4

The moment she left the school gate, a cold, dry wind buffeted her cheeks.

Shino Asada stopped still and adjusted her sand-yellow muffler.

With over half of her face covered by the cloth and the other half by her plastic-rimmed glasses, Shino was ready to continue walking. Her heart itched steadily as she strode quickly down the leaf-strewn path.

…Out of the 680 days of her high school education, 156 were finished.

She was a quarter of the way done. In that sense, the length of her torture was astounding. But if she included middle school in the total, nearly 60 percent of the trial was in the past. It’ll end someday…It will end someday. She repeated it like a magic spell.

Of course, even when she reached her high school graduation, she had no goals to achieve or career to seek. She just wanted to be free of the “high school” affiliation that she was largely forced to accept.

Every day she visited that prison, listened to lifeless lectures from her teachers, and participated in gym and other activities with students who hadn’t evolved a bit since they were toddlers. Shino wondered what the point of all of it was. On very rare occasions, there was a teacher with a worthwhile lesson, or a fellow student with admirable qualities, but their existences were hardly necessary to Shino.

Once, Shino told her grandparents—who were her legal guardians—that rather than go to high school, she would prefer to start working immediately, or go to an occupational school to prepare for a career. Her old-fashioned grandfather went red with rage, and her grandmother wept, saying that she needed to go to a good school and marry into a good family, or else they would be doing her father a disservice. Left without a choice, Shino studied hard and got into a fairly good municipal school in Tokyo. Upon starting there, she was surprised to find no real difference from the public middle school back home.

So, as she did each day of middle school, every afternoon after she left the school gates, Shino performed her ritual of counting down the days.

Shino’s solitary apartment was about halfway between the JR train station and school. It was a cramped place, the main room less than a hundred square feet with a small kitchen, but it was adjacent to a shopping arcade, which was convenient.

At three thirty in the afternoon, the arcade street was relatively uncrowded.

Shino stopped first at the display table of the bookstore and noticed a new book from one of her favorite authors, but it was in hardcover, so she decided to hold off. If she put in a reservation online, she’d be able to rent it from the local library in a month or so.

Next she bought an eraser and a graph-paper notebook at a stationery store, checked her remaining cash, and made her way to the supermarket at the center of the shopping district. Shino’s dinners were always extremely simple, so as long as her meal balanced nutrition, calories, and price, she didn’t care what it looked or tasted like.

She was passing by the video arcade next to the market, planning on a carrot and celery soup with tofu cubes, when someone called her name.

“Asada!”

It came from the narrow alleyway between the two buildings. She automatically tensed and slowly rotated ninety degrees to her right.

In the alley were three girls wearing the same school uniform as Shino, but with considerable differences in the length of their skirts. One was squatting down and fiddling with her phone, while the other two leaned against the wall of the supermarket and leered at Shino.

She stood there without responding until one of the two leaners arrogantly beckoned her over with a wave of her head.

“Come here.”

Shino didn’t move.

“…What do you want?”

The other one quickly strode over and grabbed Shino by the wrist.

“Just get over here.”

She had no choice but to be pulled along. They shoved her back down to the far end of the alley, well out of sight from the main walkway, where the squatting student looked up at her. She was Endou, the leader of the trio. With her black eyeliner, slanted eyes, and pointy chin, she looked like some kind of predatory insect.

Endou’s glitter-sparkling lips twisted menacingly. “Hey, Asada. We were just doing a ton of karaoke, and now we can’t afford the train fare home. We’ll pay you back tomorrow if you lend us this much.”

She held up a finger. She didn’t want 100 yen, or 1,000. That meant 10,000.

Shino silently thought of a number of logical rebuttals to this demand—how could they have sung a “ton” of karaoke in the twenty minutes since school let out? Why did they need train fare when all three of them had passes? Why did they need 10,000 yen just to ride the train? But none of these questions would change her fate.

It was the second time this trio had demanded money from her. The last time, she claimed she didn’t have that much. Shino figured that excuse wouldn’t fly a second time, but she tried anyway.

“Of course I don’t have that much.”

For an instant, Endou’s smile disappeared, then returned.

“Then go withdraw some cash.”

“…”

Shino tried to walk back out to the street without responding. They weren’t going to follow her to a bank where people would be watching, and nobody was stupid enough to wander back into trouble once they were in the clear. But Endou wasn’t done.

“Leave your bag. And your wallet. All you’ll need is your card, right?”

Shino stopped and turned back. Endou was still smiling, but her narrowed eyes glinted like a cat toying with its prey.

At one point, she’d actually thought these three were her friends. Shino cursed her own stupidity.

Shino was fresh to Tokyo from the country when school started, so she didn’t know anyone and had nothing in common to discuss with anyone. It was Endou’s group who reached out to her first.

They invited her to eat lunch, and eventually the four of them would stop to get fast food after school. Shino mostly listened, and occasionally found herself irritated by the topics, but she still appreciated the gesture. At last, she had friends that didn’t know about what happened. At least she could be a normal student here.

It wasn’t until much, much later that she realized they’d singled her out because they checked her address in the class registry and figured out she lived alone.

When they asked if they could come visit, Shino gladly accepted. The girls praised her apartment, raved jealously about it, and they sat chatting and snacking until it got dark.

The girls came to Shino’s apartment the next day as well. And the day after that.

Soon the three of them came to her place to change outfits and then take the train for a night on the town. They would leave their belongings in the apartment, and soon the closet was stuffed with the girls’ clothes.

Shoes. Bags. Cosmetics. Endou’s and her friends’ items grew and grew. By May, the three were often stumbling back drunk and sleeping in the one-room apartment with her.

One day, near her breaking point, Shino timidly pointed out that with the way they visited every day, she had no time or ability to study.

Endou’s only answer was, “Aren’t we friends?” The next day, she demanded a spare key.

Then, on the last Saturday of May, Shino came back to her door from the library to hear raucous laughter coming from inside. It wasn’t just Endou and the two others.

She held her breath and listened intently. The fact that she had to go to these lengths over the state of her own apartment filled her with misery.

There were clearly several men in her apartment.

Unfamiliar men in her home. Shino collapsed with fear. Then came rage. She understood the truth at last.

She walked down the stairs of the building and called the police. The officer who responded was quite confused by the testimony from both sides, but Shino stayed firm and said she didn’t know any of them.

When the officer insisted that she report to the station with him, Endou glared at Shino in fury, said, “I see how it is,” then gathered up her things and left.

Her vengeance came swift.

Endou exhibited a demonic ability for research that was unthinkable given her typical demeanor. She looked up the reason Shino was living alone—an incident that had occurred in a distant prefecture five years ago, the details of which could barely be found on the Net anymore—and revealed it to the entire school. None of the students talked to her anymore, and even the teachers avoided looking at her.

Everything went back to the way it was in middle school.

But Shino was fine with that.

It was her weakness, her desire for friends, that had clouded her judgment. She was the only one who could save herself. She had to get stronger on her own, heal the scars of the past on her own. She didn’t need friends for that. Enemies were better. Enemies for her to fight. Everything around her was an enemy.

Shino held a deep breath and stared Endou in the eyes.

There was a dangerous glint in those narrowed slits. Endou’s smile vanished for good.

She growled, “What? Get going.”

“No.”

“…Huh?”

“No. I’m not giving you money,” Shino said, eyes locked.

Firm refusal would only bring more hostility and harassment. But Shino certainly wasn’t going to give in to their demands, and she didn’t want to pretend to go along with it and run off, either. She hated the idea of exposing her own weakness, not to Endou, but to herself. She’d lived the last five years wanting to be stronger. If she crumbled now, that effort would have gone to waste.

“What…? You think this is funny?”

Endou took a step forward, her right eyelid twitching. The other two quickly circled around Shino’s back and leaned in close.

“I’m leaving now. Get out of the way,” Shino said quietly. She knew that no matter how menacing an air they might affect, Endou’s trio didn’t have the guts to turn that into action. They were relatively good girls when they went back home. After the last incident that involved the police, they’d learned their lesson about that.

But.

Endou knew Shino’s weakness—the sore point that would bleed if prodded.

Her brightly colored lips twisted into a mocking smile. Endou held up her fist and pointed it at the bridge of Shino’s glasses. The index and middle fingers extended outward into the universal child’s symbol of a gun, a harmless caricature.

But that gesture was all it took to cast a chill over Shino’s entire body.

Her legs gradually lost strength. Her sense of balance abandoned her. The color drained from the alleyway. She couldn’t take her eyes off the glittering fingernails trained directly on her face. As her heart rate rose, so did a high-pitched whine in her ears…

“Bang!” Endou shouted. A pitiful shriek squeaked out of Shino’s throat. Her body trembled uncontrollably.

“Ka-hah…Listen, Asada”—Endou chuckled, fingers still held in position—“my big brother has a couple of model guns. Maybe I’ll bring them to school sometime. You like pistols, don’t you?”

“…”

Her tongue wouldn’t move. It was shrunken and useless inside her desiccated mouth.

Shino shook her head, trembling. If she saw an actual model gun in class, she might pass out on the spot. Just imagining the picture made her stomach churn. She doubled over.

“Don’t start puking, Asada!” said a pleased voice from behind her.

“That time you barfed and passed out in history class was a real headache to clean up.”

“Then again, it’s nothing you don’t see around here with old drunk guys.”

High-pitched giggling.

She wanted to get away. To run and never look back. But she couldn’t do that. The two opposing voices in her head ranted on.

“Look, just give me what you have on you and I’ll cut you some slack. You don’t look too good, after all.”

Endou reached out for the bag in Shino’s hand, but she couldn’t resist. The more she told herself not to think about it, not to remember, the more the black glimmer came back on the movie screen of her memory. The feeling of that heavy, slick metal. The pungent smell of gunpowder tickling her nose.

Somewhere behind them, a voice shouted.

“This way, Officer! Hurry!”

It belonged to a young man.

Endou’s hand instantly left her bag. The three bullies burst off running toward the exit and melted into the crowd milling through the arcade.

Shino’s strength truly left her now, and she fell to her knees. Her focus was fixed entirely on controlling her breathing and preventing the onset of a panic attack. Eventually the sounds of the bustling shoppers and the wafting smell of grilled chicken outside the supermarket returned to her senses. The nightmare flashback was fading.

She must have sat there for most of a minute. Eventually the voice returned, hesitant.

“Um…are you all right, Asada?”

Shino took one deep breath and put some strength into her wilted legs to stand. She turned and straightened her glasses to see a short, skinny boy.

He wore jeans and a nylon parka, with a dark green daypack on his shoulder. His rounded face had a black baseball cap on top. In his personal clothes, he simply looked like a middle schooler. Only the dark, sunken bags around his eyes belied his youthful appearance.

Shino knew this boy’s name. He was the only person in this city she could trust, the only person who wasn’t an enemy, and a good battle comrade in her other world.

Sensing that her palpitations were finally under control, Shino gave him a weak smile.

“…I’m all right. Thank you, Shinkawa. Where’s the officer?”

She looked around him, but the dim alleyway was still empty, and it didn’t seem like anyone was about to show up.

Kyouji Shinkawa scratched the back of his cap and grinned.

“That was a bluff. They do that all the time in TV shows and manga, right? I always wanted to try it—I’m glad it worked.”

“…”

Shino shook her head in disbelief.

“…I can’t believe you thought to pull off a stunt like that on the spot. Why are you here?”

“Oh, I was just over at the game arcade. I left out of the back entrance, and…”

He turned around and pointed. There was indeed a small gray door set in the middle of the stained concrete wall.

“I saw them surrounding you. Almost called the cops for real, but then I had that idea instead…”

“No, you did great. Thanks.”

She smiled again, and for a moment Kyouji’s face crumpled into a grin before returning to a worried expression.

“Um, does this…happen a lot? I mean, I know it’s not technically my business…but maybe you should inform the school…”

“That’s not going to be any help. Don’t worry, if it actually escalates higher than it is now, I’ll go straight to the police. Besides, don’t fret about me…What about you?”

“Oh…I’m fine. I’m not going to see them anymore,” the slender boy said, his smile tinged with self-deprecation.

Kyouji Shinkawa had been Shino’s classmate until summer vacation. He hadn’t been to school since the start of the semester.

From what the rumors said, Kyouji had undergone severe hazing at the hands of the upperclassmen in his soccer club. His small size and his wealthy family’s clinic made him the perfect target. Though they hadn’t been as carelessly blatant about it as Endou’s group, they’d apparently sucked him dry of a preposterous sum of money through meals and other entertainment. But Kyouji had never told her the truth directly.

They’d first met at the local library back in June.

Shino had been looking through a large comparison graph in a book titled Firearms of the World. At the time, she’d gotten to the point where looking at photos of guns didn’t cause her to have panic attacks. But when she got to the page with The Gun on it, she could only look at it for ten seconds before slamming the book shut. At that exact moment, someone spoke up behind her back.

“Do you like guns?”

It was several moments before she realized he was a member of her class.

Shino was about to instantly and firmly declare that it wasn’t true—in fact, it was just the opposite—but then he would wonder why she was looking through such a book, and she didn’t think she could come up with a logical answer for that question. So, her response was ambiguous.

These days, Kyouji knew that Shino suffered from a terrible phobia of guns. But at the time, he misconstrued her answer and excitedly sat down next to her.

He pointed out the various guns on the graph and dropped pieces of knowledge on each of them. Shino let him speak, trying to hide her alarm, but eventually he reached the topic of another world he visited.

She knew that full-dive game machines had come to market a few years ago, and had even heard the term VRMMO before. But Shino had no familiarity with video games as a child, and assumed that the world of swords and sorcery were best left to fantasy novels.

But the virtual world that Kyouji described to her on their first meeting did not contain any swords or magic spells. It had guns.

This world’s name was Gun Gale Online. It was a brutal wasteland in which players slaughtered one another with incredibly detailed models of actual guns.

Shino cut him off and asked in a quiet voice, “Does this game have a gun called…?”

The boy blinked in surprise, then nodded as if the answer should have been obvious.

She wondered to herself if she might be able to face The Gun again in the virtual world. Another chance to come across, fight against, and perhaps finally get past the black gun that had left deep, permanent scars on her heart five years ago, at the age of eleven…

Shino clenched hands cold with sweat and asked Kyouji another question, her throat ragged. How much did she need to play this game?

That was half a year ago.

The girl named Sinon who existed within Shino was now a ruthless sniper who terrorized the wastes of GGO. Sadly, she had not yet encountered a foe who wielded The Gun. And because of that, her question remained. Was she, Shino Asada—not Sinon—truly any stronger in the real world…?

The answer was still beyond her grasp.

“…You want to get something to drink? I’ll buy,” Kyouji asked.

Shino was pulled back to reality. She looked up to see that what little light made it into the narrow alley was starting to redden.

“…Really?” She smiled and Kyouji nodded happily.

“Tell me more about that huge fight you had. There’s a quiet little café through the back street here.”

A few minutes later, seated in the back of the café with a cup of fragrant milk tea in her hands, Shino finally felt relaxed. Endou’s gang would be after her again soon, but she could worry about that when the time came.

“I heard about your big battle the other day. Seems you were quite the hero.”

She looked up and saw the skinny boy poking at the scoop of vanilla ice cream in his iced coffee with a spoon and staring at her.

“…It’s not true. The entire operation was a failure. We lost four out of our six squadron members. Given that we were the ones waiting in ambush, that’s hardly what you’d call a victory.”

Imagining a real gun while in reality was more than enough to trigger a panic attack for Shino, but thanks to the virtual rehabilitation program that was GGO, discussing the game in real life gave her enough stability to remain calm.

“Still, it was amazing. Apparently Behemoth has never died in a group battle like that before.”

“Oh…I didn’t realize he was so famous. I never saw his name in the Bullet of Bullets rankings.”

“Of course not. Doesn’t matter how powerful your minigun is if the weight of five hundred bullets puts you way over the limit and you can’t run. The BoB’s an every-man-for-himself fight, so once someone picks you off from a distance, that’s it. But in a group battle with adequate backup, he’s basically invincible. That gun’s not fair, it really isn’t.”

She couldn’t help but grin at his sulky pout.

“In that case, people say my Hecate II is plenty unfair, too. It’s pretty difficult to use, though—you don’t feel invincible at all. I bet it’s the same way for Behemoth.”

“Well, it’s a problem I’d like to have. Say…what’s your plan for the next BoB?”

“I’m in, of course. I’ve got data on pretty much all the top twenty players from last time. I’ll be bringing in the Hecate this round. I’m gonna—”

She was about to say kill them all, but quickly changed her tone.

“—get that top prize.”

Two months ago, Sinon had entered the second Bullet of Bullets, GGO’s battle-royale championship event, and made it through the preliminary round to the thirty-man final round. Sadly, once she was there, she only placed twenty-second.

The match started with the thirty contestants assigned to random locations, which meant a high probability of immediately being launched into a short-range battle. Sinon chose to bring an assault rifle rather than her Hecate for this reason, but she ended up being picked off by a sniper while in close combat.

In the two months since then, she’d grown much more familiar with her wild filly of a gun and also picked up a rare MP7 for practice with short-range fighting. Sinon felt she was ready to bring her giant sniper rifle to the third BoB. Her plan was simple: Find cover, wait for targets to cross her line of sight, and take them all down, one by one. She would shrug off their complaints.

Given the overload of powerful soldiers in GGO, she knew that if she could shoot all of them down and prove she was the best, it meant that, finally…

Kyouji’s sigh of lament brought Shino back from her thoughts.

“I see…”

She blinked and looked at him. He was staring at her, his eyes narrowed as though looking into a bright light.

“You’re really something, Asada. You got that incredible gun…and you pumped up your Strength to match it. It’s funny, I’m the one who got you into GGO, and now you’ve left me in the dust.”

“…I doubt that. You made it to the semifinals of the prelims last time, Shinkawa. It was just luck that you didn’t make it through. It was too bad—if you’d gotten to the finals, you would’ve been in the real tournament.”

“No…I didn’t have what it took. Unless you’ve got really good luck with drops, the AGI build is at its limit. I made the wrong stat choices,” he complained. She raised an eyebrow.

Kyouji’s character, Spiegel, had an Agility-centric build, which was the most popular style in the early days of GGO.

By pumping the character’s Agility as high as possible, the player enjoyed overwhelming evasive ability and firing speed—in this case, that referred not to the gun’s rate of fire, but the time it took for the bullet circle to stabilize. For the first six months of GGO, such players reigned supreme. But as more of the map was conquered and powerful live-ammo guns were uncovered, such players lacked the Strength necessary to equip these deadly weapons. On top of that, as the guns themselves got more accurate, evasion became less helpful, and now, eight months since the start of the game, the agility build was no longer the prevailing strategy.

But still, if you got one of the powerful large-bore rifles such as the FN FAL or H&K G3 that reigned through firing speed, you could make real noise as an Agility player. The runner-up in the last BoB, Yamikaze, had an AGI build. On the other hand, the winner himself, Zexceed, played a STR-VIT balance.

But Shino was of the opinion that these stat-heavy builds only referred to a character’s strength. There was another factor that was much more important.

That was the player’s strength. The strength of will. The way that Behemoth stayed cool and calm the entire time, with enough presence of mind to put on a wry, confident grin. His source of strength was not the M134 minigun, it was that ferocious smile.

So Shino couldn’t help but feel that something was wrong with what Kyouji said.

“Hmm…Sure, having a rare gun is good. But it’s more like some of the elite players have rare weapons, but not everyone with a rare weapon is elite. In fact, about half of the thirty finalists last time just had customized store-bought guns.”

“That’s easy for you to say, since you’ve got that crazy rifle and have a good balance of Strength to use it. The difference a good gun makes is huge,” he lamented, stirring his coffee float. Shino realized it was pointless to argue any further and tried to wrap up the conversation.

“Aren’t you going to enter the next BoB, Shinkawa?”

“…Nope. It would just be a waste of time.”

“Oh…Hmm…Well, there’s school to worry about, too. You’re going to a prep school for the university exams, right? How are the mock tests going?”

Kyouji hadn’t been to school since summer vacation, and it apparently caused quite some friction between him and his father.

His father ran a fairly large hospital, and despite being the second son—one of the kanji in his name meant “two”—it was expected that Kyouji would study for medical school like his brother. After an extremely tense family meeting, Kyouji was allowed to study from home and prepare for the college entrance exams in two years, thus putting him on a course to enter the medical college of his father’s alma mater without losing any extra time.

“Uh…yeah,” Kyouji laughed, nodding. “Don’t worry, I’m keeping up with the marks I was getting while in school. No issues here, instructor.”

“Very good,” she joked sternly. “The amount of time you spend logged in is pretty wild. I was actually kind of worried—you’re online every time I come on.”

“I study during the daytime, that’s all. It’s all in the balance.”

“With all the time you spend in-game, you must be making some pretty good cash.”

“…No, not really. As an AGI-type, it’s almost impossible to do solo hunts anymore…”

Shino tried to change the subject before they went down that path again. “Well, as long as you can make back the subscription fee, that’s enough. Sorry, I should get going.”

“Oh, right. You have to cook your own meals. I’d sure like to have a nice homemade dinner again sometime.”

“Um, s-sure. Maybe later…when I’m a bit better at cooking,” she replied hastily.

Shino had once invited Kyouji to her apartment and cooked dinner for the both of them. The meal itself was fun, but as they drank tea afterward, she felt Kyouji’s gaze grow more ardent, which sent a panicked sweat down her back. He might be an extreme online gamer and a gun fanatic, but boys were still boys. She realized that inviting him into her home was not the smartest decision.

She didn’t dislike Kyouji. Her conversations with him were some of the few moments she could actually relax in the real world. But she couldn’t imagine anything more than that now. Not until she triumphed over the memories that coated the base of her heart pitch-black.

“Thanks for the drink. And…thanks for helping me. It was really cool,” she said, getting to her feet. His face scrunched up and he scratched his head.

“I just wish I could help keep you safe all the time. So, um…are you sure you don’t want me to escort you home from school?”

“N-no, I’m fine. I’ve got to be strong.”

Shino smiled for him, and Kyouji looked down, as if to avoid a bright light.

She headed up the concrete stairs, which were faded to the color of watered-down ink from years of rain.

The second door was to her apartment. She pulled the key out of her skirt pocket and inserted it into the old-fashioned electronic lock. After typing her four-digit security code on the little panel, she twisted the key and felt a heavy metal thud from the latch.

Inside the chilly, dark entranceway, she shut the door behind her. Shino twisted the doorknob to get the lock beeper to sound, then muttered, “I’m home,” in a flat voice. No one answered, of course.

After the wooden step with the mat on top, the narrow hallway proceeded for about ten feet. On the right was the door to her bathroom, and on the left was a tiny kitchen.

Once she’d placed the veggies and tofu from the supermarket into the refrigerator next to the sink, Shino headed into her main room in the back and heaved a sigh of relief. Using the last bit of daylight coming in through the drawn curtains, she found the switch on the wall and turned on the light.

It was not a stylish room. The cushion tiles were designed to look like wood flooring, and the curtains were plain ivory white. On the right wall was a black pipe-frame bed and beyond it a matte black writing desk. On the far wall was a small storage chest, a bookcase, and a full-sized mirror.

She dropped her school bag on the floor and took off her sand-colored muffler. Her coat went on a hanger with the muffler and into the cramped closet. Shino pulled the glossy, dark green scarf off of her nearly black school uniform and had just pulled down the zipper on her left side when she stopped and glanced at the desk.

The events after school had been wild and unpredictable, but she felt a small lump of confidence in her chest at the way she’d faced Endou’s threats head-on. She’d nearly had a panic attack, but she stood her ground without running away.

That, combined with her battle in GGO two days ago—in which she emerged victorious from a battle with her deadliest opponent yet—had forged her courage with a hotter flame than even before.

Kyouji Shinkawa told her that Behemoth was considered invincible when working with a party. She’d seen the pressure he exhibited in person—that legend was not an exaggeration. In the midst of the battle, Sinon had nearly tasted defeat and death, but she seized her victory by force.

Maybe…

Maybe she could face her fears now, tackle those memories directly and control them.

Shino stared at the drawer of the desk, not moving.

After nearly a minute, she tossed the scarf she was still holding onto the bed and strode over to the desk with purpose.

She took a few deep breaths and drove off the fear that crawled around her backbone. Put her fingers on the handle of the third drawer. Slowly pulled it out.

Inside was a series of small boxes, of the sort for holding writing materials. As she pulled it farther out, the deepest part of the drawer was revealed. The line of boxes came to an end, and the thing came into sight. A small, shiny black…toy.

It was a plastic gun. But the modeling was extremely fine, and the hairline finish looked like nothing aside from real metal.

Trying to stifle the pounding that had begun just from the sight of the gun, Shino reached out for it. She hesitantly touched the grip, grabbed it, lifted it up. It was heavy in her hand. It was as cold as if it absorbed all of the chill in the room.

This model gun was not a copy of a real firearm. The grip was ergonomically curved, and the large muzzle was placed just above the trigger guard. The crude action, complete with exhaust vent, was placed up behind the grip, in what was called the bullpup style.

It was a Procyon SL, an optical gun from Gun Gale Online. Despite being categorized as a handgun, it featured a full-auto mode, which made it very popular as a sidearm when fighting monsters.

Sinon had the original thing in her storage room back in Glocken, but Shino had not bought this physical copy for herself. It wasn’t even sold in stores.

It came a few days after she placed twenty-second in the Bullet of Bullets two months ago. Shino received an in-game message from Zaskar, the company that ran GGO, all in English.

Once she had figured out what it said, she found that they were giving her the choice of either an in-game prize or a real model of a Procyon SL as her reward for placing in the BoB.

She immediately made up her mind to go for the game money, having no desire for a lifelike toy gun to show up in the mail. But then she gave it a second thought.

If she was going to be sure that the drastic measures she was taking in GGO to heal her trauma were working, she’d have to touch an actual model gun in reality. But visiting a toy store to get one was too big of a mental hurdle. She was sure Kyouji would happily lend her one, but the potential that she might start convulsing the moment he handed it to her made her think better of that idea. Buying one online was the most realistic option, but even looking at pictures of guns on a site made her queasy and prevented her from going through with it. To say nothing of the monetary cost.

If the company behind GGO was going to send her a model gun for free, that solved all of her issues—and after agonizing over the decision until she was ready to burst, she decided on the real prize over the virtual one.

One week later, a heavy EMS package arrived at her door. It took another two weeks for her to work up the courage to open it.

But the reaction she had at the moment of truth betrayed her hopes. Shino shut the thing in the back of her desk drawer and consigned it to a dusty corner of her memory.

Now, Shino had finally picked up the Procyon again.

The chill of the gun snuck through her palm into her bicep, through her shoulder and into the center of her body. For being a resin model, it was unbelievably heavy. The handgun that Sinon would have spun around with her fingertips seemed to be shackled to the ground in Shino’s hands.

As the warmth was sucked out of her palm, the gun began to heat up. Once it was lukewarm and clammy with her sweat, that warmth seemed to belong to someone else.

Who?

It was…his.

Her pulse quickened beyond the point of control, and the freezing blood raced and rushed through her entire body. Her sense of orientation faded. The floor beneath her feet tilted, lost firmness.

But Shino could not take her eyes off the dark gleam of the gun. She gazed into it at point-blank range.

Her ears rang. Eventually the sound evolved into a high-pitched scream. A scream of pure terror from a young girl.

Who was screaming?

It was…me.

Shino didn’t know her father’s face.

That didn’t mean that she had no memory of her father in real life. It meant that, in literal terms, she had never seen her father, even in photographs or videos.

He died in a traffic accident when Shino was not yet two years old. Shino’s parents were driving on an old two-lane road on the side of a mountain near the prefecture border in northeast Japan, on their way to spend the end of the year with her mother’s parents. They’d left Tokyo late, and it was past eleven o’clock when it happened.

The cause of the accident was a truck making a turn that, based on the tire marks left behind, put it over the line into the other lane. The truck’s driver smashed through the windshield and was essentially DOI when he hit the street.

Their compact automobile, impacted directly on the right side by the truck, went over the guardrail and down the slope, where it was stopped by two trees. Her father was unconscious from heavy injuries in the driver’s seat, but had not died immediately. In the passenger seat, her mother only suffered a broken left femur. Strapped into a child seat in the back, Shino was virtually unharmed. She didn’t have a single memory of this event.

Unluckily, the road was barely even used by the locals, and it was totally empty late at night. Even worse, the impact of the crash had destroyed their phone.

Early the next morning, a passing driver noticed the accident and called it in, six hours after it happened.

The entire time, Shino’s mother could do nothing but watch as her husband died of internal bleeding and went cold. Something in the deepest part of her heart was irrevocably broken.

After the accident, her mother’s life had essentially been rewound to before she’d met Shino’s father. The two of them left their home in Tokyo and moved in with Shino’s grandparents. Her mother destroyed all the remnants of her father’s memory, including photographs and videos. She never talked about her memories of him again.

After that, she tried to live like a country girl, seeking only peace and tranquility. Even now, fifteen years after the accident, Shino didn’t know exactly how her mother viewed her. It often seemed to be more like a little sister than anything, but fortunately for Shino, her mother never showed her anything but deep love. She remembered story time and lullabies before bed.

So in Shino’s memory, her mother was always a fragile girl who was easily hurt. Naturally, as she grew older, Shino began to realize that she needed to be strong. It was her job to protect her mother.

Once, when her grandparents were out, a persistent door-to-door salesman camped out at the front door and frightened her mother. Nine years old at the time, Shino warned that she’d call the police to drive him off.

To Shino, the outside world was a place full of dangerous things that threatened her quiet life with her mother. All she knew was that it was her job to watch out for them.

So in a way, Shino felt it was inevitable that the incident happened to them. That the outside world she’d tried so hard to stay away from struck back with a vengeance.

At age eleven and in the fifth grade, Shino was not a child who played outside. She came straight home from school and read the books she borrowed from the library. Her grades were good, but she had few friends. She was extremely sensitive to interference from outside sources—she once gave a boy a bloody nose for the harmless prank of hiding her school shoes.

It happened on a Saturday afternoon right at the start of the second semester.

Shino and her mother walked to the local post office together. There were no other customers there. While her mother was producing forms at the window, Shino sat down on a bench in the lobby, legs dangling, to read the book she brought along. She didn’t remember the name of the book.

She heard the door creak and looked up to see a man enter the building. He was skinny and middle-aged, dressed in grayish clothing and holding a Boston bag in one hand.

The man stopped in the entrance and looked around the office. For an instant, his eyes met Shino’s. The color of his eyes struck her as strange. The whites were yellowed, and his irises were like deep black holes, restlessly moving. Now that she was older, she realized his pupils were probably in extreme dilation. Later they would learn that he’d injected himself with stimulants before entering the post office.

Before Shino had time to be suspicious, he quickly walked to the desk, where Shino’s mother was conducting business at the transfer and savings window. He grabbed her right arm and tugged it, then shoved with his other hand. Her mother fell down without a sound, her eyes wide with shock.

Shino jumped to her feet, about to give the man a piece of her mind for the cruel violence he’d committed on her beloved mother.

The man put the bag on the counter and pulled out something black from within. She didn’t realize it was a gun until he pointed it at the man behind the window.

A pistol—toy—no, real—robbery?! The words flashed through Shino’s mind.

“Fill the bag with money!” he demanded in a raspy voice. “Both hands on top of the desk! No pressing the alarm button! Nobody move!!”

He waved the gun back and forth, warning the employees in the back of the station.

Shino considered running out of the building and calling for help somehow. But she couldn’t do that with her mother collapsed on the ground like that.

She hesitated long enough for the man to shout, “Put the money in the bag! Everything you’ve got!! Do it now!!”

The employee at the window grimaced in fear, but held out a two-inch-thick stack of bills, when—

The air in the building seemed to expand for an instant. Shino’s ears throbbed, and it took some time before she realized that it was caused by a high-pitched blast. Next, something clinked quietly off the wall and rolled toward her feet. It was a narrow, golden metal tube.

She looked up again to see the employee behind the counter clutching his chest, his eyes wide with shock. There was a small red stain on his white shirt, just below the tie. No sooner had she processed this information than the employee fell backward in his chair, pulling down a cabinet of documents with him.

“I told you not to press the button!” the man screeched. The gun was trembling in his hand. A smell like fireworks reached her nose.

“Hey, you! Get over here and pack the money in!”

He pointed the gun at two female employees who were frozen in terror.

“Do it now!” he screamed, but the women just shook their heads in tight motions and did not move. They’d probably been trained on what to do in such an emergency, but no manual protected the human body against real bullets.

The man kicked the wall beneath the counter several times in irritation, then raised his arm again, preparing to shoot another person. The women screamed and ducked down.

But then he spun his body and pointed the gun into the customer area.

“Do it quick, or I’ll shoot someone else! I’ll do it, don’t test me!!”

He was pointing at Shino’s mother on the ground, her eyes staring into space without focus.

The unfolding disaster around her was overloading her mother’s ability to cope. Shino instantly understood what she had to do.

I have to protect Mom.

It was that belief, that force of will that had been with her since she was a child, that drove her body to action.

She threw the book aside and leaped onto the man’s right wrist—where he was carrying the gun—and bit down hard. Her sharp little baby teeth easily locked into his tendon.

“Aaah!”

He screamed in shock and tried to shake her off. Shino’s body hit the side of the counter and two of her baby teeth fell out, but she didn’t notice. The black gun fell out of the man’s hand in the chaos. She scrambled to pick it up, all other thoughts lost.

It was heavy.

The weight of metal, pulling down on both of her little arms. The vertically lined grip was slick with the sweat of the man’s palm, and his residual warmth made it feel like a living thing.

Shino was old enough to know what the tool was for. If she used it, she could stop that terrible man. Guided by this line of thought, she held up the gun the way she’d seen, putting her pointer fingers on the trigger, and pointed it at him.

He leaped onto Shino with a screech and grabbed her wrists, hoping to pull the gun right out of her hands.

Even now, she didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing for her. But it was plain truth that the man’s grip on the gun pointed toward him actually aided her shot.

After the fact, Shino learned more than enough information about The Gun—the one the man had used in his attempted robbery.

In 1933, over ninety years ago, the Soviet Army produced a gun called the Tokarev TT-33. Eventually the Chinese copied the design as the Type 54, also known as the Black Star. That was the name of The Gun.

It used 7.62 × 25 mm tungsten bullets. This was a smaller-bore weapon than the more popular 9 mm handguns, but it had better firepower. The initial velocity of its bullets was supersonic, and the gun had the greatest penetrating power of anything its size.

This meant it had tremendous recoil, and in the early 1950s, the Soviets phased it out for the newer, more compact 9 mm Makarov.

This was not a gun that an eleven-year-old child could operate with any ability. But because the man was clutching her wrists, and Shino realized he was going to take the gun away, her fingers tensed, and automatically pulled the trigger.

An overwhelming shock ran through her hands to her elbows and shoulders, but all of the vibration that should have jolted the gun askance went straight into the man’s wrists instead. The air pulsed with heat again.

He made a hiccupping sound and let go of Shino, stumbling back a few steps. A dark red circle was expanding rapidly around the stomach of his gray patterned shirt.

“Aaa…aaaaah!!”

He held his gut with both hands. She must have hit a big artery, because a stream of blood escaped through his fingers.

But the man did not collapse. Because the full metal jackets the Black Star used were powerful enough to pass through the human body instantly, they were low on stopping power.

He screamed and reached out for Shino with his bloodied hands. The blood spatter from his gunshot wound sprinkled onto her.

Her hands trembled and quaked, and she pulled the trigger again.

This time, the gun rocketed in her hands, sending a jolt of pain through her elbows and shoulders. Her whole body shot backward and hit the counter, knocking the breath from her lungs. She didn’t even register the sound of the shot.

The second bullet hit the man below his right collarbone, passed through him, and hit the wall behind his back. He stumbled, slipped on his blood, and fell to the linoleum floor.

“Gaaahh!!”

But he did not stop moving. Bellowing with rage, he tried to push himself up.

Shino was in a state of terror. She knew if she didn’t stop him for good this time, he would absolutely kill her and her mother both.

Ignoring the pain that threatened to tear her arms off her shoulders, she took two steps forward and pointed the gun right at the middle of the man’s body, which he had raised eight inches off the ground.

The third shot dislocated her shoulder. This time there was nothing at all to stop the force of the recoil. Shino fell backward onto the floor. She did not let go of the gun.

The third bullet, once again shot wildly off the mark, traveled several inches higher than she aimed.

It hit the man right in the center of his face. His head struck the floor with a thud. He no longer moved or bellowed.

Shino scrambled up to ensure that the attacker was finally immobile.

I protected her.

That was her first thought. She had successfully saved her mother.

Shino looked over at the woman, still lying on the floor a few yards away. And in the eyes of her mother, the one person she loved more than any other in the world…

She saw undeniable fear directed at an undeniable target: Shino herself.

Shino looked down at her own hands, still tightly squeezed around the grip of the handgun. They were covered with dark red droplets.

Her mouth opened, and at last Shino let out a terrible wail.

“Aaaahh!!”

The shrill cry ripped its way out of her throat. Shino continued to stare at the Procyon SL in her hands. The skin from the backs of her hands to the bits between her fingers was slick and dripping with blood. She blinked several times, but it did not disappear. Drip, drip, drip, the viscous fluid fell to her feet.

Suddenly, liquid burst out of both her eyes. Her vision clouded and swam, covering the black shine of the model gun.

Within the darkness, she saw his face.

The third bullet erupted from the gun and toward his face. Even after hitting him, the mark was surprisingly small, like a little bruise. But immediately after that, a red mist burst from the back of his head. The expression and life disappeared from his face.

Somehow, just his left eye moved, that bottomless hole of a pupil staring at Shino.

Right into her eyes.

“Ah…ah…”

Her tongue covered the back of her throat, blocking her breath. As if from a distance, she felt her stomach contract violently.

Shino gritted her teeth and summoned every ounce of her concentration to throw the Procyon to the ground, then rushed toward the kitchen on unsteady feet and scrabbled at the knob to the bathroom, her palm slick with sweat.

As soon as she’d lifted the toilet lid and bent over, hot bile surged up from her stomach. She tensed and clutched, vomiting over and over until it felt like everything in her body had been expelled.

When her stomach had finally stopped contracting, Shino was completely exhausted. She lifted her left hand and hit the flush knob. With great difficulty, she got to her feet, removed her glasses, and scrubbed her hands and face over and over with the bitingly cold water from the sink.

She finished by rinsing out her mouth and drying her face with a clean towel from the cabinet. Her mental faculties were completely shut down.

With tottering footsteps, she returned to her room.

Doing her best not to look at it directly, she used the towel to cover up the model gun on the floor, then picked it up within the fabric and quickly hurled it back into the rear of the desk drawer. Once the drawer had snapped cleanly shut, she flopped face-first onto the bed, mentally and physically spent.

The droplets of water from her wet hair mingled with the tears on her cheeks and stained her blanket. Eventually she realized that she was muttering the same things over and over in a tiny voice.

“Help me…someone…help me…help me…someone…”

Her memories of the next few days after the incident were unclear.

Some adults wearing dark blue uniforms carefully, nervously told her to give them the gun, but her fingers were too stiff for them to pry it free.

Many spinning red lights. Yellow tape waving in the wind. Blinding white light that forced her to shade her eyes. Only when she was being loaded into the police car did she recognize the pain in her right shoulder, and when she hesitantly brought it up, the officer quickly had her transferred to an ambulance.

All these things existed in her head as vague, broken fragments of memory.

In her hospital bed, two police ladies asked her about the incident over and over. She told them how much she wanted to see her mother, but it wasn’t until much, much later that her wish was granted.

Shino was let out of the hospital after three days to her grandparents’ home, but her mother’s hospital stay lasted for over a month. The peaceful life they had before the incident never returned.

The media companies avoided reporting on the details of the case, following their own guidelines. The attempted armed robbery ended with the death of the suspected robber, with no additional public details. But it was a small rural town. The events that occurred within the post office all made it into the open—often with embellishments attached. The tale spread around the town like wildfire.

For the last year and a half of elementary school, Shino was showered with every possible derivation of the word murderer. By the time she reached middle school, that harassment had evolved into pure exclusion from her peers.

But to Shino, the gazes from others weren’t really the problem. She had never had any interest in being part of a group, even when she was younger.

The problem was the claw marks the incident left upon her psyche. As the years passed, they showed no signs of fading. They tormented her.

Every time Shino saw something categorized as a gun, the memories of the incident flooded back into her mind, vivid and terrible, plunging her into a state of shock. Hyperventilation, paralysis, disorientation, vomiting, even fainting. These spasms could easily happen, not just from seeing simple toy guns, but even images on TV.

Because of that, Shino stopped watching virtually every kind of TV drama or movie. She suffered several fits because of educational videos in social studies class. The only relatively safe territory for her was literature—particularly the classics of old. Most of her middle school career was spent in a dusty corner of the library flipping through huge hardcover compendiums.

Once middle school was done, she begged her grandparents to let her move somewhere else to work. When that got her nowhere, she came up with a backup plan—going to a high school in the Tokyo neighborhood where Shino had lived with her parents as a baby. She wanted to be in a place without the rumors and fascinated stares, of course, but more importantly, she knew she would never recover from her trauma if she lived in that town for the rest of her life.

Naturally, Shino’s symptoms were diagnosed as a typical case of PTSD, and over the last four years, she’d seen countless therapists and counselors. She took their medications obediently. But all of those doctors with their oddly similar smiles could only brush and stir the top layer of her heart, and none of them reached the place where the scars lay. As she sat in their pristine examination rooms, listening to them assure her that they understood how hard it was, she could only repeat the same refrain to herself.

You understand? Have you ever killed someone with a gun before?

At this point in time, she regretted that attitude and realized that it certainly hadn’t helped her connect with them and advance her treatment. But it still formed the core of her belief. Shino’s true wish was probably for them to decide once and for all if her actions were good or evil. But none of those doctors could have told her that.

No matter how badly her memories and spasms haunted her, however, she never once thought about taking her own life.

She had no regrets about pulling the trigger with the gun pointed at that man. Shino had no other choice from the moment he’d pointed it at her mother. If she was put back into that moment again, she would do the exact same thing.

But she believed that if she sought the escape of suicide, it wouldn’t be fair to the man she killed.

So she had to be strong. She wanted the kind of strength that would make her actions during that incident a simple matter of course. Like a soldier who killed her enemy on the battlefield without hesitation or mercy. That was the reason she wanted to live alone.

When she graduated middle school and left her town, she said good-bye to her grandfather, her grandmother, and her mother, who still saw her as the child she was before the incident, hugging her and stroking her hair.

Shino moved to this town, where the air was dusty, the water was bad, and everything was expensive.

And that was when she met Kyouji Shinkawa and Gun Gale Online.

When her breathing and her pulse finally started slowing, Shino let her eyelids drift open.

Lying facedown on the bed with her left cheek on her pillow put the tall vertical mirror in her line of sight. Inside the mirror, a girl with wet hair plastered across her forehead stared back. She was slightly scrawny with huge eyes. Her nose was small, and her lips were not very full. She looked like an undernourished kitten.

She shared her body type and the short hair that framed her face with Sinon, sniper of the wastes, but nothing else was alike between them. Sinon was more like a fierce, feral mountain lion.

The first time she overcame her terror and logged in to GGO, she ended up dragged into an incomprehensible battle and made a startling discovery. When she was in this arid virtual world, which was nothing like the real one, she could handle any kind of gun and even shoot other players with nothing worse than a bit of tension. She didn’t suffer those terrible fits.

She knew immediately that she had found the means to get past her memories. As a matter of fact, since she started playing GGO, she’d become able to look at pictures of guns without having the convulsions, and she was able to talk to Kyouji about the weapons in GGO just fine.

And that wasn’t all. Shino actually loved the mammoth Hecate II sniper rifle she’d won half a year ago. She felt her nerves calm when she stroked the long, smooth barrel, the way that other girls her age might stroke a pet or plush animal. When she rubbed her cheek against the rounded stock, she felt its warmth.

If she continued fighting with her gun on that virtual wasteland, her wounds would eventually heal, and the fear would disappear. Thus she continued to destroy countless monsters and players with her deadly bullets.

But a voice in her heart came back to her:

Really? Is this really what you want?

Sinon was already good enough to be considered one of the top thirty players in GGO. She wielded an antimateriel rifle with ease—a weapon that most considered beyond any player’s skill—delivering certain death to anyone caught in her scope. She was a warrior with a heart of ice, the very thing that Shino once wished she could be.

And yet in real life, Shino still couldn’t hold a simple model gun.

Was it really what she wanted…?

Behind her glasses, the girl in the mirror’s eyes wavered, lost and afraid.

There was no refraction to the lenses in the frames she’d been wearing since last year. They weren’t a visual correction tool, but a type of armor. They were made of hardy NXT polymer, strong enough to hold firm against a bullet—according to the pamphlet. She didn’t know if that was true or not, but the expensive lenses gave her a slight feeling of security, at least. She couldn’t be at ease walking around without them now.

But that only meant that she was addicted to the meaningless little accessory.

She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the pitiful pleading question rise to the surface again.

Someone…help…What should I do…?

No one’s going to help you!! she roared to herself, trying to drive the voice of her weakness away, and bolted upright. On the small end table next to her bed, the silver AmuSphere circle glowed.

She just didn’t have enough yet. That was the only issue.

There were twenty-one gunners stronger than Sinon in that world. Once she’d bested them and sent them all to the underworld so she could reign supreme over the wasteland, only then…

Only then could Shino and Sinon merge into one, making that true strength available to her in the real world. Only then would The Man and The Gun disappear into the midst of the countless targets she’d buried, never to surface in her memory again.

Shino reached for her air-conditioning remote, turned on the heat, and stripped her uniform jacket off. She undid the hook on her skirt and pulled her legs out, then tossed it onto the floor. Last, she removed the light blue glasses and set them carefully on the edge of her desk.

She lay down on the bed and put the AmuSphere over her head, feeling for the ON switch.

A quiet electronic tone signaled that the boot-up procedure was finishing. She opened her mouth.

“Link Start.”

The voice that came out was weak and ragged, like a child who had cried herself hoarse.