Phantom Bullet 2

by Reki Kawahara

  “Sinon… Can you hear me, Sinon?!” Kirito shouted, but she couldn’t respond. She could only crouch down on the buggy’s rear step, moaning to herself.

  “Sinon!!”

  This final, fierce bellow caused her to stop at last. She slowly craned her neck until the rear view of Kirito’s flowing hair came into sight. He was staring straight ahead and gunning the gas, his voice calm despite the obvious tension.

  “Sinon, he’s going to catch up with us at this rate. You need to snipe him.”

  “I…I can’t…”

  She shook her head like a sulking child. The weight of the Hecate II pressed into her shoulder, but instead of the usual drive to fight, the sensation brought her nothing.

  “You don’t need to hit him! Just keep him at bay!” Kirito continued, but she could only shake her head.

  “I…can’t… He…he’s…”

  Sinon knew that even if she put a 12.7 mm bullet in the heart of the ghost from her past, he would not stop. A warning shot would produce nothing.

  Instead, Kirito turned around, his black eyes flashing. “Then you take over driving! I’ll shoot that gun instead!!”

  That shook something tiny that still remained within Sinon—a meager amount of pride, perhaps.

  The Hecate…is part of me. No one else…can use it…

  The fragmented thoughts sent a tiny pulse through her trigger hand. She ponderously took the massive rifle off of her shoulder, set it down on the roll bar across the buggy’s rear, then hesitantly got up and peered through the scope.

  Even at the minimum magnification level, the short distance to the target—less than a hundred yards—made Death Gun and his robotic horse take up a third of the view. She reached up, ready to bump up the zoom to get a better shot at the center of his body, then stopped.

  It occurred to her that if she zoomed in any further, she’d get a good view of the face under the hood. Her fingers stopped moving. Sinon moved her right hand to the grip and entered sniping position.

  Death Gun should have noticed what she was doing, but he did not stop or show any signs of evading. He kept coming straight for them, hands on the reins. She knew he was disrespecting the threat she posed, but she didn’t feel any anger—all she felt was fear at the possibility that he might once again pull out that cursed reincarnation of the Type 54 that once attacked Shino.

  One shot. Just one shot. Even if he saw the bullet line, she might be close enough that he couldn’t dodge in time. It was a weak, passive hope, but that was all Sinon had to scrape together at this point. She moved her index finger to the trigger, ready to pull.

  But once again, that strange stiffness crept into her finger and prevented it from working.

  No matter how hard she squeezed, her finger would not touch the trigger. It was as if the Hecate itself, her trusty partner, was rejecting her…

  No, that wasn’t it. She was rejecting it. Inside of Sinon, Shino was refusing to fire the gun.

  “…I can’t shoot,” Sinon/Shino rasped. “I can’t shoot. My finger won’t pull the trigger. I…I can’t fight anymore.”

  “Yes, you can!” a stern voice belted, right into her back. “Everyone can fight! The only choice is whether to fight or not to fight!”

  Even with that challenge from the man she chose as her greatest rival, the vanishing flame within Sinon’s heart barely wavered.

  A choice. Then I choose not to fight. I’m tired of feeling this pain. Every time I thought I found hope, it was taken away and destroyed; I’m tired of it. It was an illusion that I could be stronger through this game. I have to bear my hatred for that man and fear of guns for the rest of my life. I have to look down at the ground, hold my breath, don’t look, don’t feel…

  Suddenly, a burning flame enveloped her frozen hand.

  Sinon’s eyes opened wide.

  Kirito had turned his body around on the front seat of the buggy and leaned over her back. He stretched out his arm as far as it could go and grabbed her hand just before she could pull it off the Hecate’s grip, squeezing it tight.

  He must have fixed the pedal to keep the buggy going at top speed, because they weren’t slowing down, but sooner or later they would hit an obstacle in the road if he didn’t turn back around to steer. Kirito paid no mind to any of that. He shouted in her ear, “I’ll shoot with you! So just move that finger once!”

  Sinon didn’t even know if the game would allow two people to fire one gun together. But she did feel a blazing warmth where Kirito’s palm touched her, slowly thawing her frozen fingers.

  The index finger twitched, the joint creaked, and her skin touched the metal of the trigger.

  A green bullet circle appeared ahead, but it extended well past Death Gun’s body, bouncing and pulsing wildly with the racing of her heart and the rattling of the buggy. At this rate, Death Gun wouldn’t even need to worry about dodging.

  “It’s n-no good…There’s too much shaking to aim,” she groaned weakly.

  His reassuring voice sounded in her ear. “Don’t worry, the shaking will stop in five seconds. Ready? Two…one…now!”

  There was a sudden bounding noise with a terrific shock, and the rumbling simply stopped. The buggy had climbed up something and jumped into the air. She caught sight of the ground out of the corner of her eye and noticed a wedge-shaped sports car stuck in the ground like a primitive ramp. Kirito must have pointed the buggy straight for it before he turned around.

  How can he stay so calm in these circumstances? Sinon wondered for just an instant. But she denied it just as quickly. No…it’s not being calm. He’s going all out. He’s not making excuses, he’s choosing to use every ounce of ability he has to fight. That’s it—that’s his strength.

  The previous day, in the final of the preliminary bracket, she asked Kirito if he had that much strength, what could he possibly be afraid of?

  But that question itself was a mistake. True strength was facing forward despite fears, troubles, and suffering. There was only one choice there: to stand or not to stand. To shoot or not to shoot.

  She couldn’t imagine herself doing what Kirito did. But, if not forever—at least now.

  Sinon tried with all of her mind and body and soul to pull the trigger of her beloved gun. The spring, tuned to be light, felt unbearably heavy. But with the help of the warm hand doubling hers, her finger steadily sank into it. The bullet circle shrank just enough to make her feel a bit better, but the enemy’s silhouette didn’t even fill half of the sphere.

  It probably—definitely—won’t hit him, she thought as she pulled the trigger, the first time she’d ever made a shot as a sniper with that attitude.

  The Hecate II positively exploded, releasing its pent-up dissatisfaction in a blinding flash from the muzzle.

  Her uneven support prevented her from eliminating the recoil, knocking her backward, but Kirito was there to keep her steady. As the buggy passed the peak of the jump and began to descend, Sinon kept her eyes wide, watching the course of the bullet. The projectile cut a spiral in the evening air, just barely passing to the right of the reaper’s horse behind them.

  I missed…

  There were more bullets in the magazine, but Sinon didn’t even have the willpower to pull the bolt handle anymore.

  But perhaps because the “goddess of the underworld” had too much pride to miss entirely, the enormous antimateriel round did not just open a harmless hole in the asphalt; it rammed into the side of a large truck stretching across the highway.

  Nearly all of the man-made objects placed around the GGO environments could be used as cover for players to hide behind. But since this was taking as many cues from an FPS as an MMORPG, there were certain risks involved with that. When objects like barrels and large machinery took enough damage, they might explode. Every once in a while, a decrepit old car rotting in the road still had gas in the tank, and if a bullet struck true…

  A small flame licked out of the side of the large truck. Death Gun noticed this as he was a
bout to pass around it, and tried to have the robot horse jump to the other side of the street.

  But an instant before he could, an enormous fireball erupted, bathing the truck and horse in blinding orange light.

  The three-wheel buggy landed at last and jolted off the ground at the same moment that the shock wave of the explosion rumbled the street below. She didn’t see the explosion itself, because it was blocked by the sports car they’d jumped off of, but there was no missing the resulting jets of flame and spraying metal parts of the robotic horse.

  Did we beat him? she wondered for just a moment, then stamped out that ray of hope. There was no way a simple explosion would kill that grim reaper. At best, they had bought some time. Still, even that felt like a tremendous miracle at this point.

  Kirito was facing forward again, regaining control of the buggy and accelerating once more. Sinon slumped over the rear step, staring at the black smoke cloud rising in the purple sky of evening. No thoughts came to her mind. She simply gave in to the rumbling of the racing buggy.

  The density of rusted-out vehicles and buildings began to thin, replaced by more rocks and odd-looking plants, until she realized the three-wheeled buggy had passed out of the city and into the desert to the north.

  Even the road steadily turned from cracked asphalt to simple sand that had been hardened into furrows. The rumbling of the tires got much fiercer, so Kirito slowed down and drove them between the dunes at a more moderate pace.

  Sinon started counting the number of big cacti on either side for no good reason, until it occurred to her to check the watch on her left wrist. The fine needle pointed to 9:12. To her surprise, the string of events from leaving the river bed at the south end of the city until now had taken barely ten minutes.

  But in that small span of time, Sinon’s perspective on the BoB final—if not the entire game of GGO itself—had changed dramatically.

  Now that she could think with some level of rationality again, there was no way that the player behind Death Gun could be the same man as the one Shino had shot in the attempted postal office robbery years ago. The gun that had put that idea in her head in the first place—the Type 54 Black Star—was a minor but reasonably common gun in GGO. In fact, it had a pretty low price on the market. It wasn’t impossible that Death Gun would happen to choose it for a sidearm.

  The problem was that seeing the gun had shocked and frightened her, nearly prompting one of her fits. One of Sinon’s goals in this game was to fight against an enemy using a Black Star. She had believed that if she came face-to-face with The Gun, she would deal with it without shrinking, just as she had dispatched countless other targets in this world.

  But in reality, this had happened. The effects of the stun round had worn off already, but her whole body still felt dull, and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Even the comforting weight of the Hecate in her arms was painful.

  It was all a lie. An illusion. The massive kill score I built up over these weeks and months and the strength I thought that number represented meant nothing in the end…

  As she hung her head, the tires slid over the sand and came to a halt. She heard Kirito’s calming voice. “Well, the view’s nice…but there’s not much in the way of places to hide…”

  She dimly recalled that when Kirito saved her from her paralysis, he was heavily damaged already. He probably wanted to find a safe place to hide out in the desert so they could use the auto-distributed first aid kits to regain some HP. But the healing speed on those items was significantly slow. If they were going to recover safely, they’d need more than just sand dunes and cacti to hide behind.

  Sinon lifted her heavy head and looked around. She noted some reddish rocks off in the distance and pointed them out. “There…We’ll probably find a cave over there.”

  “Oh, good idea. I remember you saying that the caves in the desert area were hidden from the Satellite Scan,” Kirito replied quickly, turning the buggy off the path and into the thicker sand. In less than a minute they were there, circling around the rocks. As she expected, there was a large cave mouth in the north face of the rock. Kirito slowed the buggy down and drove it right in.

  It was fairly spacious on the inside, with a dozen or so extra square feet of space, even after they rolled the buggy into a spot hidden from the view of the entrance. It was dark in the back, but thanks to the faint bits of sunset reflecting off the walls, it wasn’t totally black.

  Kirito turned off the engine and stepped onto the sand, stretched, then turned back to Sinon. “Let’s stay here for now to avoid the next scan. Oh, but wait—does this mean we won’t get the satellite data on our terminals, either?”

  She couldn’t help but smirk at the impertinence of his question. Sinon got off the buggy on lifeless legs, made her way to a wall and slumped down against it. “Of course not. And if someone happens to be nearby and tosses a grenade in here on a hunch, we’ll both be blown up.”

  “Good point. Well, it’s still better than disarming entirely to hide underwater. Speaking of hiding,” Kirito said, wandering away from the buggy and glancing toward the entrance, “he just popped up right next to you. Does that ripped-up cloak of his have the ability to make him invisible? When he just vanished at the bridge, and didn’t show up on the satellite, maybe it wasn’t because he was in the river…”

  “I think you’re right. That was an ability called ‘Metamaterial Optical Camo.’ They said it was only something bosses used…but I suppose it’s possible that some equipment can make use of it,” she explained, then realized what Kirito was worried about. She glanced at the mouth of the cave and added softly, “I think we’re fine here. It’s rough sand below. He can go invisible, but not silent, and we’ll see the footprints. He can’t just pop up the way he did earlier.”

  “Good to know. We’ll have to keep our ears open,” Kirito said, convinced, then sat down to her right a few feet away. He rummaged in his belt pouch and pulled out a tube-shaped medical kit, then clumsily pressed it to his neck and pushed the button on the far end. It made a little hissing sound, and his avatar was briefly consumed with a red visual effect that indicated healing. A single kit would heal about 30 percent of one’s HP, but the full effect took three minutes, so it wasn’t much use in combat.

  Sinon looked back to her watch. It was just now nine fifteen, the time of the fifth satellite pass. But as she had told Kirito earlier, the signal wouldn’t reach them, so there was no point in checking the map.

  At the last tournament, the battle royale had started at eight o’clock, just like this one, and it had taken a bit over two hours for the final showdown between Zexceed and Yamikaze. If this one played out at that pace, there would be around ten people left right now. Last time, Sinon was the eighth fatality, just twenty minutes in, so she’d improved on her record considerably—not that she was in any mood to celebrate it.

  Sinon lowered her hand, leaned back against the wall of the cave, and mumbled, “Hey…do you think, maybe…Death Gun died in that explosion…?”

  In her heart, she knew the likelihood of that was incredibly low. But she couldn’t help but ask. After a long silence, Kirito answered, “No…I saw him jump off the robot horse before the truck blew up. It was close enough that he got hurt…but I can’t believe he’d be dead from that.”

  It was true that an explosion at that close range normally caused considerable damage.

  Normally. To a normal player.

  But he wasn’t normal. He used that Black Star to kill Zexceed, Usujio Tarako, and probably Pale Rider as well. Maybe the cloaked man really was a ghost, wandering the network. She couldn’t say that out loud, of course. All she did was grunt in understanding, place the Hecate in the sand next to her, and clutch her knees.

  Head pressed downward, she asked, “How did you save me that quickly when you were in the stadium? Weren’t you up on the outer walls?”

  She thought she detected a wry grin from him. Sinon turned her head to see the lightswordsman leaning against
the wall, hands folded behind his head.

  “I could tell at first glance that Musketeer X wasn’t the guy we were looking for after all…”

  “…How come?”

  “Because she wasn’t a guy, she was a woman. A proper one, not my fake F-model kind.”

  She murmured in surprise. Kirito shook his head and looked a tad bitter.

  “That was when I realized we’d missed something big…and when it occurred to me that Death Gun might go after you alone, I rushed up and cut down Musketeer X while she was still giving me her name. I’ll have to apologize to her later about that…”

  Sinon grunted again, but couldn’t help but wonder if he intended to apologize for rushing his opponent rudely, or simply because his opponent was a woman. But before she could say anything, he continued:

  “I took a hit, too, but I still won, and when I looked to the south, I saw you collapsed in the street…It looked like trouble, so I grabbed Musketeer’s big rifle, as well as a smoke grenade, and jumped down from the walls. Then I started shooting and tossing and charging and…”

  He shrugged, as if to say, You know the rest.

  Which meant one of the two bullet wounds in Kirito’s body was from Musketeer X’s rifle, and the other was from Death Gun’s L115. He made it sound like no big deal, but she’d seen his defensive capabilities in the battle against Xiahou Dun. The fact that he’d taken two shots was a sign of how desperate he had been to save her.

  On the other hand, you could say that this showed Sinon was just holding Kirito back. Perhaps, even with Death Gun’s unexpected Optical Camo gear, she might have paid more attention to her surroundings and sensed him coming, avoiding the stun round properly. If she’d been able to regroup with Kirito sans paralysis, they might have been able to take down Death Gun right then and there.

  Assuming he was just a normal player and not a vengeful ghost, of course.

  Sinon bonked her forehead against her knees, plagued by indecision and a feeling of powerlessness. She felt Kirito lean closer. He murmured, “You don’t have to take it out on yourself like that.”