“Maybe the ammo costs a bunch? High-level spells in ALO take expensive reagents, after all,” Leafa noted. The group went back to thinking, while the hooded figure cocked the pistol and aimed it at the fallen player.
But he didn’t pull the trigger yet. It seemed he wanted to tease his opponent—and the viewers. Instead he raised his left hand and did something unexpected. The index and middle fingers went together and tapped his forehead, chest, and left and right shoulders in quick succession.
The next instant, something prickled inside of Asuna’s head.
It wasn’t a new gesture by any means; she recognized the classic sign-of-the-cross motion. It featured prominently in many Western films, and even within VRMMOs—some healers liked to do it as a role-playing motion. Perhaps a proper Christian would not enjoy seeing the motion coopted in this way, but Asuna was not a Christian, and it wasn’t anger or displeasure that hit her just now. It was more like her fingertip had caught against a string that wasn’t to be touched…
Her entire body went tense, and her eyes were wide. The cloaked player finished making the sign of the cross and put that hand to the grip of the pistol. His right foot drew back and he assumed a firing position, ready to shoot Pale Rider at last…
“Wha—?!”
Everyone in the room exclaimed at once.
For some reason, the cloaked player had bent over backwards at an extreme angle. The reason for this came to them a split second later. From outside the frame, an enormous orange bullet shot past and grazed the hem of the splayed-out cloak, tearing through the spot where the player’s heart had been just a moment before, then passed out of frame.
Someone must have sniped at the cloaked player from a great distance away. It looked to Asuna like the shot had come from behind him and to the left. It clearly took tremendous skill for him to evade an attack at that angle and speed so deftly. Even in an unfamiliar game, she was certain of that.
The cloaked player regained his balance with an eerie, lifeless smoothness, and turned back to his left for just an instant. Asuna felt like his invisible face smirked beneath that dark hood.
Something in her head twitched again.
What? What is this? Is it…a memory? But that can’t be true… I’ve never been to GGO, or even seen footage of it in action…
The cloaked player raised his pistol again, ready to fire it straight through Asuna’s confusion. This time, he unceremoniously pulled the trigger at the paralyzed foe on the ground.
There was a high-pitched gunshot. An empty brass casing flew out and skittered onto the dusty ground.
The bullet hit Pale Rider in the center of the chest with a tiny flash. It certainly wasn’t the kind of enormous attack that would eradicate all his HP at once.
Pale Rider himself bore that impression out a second later when his paralysis effect finally wore off, and he instantly leaped up and pointed his large gun at the chest of the cloaked player.
“Yikes, what a turnaround,” Lisbeth murmured, and Asuna could see it coming, too.
But there was no blast, no flash, no clicking of a trigger. The gun fell out of Pale Rider’s fingers and clattered on the ground at his feet.
Next, he leaned slowly to his right, kept leaning—and fell stiffly to the ground once again.
Below the smoke-gray visor of his helmet, his narrow nostrils and lips were visible. His mouth trembled, then gaped wide. Silent furor shot out from within. Asuna understood intuitively that this was the shock and fear of the player within the avatar.
“Wh…what the…?” Leafa gasped, her hand to her mouth. Then something even more surprising happened. The fallen, writhing form of Pale Rider went as still as if someone hit the pause button, then faded into a crawling static pattern and disappeared.
The visual effect hung in the air for a while after the avatar vanished, eventually clustering into letters that spelled out DISCONNECTION. They were scattered by a pair of matte black boots as the cloaked player strode forward, pulling his hand back behind his cape.
The location of the cameras must have been visible within the game, as he pointed his gun straight toward the screen. Asuna felt a shiver run down her back at the sensation that he was pointing from GGO to ALO—no, from virtual reality to actual reality, at her flesh-and-blood body.
The red-glowing eyes flickered from the darkness of the hood. A mechanical voice rasped out of the screen.
“My true name, and that of this weapon…is Death Gun.”
The instant she heard that voice, the sound of raw, twisted emotion shrouded in cold artificiality, Asuna felt the biggest crack yet in the depths of her memory.
Her breathing stopped. Her pulse quickened. The hidden face grew to cover the entire center of the screen. The voice came again.
“One day, I will, appear before, you too. This gun, will bring, true death. I have, that power.”
The black gun creaked slightly. Asuna couldn’t prevent a shiver at the thought of the trigger being pulled, and a bullet flying straight through the virtual screen at her. The cloaked figure seemed to smile from the darkness, mocking her fear. Again, the voice came:
“Don’t forget. It’s not, over. Nothing, is, over…It’s showtime.”
The last two words were delivered in halting English. The final, biggest shock of all.
I know him.
She was sure of it. She’d met him before. Traded words with him. But where…?
She already knew the answer. It was in the floating castle…Aincrad. Not the safe replica floating in ALO’s sky, but the true alternate world that had trapped her for two years: Sword Art Online. The “it” that wasn’t “over” referred to the name of that game.
Who is it? Is someone I met in that game controlling the avatar under that cloak?
Despite her daze, Asuna’s mind worked frantically. A sudden hard sound from behind caused her to leap up onto the sofa. She turned around to see the source of the sound—a crystal tumbler that had fallen onto the floor and shattered into tiny polygonal shards, which were quickly disintegrating. It had fallen out of Klein’s hand as he sat on a stool at the bar counter. His eyes were wide under the bandana; he didn’t even realize that he’d broken the expensive player-made glass.
“What the hell are you doing back th—” Lisbeth started, but Klein’s hoarse rasp cut her off.
“N-no way… That can’t be…”
Asuna stood up from the sofa, turned, and shouted, “Do you know him, Klein?! Who is he?!”
“I-I don’t remember his old name…but…I know one thing for sure…” The warrior turned eyes etched deep with fear onto Asuna. “He’s a Laughing Coffin member.”
“…!!”
Lisbeth and Silica joined Asuna in sucking in a sharp breath. The name Laughing Coffin was vividly painted into their memories—the red guild that had committed numerous atrocities on their fellow players in Aincrad.
Asuna steadied herself with a hand on her two friends’ shoulders. She asked Klein, “Y-you don’t think…he’s their leader, the one with the cleaver…?”
“Nah…it ain’t PoH. The attitude and way of speaking is totally different. But…when he said, ‘It’s showtime,’ that was PoH’s catchphrase. Musta been someone close—another guy real high up in the organization,” Klein moaned. He glanced at the screen again. Asuna and the three girls followed his gaze.
In the expanded feed at the center of the screen, the cloaked man had put his gun away and was retreating. He slid away to the distant end of the frame as smoothly as a ghost toward the bridge, but rather than cross it, he passed around the far edge of the bridge girder toward the riverbank. The dark gray cloak melted into the shadow of the bridge against the bright contrast of the sun and disappeared.
Leafa’s quiet voice broke the heavy silence that filled the room. “Um…what’s Laughing Coffin?”
“Well,” Silica started, then proceeded to briefly explain the threat and elimination of the murderous guild to Leafa, the only person present who had
n’t lived through SAO. When she was done, Leafa bit her lip and looked right at Asuna her with jade-green eyes.
“Asuna, I think that Big Brother must have known this person was in GGO.”
“What?!”
“Something was wrong with him when he came back late last night. I think…he must be playing GGO to settle some kind of score…”
This time it was Lisbeth who held Asuna’s hand as she grappled with shock. She squeezed reassuringly and shook her head, pink hair bobbing. “But…what about the job he’s doing? Didn’t he jump into GGO to prepare a report for someone, or something?”
Yes, that was true. Seijirou Kikuoka from the government’s Virtual Division had hired Kirito for the job. But even as the man in charge of the SAO Incident Rescue Task Force, Kikuoka couldn’t possibly know the details about the rift between Laughing Coffin and the front-line team. But at the same time, she couldn’t imagine that Kirito’s conversion and the existence of the cloaked player were a coincidence. Something was going on. Something that caused Kikuoka to focus on GGO and hire Kirito to investigate it.
Asuna took a deep breath, squeezed Lisbeth back, and said, “I’m going to log out and try to contact the person who hired Kirito.”
“Huh?! You know who it is, Asuna?!”
“Yes. In fact, we all do. I’m going to bring him here to grill him. He must know something. While I’m gone, Yui will search all GGO sites and try to find any data corresponding to this cloaked player.”
“You got it, Mama!”
The little black-haired pixie leaped from her shoulder and landed on the table. Yui shut her eyes and began the process of extracting useful information from the chaos of the Net.
“Okay, everyone…just hang on a bit!” Asuna cried, leaping over the back of the sofa with blue hair flying as she called up her menu window. With a purposeful nod at the group, she hit the LOG OUT button.
Rainbow light enveloped her body, sending her soul flying from the top of the virtual tree to the far-off real world.
12
The game of Gun Gale Online did not feature the “class system” traditional to most RPGs, with warriors, mages, and rogues.
Every player had six base stats such as Strength, Agility, Vitality, and Dexterity, as well as the ability to freely choose and level up hundreds of skills such as weapon mastery, better bullet trajectory predictions, First Aid, Acrobatics, and so on. These combinations allowed a player to make their own unique “build.” In other words, that effectively meant that the game had as many classes as there were builds.
The downside was that a poorly designed build—say, STR too low to carry large weapons, plus a focus on heavy arms mastery—limited one’s battle ability. So naturally, a number of basic build patterns emerged, as players learned that using this weapon effectively required that stat and skill. While every player’s detailed skill choices were different, this broke down their general builds into a number of broad “class” patterns such as attacker, tank, medic, scout, and so on.
Sinon’s “sniper” class was one of those, albeit a rare one. She prioritized Strength so she could equip her massive rifle, along with Dexterity to improve accuracy, and a fair amount of Agility for disengaging and retreating after every sniping attempt. In exchange, Vitality was her dump stat—if she got caught, she was dead anyway, so why bother increasing health? As for skills, Sniper Rifle Mastery was obvious, and she took everything related to accuracy. Again, no use for defensive skills. The tricky part was that even with all the improvements to accuracy, the pulse-measuring system demanded a basic level of player skill for success regardless.
That feast-or-famine build actually put her at a serious disadvantage in the populous battle-royale format. It was all too easy for someone to sneak up and ambush her while she was trying to snipe at someone far away. And a sniper was helpless when set upon by close-range attackers with SMGs or assault rifles. She might get off one desperate shot from the hip—which probably wouldn’t land—and be pumped full of holes before she could shoot a second time.
For that reason, if Sinon was on her own and fell prey to a high-accuracy midrange attacker like Xiahou Dun with his Norinco CQ, she would lose.
But this time, it didn’t play out like that. Through unexpected circumstances, Sinon was accompanied by probably the only lightswordsman in the entire game of GGO.
And when it came to high-risk builds, a sniper had nothing on someone using a photon sword, which was inserted as nothing more than a fun gag by some programmer on Zaskar’s development team.
Its range was four feet, the length of the blade itself. That was even shorter than the twenty-foot range of the Remington derringer pistol, the smallest gun in GGO. However, the pale, glowing energy blade contained unfathomable power—it split her point-blank .50 BMG round in two.
If it could cut any shot, then in a way, that made it the greatest defensive weapon in the game. But using a blade just an inch wide to defend against a hail of supersonic bullets, even with the predictive bullet lines, was just about impossible. It required the precision to identify the paths and order of an onslaught of projectiles, the deliberation to quickly and accurately move the sword to deflect, and most of all, the sheer pluck to stare down automatic rifle fire without shrinking.
Sinon couldn’t imagine what kind of practice would be necessary to gain all of those skills. They might be beyond the bounds of a VR game to begin with. It demanded the experience, will, and soul power of the player behind the avatar.
Xiahou Dun finished reloading and opened a second hail of fire with his CQ. As she watched Kirito cut down just the on-target bullets out of the storm of glowing lines, Sinon couldn’t help but reflect on these concepts.
Strength that transcended the wall between reality and virtual reality. That was the exact boundary that she sought herself. She needed the sniper’s precision and bloodless cruelty to crush the weakness of Shino Asada that dwelled within her. She had wandered these wastelands for the last six months in search of targets who would bring her that strength.
If she summoned everything she had to fight and defeat the powerful foe named Kirito, she might get there. This was Sinon’s overriding thought ever since their meeting yesterday.
But at the same time, a different feeling was growing within her heart.
I want to know. I want him to tell me. About the place he was before GGO. How did he live there, what did he feel, and how did he survive? In fact, she even wanted to know what kind of person he was in reality. And she had never felt that about anyone before…
“Sinon, now!” Kirito shouted, snapping her back to the situation at hand. He had just finished deflecting all of Xiahou Dun’s shots.
Her trigger finger squeezed the Hecate. It would be a sloppy shot with her concentration as affected as it was, but the target was less than a hundred yards away, and her accuracy was maxed out. The bullet struck right in the center of Xiahou Dun’s medieval body armor.
In a normal battle, an avatar that lost all its HP would shatter like glass and disappear, but in the BoB final, different rules were in effect that kept the body in place. Xiahou Dun flew through the air, helmet tassel flapping, and landed, limbs splayed, on the dirt. A red DEAD tag began to rotate over his prone form.
She stood up with a sigh of relief and switched out the Hecate’s magazine for a fresh one with the full seven rounds. With her trusty friend resting on her shoulder, she turned to her temporary partner.
The side of his face against the setting sun looked somehow mysterious as he twirled the lightsword in his hands and returned it to his waist carabiner. Sinon took a deep breath to suppress a feeling much like her previous urge to know more about him, and said, “The sound of that battle’s going to draw more of them. We ought to move.”
“Right,” he replied, casting a sharp gaze toward the nearby river. “Death Gun must have headed north along the river. He’s probably going to hide out and pick his next target when the satellite passes over again at nine. I
want to stop him before there are any more fatali—victims. Got any ideas, Sinon?”
She blinked, surprised that he would asked her, then shook her head. She figured that given all the unexpected adjustments she was being forced to make, no good ideas would come to her, but to her surprise, the words emerged quickly.
“…Weird powers or not, Death Gun is essentially a sniper. That means he’ll be vulnerable in open space without cover. But if you go north, the forest on the other side of the river fades out pretty quick. All that’s left until you reach the ruined city at the center is a wide-open field.”
“Meaning that it’s quite possible he’ll choose that city for his next hunting spot,” Kirito muttered, glancing at the faded silhouettes of the high-rise buildings far, far to the north. The distance effects made them look incredibly distant, but it was less than two miles away in actuality. With enough agility and caution, it could be traversed in just ten minutes.
“All right, let’s head for the town. If we run along the river, they won’t see us from the sides.”
“…Got it,” Sinon replied. She turned back for a moment. At the foot of the bridge still lay Dyne’s body. Oddly enough, the fact that his dead body was there proved that he was still alive. The one who was actually—potentially—dead was Pale Rider, who was gone entirely.
She wasn’t ready to believe it just yet. But at the same time, she couldn’t accept that it was all a lie.
There was one thing Sinon was certain of, however. This Bullet of Bullets was going to change her. Whether it was in a way she wanted or not, and whether the one who changed her was Kirito or the mysterious cloaked player, was still unknown.
All she could do was trust her instincts. Inspiration was the one skill that no player build could boost.
While she didn’t have as extreme a build as Spiegel, Sinon’s Agility was far from low. Numerically speaking, she ought to be around the same as Kirito, who claimed to be a Strength-first player.
But as they sprinted together, Sinon found that it was everything she could do to keep up with that long, fluttering black hair. Something about the way he carried himself was different. Kirito leaped over every countless rock and sudden crack at the water’s edge, as though he had their locations memorized. The way that he occasionally looked back to check on her and seemed to be slowing down to match her pace filled her with spite.
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