Phantom Bullet 2

by Reki Kawahara

  “I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you to calm down, Asuna,” Lisbeth said from her spot next to the virtual sofa.

  Asuna let out a small breath at last and answered tensely, “Yes…I’m sorry. But…I just get this bad feeling. The only reason Kirito would convert to that game without telling us about the Laughing Coffin connection is because of something very serious…Perhaps even some kind of real-life danger.”

  “Sadly, I can’t tell you you’re overthinking this. Not after what we just saw,” Lisbeth said, referring to the eerie event they’d witnessed on the stream of the Gun Gale Online tournament.

  The player in the tattered cloak had shot his opponent with one measly pistol bullet. But the target disconnected and vanished. Then the cloaked player turned to all of the people watching the event and announced, “It’s not over. Nothing’s over. It’s showtime.”

  As soon as he heard those words, Klein announced with shock that the cloaked man had to be a former member of the SAO red guild Laughing Coffin.

  Asuna had experienced many large-scale battles during the two years she’d spent in that floating castle, and easily the worst experience of them all was the battle of the front-line players to eliminate Laughing Coffin. No other battle of player against player ended up with over thirty fatalities.

  In all honesty, the fine details of the battle were lost from her memory. The most vivid detail in her mind was the back of the black swordsman who fought like a demon when their group was ambushed and in danger of falling apart. If it weren’t for Kirito’s efforts, the entire vanquishing party could have perished.

  The battle was far, far shorter than any floor boss encounter, and it left about ten dead from the party, and over twenty dead from Laughing Coffin. All of the survivors of the killer guild were sent to the prison in Blackiron Palace, and the dead were briefly mourned. Since then, no one had spoken of the battle. Asuna, Klein, and Kirito each forgot about what happened in their own way. They forgot everything…she had thought.

  But she was shocked to find that bloody event of the past coming back like this, a year after everyone had been freed from SAO.

  Silence settled over Asuna, Klein, Lisbeth, Silica, and even the unrelated Leafa. They simply waited for the arrival of someone who knew more about the situation than they did.

  The knock on the door came about a minute after Asuna logged back in. He had probably dived in as soon as humanly possible after receiving the summons, but Liz gave voice to everyone’s honest opinion when she greeted him with “You’re late!”

  “I…I flew as quickly as I could from the save point. If ALO had a speed limit, I’d have my license revoked,” quipped the visitor, a mage of the undine race like Asuna. His slender form was wrapped in a plain robe, his marine-blue hair was styled in a simple part, and his thin, pleasing features were outlined by round, silver-framed glasses.

  His character name was Chrysheight. Four months had passed already since he began playing ALO as a companion of sorts to the group. Only Asuna and Kirito knew that his alias came from a combination of chrysanthemum and height, two of the kanji characters in his real name.

  In the real world, his name was Seijirou Kikuoka—member of the government’s Virtual Division and onetime agent of the SAO Incident Rescue Task Force. After Kirito returned safely to the real world, Kikuoka had offered all kinds of help to Kazuto, and even helped him rescue Asuna. As for why such a person would bother to have his own ALO character, he had claimed it was “to better get along with you and your VRMMO friends,” but Kirito himself claimed that it was just a facet of his information-gathering duties. Asuna herself felt that Kikuoka was a rather fishy character, but she didn’t have a good reason to refuse him, so they had adventured together on a few occasions as partners. Until today.

  Chrysheight—no, Seijirou Kikuoka—closed the door behind him and strode forward much more comfortably than he had four months ago, when he first dove into the game.

  Asuna strode over, boots clicking, until she was right in front of him, stared into the soft eyes that he shared with the real Kikuoka, and asked, “What’s going on?”

  When she called him on the phone from Dicey Café, all she said was that she had a question about Kirito’s conversion to GGO, and she wanted him to come to her place in Ygg City. As he was a bachelor and government official on a Sunday night, she knew this request was a big one, but he was fortunately home at the time, and she didn’t need to twist his arm any more than that. For being “home,” his reception sounded poor, and there was some kind of rumbling sound coming over the call, but she didn’t have time to ask about that. He was there in barely two minutes, so if anything, she ought to apologize for calling on him so suddenly, but the feeling of haste urging her on cut that short.

  Chrysheight’s narrow eyes blinked several times behind his humorous round glasses. Asuna knew Kikuoka well enough to realize that it was not an act of surprise, but a defense mechanism to allow his high-speed mind enough time to think of an answer.

  The mage cleared his throat and began to lecture in the tone of a professor. “It might take some time to explain everything for you. And where to even begin…?”

  Asuna was about to round on him for dodging the question, but she was cut off by the appearance of a tiny figure who emerged from among the glasses and cups on the table, who looked up at Kikuoka and said, “Then I shall do it for you.”

  It was Yui, of course. Her normally lovable little face had taken on Kirito’s serious look. In a clear, ringing voice like a tiny bell, she stated, “The first appearance of a player in Gun Gale Online claiming to be called ‘Death Gun’ was late at night on November 9, 2025. He fired his gun at a TV monitor in a tavern zone within GGO’s capital city of SBC Glocken…”

  For the next two minutes, Yui ran through the situation to a frightening level of detail. Death Gun made two meaningless gunshots within the crime-controlled zone of town where all attacks were nullified. But they were immediately followed by a disconnection that seemingly had to be a result of those shots. The two players who were shot hadn’t logged in again since. And there were two strange deaths that fit the time of the shootings.

  “…No media outlet went more in-depth than to say that the deceased were logged in to a VRMMO at the time, so I cannot be certain if they were playing GGO. But based on the extreme similarity in the cases, I do not need to hack into the network of the coroner’s office to make a good case that the victims were Zexceed and Usujio Tarako. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that Pale Rider, the player who was forcefully disconnected by Death Gun six minutes and forty seconds ago, is already dead in reality,” Yui finished. She leaned against a nearby glass. Asuna reached out and scooped up the little pixie, cradling Yui to her chest.

  The ability of Yui’s AI to sift through media reports and individual testimony and process them into a logical conclusion, then phrase it into a grammatically proper statement, was nothing short of stunning. The flip side of that was the fragility of her emotional circuits. When she was still a mental-care counseling program in SAO, she was unable to process the overflow of fear, desire, and malice from the player population, and was most of the way to a total breakdown when they found her.

  To Yui, compiling and selecting from all the information regarding Death Gun had to be a terrible burden. Asuna leaned down and whispered, “Thank you,” even as she reeled from the enormity of the information she had just learned.

  That shock extended to Leafa, Lisbeth, Silica, and Klein as well. No one spoke.

  It was Chrysheight’s gentle voice that broke the silence. “This is quite a surprise. I’d heard that little fairy was an ALO Navigation Pixie…but I didn’t know they could compile and analyze so much information in such a short time. Do you feel like taking a little job in Ra…er, in the Virtual Division?” the mage joked.

  Asuna shot him a dirty look. Kikuoka raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry. I have no intention of playing dumb at this point. Everything
the little one just said…is true. Zexceed and Usujio Tarako died of heart failure right around the point that Death Gun shot them.”

  “All right, Chrys. You’re the one who hired Kirito for this, right? So you’re sayin’ you knew about the murders, and you still sent him into the game anyway?!” Klein demanded, hopping down from the bar counter to accost Chrysheight. The mage held up a hand to stop him in his tracks. The light glinted off of his glasses, hiding the expression in his eyes.

  “Just a moment, Mr. Klein. This is not a murder case. That was the conclusion that Kirito and I came to, after a lengthy discussion about the two incidents.”

  “What…do you mean…?”

  “Just think about it. How would he kill them? The AmuSphere is not a NerveGear. You should know that better than anyone. The AmuSphere was designed with every possible safety measure, and no matter how hard you try, it can’t put a scratch on anyone’s brain—and it certainly can’t stop the heart, over which it has no direct influence whatsoever. Kirito and I met last week for a long debate, and that was our ultimate conclusion. There is no way to kill a player’s real body with a gunshot from within the game,” Kikuoka explained, calmly and logically, like a teacher lecturing an overexcited student. Klein grumbled, but returned to his stool.

  Next it was Leafa’s turn to break the following silence with a hoarse murmur. “Then why did you ask my brother to go to GGO, Chrys?”

  The shapely legs extending from her bright green skort pounded the floor. The sylph warrior got to her feet and slowly crowded in on Kikuoka, as if she were in a kendo bout. “You felt it too…In fact, you can feel it now, can’t you? Just like us. There’s something to this. Whoever Death Gun is, he’s hiding some terrible, horrifying secret.”

  “…”

  Kikuoka fell silent at last. Sensing that even he didn’t know what they knew, she offered him their shared secret. “Chrys, Death Gun is…Well, he’s an SAO survivor, just like us. And he was a former member of Laughing Coffin, the horrible killer guild.”

  The tall mage froze, sucking in a sharp breath through thin lips. Even the cool, elite agent couldn’t hide his shock this time—his normally soft, narrow eyes bolted wide for an instant. Two seconds later, his voice was subdued.

  “…Is this true?”

  “Yes. We can’t remember his name, but both Klein and I took part in the battle against Laughing Coffin. That means it’s not the first time Death Gun killed someone in a game. Are you going to continue claiming that this is all a coincidence?”

  “B…but…what are you stating, Asuna? That ESP and curses are real? That Death Gun’s had some abnormal power since SAO, and is using it to kill people again?”

  “…Well…”

  Asuna bit her lip. She had no answer for that. A moment later, Lisbeth broke in.

  “H-hey, Asuna? Does Chrysheight know about SAO? I thought he was some kind of government employee involved with networks in real life, and was playing ALO as a way to study VRMMOs…”

  Surprisingly, it was Kikuoka himself who confirmed this first. Perhaps he had no intention of hiding this from the start. He explained, “Lisbeth, that is essentially correct, but I was doing a different job before it. I was a member of the SAO Incident Rescue Task Force…not that we ever managed to develop any kind of plan to counteract it. Our team was all name, no results…”

  Lisbeth’s eyes went wide, and she looked conflicted. Chrysheight was being self-deprecating, and selling himself short. The task force worked quickly after the start of the SAO Incident in November 2022, promptly transferring all ten thousand victims to hospitals around the nation. There was difficulty in acquiring funds for the beds and hospital costs, but according to Kirito, it was Kikuoka himself who had negotiated hard to gain the cooperation of the appropriate government ministries. Every SAO survivor today knew how hard the task force fought, and were grateful for it, not bitter.

  Liz, Klein, and the others were, in fact, stuck between their anger at Kirito’s dangerous job and their debt to Kikuoka for helping save their lives, and they couldn’t take him to task.

  Instead, Asuna stepped in and quietly said, “Chrysheight, I don’t know how Death Gun is killing people, either. But that doesn’t mean that I can just sit back and watch Kirito battle this figure from the past on his own. Isn’t it possible for you to figure out the real address and name of whoever is playing Death Gun? I’m sure it’s not easy, but if you consult the list of the Laughing Coffin survivors and cross-reference it against all the Internet providers for whoever’s connected to the GGO servers…”

  “H-hang on. First of all, I’d need a court warrant for that, and it would take hours just to explain the situation to the investigation office…”

  Kikuoka held his hands out to placate Asuna, but he seemed to notice something as he spoke and trailed off, blinking. He shook his head.

  “No, in fact, that wouldn’t be possible to begin with. All the SAO player data the Virtual Division has is real name, character name, and final level. Guild names and number of kills are completely unknown. So just knowing that someone was a former Laughing Coffin member won’t help us track down their real name or location.”

  “…”

  Asuna bit her lip hard. She was sure she remembered Death Gun’s way of speech and actions. She was certain that she’d come face-to-face with him at some point between the big battle and the aftermath. But she couldn’t remember the name. In fact, maybe she’d never even tried to learn it. She just wanted to forget everything she knew about the group as quickly as she could…

  “I think my brother is in the midst of that battle now, so he can remember that name,” Leafa suddenly mumbled. In a way, she was the closest to Kirito—Kazuto—in real life. She clutched her hands together. “When he came back home last night, he had a terrible look on his face. I think he must have realized that Laughing Coffin was in GGO during the preliminaries last night, and that this person was actually killing again, somehow. So I’m positive he went to settle the score. He went to figure out the player’s name, and stop them from PKing again.”

  Asuna held her breath when she heard this. Though it pained her a bit to admit it, Leafa’s guess had to be right. In fact, Kirito had to feel that it was his responsibility. As a member of the group that came together to vanquish Laughing Coffin, he felt a duty to ensure their wicked deeds were eradicated once and for all.

  Oh, Kirito. You always have to…You just can’t help yourself…

  “You…goddamn…fool!” Klein bellowed, pounding the bar counter. His scruffy jaw twisted into a howl. “Don’t just leave us outta the loop! If you’d said one damn word about this…I woulda converted without even askin’ what game we were goin’ to…”

  “Indeed…but Kirito would never say. If he felt there was any danger, he would try his hardest to keep us out of it. That’s just what he’s like,” Silica said, wearing a tearful smile.

  Leafa smiled and nodded. “Yes…that’s right. He’s always been like that. In fact, I bet he’s even found some enemy combatant in this tournament to protect, right about now.”

  Out of habit, everyone looked over to the huge screen on the wall. Here and there in the multiwindowed display was the bright flash of gunfire. But as usual, Kirito’s name did not appear, and the player who called himself Death Gun in the tattered cloak hadn’t shown up since his last exhibition.

  Then again, no one present had seen Kirito’s GGO avatar, so if he had been the target at any point, rather than the character named as the viewpoint player, they might not have recognized him. Still, KIRITO hadn’t disappeared from the player list on the right edge of the screen, and he was still listed as ALIVE as more and more combatants’ status shifted to DEAD. Somewhere on that vast island battlefield, he was locked in a subtle, secret struggle with Death Gun.

  Even if Asuna converted to GGO right at this moment, she couldn’t enter the tournament or help Kirito. But she wanted to do something. She needed to support him, protect him, encourage him.r />
  Filled by this sudden emotion, Asuna turned to Leafa and asked, “Leafa, you said Kirito’s not diving from his own room, right?”

  “Yes. But all I know is that he’s coming from somewhere in the center of Tokyo.”

  Asuna had already heard as much—that was why she was diving into ALO from Dicey Café in Okachimachi rather than her home in the more distant Setagaya Ward, so she could meet up with Kirito sooner once the tournament was over. She nodded and turned to Kikuoka.

  “Chrysheight, I’m certain you know the answer. Where is Kirito diving from?”

  “Uh…well, that would be…” mumbled the robed mage, his sea-blue hair waving. Asuna took a firm step forward, and this time he answered in the affirmative. “Yes, I know. I set it up, in fact. The security is airtight, and he’s being monitored. There’s someone with him, so I can guarantee that his physical body is in no danger…”

  “Where is he?”

  “…Uh, well, that would be…at a hospital in Ochanomizu, Chiyoda Ward… But don’t worry, just because he’s in a hospital. It was only chosen because they have heart monitors there, not because we anticipated any bodily harm,” Kikuoka said, trying not to make it sound like an excuse. But Asuna waved her hand and cut through his chattering.

  “A hospital in Chiyoda?! You mean the same one that he visited for physical rehab?!”

  “Well, yes…”

  That’s close. Dicey Café in Okachimachi and Ochanomizu are only separated by Suehiro in between. It might take five minutes if I can catch a cab, Asuna realized. Her mind was set.

  “I’ll be going now. To Kirito in real life.”

  14

  When I separated from Sinon and left the cave, the red of the sunset was almost entirely gone, with only a purple brushstroke across the sky to mark the dying of the light.