3

Dusk.

The low-hanging clouds were painted yellow by the tilt of the setting sun.

The shadows of the ruined high-rise buildings, remnants of the former age, steadily grew across the wasteland of rock and sand. If she was going to be on standby for another hour, she’d have to think about switching to her nighttime loadout.

Sinon didn’t like fighting with night-vision goggles, because it diminished the tension of that kill-or-be-killed mentality. She sighed atop the shadowed concrete, wishing the party that was her target would show up before the sunlight disappeared. The other five people in the depressing ambush with Sinon had to be thinking the same thing.

As if to give voice to the entire party, an attacker, with his small-caliber submachine gun at his waist, grumbled, “Damn, how long are we gonna be waiting here…? Hey, Dyne, you sure they’re coming? The lead wasn’t a bust, was it?”

Dyne, the craggy, burly leader of the squadron, shook his head. The large assault rifle hanging from his shoulder clattered.

“They’ve been hunting the same route, same time, nearly every day for three weeks. I’ve confirmed it all myself. They’re a little late on the return today, but it’s probably just because the mob spawn rate’s a little higher than usual, and they’re cleaning up more of ’em. We’ll get better rewards for it, so don’t complain.”

“Yeah, but,” the man in front pouted, “today’s target is the same group we attacked last week, right? Won’t be they be on guard and change their route…?”

“It’s been six days since our last ambush. And they’ve been visiting the exact same hunting ground every time. Their squadron’s built for mob hunting…”

Dyne’s lips curled into a mocking smile.

“No matter how many times they get attacked and lose their earnings, they’ll just keep trying to make it up by hunting more. The perfect prey for a manhunting squadron like us. We can pull this off another two or three times; you’ll see.”

“I dunno if I can believe that. Anyone’s going to put together a plan after they get attacked the first time.”

“Maybe they’d be on the lookout the day after, but they’ll forget soon enough. Field mob algorithms are the same every day. After a while, they get to be just as robotic and automatic as the monsters they kill. Weak losers—no pride at all.”

Sinon buried her face deeper into her muffler, disgusted by the conversation. The presence of emotions only dulled one’s trigger finger, yet she couldn’t prevent her irritation at Dyne’s boastful gloating.

Apparently Dyne felt that parties who hunted mobs on a routine were lower than him, a PvPer, yet lying in wait to ambush the same party over and over had no effect whatsoever on his pride. If they were going to spend hours in wait here on neutral ground, they could have earned a lot more fighting another high-level squadron in the underground ruins.

Naturally, that increased the chance that they’d die and respawn in town without their equipment. But that was battle. Only trial by fire truly disciplined the soul.

She’d been working with Dyne’s squadron for the last two weeks. She regretted the decision to join almost immediately. Despite their proud claims of fighting only other players, they were a safety-first party, only setting their sights on inferior opponents and disengaging at the very first sign of danger.

But Sinon raised no complaints about the focus of the squadron. She followed Dyne’s orders and pulled the trigger when she was supposed to. She wasn’t trying to make a name for herself through loyalty. She wanted to be sure that when she faced off against Dyne as an enemy, she had as much data and knowledge as possible to land the perfect head shot.

While she had nothing good to say about his personality, Dyne’s eighteenth-place finish in the last Bullet of Bullets and the rare SIG SG 550 assault rifle that sprayed 5.56 mm rounds were the real deal. So she shut her mouth, kept her eyes bright, and absorbed all of the information he carelessly dispersed.

Dyne blathered on.

“…The thing is, they’ve all got optical guns for hunting mobs, so they can’t arrange for live-ammo guns for the entire group on a whim. At best, they might have one for covering fire, but no more. And Sinon’s got her sniper rifle to help take out whoever uses that one. There’s absolutely no flaw in our plan. Right, Sinon?”

Sinon barely nodded with her face still stuffed in the muffler, suddenly the unwanted focus of the conversation. She did not speak up, hoping that would indicate she didn’t want any part of it.

Dyne snorted in annoyance, while the attacker grinned at her and said, “Yeah, that makes sense. With Sinon’s long-distance fire, we’ve still got the advantage. By the way, Sinocchi…”

He crawled over toward her, never leaving the shade of their cover, the lazy smile still plastered on his face.

“You got any time later? I was hoping to raise my Sniping skill and I could use a few pointers. Feel like getting a cup of tea?”

Sinon glanced quickly at the weapon on his waist. His main weapon was an H&K UMP, a live-ammo submachine gun. He played an Agility-first build, so his evasion in a head-on battle was notable, but level-wise and equipment-wise, he was not worth remembering. She wracked her brains to recall his name and dipped her head.

“I’m sorry, Ginrou. I’ve got something to do IRL later…”

Her voice was high-pitched, clear and adorable, not at all like her real voice. Sinon felt sick to her stomach; this was why she hated talking. Despite the fact that she’d just turned him down, Ginrou’s leering smile did not vanish from his lips. A subsection of the male players in the game seemed to feel some kind of pleasure from hearing her voice. The skin of her back crawled at the thought.

The first time she dove into the VRMMORPG Gun Gale Online, she chose a bland, crude male body for her avatar. When the game made it immediately known that switching genders from player to character was not allowed, she wanted to pick as tall, muscular, and soldierlike a body as possible.

Instead, the randomly generated body was that of a petite, fragile, doll-like little girl. When she made to delete her account and build a new character, the friend who had invited her to try the game said it would be “such a waste” to get rid of it right away, and eventually she leveled the character up to the point that it really would have been a waste to start over.

Because of that, she had to deal with the occasional unwanted offer like this. Sinon played to fight, not to deal with this nonsense.

“Oh, right, you’re a student in real life, aren’t you, Sinocchi? College? Got a report to write?”

“…Yeah, sure…”

It felt like after she’d accidentally admitted something about school when logging off one day, the come-ons had gotten much more insistent. She could never admit that she was actually in high school.

The other two front-line players, who had been fiddling with their menus through all of this, finally approached to keep Ginrou away. One of them, a man with green bangs that hung over his smoke-styled goggles, said, “Ginrou, can’t you see you’re bothering her? Don’t bring up RL.”

“Yeah. Just because you’ve been playing solo here and in real life for years doesn’t mean you have to bug her,” said the other man, who had a camouflage helmet tilted at a rakish angle. Ginrou knuckled both of their heads.

“Like either of you have had a girlfriend in years!”

The three of them cackled and Sinon scrunched up even smaller in disbelief.

If you played GGO to battle against other players, there were much better ways to spend your downtime—maintaining focus, checking equipment, and the like. If you were trying to earn enough in-game money to cash out, you were better off in a mob-hunting squadron. And if you wanted to meet people, even among the gender-fixed games, there were much more fantastical worlds with a better gender ratio than this miserable, blasted ruin of a landscape. What did these people think they were doing here?

She buried her face back in the muffler and traced her fingers along the massive rifle barrel, propped up on its bipod.

Someday, I will destroy your avatars with this gun. Will you still be laughing and bothering me then?

Her foul mood was absorbed by the chill of the barrel, and slowly subsided.

“Here they come.”

The last member of the party, spying with binoculars through a hole in the collapsed concrete wall, announced the presence of their target a full twenty minutes later.

The three attackers and Dyne stopped chatting at once, and the mood in the air turned serious.

Sinon glanced up at the sky. The yellow clouds were taking on a tiny bit of red, but there was plenty of light left.

“Finally decided to show up,” Dyne growled softly. He leaned forward and took the binoculars from the scout at the wall. He peered through the same hole, checking the status of the enemy for himself.

“…Yep, that’s them. Seven…that’s one more than last week. Four in front with optical blasters. One with a large-bore laser rifle. Plus…ooh, one with a Minimi. That one had an optic last week, so they must’ve switched over to live ammo in response. If you’re gonna snipe anyone, that’s the one. Last one’s…wearing a cloak, so I can’t see a weapon…”

Sinon lay flat and pressed her face to her rifle’s high-power scope. Their group of six was lying in wait in a ruined building from the old civilization; the building sat on a hill with some vantage over the surrounding terrain. The ragged concrete walls and steel rebar skeletons made for good cover, and the view made it perfect for surveying the wasteland ahead.

She looked up to the sky again to ensure that the virtual sun would not reflect in her lens, then flipped up the scope covers, front and rear.

With her right eye pressed to the lens and the scope set to the lowest magnification, she could see small dots moving across the landscape. She tweaked the magnification dial with her fingertips. With each click of the dial, the little black sesame-seed dots grew until she saw seven players.

As Dyne said, four of them had optical assault guns, two of which were constantly checking their surroundings with binoculars of their own. But unless the group had nearly mastered the Search skill, they would not find Sinon’s squadron lying in wait.

In the middle of the pack were two players with large guns on their shoulders. One had a semiautomatic optical laser rifle, while the other had a live-ammo light machine gun, the FN Minimi. In real life, that was an excellent squad infantry support weapon—even the Japanese Self-Defense Force used it. Indeed, because over half the power of the optical gun attacks would be neutralized by their defensive field, it was the Minimi that posed the most threat by far.

There were two main types of weapons in Gun Gale Online: live-ammo guns and optical guns. Live ammo delivered plenty of damage per round and could penetrate defensive fields. But they also required the user to lug around heavy ammo clips, and bullet trajectories were susceptible to the effects of wind and humidity.

Meanwhile, optical guns were much lighter to carry, and featured longer range and higher precision. The energy packs that served as clips were much more compact as well, but the strength of the guns was diminished by the defensive fields that players wore as armor.

Therefore, it was common wisdom that optical guns were better against monsters, while live-ammo guns were better suited for human players. But there was another feature that distinguished the two categories.

All the optical guns were designed from scratch with fictional names, but the live-ammo guns were based directly on actual, existing firearms. Therefore all the gun fanatics—such as Dyne and Ginrou—who made up a significant portion of the GGO player base happily preferred to carry around live-ammunition guns, only switching to optics when hunting monsters.

The rifle Sinon had her cheek pressed against was also a live-ammo gun. But before she’d come to this game, Sinon couldn’t have told you a single gun manufacturer. She learned their names as items within the game, but she had not developed even the slightest bit of interest in learning more about their real-life counterparts. To her, the unlimited number of guns in the world of GGO were nothing more than 3D-modeled objects, and she didn’t even like the thought of seeing a real gun in the regular world.

All she did was destroy her virtual enemies with virtual bullets in this land of slaughter—until her heart turned hard as stone, and her blood cold as ice.

Sinon would pull the trigger again today to keep that process in motion.

She swept aside any unnecessary thoughts and budged the rifle slightly. At the back of the enemy formation was a player wearing enormous face-covering goggles and a large camouflage cloak. As Dyne had said, the player’s equipment was hidden.

He was extremely large. There must have been a hefty backpack slung over his shoulders, because the cloak bulged alarmingly over his back. The hands peeking out of his sleeves were empty. Whatever weapon hung from his waist, it couldn’t be any larger than a submachine gun.

“Can’t see his face because of the cloak?” Ginrou’s voice floated up from behind. He spoke in a joking tone, but there was no hiding the note of tension. “Think it’s him? You know…Death Gun.”

“Hah! Like he exists,” Dyne snorted. “Besides, didn’t they say that guy was short, and wearing a ghillie suit? This one’s huge. Six feet at a minimum. I’m thinking he must be a Strength-build hauler. He’s carrying their loot haul, ammo, and energy packs in that bag. Probably doesn’t have anything decent to shoot with. Ignore him in combat.”

Sinon watched the man through her scope.

The heavy goggles hid his expression. Only his mouth was exposed. The lips were tightly shut and absolutely still. The other members, though on guard, seemed to be chatting—she caught the occasional flash of white teeth—but the large man in the back was completely silent. There was no wavering in his silent march.

Half a year of experience in GGO taught Sinon’s instincts that this man was the true threat, much more than the one with the Minimi. But aside from the backpack, there were no other obvious bulges in his cloak. Perhaps he was hiding a small but high-powered elite weapon. But anything that good and that small would have to be an optical gun, and not powerful enough to make the difference in PvP. Perhaps the pressure she felt emanating from him was her imagination…

After some hesitation, Sinon spoke up in a soft voice.

“I get a bad feeling from him. I want to snipe the guy in the cloak first.”

Dyne pulled the binoculars away and looked at her, eyebrow cocked.

“Why? He’s barely got any gear on.”

“…I have no proof. I just don’t like him being such an uncertain variable.”

“If that’s the case, shouldn’t the Minimi be the obvious variable to worry about? If the blasters sneak up on us while you’re still getting rid of that one, we’ll have trouble on our hands.”

While protection fields were effective against optical guns, their benefit lessened as the distance between gun and target shrank. At very close range, it was quite possible for a laser blaster with its much larger magazine to overpower the alternative. Sinon had no leg to stand on, so she withdrew her opinion.

“…All right. First target is the Minimi. If possible, I’ll take the cloak with my next shot.”

The problem was that when it came to sniping, the only truly effective shot came before the target knew it was under attack. Once the enemy knew where she was firing from, evasion was as simple as staying out of her line of fire.

“Hey, no more time to talk. Distance of 2,500,” said the recon man, who had taken the binoculars back from Dyne. The leader nodded and turned to the three attackers behind him.

“All right. We’re going to follow the plan, move up to the shadow of the building ahead, and wait for them. Sinon, once we’re on the move, we won’t be able to see them, so you need to alert us if anything changes. I’ll give you the signal to snipe.”

“Roger.”

Sinon put her eye back to the rifle scope. Nothing had changed in the party. They still marched across the wasteland, their pace slow and easy.

As the scout had said, two and a half kilometers separated Sinon’s squadron from the enemy. Just slightly closer than halfway in between, an even larger ruined building loomed over the landscape. Dyne and the rest were going to use that as cover and ambush their prey as they approached.

“All right, move out,” Dyne commanded. Aside from Sinon, the others muttered quick acknowledgments. Their boots scraped on the gravelly sand as they slid down the backside of the sloping hill. Sinon waited for the whistling evening wind to drown out their footsteps, then pulled out a small headset from below her muffler and affixed it to her left ear.

For the next few minutes, Sinon would be fighting the sniper’s lonely battle against pressure. The next bullet she fired would have an enormous influence on the fight that ensued. The only things she could rely on were her trigger finger and the silent gun. She rubbed the massive barrel with her left hand. The black metal answered her with chilly silence.

More than anything else, it was this gun that had cemented Sinon’s infamy in this world as a very rare type of sniper. It was called a PGM Ultima Ratio Hecate II. At four and a half feet long and just over thirty pounds, it fired enormous .50-caliber (12.7 mm) rounds.

 In the real world, from what she’d heard, it was categorized as an antimateriel sniper rifle, meant for piercing military vehicles or structures. It was so powerful that some fancy-named treaty prohibited it from being used against human targets. There was no such law here.

She’d earned it three months ago, around the time she was experienced enough to be considered a veteran of GGO. On a whim, she’d been playing solo in a massive ruined dungeon beneath the capital city SBC Glocken when she fell into a chute trap.

Gun Gale Online took place after a massive war in the distant past caused civilization to collapse, and the players were the descendants of space colonies who had returned to Earth. Glocken itself was the giant ship they’d used to reach the planet, and beneath the ship was the ruin of one of the giant cities that had been wiped out in the war. The city’s ruins were crawling with automatic fighter drones and genetically modified creatures that greeted the adventurers, who dreamed of unearthing ancient treasures. Sinon fell right into the bottom level of that dungeon, its most deadly region.

It was not the kind of place a solo player should be able to handle. Soon she had resigned herself to dying in the very first encounter and spawning back at the save point in town. Eventually, she ended up in a huge, stadiumlike round space, which featured an extremely grotesque creature.

Based on the size and name, it appeared to be a boss monster, but she had never seen it on any of the news sites or wikis. Upon this realization, what little of a gamer’s soul Sinon had was stimulated into action. If she was going to die, she’d die fighting this thing. She hid in the exhaust vents over the stadium and trained her rifle on the beast.

The battle did not turn out as she expected. The boss had a number of attack styles—heat ray, claws, poisonous gas—but the range of all these attacks was just short enough to miss her position. Meanwhile, Sinon’s rifle did paltry amounts of damage to a target that was barely within its effective range. Based on the stock of ammo she was carrying, it would be impossible for her to beat the creature unless she hit its weak forehead with essentially every bullet she had remaining.

With ice-cold calculation and concentration, Sinon pulled it off. The boss collapsed and exploded into vanishing shards three hours after the battle began.

What it dropped was an enormous rifle she’d never seen before. By design, both NPC and player craftsmen could not forge powerful live-ammo guns, and the only ones for sale in town were low-power models. If you wanted anything midlevel or higher, the only option was excavating them from ruins. The Ultima Ratio Hecate II that Sinon found was in the very rarest tier of excavated weapons.

It was said that there were only ten antimaterial rifles on the server, including Sinon’s Hecate II. They commanded an extraordinary price on the market, of course—the last one to be auctioned off went for twenty mega-credits, or twenty million credits. The exchange rate of credits to yen was a hundred to one, meaning the player had earned about 200,000 yen for the sale.

Sinon was a high school student living alone and stretching her monthly budget as far as it could humanly go, so she was sorely tempted by that number. Recently she’d been earning enough to pay 1,500 yen, half the cost of her monthly subscription, but that was still half of her allowance. And if she dove any more often than she already did, she couldn’t maintain her grades. But 200,000 yen was enough to cover all the money she’d sunk into the game with a majority to spare.

Yet Sinon did not sell the gun. Making money wasn’t the reason she played GGO; it was to defeat her enemies—every player stronger than her—so she could conquer her own weakness. And on top of that, for the first time ever, she felt a soul within that simple item.

Because of the Hecate II’s massive bulk, it required a considerable amount of strength to carry. Fortunately for Sinon, she’d spent more of her stat points on Strength than Agility, and she just barely met the required value. The first time she brought it into battle and caught an enemy in its scope, she felt strength and will within the heavy, cold pile of metal. It was a cruel soul that desired slaughter and demanded death. It was every bit the unflinching, unyielding, unsentimental being that Sinon wished herself to be.

Much later, she learned that the name Hecate came from the Greek goddess of the underworld. That was the moment she decided this gun would be her first, and last, partner.

The party continued to move through her scope finder.

Sinon lifted her head and looked down on the wasteland directly to see that Dyne’s group of five was approaching the large building that separated her and the target. The distance between the two was already down to 700 meters—under half a mile. She put her eye back to the scope and waited for Dyne’s order.

Less than a minute later, a crackling voice came through the earpiece.

“We’re in position.”

“Roger that. Target hasn’t changed course or speed. Distance to you, 400. Distance to me, 1,500.”

“They’re still a ways off. Are you ready?” he asked.

She gave him a bland affirmative.

“…Okay. Begin sniping.”

“Roger.”

Their conversation over, Sinon held her mouth shut and placed her right index finger against the trigger guard.

Through the scope, she saw her first target, the man with the Minimi on his shoulder, saying something as he walked. In last week’s battle, Sinon had not been on sniping duty, but had charged into battle with an assault rifle. She surely would have seen him at such a close range, but she didn’t remember his face. Based on his support weapon, however, he must have been at a considerable level.

She moved the reticle delicately, trying to stifle the increased pulse of her heart. Correcting for distance, wind direction, and the target’s movement speed, she placed her aim over a yard in the air to the upper left of the man. Her finger traced the trigger.

In that instant, a translucent, light green sphere appeared in her field of vision.

The sphere, shifting and wavering periodically, covered from the center of the man’s chest to around his knees. It was called a “bullet circle,” an offensive assistance system that only Sinon could see. When the bullet left the gun, it would land at a random point within the circle. At its current size, the amount of the circle occupied by the man’s body was about a third, meaning she had a 30 percent chance of hitting the target. On top of that, even with the power of the Hecate II, it was impossible to get an instant kill by hitting the limbs alone, which dropped her chances of a one-hit kill even lower.

The size of the bullet circle was affected by distance, the gun’s stats, the weather, the amount of light, and the player’s skill and stat values, but the most important parameter of all of them was the shooter’s pulse.

The AmuSphere monitored her real-life heart rate as she lay on the bed, sending that information to the game engine. The instant her heart thumped, the circle expanded to its maximum size. Then it would shrink and shrink until the next heartbeat pushed it out again. If a sniper wanted to raise her accuracy, she had to pull the trigger in the space between heartbeats.

The problem was that a relaxed, resting heart rate might be sixty BPM, one per second, but under the stress of sniping, that could rise to twice the speed, causing the circle to expand and contract wildly. Under those circumstances, it was impossible to time the shot between pulses.

This was the main reason there were so few snipers in GGO.

You couldn’t land a hit. There was no way to eliminate tension when sniping. The heart rate had an effect in close combat as well, of course, but at that distance even an affected shot could land at times—especially with fully automatic SMGs and assault rifles. But when sniping a target over half a mile away, the bullet circle expanded to several times the size of a person. The fact that Sinon had gotten this one to a 30 percent accuracy size was nothing short of a miracle.

But, Sinon thought to herself, how bad is that pressure, that anxiety, that fear, when you really get down to it? Fifteen hundred meters? That’s like making a basket with a wadded-up piece of paper. It’s not that bad—

Not compared to what happened back then.

Her head went ice-cold. Her heart was as still as if it never beat.

Ice. I am a machine of coldest ice.

The pitch of the bullet circle’s shifting dropped precipitously. Her sense of time slowed until she could easily, clearly, identify the moment the circle was at its smallest size.

One…two…three times the circle shrank, and when it covered only the heart of the man lugging the Minimi on his shoulder, Sinon pulled the trigger.

The world shook with a blast like thunder.

A gout of fire erupted from the muzzle brake on the end of the Hecate II’s barrel, and the projectile burst forward faster than the sound of the blast. The recoil pushed the rifle and Sinon herself backward, but she held firm with both feet.

Beneath her reticle, the man looked up, perhaps noticing the muzzle flash in the distance. His gaze met hers through the scope.

And in that very instant, the man’s chest, shoulder and head exploded into tiny shards and disappeared. Just a moment later, the rest of his body crumbled into nothing, like a broken glass statue. Unfortunately for him, the extremely expensive-looking Minimi on his shoulder was selected as a random drop and fell into the sand. When he rematerialized back in town, he’d be hit by the double shock of a one-hit fatality and the loss of his gear.

Sinon observed all of the above without emotion. Her right hand moved automatically, pulling the Hecate II’s bolt handle. It spit out an impressively sized cartridge, which hit a nearby rock with a heavy clang and vanished.

Even as she loaded the next round, Sinon adjusted the rifle to the right, catching her secondary target, the large cloaked man, in the sight. His goggled face was pointed straight at her. She placed the sight just above his body and brushed the trigger. The green projection circle appeared again and instantly shrank to a point.

Three seconds had passed since the first bullet left the gun. A semiautomatic rifle could continue firing, but the bolt-action Hecate II was not that convenient. However, your average player, upon the shock and momentary petrification of seeing his partner’s body exploding, needed at least five seconds to mentally recover, identify the firing direction, and begin taking evasive maneuvers. She figured that with the ensuing chaos, she’d have time to succeed at a second shot.

But the cloaked man showed not a single sign of panic. He stared straight at Sinon through his large goggles. He had to be a serious veteran, probably a player whose name others would recognize. She pulled the trigger.

At this point, the man would be seeing a pale, translucent red “bullet line” that indicated the arc of incoming enemy fire. This defensive aid was implemented to increase the fun of the gunfights, augmenting the guessing game of when and where an attack would come from. Bold players with excellent reflexes and high Agility could evade more than half the bullets from an automatic assault rifle at a distance of fifty yards.

The greatest benefit to playing the sniper class was that the very first shot did not cause the bullet line to appear to the target. Since Sinon had already taken her first shot and revealed her location, that advantage was now lost.

There was another roar. The Hecate II’s bullet, a missile of pure death launched by her unfeeling finger, ripped through the pale yellow atmosphere.

As Sinon feared, the man calmly took one wide step to the right. The next instant, the 12.7 mm round tore through the space several feet away. A large circular mass disappeared from a concrete wall jutting up out of the wasteland far behind him.

Sinon’s hand moved automatically to the bolt to load the next bullet, but she did not return her finger to the trigger.

Any further sniping would be pointless. If she wanted to hit her target, she needed to move locations, hide from his line of sight, and wait out the sixty seconds for the recognition system to reset and allow her that first sneak attack again. But by then, the battle would essentially be decided. She whispered into the com next to her mouth, eye still pressed to the scope.

“First target clear. Second target failed.”

Dyne’s response was immediate.

“Roger that. Begin attack…Go, go, go!!”

Sinon heard the faint scrape of boots hitting ground through the com. She hissed the breath she’d been holding in.

Her duty was over. The Hecate II was an extremely valuable gun, so charging into close battle with it could be disastrous if she died and it was dropped for the enemy to claim. Dyne told her that she could wait on standby after her job was done. She wasn’t happy that her second shot missed, but all she could do now was pray that the bad feeling she had was an illusion.

Despite knowing her role was done, Sinon moved the rifle again and bumped down the magnification on the scope to get a view of the entire enemy squadron. The four lead gunners were scrambling toward rocks and concrete walls for cover, while in the back, the man with the large laser and the cloaked—

“Ah!”

She gasped. The large man had just thrown his arms up and ripped away the camouflage cloak. There were no weapons in his hands. Or at his waist.

The bulky object on his back, which she’d taken to be a backpack for hauling items, was exposed at last.

A metal rail curved from shoulder to broad shoulder. Hanging from it was a delicately framed metallic object.

It was a spherical machine cradled in a Y-shaped frame. At the top was a thick carrying handle, and below that, a bundle of six gun barrels. It was easily over three feet long. There was a belt feeder affixed to the machine, which was connected to a high-capacity ammo belt that also hung from the frame.

This dreadful thing, too enormous and menacing to be called a “gun,” itched at Sinon’s memory. She had seen this weapon once in an index on a GGO fansite.

It was called a GE M134 minigun, and belonged to the Heavy Machine Gun category—the largest type of weapons found in Gun Gale Online. Those six barrels rotated at high speed, loading, firing, and expelling cartridges nearly instantly. It could fire a hundred 7.62 mm bullets in a single second, making it more than worthy of its demonic reputation. This was not just a gun—it was a war machine.

Naturally, such a thing was tremendously heavy. From what she recalled, the body alone weighed forty pounds, and with that much ammo, the whole thing had to be pushing ninety. Even the most extreme STR-heavy build couldn’t fit all of that under the personal weight limit. He had to be suffering a movement penalty for overencumbrance.

The squadron wasn’t moving slowly because their hunt went long. They were going at the maximum speed that man could move.

Stunned, Sinon watched through the scope as the large man reached around his back to grab the handle of the minigun. The massive machine slid smoothly across the rail and rotated ninety degrees to point forward when it reached his right side. He planted his legs wide, pointed the six-barreled gun forward, and for the first time, the mouth below his goggles curved into a triumphant smile.

She hurriedly spun the scope’s dial to the minimum magnification. In the bottom left of her view, Ginrou and the two other attackers were charging in with submachine guns. The enemy party’s front-line shooters were firing back with laser blasters, but the pale blue lasers all fizzled out and vanished into a rippling waterlike surface about three feet in front of her teammates. The anti-optical defense fields were doing their job.

Their live-ammo SMGs spit return fire, and one of the targets, caught a little too far out from his rock cover, flailed with a few red hit blips and collapsed. Ginrou’s group charged farther, up to the closest concrete wall between them and their targets.

The large man squatted. His minigun spun into life, spraying a brilliant curtain of bullets for just a third of a second.

That was all it took to obliterate both the concrete cover and Ginrou’s avatar. He was as helpless as a sand sculpture hit by a tidal wave.

“…”

Sinon bit her lip and stood up. She lifted the Hecate II off the ground, folded its bipod, and wrapped the ammo belt around her body.

At four and a half feet, the gun was nearly as long as Sinon was tall, since she was at just over five feet herself. It bit hard into her shoulder, but was still within her carrying capacity. The only reasons she could manage to keep the tiny H&K MP7 as a sidearm without going over the limit were her considerable Strength stat and the fact that the only Hecate ammo she had were the seven bullets in the magazine.

Even by the naked eye, she could see the muzzle flashes of the gunfight happening nearly a mile away. Sinon silently sprinted as fast as she could go.

At present, Dyne’s team was at a severe disadvantage. Against just the one man with the minigun, they could win by maintaining medium distance and keeping light on their feet. But with the others and their laser blasters at close enough proximity to negate their protective fields, they had no choice but to tackle the nearer enemy.

Though she was part of the squadron, they would not complain if Sinon simply retreated to safety. She had a duty in their mission, and she did her part.

And yet she ran straight for the battle. Not because she wanted to save her companions—it was that confident grin on the minigunner’s face that drove her forward.

He had the strength and ability to laugh on the battlefield. He’d played long enough to earn himself a minigun, which was at least as rare as the Hecate, if not moreso. He had the patience to build up the frightful amount of strength necessary to wield it. And he had the willpower to react to Sinon’s sniping calmly and precisely.

Only by fighting and killing such a foe could Sinon eliminate the other, weaker her—the young Shino Asada, who was always crying in a heap inside her mind.

That was the only reason she continued to challenge this world of madness. If she ran away for safety now, she would be ruining everything she’d built so far.

Sinon raced on through the dusty air, her feet carrying her as quickly across the dried earth as her stats allowed.

She avoided the rocks and ruined walls that stuck out of the gravelly sand here and there, launching herself over obstacles if necessary, and in barely a minute, she was within proximity of the battle.

It was a mad, direct dash, using every ounce of her Agility. She didn’t spare a single thought to hiding herself. The enemy probably knew she was approaching already.

The area of trading fire had moved quite a bit since the battle began. Naturally, it was Dyne’s group that was being pushed. With the minigun’s commanding fire pinning the group, the enemy’s front troopers were able to close the distance. In order to stay out of the effective range of their lasers, Dyne and the others had to keep darting from cover to cover.

She was close enough now that her direct sprint would no longer work. If she traveled in the open, the minigun would pulverize her with a hail of bullets. Worse, there were almost no more of the concrete walls the team had been using as cover in the direction they were fleeing. The only thing left was the half-collapsed building they’d used to approach as they staged the ambush. Once they ran in there, they’d be trapped like rats.

Noticing all of these details at once, Sinon leaped straight for the shadow of the wall behind which Dyne and the others were hiding. As soon as she got closer, three pale, translucent red lines popped into being right in front of her.

“Ugh!”

She gritted her teeth and entered an evasive maneuver. Those were the bullet lines that showed the trajectories of the enemy attackers’ laser blasters.

First she crouched as low as she could go to duck the first of the bullet lines. The next instant, a pale blue laser burned the air over her head. The second line was just before her eyes. She immediately launched off her right foot as hard as she could, floating through the air. The laser passed just below her stomach, leaving her vision pure white for an instant.

The third bullet line intersected her airborne trajectory at a slightly higher point. She shrunk her head down as much as she could and avoided the hit, but the beam caught her light blue hair right at the tip, sending little sparking bits of light flying.

Having successfully dodged all three laser blasts, Sinon landed back on the ground to see—

—a terrifyingly thick red line the color of blood and over a foot across. It had to be the bullet line of the minigun. That deluge of bullets would be upon her in less than a second.

Lashing her terrified body into action, she tensed the foot that just hit the ground and launched herself airborne again. Twisting in midair, she tilted herself backward like a high-jumper.

The next moment, she felt a ferocious flow of energy storm just past the skin of her back. The white, gleaming swarm of bullets passed through her field of vision and tore huge chunks out of the already pockmarked ruined building behind them.

Just before she could land flat on her back onto the sand, Sinon flipped over and stopped herself with hands and feet. At the same time, she tossed her body forward. After a few somersaults, she reached the shadow of the wall where Dyne and the others hid.

The squadron leader stared at the sudden appearance of Sinon with open shock. No matter how charitably she interpreted the look, it was clearly not the shine of appreciation for unexpected reinforcement, but disbelief that anyone would rush to their death like this.

Dyne quickly broke his gaze and looked down at the assault rifle in his hands. When he spoke, his voice was ragged and quiet.

“…They hired a bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard?”

“Don’t you know him? That muscle-bound freak with the minigun is Behemoth. He makes his base on the north continent. Works as a so-called bodyguard for squadrons with more money than balls.”

That’s a much more respectable play style than what you do, Sinon thought, but she didn’t share that opinion with him. She glanced over at the three other attackers, who were occasionally popping their heads out from cover and mounting weak attempts at counterfire, and spoke just loud enough for all of them to hear.

“If we stay hidden here, we’ll be wiped out in no time. The minigun should be running out of ammo soon, and if we all attack at once, he might rethink that strafing fire. That’s the only chance we’ll have to get rid of him. You two with the SMGs from the left, Dyne and me from the right, and the M4 back here to cover us…”

Dyne interrupted her hoarsely.

“It won’t work. They’ve still got three blasters left. If we charge in, our fields won’t last…”

“Automatic blaster fire isn’t as fast as live rounds. We can dodge half of them.”

“We can’t!” he repeated, shaking his head. “The minigun will just tear us to shreds. I hate to say it, but we should give up. Better to log out now and give them the satisfaction of victory than suffer the consequences…”

In a neutral zone, logging out didn’t happen immediately. The soulless avatar would sit in place for several minutes, open to any kind of attack. There was even the low possibility that weapons or armor would drop randomly once the avatar was dead.

She’d always thought that Dyne’s orders to pull back came too soon, but she never expected this kind of cowardly capitulation. He was like a sulking child throwing a tantrum. Sinon stared straight at his face, the picture of a hardened soldier. He gritted his teeth and wailed.

“What? Don’t get all serious about a stupid game! It’s the same thing, we’re either going to die here or die charging them…”

“Then die!” she spit back at him. “Show me you at least have the guts to look down the barrel of a gun and die, even if it’s ‘just a stupid game’!”

What was she doing yelling at this man who was nothing more than a mark, a future target to be eliminated? Her time with this squadron was obviously at its end.

But despite all of that, she grabbed the lapel of Dyne’s camo jacket and yanked him up. At the same time, she hissed orders at the three wide-eyed members beside them.

“Just distract the minigun for three seconds and I’ll pick him off with the Hecate.”

“…Y-you got it,” stammered the attacker with the goggles and green hair. The other two nodded after his lead.

“Good. We’ll split in two and charge from both directions at the same time.”

Sinon shoved the sulking Dyne’s waist over to the far edge of their cover. She drew her MP7 sidearm and held out her fingers to count down.

Three, two, one.

“Go!!”

They leaped as one into the sandy battlefield, where death waited a second away with automatic fire.

Multiple bullet lines immediately crossed her path. She doubled over and slid to avoid them, looking up to catch sight of the enemy squadron.

About sixty feet ahead and to the right, two laser blasters waited on the other side of a wall. Farther to the left was another. Behemoth, the minigunner, was in the middle and another ten yards behind, trying to get a bead on the two allies who’d darted left.

Sinon ran to her right, pointing the MP7 at the blasters. A bullet circle appeared when she squeezed the trigger, but her heart rate was too high to control, and it pulsed and bounced over the attackers’ bodies.

She fired anyway. The recoil on the SMG was almost nothing compared to the Hecate II. In no time at all, the twenty-round magazine of 4.6 mm bullets was empty.

The two men with blasters panicked despite her wild firing and ducked back behind the wall. A few of the bullets hit them, not enough to take their HP down, but enough to buy her a few seconds of time.

“Cover me, Dyne!” she shouted, crumpling to the ground and pulling the Hecate II off her back and into her arms. There was no time to set up the bipod. She had to balance its tremendous weight as she found the scope.

The magnification was still set low, but Behemoth’s upper half filled the viewfinder. He was looking straight at her. Sinon didn’t have time to wait for the trajectory circle to shrink—she pulled the trigger.

With a blast, her desperate shot ripped through the air right next to Behemoth’s head. He stumbled with the shock of its passing, the goggles flying off his face and crumbling into nothing.

Missed!

She bit her lip and tried to stand, but her gaze caught Behemoth’s through the scope. His face exposed, Behemoth’s gray eyes flashed threateningly. His lips still had that confident grin.

An enormous red light swallowed Sinon’s entire body.

Instantly she knew there was no way to avoid it. There was no time to stand out of her firing crouch and leap to either side.

But she could at least face the gun head-on.

Sinon got up and stared straight at Behemoth, intending to honor her challenge. Abruptly, a few lights sparkled on his giant frame.

It was Dyne. He had his assault rifle in firing position with one knee on the ground, carefully taking his shot. Getting anything to hit him at this range and in this situation was an admirable display of skill, even if she didn’t think much of his personality. Sinon jumped hard to her right. Several dozen bullets passed through the space where her body had just been.

“Dyne! Move to the ri—”

Before she could finish that sentence, the two behind the wall opened fire on Dyne as he got back to his feet.

They were too close. The beams burned through his protective field and then his body.

He looked at Sinon for an instant, then turned to face forward.

“Raaah!!”

And charged straight ahead.

A storm of lasers fired back at him. He dodged, weaved, and tore onward. But he couldn’t evade all of them.

With his last few seconds, Dyne pulled a plasma grenade that hung from his belt like a good-luck charm and heaved it over the wall. With his HP down to zero, the avatar exploded into virtual shards, his back to Sinon.

The next moment, a flash turned the entire world white.

There was a tremendous shock, like some Norse god’s hammer striking the earth. Pale energy coursed through the ground, throwing up waves of sand. One of the attackers flew into the air, disintegrating before he even hit the ground.

Nice one!

With a silent cheer for the departed Dyne, Sinon squinted her eyes against the wave of sand and scanned the scene.

One of the two allies who’d charged the minigunner on the left was already gone, but so was the other enemy blaster on that side. On the right flank, Dyne had engaged in a virtual suicide attack, taking one of the two enemies down with him and leaving the other stunned for a time.

And there, hazy through the thick clouds of airborne dust, was a large silhouette making its way straight for her.

At this point, it was essentially a one-on-one fight between Behemoth and Sinon. But a heavy machine gun vs. sniper rifle fight at this distance was completely one-sided.

She had to find cover to protect herself from the minigun while she prepared to fire. But with a simple head-to-head situation, there was no way to hide or take it by surprise…

No, wait.

She held her breath. While the sand still hung heavy in the air from Dyne’s grenade, Behemoth wouldn’t be able to pinpoint her exact location. She couldn’t snipe him, either, of course, but she might able to move to the one spot in this area where his gun’s hail of fire couldn’t reach her.

As soon as the idea occurred to her, she was off and running. The tattered remains of the large building loomed just behind the area where they were fighting.

Once Sinon was through the entrance, the yellow sky could be seen clearly through the collapsed rear half of the building. She found what she wanted on the right-hand wall—stairs upward. She moved as quickly as she could without kicking over any of the detritus littering the ground and making noise.

The metal staircase was missing the occasional step, but it wasn’t enough to stop her quick ascent. She practically kicked the wall of the landing to shift directions and continue upward.

In less than twenty seconds she had reached the fifth floor, where the stairs stopped. There was a large window to her left.

Here she could buy the few seconds necessary to take sniping position without drawing Behemoth’s attention. She pressed the stock of the Hecate against her shoulder and looked out the window.

Immediately, her vision went red.

On the ground over a dozen yards below, Behemoth already had the minigun pointed up as far as it could go, trained perfectly on Sinon. He read her like a book—her plan, her execution, everything.

She didn’t have time to retreat or hide.

He was too good. A real GGO player—a soldier.

But that was the exact kind of opponent Sinon wanted. She would kill him. She had to.

There was no hesitation. She put her right foot on the windowsill, not bothering to take firing position, and launched herself upward.

A burning, brilliant stream of energy tore upward from the ground. A tremendous shock smashed through Sinon’s left knee. Her leg tore away, taking a massive chunk of her HP bar with it.

But she was still alive. Sinon floated through the air over the minigun’s trajectory of fire. Straight over the head of Behemoth.

He tilted backward, trying to catch up to the angle of her flight before his clip ran out. But he couldn’t get to her. The minigun was connected to the frame on his back and couldn’t point directly upward.

As her body began to descend, Sinon pressed the Hecate’s stock to her shoulder and looked through the scope. All she saw was Behemoth’s burly features. At last, the smile was gone from his lips. His teeth were bared, and his eyes burned on the fuel of shock and anger.

Sinon was barely conscious of the movement of her own mouth.

As if taking over from him, she smiled. A fierce, cruel, cold smile.

Falling a great height was hardly the ideal position for steady sniping, but she was too close to miss. When the tip of the barrel was just three feet from his head, the green bullet circle shrank into place in the center of his face.

“The End,” she muttered, and pulled the trigger.

A spear of light shot out of the fingertip of the goddess of the underworld, bearing the maximum amount of energy of any bullet in this world.

It ripped a hole from his face through his trunk and buried itself deep in the gravelly earth.

The next instant, an explosive shock wave erupted outward, and Behemoth’s body blew apart from the inside.