū shook his head. "No. Because then they would just wait until you've surveyed a floor to go on it. If you have a set pattern, people will adapt to it. If you have no pattern, you'll simply leave oversights. That's why we need a third person to assist the patroller."

"So, a second person to patrol?" Niko asked.

"No. That'd still leave too many holes. What we'd need is a scout." He nodded towards the apartment all the way across from us—apartment B. At its right wall was a fire escape. Every window led out to it, and the top connected to the rooftop. However, the route onto the roof had been obstructed by a stack of crates.

"Have you noticed? Every building has that fire escape on both ends. And these vests light up. And we have a pair of binoculars. A person from that height that far would be able to see every floor, as the hallways are the one thing that's lit up, which covers the biggest weakness of the patroller. You see where I'm going with this."

Chihaya nodded, impressed. "Yeah... We use someone on the fire escape as a scout which aids the patroller."

"Precisely. The scout will be seen by the patroller via binoculars. They'll have the vest, which'll make them distinguishable. When there are no threats, the scout will remain on the roof level. However, for any floor which has begun presenting a threat, the scout will climb down to the corresponding level on the fire escape."

"What is there's multiple intruders across different floors?" I asked.

"That is the one weakness of this strategy." He said. "The solution is that the scout would climb to each floor in the order that the multiple intruders present themselves in. It's not perfect. However, there's far more pros than having the patrol just blindly going floor to floor."

"But is it worth having one less person, though?" Niko asked, pounding in a final nail into the beam.

"I think so." Chihaya said.

"We'll collect less coins by stealing, but will make up for it by being able to extract more coins from caught burglars." Zakū said.

Niko nodded, his eyes flashing with a sense of understanding.

"Wouldn't it just be better to cover and uncover your vest lights to signal the floors?" Chihaya asked.

He shook his head. "That'd be too difficult to communicate. We'd have to set up some sort of system where I let you know when I see an intruder, then you let me know you're observing me, then I begin flashing the light for each floor. Too prone to error."

"Ah, makes sense." Chihaya said.

"And one final thing." Zakū said. "The game said the coins had to be in the lobby to count, but never said anything about adding our own measures surrounding the coins. We passed by several planters and pots. I say we bring them all here, and put the coins into the soil. For good measure, add a few pots without any coins in them. I reckon that'll really mess with people getting into our base."

"On it." Niko said, running into the hall. He picked up two pots filled with soil, and stacked an empty pot on top of another one. I raced back up onto the second floor, grabbing several pots and tossing them into the bushes on the ground floor to cushion their impact. As I was about to head back down, I also grabbed a trowel that I noticed last second.

"Here." I said, handing it to Niko. "Use this to shovel dirt from the flowerbeds into the pots."

Niko took it out of my hands. "Thanks."

Chihaya's eyes darted to the corner of his lens, presumably to glance at the time. "Two minutes left."

"So who'll be the scout?" I asked, turning towards the fire escape in the distance.

"It should be someone who's swift, attentive, and reliable." Chihaya said. I perked up, but he turned towards Zakū. "Zakū, I think you're the perfect man for this job."

He nodded. Chihaya kept speaking. "So that leaves Judumai as the robber." He turned towards me. "You have one of the most important roles, so be careful. When we first start, come back to deposit your coins after every steal."

"Yeah. I'll be fast and careful. Try to make some early progress." I promised.

"There's sky bridges connecting the floors across apartments on floors three, six, and the roof. And obviously on floor one. So you'd be best going to the nearest apartment on floor four or five."

"Alright, I'll take the apartment to our left, which is apartment C, on floor four so I can return