Phantom Bullet 2

by Reki Kawahara

  …Am I even capable of that?

  Sinon fought off the encroaching hesitation and fear as she scanned the desert with scope and naked eye alike.

  Her attempted shots atop the buggy while they were escaping the city were pathetic. She had missed the cloaked player by a mile, and it was sheer coincidence that she had hit the truck’s gas tank at all. All the pride she had built up in the game had evaporated in that instant.

  As Sinon the sniper, if she racked up kills, honed her craft, and one day won the BoB, then Shino Asada, real-world girl, would find the same strength. She would shed her fear of guns, no longer remember the events of her past, and finally have a normal life. That had been her belief ever since Kyouji Shinkawa had invited her to play GGO.

  But perhaps that desire was just a little bit off-target.

  At some point, she began to think of Sinon and Shino as separate people within her mind. There was strong Sinon and weak Shino. But that was a mistake. Sinon still had Shino’s weakness within her. It was why she trembled in fear at Death Gun’s Black Star and missed her shot.

  Both of them were her. She only noticed this once she had seen the mysterious boy named Kirito. He had to be the same way in real life. He had to resist his own weakness and fight every day to be strong—even without a lightsword at his waist.

  In that case, Sinon’s strength had always been inside of Shino.

  I’ll fire this bullet as Shino. The same way I did in that incident five years ago.

  She’d been running from that moment this whole time. She tried to forget, to erase it, to shut her eyes, to paint over the memories.

  But that’s over now. I’ll face my memory, my sin, head-on. I’ll go back to that moment so I can start walking from there. That’s the moment I’ve been waiting for all this time, I think.

  If that’s the case…then this is that moment.

  Through the scope, Sinon’s right eye caught sight of a figure moving at high speed: Yamikaze.

  Her finger touched the trigger. No pressure on it yet. This would be a one-chance shot. She didn’t have time to move and reset her locational data.

  If she missed, Yamikaze would charge on Kirito first. Even Kirito couldn’t handle Death Gun and Yamikaze together. He would fall from one of their attacks. If Death Gun downed Yamikaze, the reaper would turn his Black Star on Sinon again. The 7.62 mm virtual bullet would hit Sinon, and the accomplice waiting in the real world would see it on the stream and administer the fatal drug to Shino’s body, stopping her heart.

  That all meant that Shino’s actual life depended on this shot. Just as it had once before.

  Oddly enough, her heart was calm. Maybe it was just because she couldn’t fully process the situation. But that wasn’t the whole story. Something, someone, was giving her strength. The warmth she felt in the fingertips of her freezing, numb hand belonged to…

  …the Hecate II. Her indispensable counterpart, the weapon that had pulled her through countless battles.

  …Oh, right. You’ve always been here with me. Not just in Sinon’s arms…but by Shino’s side as well. Even when I couldn’t see you, you’ve been there, encouraging me.

  Please…I am weak. Give me your strength. The strength to stand, and walk again.

  Through the weeks and months of battles in the late Aincrad, the front-line warriors developed and mastered a number of extra-system skills.

  There was reading ahead, the ability to predict an opponent’s first move in a duel, based on his sword position and center of weight. There was discernment, to predict the attack trajectory of long-distance monster or human attacks based on eye location. There was hearing, pinpointing locations of approaching enemies out of the midst of the ambient sound mix. Misleading was taking advantage of the monster’s AI patterns to put them at a severe disadvantage. Then there was the switch tactic, which allowed for a group to heal individual members at the same time it attacked.

  Out of all these skills that you’d never find in the player menu, the most difficult to master, and thus the one treated like some kind of occult magic, was hyper-sensing—the ability to detect spirit.

  It worked quicker than eyesight or hearing to detect the presence of hostile enemies. In short, it was the ability to sense ill intent focused on the user.

  Those who denied that this ability existed claimed that a person’s “killer intent” was physically impossible in the virtual world. After all, anyone in a full dive was perceiving the world solely through the digital signals the NerveGear passed to their brain. All information had to be represented as code, and there was no way to program something as dubious and imaginary as ill will or sixth sense.

  Their argument made perfect sense. I certainly wasn’t going to argue that some kind of extrasensory skill really existed.

  But over the two years I spent in that floating castle, on multiple occasions, I experienced what I could only describe as sensing bloodlust. Without seeing or hearing anything, I sensed that I was being targeted by someone, and hesitated from proceeding in the dungeon. As a matter of fact, I had saved my own life doing that.

  I tried telling my “daughter” Yui about the experience this year. Yui was once a low-level subroutine of the Cardinal System that ran SAO. She assured me that in SAO and its replica system The Seed, there was no means of informing a player about the presence of other players or monsters outside of the standard five senses.

  Therefore, it wasn’t possible to detect a foe waiting in perfect silence out of the line of sight, she said. I tried explaining something I’d secretly imagined for many years.

  While diving into a VRMMO, a player is always connected to the version of himself that exists on the game server as data. While alone in the wilderness or a dungeon, only the player can observe that data. But if something else was waiting in ambush, it required twice as much data to be accessed from the server. Perhaps this extra processing, an infinitesimal lag in the data transfer, could be interpreted by the player as killer intent…

  Yui put on an extraordinarily skeptical face and suggested that any server that lagged over a load that tiny ought to be put out to pasture for good. But she did add that theoretically, she could not state with 100 percent confidence that it was impossible.

  In the end, chalking it up to ESP might have been a more convincing explanation.

  But at the current point, the reasoning did not matter.

  For the first time in my long history of VRMMO playing, I had nothing to rely upon other than this Hyper-Sensing skill.

  Beyond the very last traces of light left in the sky, a hazy disc of pale white rose. The moon was full. But thanks the presence of heavy clouds, it was much darker than a full moon night in Alfheim. The curves of the dunes melted partially into the night sky, making it difficult to tell if the occasional jutting shadow was a cactus or a rock formation.

  If someone was hiding at the foot of such an object and pointed a gun at me, I might not be able to detect the movement with my eyesight. To make matters worse, the foe who had to be watching now had the unbelievable advantage of invisibility. The only visual clue I could use was footprints in the sand. At a distance of over half a mile, such an effect might not even be displayed. It was a waste of time to try to spot it. Similarly, the sound of such an approach would be completely lost in the howling of the wind.

  So just shut your eyes. Turn off your ears.

  I closed my eyelids, shaking off my fear. One by one, I purged the whistling of the wind, the dry chill, and the scraping of the sand beneath my feet from my mind.

  From the very far distance came a barely perceptible vibration. Someone was running at a very high speed. That would not be Death Gun. The distance was southwest. It had to be Yamikaze.

  I withstood the urge to turn and look for him. Yamikaze was Sinon’s target; she would stop him. I eliminated even those footsteps from my mind. I focused all of my senses forward, utilizing them for nothing more than picking up any kind of change in the environment.

&nb
sp; Oh…that’s right. Now I remember. On the night of the Laughing Coffin battle, it wasn’t movement or sound that tipped me off to their ambush. It was just “the willies.” I turned around on instinct alone to spot the silent, creeping shadows in the side branches of the cave.

  What was the name of the man who led the ambush charge? It wasn’t PoH, the leader of the group. He probably wasn’t there at all. So it was one of the lieutenants. The man wielded an estoc, a very long, pointy sword. It had no blade, only a point for stabbing. The tiniest little glimmer of that deadly prong, snaking forward…

  Did I kill him? No, I didn’t. When his HP got down to half, he switched with a comrade, drawing back to lick his wounds. As he retreated, he hissed something at me. It wasn’t some cocky boast. It was a halting, unpleasant hiss.

  “…Kirito. Later, I will, kill you.”

  That way of speaking. That attitude. The two reddened eyes that seemed to glow beneath his hood…

  Something prickled between my eyebrows.

  It was that feeling. The inorganic, clinging, freezing bloodlust—coming for me.

  I opened my eyes.

  Across the desert, at the foot of a cactus just a shade north of east, a tiny light glimmered.

  The point of an estoc. The firing of a rifle.

  I leaned to the right. But in fact, by the time I was starting the lean, a tiny mass of pure compressed damage bore down on my forehead. The flow of time shifted. It turned heavy, so heavy, freezing the air itself—

  The tip of the rotating bullet barely grazed the temple of my tilting face, clipping my hair as it passed by.

  “Aaaahhh!!”

  I let out a roar, launching off the sand and leaving a lock of black hair floating in the wind.

  He’s fast!!

  Yamikaze’s speed through her scope exceeded Sinon’s imagination. His maxed-out AGI and extreme dashing skill produced a pace that matched his name: dark wind.

  He wore a dark blue combat suit with a minimum of protection covering his small frame. He had no sidearm, and only a single plasma grenade on his belt. He didn’t even have a helmet on to cover his pointed, stern face. The thin M900A was cradled in his arms as he leaned forward into his sprint, and even at full speed he hardly shook at all. Only his legs appeared to move, a furious blur beneath him. The sight made him less a soldier than a ninja, and he showed no signs of slowing.

  Even the quickest player normally ran a bit, then found cover, checked his surroundings, and ran again. For a sniper like Sinon, that brief pause was her best chance to attack.

  But Yamikaze, though he used cacti and rocks as cover, never stopped behind them. He knew that a player with his level of agility was actually safest on the move at max speed.

  …What to do? She could try to read ahead and fire in front of him. But Yamikaze didn’t sprint in a straight line. He circled around the dunes and occasionally over one, randomizing his movement so that predicting his course was impossible. She could also intentionally put the first shot at his feet, making him panic and giving her a chance to hit him when he dove for cover. But it was unlikely that such a plain, familiar trick would work on a hardened veteran like him. And once she used that first shot, he would have her bullet line to make use of. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to waste the sniper’s greatest opportunity like that…

  Sinon couldn’t decide. But unlike when she was on the buggy, this indecision was not caused by fear and hesitation. Her mind was cold and clear. She had strength from the smooth wooden stock of the Hecate against her cheek, and the boy who kept his back to Yamikaze out of his faith in her.

  I shouldn’t just fire a desperate shot at Yamikaze while he’s sprinting, she finally decided, letting her trigger finger relax just a bit.

  That wasn’t sniping. When she shot, she needed absolute confidence. Yamikaze would stop just once before he got Kirito into the firing range of his M900A. That was her chance. She would wait for the final moment, when that opportunity presented itself.

  The navy blue ninja was already within a kilometer of Kirito. As long as Kirito kept his back to the man and did not move, Yamikaze would assume that he hadn’t noticed his presence yet, and move to the hundred-meter range that AGI types preferred best.

  I can wait until then. You hold out too, Kirito. Trust in me.

  There were no communications items in the battle royale, so all Sinon could do was send her message mentally. But she felt like her thoughts reached him. That was the last thought she had. Her whole existence fused with the Hecate, her vision becoming the scope; her touch, the trigger. Even her breathing and heartbeat faded away. All she sensed was the speeding target and the crosshairs trained over his heart.

  She didn’t know how long that state lasted.

  Finally, the moment arrived.

  A white light shot across her view from the lower right to the upper left: a bullet. It was not from the Hecate, obviously. It was a .338 Lapua bullet, shot by Death Gun from the east end of the desert. Kirito dodged the bullet, and it reached all the way near Yamikaze to the west, thanks to the L115’s incredible range.

  Yamikaze clearly wasn’t predicting a massive bullet to come bearing down on him from the other side of Kirito, whom he assumed wasn’t aware of the racing pursuer. He didn’t hit the deck entirely, but he did crouch down and put on the brakes, swiveling over to a nearby rock.

  This would be her one and only chance to snipe.

  Her finger began to pull the trigger, largely following the will of the Hecate. The light green bullet circle appeared and shrank to the size of mere pixels in an instant. The point was centered on the middle of his chest. The trigger clicked, the hammer struck the firing pin, the .50 BMG cartridge exploded in the chamber, and a massive bullet instantly rocketed out at supersonic speed.

  Through the scope, Sinon’s right eye met the wide, shocked gaze of Yamikaze as he noticed the Hecate’s muzzle flash. There was surprise, frustration, and a certain element of admiration there.

  A bright flash erupted from the chest of the championship contender ninja. The avatar flew several yards into the air, tumbled onto the sand, and came to a stop, facing upward. At his side, his M900A and grenade fell, rattled loose by the impact. The DEAD tag began to rotate over his stomach, but Sinon did not see it—she was already turning 180 degrees with the Hecate.

  Kirito!! she cried, a silent scream.

  The swordsman in black was running straight for the pale moon rising beyond the horizon. His running form was not at all like Yamikaze’s compact machinery. His chest was puffed out and his chin was tucked down, legs pumping in a wide stride like some kind of dance. His right hand flashed and unhooked the lightsword from his belt. The violet-blue blade crackled and shone in the darkness.

  Ahead of Kirito, an orange light momentarily flickered. Gunfire.

  The curve of the lightsword’s swing intersected the bullet. Then again. And again. Now that he’d dodged the first shot, Kirito could see the bullet lines. No matter how many times he fired that bolt-action rifle, Death Gun could not break his target’s ultraquick reaction speed.

  Sinon flipped the scope’s night-vision on and raised the magnification level to maximum, pinpointing the source of the gunfire.

  There he was. Below a large cactus. She saw the recognizable sound suppressor poking out from the tattered cloth, as well as the cleaning rod affixed to the barrel. It was Death Gun, a true murderer, with his “Silent Assassin” L115A3.

  She kept her eye open in the scope, battling the fear that suddenly welled up at the sight of him.

  You’re not a ghost. You killed many people in Sword Art Online, and you’re sick enough to have plotted and carried out this ghastly plan after regaining your freedom—but you’re a human being who lives and breathes. That means I can fight you. I can hold to my belief that the Hecate and I are more powerful than you and your L115.

  She pulled the bolt handle and reloaded the next bullet as she swung the crosshairs into the darkness of the cloak’s hood. />
  She could see flickering red eyes in the darkness. But it was not the hellfire of the dead. It was simply the lens of a full set of goggles. The only thing behind them was the face of an ordinary in-game avatar.

  Sinon brushed the trigger and squeezed very slightly.

  The next moment, Death Gun’s head twitched. He saw the bullet line. Thanks to her shot on Yamikaze seconds earlier, Sinon’s location was officially revealed. But that only meant they were on equal footing.

  You’re on!!

  Through the scope, Sinon saw Death Gun swivel his L115 toward her. A bloodred line extended from its black maw and chillingly caressed her forehead. Sinon didn’t wait for the circle to contract; she pulled the trigger.

  The gun blasted at the same moment that Death Gun’s rifle spit a tiny flame. Sinon pulled her head away from the scope, catching sight of both her own bullet and the oncoming projectile with the naked eye. Their trajectories seemed to be perfectly aligned.

  For a moment, she thought the bullets might collide, but that miracle did not happen. Instead, they very nearly touched in midair, throwing each round just slightly off course.

  She heard a high-pitched kwang right next to her ear—the scope on the top of the Hecate vanished without a trace. She’d have been dead if her eye was still pressed into it. Death Gun’s .338 Lapua brushed Sinon’s right shoulder and passed behind her.

  Meanwhile, the Hecate’s .50 BMG missed its mark as well, colliding with the L115’s receiver.

  In GGO, each major gun part had its own durability rating. In normal use, only the barrel suffered degradation, which could be recovered with maintenance. However, if a bullet struck any part, it would suffer massive damage. Even then, it rarely resulted in total destruction, and repair was possible if some HP was left—just not when the delicate receiver got hit by a high-caliber blast. Such as in this case.

  A small fireball erupted in Death Gun’s arms, and the center of the L115 burst into a mass of polygons. The stock, scope, and barrel all collapsed into the sand. Those parts could be reused, but the receiver was gone forever. The Silent Assassin was dead.