7

“Big Brother!”

That a cheerful smile from my beloved sister—at a lunch table on a beautiful Sunday afternoon—would cause me to sense impending disaster should tell you just how guilty I felt about my present actions.

I stopped my fork just before the cherry tomato reached my mouth. “Wh-what’s up, Sugu?” I asked, only to find the premonition come to fruition when my sister—nay, cousin—Suguha Kirigaya picked up something from the seat next to me.

“Listen, I found this article on the Net this morning.”

She shoved a full-sized A4 printout into my face. It was a hard copy of the news column from the nation’s biggest VRMMO gaming website, MMO Tomorrow, typically abbreviated to M-Tomo.

The bold headline proclaimed: THIRTY FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR 3RD BULLET OF BULLETS BATTLE-ROYALE FINAL IN GUN GALE ONLINE.

After a short lead, the article ran the list of names. Right beneath Suguha’s neatly clipped index nail, it said “F Block, 1st Place: Kirito (Debut).” I tried an empty bluff.

“W-well, well, funny that someone else is using a similar name.”

“Similar? It’s the exact same name.”

Under Suguha’s trimmed bangs was a grinning face with forthright, crisp features, the very image of a healthy, athletic girl. In real life, she was a talented kendo practitioner, who helped her team reach both the high school nationals, known as the Inter-High, and the Kendo association tournament nationals at the high school level, striving for what was known as the Gyokuryuki prize—all in just her first year of high school. In comparison, my spindly, scrawny figure was no match for her physical stamina. In the virtual world of ALfheim Online, where skill reigned supreme, she was the fairy warrior Leafa, whose graceful, hardy sword occasionally overpowered my own self-taught style.

So I’d have to give up and apologize immediately if I ever got into a fight with Suguha in real life or VR, but fortunately for me, that never had to cross my mind. In the year since I’d come back to the real world, we were closer than we were before we’d grown apart. Even my dad, who temporarily returned during summer vacation from his transfer to America, was jealous of us.

So for lunch today—Sunday, December 14, 2025—with my mother stuck in the editor’s office, Suguha and I went out shopping for groceries so we could fix poached egg Caesar salad and seafood pilaf. We sat across from each other at the table to eat our lunch in blissful peace—until the article entered the picture.

“Uh…yeah. So it is,” I noted, tearing my eyes away from the printed “Kirito” and tossing the tomato into my mouth. As I chewed, I mumbled, “B-but it’s not such an uncommon name. I mean, in my case, it’s just an abbreviation of my real name, Kazuto Kirigaya. I bet this Kirito in GGO has a name like, um…Tougorou…Kirigamine. Yeah.”

The baldfaced lie to my trusting sister prickled at my heart. After all, the Kirito that Suguha was singling out was 100 percent me, without a doubt.

The reason I had to hide that fact was that in order to enter the Bullet of Bullets tournament in the first-person shooter MMO Gun Gale Online, I had to convert my Kirito avatar from its home world of ALO into the world of GGO.

Character conversion was a feature made possible by the Seed platform, the engine on which all VRMMOs ran, which allowed a player to move a character they’d built up in one game to another game while maintaining the same level of strength—a system that was unthinkable just a few short years ago.

There were limitations, of course. The biggest one was that only the character itself transferred, not any items or money. Because of that, conversion was useful only for permanent transfers, not for the tourist desire to check out a different game for a week or two.

I knew that if I told her I was leaving ALO for a different game, Suguha would be terribly shocked; she loved the fairy realm with all her heart. Not to mention that I very much did not want to explain the reason that I had had to convert Kirito to GGO. The seedy underbelly of the VRMMO world was deeply involved with the move.

Seijirou Kikuoka, a government official, had asked me to investigate something in GGO. He was once a member of the government’s SAO Incident Team, and was currently situated in the “Virtual Division”—the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Virtual Network Management Division.

The previous Sunday, Kikuoka summoned me for a meeting and described a very odd event that had happened.

In the main city of GGO, an avatar shot at another avatar, claiming the work of some kind of “judgment.” It would be unremarkable, a simple stunt, if that was all that happened. But the two players whose figures were shot by the avatar in question both died of heart attacks at the very moment they were shot in the game.

It was just a coincidence—I was 90 percent sure of that.

But that last 10 percent possibility in my mind was something I just couldn’t shake. So I agreed to Kikuoka’s bothersome, dangerous request: that I log in to the world of GGO and make contact with the mysterious shooter myself.

I didn’t have the time to build up a new character from scratch, so I converted Kirito from ALO and entered the BoB preliminary competition yesterday in an attempt to catch the shooter’s eye. While I struggled mightily with learning to adapt to the unfamiliar gun battles, the good fortune of finding an extremely helpful player right off the bat got me through the preliminary round somehow—and I even made first contact with the gunman I believed to be my target.

Whether the man calling himself Death Gun truly had the power to kill players from within the game was unknown still.

But one thing became very clear. There was a completely unexpected connection that tied me and Death Gun together:

Just like me, Death Gun was a survivor of Sword Art Online, the game of death. And beyond that, we had crossed swords in a battle for our lives—

“Big Brother, you look scary.”

My body jolted with surprise. My eyes focused on a single point again to see Suguha’s face, her eyes full of concern. She put the hard copy down on the table, clasped her hands together, and stared at me.

“Um, listen…I’ll be honest. I already know that you converted Kirito from ALO to GGO,” she admitted out of the blue. My eyes bulged. There was a grown-up, understanding smile on my younger sister’s lips. “Do you really think I wouldn’t notice that you were gone from my friends list?”

“B-but…I was going to convert back once this weekend was over…and people don’t check their list every day…”

“I don’t have to look to be able to feel it,” she stated confidently. There was a strange light in her big eyes. Oddly enough, I was struck by her femininity in that moment. I looked away with the shyness of that realization and the guilt at trying to hide my conversion.

Suguha said softly, “I noticed that ‘Kirito’ was gone last night, and logged out so I could barge right into your room. But you wouldn’t leave ALO without telling me for no good reason. I realized there must have been a reason, so I contacted Asuna.”

“Oh…great,” I muttered, wincing.

I had only related my secret conversion from ALO to GGO to Asuna Yuuki and our “daughter,” the AI named Yui. That was because Yui had limited access to the game’s system and would know if I disappeared from ALO for two measly seconds, let alone two days. There was no hiding it.

Yui didn’t like it when I kept things from Asuna. She might have accepted it if I explained that I had a very good reason for it, but I certainly couldn’t cope with the thought of placing undue stress on Yui’s core programming.

So I told Asuna and Yui—and only them—that I was leaving for GGO at Seijirou Kikuoka’s request, explaining that it was “to investigate the Seed Nexus.” I just couldn’t tell them what that investigation actually entailed: contact with Death Gun, and the connection between his in-game shootings and two real-life deaths…

It was all preposterous, but its absurdity was eerie enough to eat away at me. That was the biggest reason that I hadn’t told Suguha or my other friends about the conversion.

I looked down and didn’t explain any further. I heard the sound of a chair scraping. Soft footsteps. Then hands on my shoulders.

“…Big Brother,” Suguha whispered, leaning onto my back, “Asuna told me, ‘He’s going to go on a little rampage in GGO like he always does, and then he’ll be back.’ But I think she was secretly worried about it. I am, too. I mean…when you came back so late yesterday, you had this terrible look on your face.”

“Oh…I did?”

Suguha’s short hair brushed my neck. She breathed out directly beside my ear.

“You’re not…doing anything dangerous, are you? I don’t want you to wind up someplace far away again…”

“…I won’t,” I said, loud and clear this time. I put my hand on the one pressing my left shoulder. “I promise. When GGO’s tournament ends tonight, I’ll come back. Back to ALO…and to this home.”

“…Good.”

I felt her nod, but Suguha’s weight stayed on me for a while.

For the two years I was trapped in SAO, my sister had been stricken with terrible grief. And now I was putting her through the possibility of something similar happening. It was unconscionable.

I had the option of messaging Seijirou Kikuoka and canceling the whole operation. But after having been through yesterday’s prelims, two reasons made that choice very difficult now.

For one, I promised a rematch to Sinon, the sniper with the preposterously huge rifle who kindly taught me all about the game while I let her assume that I was a female player.

For another, there was a score to be settled between me and Death Gun.

I had to face the gray-cloaked man again and be sure. I needed to know his former name within the game—and those of his two comrades who I killed with my own sword. That was my primary responsibility, after coming back to the real world…

I patted the hand on my shoulder and reassured Suguha: “Don’t worry, I’ll be back. Now let’s eat, before this food gets cold.”

“…Okay.”

Her voice was a little more forceful than before, and she squeezed my shoulder tight for a moment before letting go. When she trotted back around the table to her chair to sit down, Suguha’s face was wearing its usual energetic smile. She shoved a huge spoonful of pilaf into her mouth and chewed for a moment, twiddling the spoon.

“By the way, Big Brother…”

“Hmm?”

“From what Asuna tells me, the job you’re doing this time is going to pay you really well.”

“Urk.”

In the back of my brain, the image of the 300,000 yen Kikuoka promised me, and the cutting-edge PC it could build, sprang to life, complete with an old-fashioned cash register sound effect. I told myself that a slightly smaller hard drive wouldn’t be the worst compromise for Suguha’s cooperation, and thumped my chest clear.

“Y-yep! A-and I’ll buy you whatever you want with it.”

“Yay! Well, you see, there’s this nanocarbon kendo shinai I’ve always wanted…”

…Maybe I’d have to make do with less RAM, as well.

I left the house on my crappy old motorcycle during at three PM, to avoid rush hour traffic. Making my way east along the Kawagoe Highway, I passed through Ikebukuro and headed down Kasuga Street for the center of the city. I turned south at Hongo to go from Bunkyo Ward to Chiyoda Ward. In minutes, the general hospital that was my destination appeared ahead.

I was here only yesterday, but my memories of that trip seemed so distant now.

The reason was obvious. When I slipped into my bed last night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there in the darkness, eyes wide open, thinking about the past. Reliving the memories that had been dormant in my mind so long—the destruction of the PK guild in SAO known as Laughing Coffin.

Just before four in the morning, I gave up on sleep and put my AmuSphere on to dive into a local VR space. I called up my “daughter” Yui from her PC, which was hooked up via LAN, so we could have a chat that would eventually get me to fall asleep. It worked, but I never hit truly deep sleep, and the dreams I found instead were long.

Fortunately, I didn’t remember most of them, though there was a voice that had been continually ringing in my ears from the moment I woke up until now.

Are you Kirito?

It was what the player I took to be Death Gun whispered to me in the midst of the BoB preliminaries yesterday. And it was also a question from a member of Laughing Coffin, two comrades of which I killed with my own sword. Three, if you included the man who was Asuna’s sworn guard.

Is it you? Are you the Kirito who killed us?

Whether it was in the BoB waiting hall or in my dreams, my only answer could be “yes.”

At today’s final, which began at eight, I was sure I would come face-to-face with that ghost of a man again. If he asked me the same thing, I had to respond in the affirmative. But at this point in time, I didn’t have the confidence to do that yet.

“If I’d known this would happen…”

…I wouldn’t have converted Kirito from ALO. I’d have started a brand-new GGO character from scratch.

I grimaced at my own stubbornness to accept what had happened to me as I stopped the bike and headed for the inpatient lobby.

I made sure to message before I left the house, so Nurse Aki was already set up in the same room as the previous day. Her hair was adorned with the same braids, but there was a pair of rimless glasses on her nose this time. She was sitting on the chair next to the bed, long legs folded as she read an anachronistic old paper book. When I opened the door, she looked up and shut the book quickly with a smile.

“You’re here early.”

“I’m sorry to put you through this chore again today, Miss Aki,” I said, bowing. The clock on the wall said it wasn’t even four yet. That meant I had over four hours until the BoB started, but it would be foolish to wait until the last second and rush to the event in a panic again. It would be a much better use of my time to log in early and get some shooting practice in.

As I hung up my jacket on a hanger, I told Nurse Aki, “My event doesn’t start until eight, so you don’t need to monitor my heart signals until then.”

The nurse, dressed in her white uniform, shrugged. “It’s fine, I’m on the graveyard overtime shift tonight. I’ll be here as long as needed.”

“Uh…i-in that case, I feel even worse…”

“Oh? Well, if I get sleepy, I might just borrow your bed here,” she remarked with a wink. As a VRMMO addict with zero real-life skills, all I could do was mumble and look away. She laughed at that. She’d seen what a pushover I was during my post-SAO physical therapy. There was no winning against her.

I hid my embarrassment by plopping down on the bed and looking at the imposing monitoring equipment and the silver, double-ringed AmuSphere headgear lying on the pillow.

The unit Kikuoka prepared for me was still brand-new; the aluminum polish and the artificial leather interior were spotless. Compared to the crude helmet that was the NerveGear, the AmuSphere was much more refined and resembled a fashion accessory more than a piece of electronics.

In keeping with its promise of “absolute safety,” it didn’t even look like a machine capable of the lethal microwaves that the NerveGear produced. It was designed to send only the faintest possible signals.

So common sense said that it wasn’t at all necessary to be strapped to a heart-monitoring device in a hospital with electrodes on my chest and a nurse on watch around the clock. No matter what anyone tried to do, the chances of anyone being able to harm me through this AmuSphere were zero. Nil.

But.

Zexceed and Usujio Tarako, two of the best GGO players around, were dead.

And I knew that Death Gun, the man who fired virtual bullets at their avatars, was once a red player in SAO—someone who knowingly, intentionally, killed other players.

What if there was still some unknown, dangerous effect of full-dive technology?

What if a player who had committed murder in the abnormal realm of SAO learned how to unleash murderous intent and hatred in a digital form that could be transmitted through the AmuSphere as data, traveling online and eventually reaching the nerve center of the target…with the signal to stop his heart?

If that hypothesis were true, it might be possible for Death Gun’s virtual shooting to have real, fatal effects. And at the same time, it could be possible for Kirito’s virtual sword to kill Death Gun or someone else.

After all, I had killed other players in Aincrad. And my kill count might have been higher than most of the red players who partook in the activity.

Until this point, I’d been trying to forget about the lives that I ended with my sword. But yesterday, the lid that sealed those memories away had been opened.

Then again, I’d never be able to forget those things anyway. All I did for the past year was look away, pretending I couldn’t see them. I tried to hide from the weight of the sin I ought to bear and pay the price for…

“What’s wrong, kid? You look like hell.”

The toe of a white slipper poked my knee. My shoulders twitched and I looked up to see the gentle gaze of Nurse Aki through her rimless glasses.

“Uh…er, nothing,” I muttered, shaking my head, but I couldn’t stop myself from biting my lip. Just a few hours earlier I’d made Suguha uneasy for the exact same reason, and now I was doing it to Nurse Aki, who was stuck at this annoying duty for my sake. I felt pathetic.

She gave me that same grin that had cheered me up so often during physical rehab and got up from her chair to sit next to me.

“C’mon, this is your big chance for some free counseling with a pretty nurse. Lay it on me, kiddo.”

“…I’m guessing I’ll be in trouble if I don’t take you up on that,” I noted with a long sigh. I looked down at the floor for a bit and asked, “Um, Miss Aki, you were in the surgical department before rehabilitation, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“Well, this might be a rude or completely insensitive question, but…” I glanced quickly to my left and mumbled, “How much do you remember about the patients that…didn’t make it?”

I was expecting to be scolded or get a dirty look. If I was in her position, I’d be annoyed having to listen to the opinion of a kid who thought he knew what it was like to work in medicine.

But the gentle smile never left Aki’s face. She looked up at the white ceiling and said, “Well, if I actually sit back and try to remember, I can see the names and faces, all right. Even the patients who were only in the same surgery room for an hour…It’s strange, given that I only saw them while they were sleeping under anesthesia.”

She must have meant that patients had died during operations where she was present. I knew it wasn’t something I should touch upon lightly, but I couldn’t keep myself from asking.

“Have you ever wished you could forget?”

I don’t know what she saw when she looked into my face. She blinked twice, but the smile never vanished from her lightly reddened lips.

“Hmm…good question. I don’t know if this answers it for you or not, but,” she prefaced, her voice husky, “when people are meant to forget something, they will forget it, I think. They don’t even have to want to forget it. After all, the more often you think you want to forget something, the stronger you’re making that memory, aren’t you? It means that deep in your heart, in your unconscious, you believe it’s something you shouldn’t forget.”

I took in a short breath. It wasn’t the answer I expected.

The more I wished to forget something, the less I was meant to forget it…?

The words sank into my chest and brought a bitter taste to my mouth. Eventually that turned into a sardonic smile.

“Then I guess I’m a real bastard…”

I looked down at the floor between my feet so I didn’t have to see the questioning look in Aki’s eyes. My arms squeezed together around my knees, pressing the words out of my chest.

“Inside of SAO, I…killed three players.”

My dry, croaking voice echoed off the white walls, sounding distorted when it reached my ears. Maybe it was actually the inside of my head producing those echoes.

Aki was my personal nurse when I attended this hospital for physical rehabilitation—November and December of last year. So she knew that I’d been trapped in a virtual world for two whole years, but I’d never told her a word about what happened in there until now.

Her job was to save people’s lives; there was no way she’d be happy to hear about someone taking them, no matter the reason. But I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out of my mouth now. I hung my head and let the dry cracking voice flow.

“They were all reds—murderers themselves. But I had the option to pacify them without killing. And I killed them anyway. I let my anger and hatred and vengeance do the dirty work. And for the past year, I forgot all about them. Even as I’m telling you this now, I don’t remember the two men’s names or faces. So you see…I’m a guy who can even forget the people he’s killed himself.”

A dense silence filled the room. Eventually, I heard the rustling of clothes and felt the shifting of the mattress. I figured Aki was standing up to leave the room.

But she didn’t. I felt her hand reach around my back to my shoulder and squeeze me close. I froze with alarm as the left side of my body was pressed against her white tunic. Her gentle whisper hit my ear.

“I’m sorry, Kirigaya. I know I said that I would give you counseling, but I can’t erase the weight on your shoulders, or bear it with you.” She lifted her hand off my shoulder and ruffled my hair. “I’ve never played any VR game, much less Sword Art Online, of course…so I can’t measure the weight of this ‘killing’ you’re talking about. But…I do know this much. You did that—you had to do it—to save someone, didn’t you?”

“Uh…”

Again, I hadn’t expected that answer.

To save someone. Yes, that might have been part of the equation. But that didn’t mean…

“In medicine, there are times when you have to choose lives. To abandon the baby to save the mother. To abandon the brain-dead to save those who are waiting for organ donors. When there are huge accidents or disasters, we have to set up a triage to determine the priority of patients. That doesn’t mean that we can kill people if we have the right reason, of course. The weight of a life that’s lost never changes, no matter the circumstances. But the people involved have the right to consider the lives of those who were saved. So do you. As long as you think about the ones you’re saving, you have the right to be saved as well.”

“The right…to be saved?” I repeated in a husky voice. I shook my head fiercely with Aki’s hand still resting on it. “But…but, I forgot about the people I killed. I abandoned that weight…my responsibility to them. So I don’t have the right to be saved…”

“If you really forgot about them, you wouldn’t be agonizing like this now,” she stated firmly. She put her hand on my cheek and forced my face in her direction. Beyond the rimless glasses, her sharp eyes were glowing.

When her neatly trimmed thumb brushed the outer corner of my eye, I realized that I had been crying.

“You do remember. When the time comes to remember, it all comes back. And when that happens, it all needs to come back, including the people you fought to protect and save.”

Aki bumped her forehead against mine. The chilly contact seemed to quell the raging weight swirling around my head. I let my shoulders drop and eyelids close.

A few minutes later, with my bare midriff covered in sticky electrodes for the heart monitor, I laid back on the bed with the AmuSphere in my hands.

Fear and self-condemnation, a cold weight in my stomach that had plagued me since last night, felt distant now. But I was certain that if I ran into Death Gun again in the world of Gun Gale Online, it would rush back in moments.

The VR interface felt as heavy as cast iron in my hands as I slipped it over my head and turned it on. It made a soft ping to indicate it was out of standby. I turned to where Miss Aki stood on the other side of the monitoring equipment, and spoke.

“Thanks for watching over me. And also for…well, just thanks.”

“Of course, dear,” she said kindly, tossing a thin blanket over my body. I breathed in the clean, soapy scent and shut my eyes.

“I don’t think you’ll see anything until after eight o’clock…and I should be out by ten. Here goes… Link start!”

A dazzling rainbow array appeared before my eyes and swallowed me whole. Just before all of my senses were shut out entirely, I heard Nurse Aki’s voice:

“Have a good time then, Kirito the Hero.”

……What?

But in the next moment, my mind was ripped from reality and transported into a wasteland of sand and gunpowder.