CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SUBTILIZER, STEALER OF SOULS, JUNE–JULY 2026

The sniper had pale-blue hair.

Her delicate, girlish body fit surprisingly well with the mammoth 50-caliber rifle she used.

She was prone, in firing position, and had her back turned, hiding her face. But she was proud and beautiful and dangerous, surely no different from a lynx.

Her concentration was tremendous. She watched the path below with absolute stillness, her right eye pressed to the scope and index finger on the trigger. It was worth watching for longer than this, but time was limited.

Something came out of a hiding spot and across the floor of the abandoned building. Pebbles, twigs, and scraps of metal littered the ground and had to be avoided carefully to ensure the approach was silent—or else she would hear.

Suddenly, her shoulders twitched.

She must have sensed something that was neither sound nor vibration. Her instincts were impeccable but, sadly, too late.

A right hand reached out, wrapping around her slender neck, while the left pressed on the back of her head. With quiet but undeniable intent, the strangling began.

The Army Combative skill kicked in, and the visual representation of the girl’s health, her HP bar, began to drop rapidly. The sniper struggled, but in the VRMMO Gun Gale Online, unless the victim had a clear advantage in the Strength stat, it was nearly impossible to break out of a rear naked choke barehanded. In that sense, it was just like the real world.

Of the twenty-nine contestants in the Bullet of Bullets event, the blue-haired sniper was the most desirable target to fight…no, to hunt. She had been expected to snipe from the upper half of this five-story building.

The problem was that both the fourth and fifth story had a clear shot at the main street of the map. The choice had to be made quickly: Which floor to wait on?

Common sense said the fourth because it would be quicker to stop there and get into firing position. But upon seeing the library on that floor, intuition and logic both said otherwise. Intuition said the sniper was probably still young enough to be a student. Logic said that a student would want to avoid shooting in a library, which might be mentally associated with everyday life.

That suspicion was correct. The blue-haired sniper spent the extra thirty seconds or so to climb another floor higher, and she appeared in the fifth-floor storeroom.

And now, like a butterfly that wandered into a spider’s web, her fragile life was soon to vanish.

Oh, but if only this was not some calculation of binary data in a virtual setting, but the taking of a real life and soul.

If only it was not her avatar struggling against the chokehold, but her true flesh-and-blood body. How sweet the moment would be when it arrived.

In the upper-right corner, the sniper’s HP bar went under 5 percent. But she still struggled desperately to break free.

Though her defeat was certain, she neither wasted energy trying to shout nor went limp in submission. Her refusal to give up on escaping was even rather touching to her foe.

And into her ear from behind, as tenderly as a lover’s embrace, came a whisper.

“Your soul will be so sweet.”