6

I turned on my blinker, leaned the frame sideways, and passed through the large gate.

Instantly, I felt the accusing stares of the pedestrians on either side of the tree-lined street, and abruptly slowed the motorcycle down.

In the midst of the increasing use of electric scooters, the crappy old Thai 125 cc two-stroke dirt bike I got through Agil’s help made an astonishing amount of noise. Every time Suguha sat on the back, she complained that it was noisy, smelly, and uncomfortable. I tried to tease her by saying that she couldn’t be like the wind if she didn’t understand that sound, but secretly I wished that I had bought one of the four-stroke scooters made after the exhaust regulations kicked in.

Especially when I was riding it on the grounds of a hospital.

I puttered along the street with the speed of a donkey pulling a cart until eventually a parking garage came into view. With a sigh of relief, I drove inside and stopped the bike at the special motorcycle section in the corner, pulling out the archaic ignition key and pulling off my helmet. The chilly winter air brought a faint scent of disinfectant with it.

It was the Saturday after my high-priced-cake meeting with Kikuoka.

He sent me a message saying that the location was prepared for me to log in to Gun Gale Online. I made the trip with heavy heart, but was surprised to find the address was for a large municipal hospital in Chiyoda Ward.

I hardly ever had a reason to visit the city center of Tokyo, but I didn’t get lost along the way. The physical rehabilitation center attached to this hospital complex was the place where I’d rebuilt my strength after escaping SAO.

Even after the monthlong stay there, I had to make the trip time after time for tests and other procedures. I hadn’t been here in six months, but the sight of that familiar white building filled me with a strange, confusing mix of nostalgia and loneliness. I shook my head to brush off the sentiment and headed for the entrance.

The conversation I had with Asuna six days ago at the Imperial Palace nearby, where I first explained the situation, played back in my head.

“Wh-whaaat?! K-Kirito, you’re…quitting ALO?!”

Asuna’s wide, shocked eyes were beginning to well up, so I quickly shook my head to put her at ease.

“N-no, no! It’s just for a few days! I’ll convert back as soon as it’s done! A-as a matter of fact…I need to go and observe this other VRMMO for a bit…”

Asuna’s panic melted away, to be replaced by a skeptical look.

“Observe…? Haven’t you been just making new accounts up until now? Why would you need to convert?”

“Well, it’s because…of the four-eyes in the Ministry of Internal Affairs…”

With great difficulty, I explained how a large part of the reason I’d chosen the palace for our date spot was based on Seijirou Kikuoka’s summons, intentionally leaving out certain details of the story.

The story finished up just as we reached the gate. We returned our tickets there and were crossing the Hirakawa Gate bridge when Asuna gave voice to her feelings, looking conflicted.

“Well, if Mr. Kikuoka’s asking you, I guess you don’t have a choice…but sometimes I wonder if he can really be fully trusted. I mean, I know we owe him a lot, but still…”

“I completely agree with you.”

We grinned wryly at each other. The smile quickly vanished from her face, and she squeezed my hand.

“…Just come back as quickly as you can. There’s only one home for us.”

I nodded and looked down at the surface of the moat.

“Of course. I’ll be back in ALO before you know it. I’m just doing a bit of research on what’s happening inside Gun Gale Online.”

…That’s right.

I did not say a single word to Asuna about the true nature of Kikuoka’s request—that I would be making contact with the player Death Gun, who (supposedly) wielded a mysterious power beyond the bounds of the game. I knew if I explained that, she would either stop me or demand to infiltrate the game with me.

I knew it was a selfish desire, but I had no intention of letting her anywhere near any virtual world with a hint of real danger about it.

Of course, I was sure the stories about Death Gun were 99 percent fictionalized.

A man who could kill a virtual player in real life.

At no point could I bring myself to believe it was true. The AmuSphere was nothing but an extension of the classic television set. It was easy to think of the full-dive virtual worlds as a kind of technological magic, but in reality, they were simple, useful tools—not magical items that transported the user’s soul to a far-off land.

But it was that last 1 percent that had brought me here.

Several months ago, I was organizing some old digital magazines that had built up on my PC’s drive, and I stumbled across a short interview with Argus’s development director, Akihiko Kayaba, just before SAO launched. In it, I found the following quote.

THE NAME AINCRAD IS AN ABBREVIATION OF “AN INCARNATING RADIUS,” MEANING AN ACTUALIZED WORLD. WITHIN THIS WORLD, PLAYERS WILL SEE THEIR DREAMS COME TO LIFE. SWORDS, MONSTERS, LABYRINTHS—THIS WORLD NOT ONLY BRINGS THESE SYMBOLS OF GAMING INTO REAL FORM, IT HAS THE POWER TO CHANGE THE PLAYER HIMSELF.

I had indeed changed. So had Asuna. And Agil, and Klein, and Liz, and Silica. Everyone who experienced those two years inside the game had changed to a degree that they could never be their old selves again.

But what if Kayaba’s “change” was more than that…? Thanks to The Seed—the VRMMO creation package—there was now a VR Nexus made of infinitely multiplying virtual worlds. Was it possible that somewhere, in some tiny corner of the Nexus, there was some element that freely overwrote the boundary between virtual life and real life?

The automatic door buzzed open and brought a wave of heated air and disinfectant that cut through my uncollected thoughts.

In any case, if two players had died in the real world, I couldn’t guarantee with absolute certainty that there was no danger in contacting Death Gun. If I admitted this to Asuna after returning to ALO, she would be mad, but in the end, she would understand.

She would know that as Kirito, the man who prematurely ended the Aincrad time line and unleashed The Seed upon the world, I didn’t have any other choice in the matter.

After a quick stop in the restroom, I followed the instructions on the printout of Kikuoka’s e-mail to reach a third-floor room in the hospital’s inpatient ward. There was no patient name in the placard on the wall. I knocked on the door and opened it up.

“Hey! Good to see you again, Kirigaya!”

It was a familiar nurse I’d known while I was in rehabilitation.

The long hair beneath her nurse’s cap was tied into one thick, three-strand braid with a little white ribbon waving at the end. Her tall frame, packed into the light pink nurse’s uniform, created a tempting silhouette for any new patient to behold. A small name tag on her left breast read AKI.

The put-on smile she wore was as purifying and welcoming as an angel’s, but I knew that she could be every bit as frightening as the situation warranted, and I wasn’t fooled. After a second of paralysis and surprise, I hastily bowed.

“Ah…h-hello, it’s been a while.”

Nurse Aki stretched out her arms and abruptly grabbed my shoulders, squeezing my upper arms and the sides of my stomach.

“Wh-whoa!”

“Look at you, you’ve got some meat on those bones again. But not enough yet. Have you been eating properly?”

“I-I have, I have. But why are you here, Ms. Aki…?”

I looked around the cramped room, but she was the only one inside.

“I got the story from that government man with the glasses. He says you’re doing some kind of virtual…network? Research thingy? And not even a year after you got out, you poor boy. Well, he said that since I was in charge of your physical rehab, he wanted me to monitor your condition here, so I’m off my regular shift for today. Those government agents really do have that national power to push people around—he cleared it with the chief nurse and everything. So here’s to some more time together, Kirigaya!”

“Ah…i-it’s a pleasure, ma’am…”

Very clever of you, knowing I can’t argue back against a pretty nurse, Kikuokaaaaa, I cursed the absent agent. Instead, I was all smiles for Nurse Aki as I shook her hand.

“…So the four-eyed agent isn’t here, then?”

“No, he said there was a meeting he couldn’t skip. He had a message for you, though.”

I took the manila envelope and pulled out a handwritten note.

Send your report to the usual e-mail address. Be sure to expense all costs incurred, as you will be reimbursed along with your payment when the operation is complete. P.S. Don’t let your hormonal urges get the best of you while you’re alone in the room with that pretty young nurse.

I immediately tore the note and envelope into shreds and stuffed the pieces into my jacket pocket. If Nurse Aki happened to see that, I’d be taken to taken to a real court for harassment.

She blinked at me suspiciously. I answered that look with a nervous smile.

“Well, uh…Let’s get connected to the Net, then…”

“Ah, of course. It’s all set up for you.”

She showed me to a gel bed with a number of imposing monitoring tools next to it. A brand-new silver AmuSphere hung gleaming over the headrest.

“Out of your clothes now, Kirigaya.”

“P-pardon?!”

“I’ve got to pop the electrodes on. No use being shy—I saw it all when you were hospitalized here.”

“…Is…just the top okay…?”

She thought it over for a moment, then mercifully nodded a yes. I obediently took off my jacket and long-sleeved shirt before lying down on the bed. She quickly slapped a few electrodes in various places on my upper half, to help monitor my heart activity. The AmuSphere itself had a heart rate monitor, but Kikuoka wanted to be thorough, just in case the unit itself was hacked into. That, at least, reassured me that he really was concerned about my safety.

“And that should do it…”

The nurse performed one last check of the monitoring tools and nodded. I reached up for the AmuSphere, fitted it over my head, and turned it on.

“Okay, well…here I go. It’ll probably be a four- or five-hour dive, just so you know…”

“Sure thing. I’ll be watching your body very closely, so don’t worry about anything back here.”

“Th-thanks a lot…”

I closed my eyes at last, wondering how exactly I’d gotten myself to this position. A little ticking sound in my ears let me know the device was powered up and ready to go.

“Link Start,” I commanded. Familiar beams of light covered my vision, tearing my mind free of my body.

The moment I landed in the world, something felt off.

A few seconds later, I understood why. The entire sky was yellow with a trace of pale red.

As I understood it, time inside Gun Gale Online was synchronized with real time. So just after one o’clock in the afternoon, the sky should have been the same shade of blue that I’d seen through the hospital window a moment ago. What was the reason for this gloomy shade of twilight, then?

After a few moments of wondering, I shrugged my shoulders to clear my head. The setting of GGO was the wasteland of Earth after the Last Great War. The coloring might just be an effect to add to the postapocalyptic setting.

Ahead of me was the majesty of the capital city at the center of the world of GGO, SBC Glocken. As befitting the king of sci-fi VRMMOs, the vibe it gave off was completely different from the fantasy cities of ALfheim’s Yggdrasil, atop the World Tree, and the major cities of Aincrad.

A host of metallic-looking high-rises loomed tall and dark in the sky, connected by a network of midair walkways. Colorful neon holograms were plastered in the spaces between the buildings, and increased in number closer to the ground to form a flood of color and sound.

I looked down to see that I was standing not on dirt or rock, but a street fitted with metal plating.

Behind me was a domed structure that was apparently the spawning point for newly created characters, while ahead of me was the wide main street heading into town. Weird little shops crowded the sides of the street, reminding me of the back alleys of Akihabara in real life.

The players I saw walking the street all had a distinctly dangerous air about them.

And there were, overwhelmingly, more men than women. Perhaps it was because my home game was the more female-popular ALO, with its world of dainty fairies, but the sight of so many imposing, well-muscled men in camo military jackets and black body armor was imposing, to say the least. Calling it energetic would be putting it nicely; the word I’d choose was sweaty. Every last one had a mean look in his eyes that said, Don’t talk to me.

There were other reasons to be intimidated. Such as the fact that the majority of the players were carrying large, black guns over shoulder or waist.

Unlike the more decorative aspects of swords or spears, guns existed for one purpose: to be weapons. They were all designed and shaped in order to best defeat the enemy and nothing more.

It occurred to me that this was something that could be said about this entire world.

The aims of this game world were refined and distilled into three simple things: fight, kill, take. Everything that made ALO what it was, the idea of living another life in a world of fantasy, was stripped clean out of GGO.

If anything, an appearance that suggested delicacy or prettiness was only a downside. How much menace you could inflict upon the opponent in battle with appearance alone was clearly a significant variable here. Most of the men wore scruffy beards or had large, ugly facial scars to help achieve this effect.

So what did my avatar look like?

I realized that I didn’t know yet, and looked down at my body. If I was going to draw the attention of Death Gun by being an infamous badass, I’d want to look like a macho soldier out of some Hollywood action flick…

…but I had a bad premonition.

Both of my hands were pale and smooth, with shockingly slender fingers. My body, clad in black military fatigues, seemed even more fragile than my real body in places. Based on my line of sight, I didn’t feel very tall, either.

As I told Asuna earlier, I hadn’t created my own character from scratch for Gun Gale Online. If I did, who knew how long it would take for me to encounter Death Gun, who only targeted the game’s most powerful players.

All of the game worlds based on the VRMMO support package known as The Seed—technically called the Cardinal system—shared just one meta-rule that applied to each and every one: the character conversion system. As long as your game was created with The Seed, you could not deactivate this feature.

By using the conversion system, a player could take a character’s data from one game and transfer it to a different game run by an entirely different company. It was similar in concept to the SIM cards that allowed one to transfer their phone data to a new model from an entirely different carrier.

Let’s say you had a character in Game A that had a Toughness of 100 and Speed of 80, and you wanted to transfer that character to Game B. Your strength in Game A would run through a relative value converter, which might give you a Strength of 40 and Agility of 30 in Game B. In short, an above-average muscular warrior in ALO would become an above-average soldier in GGO.

Naturally, this was not designed for copying characters. The moment an avatar was converted, the original in the old world disappeared entirely. Not just that, it was only the character that moved, not the items and equipment, so while the process was convenient, it did require some courage to go through with. In transferring “Kirito the Spriggan” from ALO to GGO, I had no choice but to dump nearly all of my items into Agil’s new pawnshop storage back in Yggdrasil City. Anyone else who wasn’t as lucky to know a trustworthy partner like him would have to get rid of their entire material fortune.

So the conversion process gave me a character equal in strength to Kirito in ALO, although given that I had started over from scratch there, I wasn’t as all-powerful as the Kirito from the original SAO. But since I couldn’t bring my appearance and items with me, I had no idea what sort of look I’d be given. Hopefully, I was blessed with a menacing soldier look, but…

I looked around the area, a bad premonition crawling up my neck, and noticed that the outer wall of the dome I’d just exited was made of reflective glass.

My eyes went wide.

“Wh-what the hell is this?!”

The person I saw in the reflection was a hundred light-years away from the look I was hoping to get.

The height was even shorter than my Spriggan form, and more slender. The hair was still black, just as before, but now it flowed smoothly from the back of my head down to my shoulder blades. Like my hands, the skin of my face was pale white, with brilliant red lips.

Although the color of my eyes was still the black of my previous character, they were much larger and shinier. In fact, framed by the long eyelashes, the innocently bewitching gaze that came back at me from the reflection was so different that I momentarily forgot it was me and looked away shyly. I straightened up and let out a long sigh.

Asuna used to tell me that the SAO Kirito had quite a girlish face, but this went way beyond that. I stood there, wondering how in the world I would turn myself into a menacing soldier looking like this, when a guy who had been eating something off to the side rushed up behind me.

“Oooh, miss, you’re so lucky! That’s an F-1300 line avatar! You hardly ever see that type generated. Hey, since you just started, feel like selling your account? I’ll give you two mega-credits!”

“…”

I stared at him, my mind a total blank. Suddenly, an uncomfortable possibility occurred to me, and I hastily patted my chest. Fortunately, what I felt was flat and solid, and not the rounded softness I was afraid of finding. My features were feminine, but my avatar hadn’t undergone a sex change in the conversion process.

In almost every VR game nowadays, players were forbidden from playing the opposite of their real-life sex. Long-term use of an avatar of the opposite sex apparently caused undeniable mental and physical effects. But because the player’s sex was determined based on reading brain waves, there were very rare occasions that one was identified as the other side, and suffered quite a shock when they dove in for the first time.

Based on what we knew now, Kayaba must have already understood the ill effects of crossing those streams—at the start of the original SAO, gender choice was free to the player, but we were all forcibly reverted to our original state soon after being trapped inside…

I realized that I was getting lost in my own thoughts, so I concentrated on the fellow before me and shrugged.

“Uh…Sorry, I’m a dude.”

Even my voice was high enough to be a reasonably alto female voice. Disappointed, I waited for his answer, but he was at a loss for words. When he found his tongue again, it was actually twice as excited as before.

“Then…you’re an M-9000 series?! N-no way! I’ll pay four—no, five mega-credits. Please, just sell it to me!!”

On the contrary, I’d have been happy to give it to him for free, or even exchange looks, but that was sadly not an option.

“Umm…Listen, this isn’t a new character, it’s a conversion. Can’t sell this one for money, sorry.”

“Oh…I see…”

He took one last regretful, thorough examination of my face from all angles, then recovered his spirits somewhat.

“Some people say that having a really well-used account before conversion ups your chances of snagging a rare avatar. If you don’t mind me asking, how much playing time did you put into your previous game?”

“Huh? P-playing time?”

I thought it over. The total playing time for Kirito the swordsman, the account I’d taken from SAO to ALO, was at least two years long…Which would be 730 days times 24 hours…

“Let’s see…ten thou…” I started answering honestly, then quickly covered it up. The VRMMO genre itself was barely three years old, so the only players who could have ten thousand hours logged were former SAO players, and I didn’t want to reveal that about myself.

“Er, I mean, a year. It’s probably just a lucky coincidence.”

“Oh, I see…Well, let me know if you ever change your mind.”

He took out a clear card of some kind and pushed it into my hands before reluctantly trudging off. As I stared at the card, which featured his name, gender, and guild, it began to glow and disappeared. That probably meant the information had automatically been added to my in-game data file.

Unable to get over this betrayal, I glared at my reflection in the glass. It didn’t seem like there was anything I could do about it.

My conversion history was saved into my character data, so if I converted back to ALO I would once again be the spiky-haired Spriggan, but any time I tried to switch to GGO, I would still be this unidentifiable avatar somewhere between girl and boy.

Determined to live up to my motto of finding the silver lining in any cloud, I spent a few minutes until I came up with one definitive “good thing” about it.

The only reason I was in this game was to make contact with the player known as Death Gun, and observe and assess his powers for myself, hopefully not by getting shot. In order to achieve that goal, I had to garner attention by displaying my strength.

Given the type of game GGO was, there were doubtless very few female players, so my feminine appearance, while not what I was hoping to look like, would at least help me stand out. I wouldn’t be imposing any kind of pressure in battle, so I’d have to make up for it with skill.

As far as advertising my strength, I already had a plan for that.

It took time to make a name for yourself with standard play—conquering dungeons, or the unsavory practice of PKing. But fortunately for me, this was the very day that they were starting an event called the Bullet of Bullets, a tournament for determining the best player in GGO. I’d enter the tournament and jump into the battle royale. If I could hit the upper ranks and get my name out there, Death Gun would take notice—and he might even be in the tournament already.

I had no idea how well I could fight in a game I’d never played before, but there was no better alternative than trying it out. I knew that fighting with guns wasn’t the same as the ranged battles with archers and mages in ALO, but as long as they were both VRMMOs, there would be some common ground. I’d do the very best I could—and if that wasn’t good enough, the ultimate fault lay with Kikuoka for putting this ridiculous mission on my shoulders.

At any rate, first came registering for the tournament, and then came equipment.

I gave one last glance at my reflection and snorted before heading off down the main street. When I realized that I was unconsciously stroking the long hair off of my cheeks, I felt a deep gloom settle over my mind.

Within minutes, I was lost.

The strangely named SBC Glocken was made of a number of vast floors stacked atop one another. As I looked upward, it seemed to be like a compressed version of Aincrad’s many floors looming overhead, with a small opening far above that admitted the sunset sky. Large buildings cut through the floors, and a variety of floating hallways, escalators, and elevators crossed here and there in beautiful disarray, but the complexity of it all was worthy of a dungeon.

I could call up a detailed map from the menu screen, of course, but it was not easy to match the location noted on the map with what I was actually seeing in real time.

In a single-player RPG, I would wander around in a daze, never to return to my original location, but this was an MMO—there was only one thing to do.

I checked out the crowd of people around me, looking for another player rather than an NPC, then trotted over and called out for help.

“Um, excuse me, could you give me directio—”

I immediately regretted my decision. The person I’d caught ended up being a girl.

Her pale blue hair was cut short in a careless style, but the fine braids tied at the sides of her forehead made for a memorable accent. Below her sharp eyebrows gleamed large, dark blue eyes with a feline hint to them, followed by a petite nose and lightly colored lips.

Wondering on the spot if this might be another misleadingly feminine avatar like mine, I made a quick inspection of the player’s body, but the unzipped jacket beneath her sand-colored muffler bulged in the properly feminine ways. On top of that, she was quite small; I just didn’t notice because my line of sight was lower than usual.

In a VRMMO, a good three-quarters of the time that a male player asked a female for directions, he was actually just hitting on her.

As I feared, the look on her face was of obvious suspicion—but it didn’t last very long.

“…Is it your first time here? Where are you going?” she asked in a beautifully clear voice. There was a hint of a smile on her lips. I wondered what had prompted this response, then realized the answer. She was making the same mistake that the avatar buyer had just minutes ago: She thought I was a girl. Well, that was just great.

“Uh, erm…”

I nearly corrected her about my gender on the spot, but stopped myself in time.

In a way, this was the perfect situation. If I backed out here and found a male player to ask, and he mistook me for a girl as well, it would only complicate matters. My second motto was to make use of whatever I could, which in this case meant that this poor girl would have to stay under her mistaken assumption for a while.

“Yes, it’s my first time playing. I need to find a cheap weapons shop and this place called the regent’s office,” I answered, my voice slightly lower and huskier than hers. She looked confused.

“Regent’s office? Why?”

“Um…I was going to enter the battle-royale event that’s coming up…”

Her large eyes blinked in surprise and went wide.

“You…just started playing today, right? There’s nothing stopping you from entering, but you might not be good enough to last…”

“Oh, this isn’t a brand-new character. I converted from another game.”

“Ahh, I see.” Her indigo eyes sparkled, and an honest smile broke across her lips this time. “Do you mind if I ask why you decided to switch to this dusty, greasy game?”

“Because…um, I’ve played all fantasy games until this point, and I was in the mood to try something more cyber-ish…And I’m kind of curious about what it’s like to have a gunfight.”

This wasn’t exactly a lie. After honing my VRMMO skills on close-range sword combat for so long, I wondered how well that skill would translate to the vastly different style of GGO.

“I see. Well, you’ve got real guts to challenge the BoB right off the bat,” she chuckled. “All right, I’ll show you where to go. I was on my way to the regent’s office too, anyway. But before that, a gun shop. What kind of firearms are you into?”

“Umm…”

I didn’t have an immediate answer. As it became clear that I didn’t know, she grinned once more.

“We should visit a nice big market with lots of selection, then. That’ll be this way.”

She spun around and took off. I hurried after the swaying muffler.

We passed through so many twisting alleys and moving walkways and stairs that I was certain I’d never be able to recall the path we took. After several minutes, we came on another wide-open street. Directly in front was a huge, flashy store that looked like a giant foreign supermarket chain.

“That’s it,” she said, pointing to the building as she weaved through the crowd.

The interior of the vast store was full of color, light, and sound, like an amusement park. The NPC shopkeepers were all beautiful women in revealing silver outfits flashing dazzling smiles, which made it all the more shocking to see them holding, and surrounded on all sides by, menacing dark handguns and machine guns.

“This is…quite a store,” I muttered, and the girl next to me chuckled.

“It’s usually easier to get the good bargains at the deeper specialty shops than these all-round stores that sell to newbies. But you can also use this place to find the type of gun you’d like, and then go do your shopping elsewhere.”

Now that she mentioned it, the players milling about the establishment seemed to be wearing more colorful attire than the average, and compared to her veteran desert-colored fatigues, they came across as amateurish.

“All right. What type of build are you playing?”

I paused. Though I had converted between very different worlds, my character’s general leanings should have been preserved.

“Um, mostly strength, followed by speed…I guess?”

“So you’re a STR-AGI type, then. You could be a midrange fighter with a heavier assault rifle or a large-caliber machine gun as your main weapon and a handgun for your sub…Oh, but you just converted, didn’t you? So you won’t have much money…”

“Ah…r-right.”

I waved my right hand to bring up the menu. Though I kept my statistics, I lost all my items and money in the transfer. So the number displayed at the bottom of my item storage said…

“Um, one thousand credits.”

“…Exactly the starter sum.”

We looked at each other and laughed nervously.

“Hmm,” she murmured, putting her fingers to her chin and tilting her head in thought. “With that amount, you might only be able to get a small raygun. Or on the live-ammo side, a used revolver, perhaps…But then again, if you’re interested…”

I sensed what she was about to suggest and quickly shook my head. No matter the MMO, it was never wise for a newbie to get too much assistance from a veteran player. I wasn’t here to enjoy the game, but there were still rules that a gamer had to follow.

“N-no, that’s all right. So…is there somewhere that I can earn a bunch of money really fast? I thought I heard there was a casino in this game…”

The girl looked troubled at this idea.

“That kind of thing is best to jump into when you’ve got plenty of money and expect to lose what you wager. But it’s true that there are places you can gamble, big and small. In fact, even in here…”

She spun around and pointed toward the back.

“There’s a game just over there, see?”

Her slender finger was pointing to a large machine, flashing with electric lights. Upon approaching it, I found that it was too big to be called a game machine—it covered the entire wall.

It had to be nearly ten feet tall and sixty feet wide. It was surrounded by a waist-high fence set into the metallic floor tiles, and an NPC dressed like an Old West gunman stood watch in the back. There was no fence at the near end, only a revolving metal bar and a square pillar that looked like a cashier box.

Behind the gunman, who regularly drew his oversized revolver from its holster to spin it on his finger and offer challenges to passersby, was a brick wall riddled with countless bulletholes. At the top of that wall was a pink neon sign reading UNTOUCHABLE!

“What’s this?” I asked. She pointed out the features for me.

“It’s a game where you go in the gate at the front and see how close you can get to the NPC at the back without being hit. There, see where the high score is?”

Her finger indicated a glowing red line on the floor behind the fence. It was just over two-thirds down the length of the space.

“Oh…and how much do you win?”

“Well, it costs five hundred credits to play, and you get a thousand for reaching ten meters, and double that for fifteen. Oh, and if you actually touch the gunman, you win back all of the money that’s been put into the game so far.”

“All of it?!”

“See the carryover amount on the sign? Ten, hundred…three hundred thousand credits and change.”

“That’s…quite a sum.”

“Yeah, well, it’s impossible,” she said flatly. “Once you get past the eight-meter mark, the gunman starts doing this high-speed firing pattern that’s a total cheat. He’s got an ultra-fast reload and three-point burst somehow, even though it’s just a revolver. By the time you see the bullet line, it’s already too late.”

“Bullet line…”

She pulled on my sleeve and whispered into my ear, “Look, someone’s going to add to the pool right now.”

I tore my eyes from the gunman to see that a group of three men were approaching the game.

One of them, clad in a wintry white-and-gray camo jacket, strode up to the gate with purpose. He pressed his palm to the cashier terminal, which erupted into a bright fanfare to indicate that a transaction had taken place. Nearly a dozen people wandered up from elsewhere in the store to watch.

The NPC gunman drawled something in English that I took as a threat to “blast your ass to the moon,” and put a hand to the gun in his holster. A large, green, holographic number three appeared in the air before the Arctic camo challenger, then beeped down to zero, at which point the metal bar clanked open.

“Rrraaagh!”

He roared and raced forward, then abruptly threw his legs wide to come to a stop, his eyes wide-open. He tilted his upper half to the right and lifted his left hand and leg up into the air in a truly comical stance.

Before I could wonder what kind of dance he was doing, three shining red bullets passed to the left of his head, through the space under his left arm, and below his left knee. While I’d been distracted, the gunman had fired three quick bullets in succession. The man’s evasion was impressive—but it seemed as though he knew where the bullets would be fired.

“Were those…trajectories?” I murmured to the blue-haired girl, who nodded and answered:

“Yes, he evaded the bullets by watching the bullet lines.”

The man in the camo took off on another mad dash when the lines of fire were gone, then stopped again, just as quickly. This time he opened his legs wider and bent over ninety degrees at the waist.

With a high-pitched whine, two bullets flew over his head and another passed through his legs. Another rush forward, another abrupt stop. It was like a game of “Red Light, Green Light.”

The camo man showed considerable agility in proceeding forward seven meters. Just three more, and he’d be able to win back double what he paid to play—but that’s when it all went wrong.

Until now, the NPC gunman had been firing three shots in the same pattern: pause, two shots, one shot. The man jumped to evade the last shot, but lost his balance and put a hand to the ground when he landed. By the time he recovered, it was already too late—the gunman’s hand flashed, and the shot caught him on his white vest, shooting orange sparks.

The sound system played another flare, this one droopy and mocking. The gunmen swore in triumph, and the pool total on the wall behind him shot up 500 with a jingle. The Arctic camo man slumped back toward the gate.

“…See?” The girl shrugged, hiding a grin behind her muffler. “It would be one thing if you could dart left and right, but it’s pretty much a straight shot forward, so you always get beat right around there.”

“Hmm…I see. So it’s already too late by the time you see the trajectory lines,” I muttered to myself, heading for the gate.

“Oh…Hey, wait,” she called out in surprise, trying to stop me. I grinned back with one cheek and put my palm against the cashier. It made an old-fashioned cha-ching sound.

The onlookers and the previous challenger’s group both murmured in surprise, either at another foolish attempt so soon, or at seeing my appearance. The girl with the muffler had her hands on her hips, shaking her head in disapproval.

The gunman drawled a different taunt this time, followed by the same countdown.

I dropped my hips and took a dashing stance. The instant that it hit zero and the metal bar swung open, I burst forward.

Within a few steps, the gunman’s hand rose and three red lines appeared from the end of his gun. They pointed at my head, right breast, and left leg.

As soon as this registered in my head, I leaped forward to the right as hard as I could. An orange bullet tracer shot past my left side. I kicked the panel on the right and returned to the center of the lane.

Naturally, this was my first experience against a gun within a VRMMO.

There were many monsters who used ranged attacks like arrows, poison projectiles, or magic spells in ALO and even SAO. There was one way to evade these attacks. You had to read the enemy’s eyes. It had to have been a sticking point with Akihiko Kayaba—every VRMMO monster run by the Cardinal system looked directly at its target when it attacked…but only if the creature actually had optical organs that could be classified as eyes.

That golden rule had to apply to the NPC gunman as well.

I focused not on the red bullet lines or the black muzzle of the gun, only on the gunman’s eyes. I could sense the trajectories of his shots just from the lifeless twitching of those eyes. When they moved, I darted just enough to avoid them, left and right, up and down, weaving my way around the silent lines. Each time a bullet passed, I was already in position for the next leap forward.

I must have passed the ten-meter mark by the time he finished the second set of three, because a brief sound effect played. I barely even registered it.

The gunman released his empty cylinder, sprayed the spent cartridges behind him and popped in a full six bullets with one motion, then clicked the frame back into place within the span of half a second—cheating, indeed—then pointed it at me again.

His next attack was not the same crisp three-shot pattern. The shots came irregularly; two, one, then three. I evaded out of sheer instinct, closing another five meters. There was another brief jingle, and the gunman’s lightning-quick reload.

There were only five meters left. I could see his whiskered face, twisted in what I imagined was disgust.

Beneath the ten-gallon hat, his black beady eyes swiped sideways across my chest. I determined that dodging to the side was impossible, so I flopped down and slid on the tile. The six shots flew like machine-gun fire, but I’d bought myself half of the remaining distance.

The enemy was out of bullets again. With another half a second to reload, I had enough time to reach him. But as I got to my feet, I thought I saw the gunman’s eyes twinkle with pleasure.

On the spot, I changed gears and leaped as high as I could.

The air I’d previously occupied was burned through by six lasers that shot out of his revolver without reloading.

What the hell was that?!

I did a flip in midair and landed just in front of the gunman. Though I was tempted to drop a catchy one-liner, I didn’t want to find out what other tricks he had up his sleeve—laser beams from his eyes?—so I silently slapped his leather vest instead.

There was a moment of silence, as if all the sound was sucked out of the store.

“Oh my Gaaww—!!”

The gunman screamed and put his hands on his head, then fell to his knees. A mad fanfare played overhead.

A rattling sound caused me to look up and see that the brick wall behind the gunman was crumbling outward. Before I even had time to be surprised by this, a fountain of coins was raining out, pouring over my legs and vanishing with nice little tinkling sound effects.

The big counter underneath the neon sign was dropping with eye-popping speed, and hit zero just as the waterfall of gold dried up. An awful clanging bounced off the walls of the store, then the game reset itself. The gunman was back on his feet, twirling the pistol around his finger and spouting challenges again, but after the illegal twelve-shot maneuver he just exhibited, no one in the crowd was likely to take the bait.

“…Whew.”

I took a breath and left through the exit on the left-hand fence.

Suddenly, a roar of murmurs spread through the crowd, which had grown to twice its previous size. I heard people wondering who I was and what in the world I’d done.

The little blue-haired girl trotted over from the side of the crowd and stared at me with her catlike eyes. After a few seconds, she finally said something, her voice hoarse.

“…What kind of reflexes do you have…? That last one, where you were right in front of him…You dodged a laser from six feet away…From that distance, there’s almost zero time lag between the bullet line and the actual bullet!”

“Umm…well…” I struggled, trying to find the right thing to say. “This thing’s basically a game where you predict where the bullet prediction will be, right?”

“P-predict the prediction?!” she yelped adorably, loud enough for the entire store to hear. Everyone in the crowd simply gaped, openmouthed.

A few minutes later, once the audience had drifted off, I was in a corner of the store, examining a case of rifles.

“Hmm…I don’t get this assault rifle. Why is it so big, when the caliber is smaller than a submachine gun?” I asked the nice girl, who was still helping me. She still seemed like a cat trapped between caution and curiosity, staring at me like some kind of unfamiliar creature.

“…How could you have that much evasive skill, and not even know this basic information? You said you converted, right? What kind of game was it?”

“Umm…Just, y’know, one of the fantasy kind…”

“Oh. Well, whatever. If you enter the BoB, you’ll get a good look at what real combat is like. So what were you asking—why assault rifles are so small-caliber? Well, it starts with the American M16, which they designed for small, high-speed rounds that offered increased accuracy and penetration…”

She trailed off with a sour face, like she couldn’t believe what she was saying. That odd reaction disappeared instantly, replaced by a gentle smile.

“…But that doesn’t matter, does it? Come on, let’s finish up your shopping.”

“Uh…yeah, thanks,” I said, nodding suspiciously. She looked away from me and began strolling past the large display case.

“You won 300K, so you should be able to afford something nice…but ultimately it all comes down to personal preference, so that’s what we need to figure out first.”

“Preference, huh…?”

I followed the girl, eyeing the many black and gleaming guns, but none of them stood out to me. That made sense, as I knew nothing about guns, other than that there were revolvers and automatics.

As I agonized, I eventually reached the very last one of the cases that filled the store from end to end. At this point, she ought to just pick one out for me, I thought—until something caught my eye.

In the corner of the long display case was a selection of things that looked like metal tubes, clearly not guns.

They were about an inch across and ten inches long. On one end was a metal tool that looked like a climber’s carabiner, while the other end was slightly wider and featured a black hole that seemed likely to shoot something. If it was in this place, it was probably some kind of gun, but there was no grip or trigger of any kind. The only other feature was a small switch high on the side of the tube.

“Um…what are these?” I asked the girl. She looked back and shrugged her shoulders, which seemed to be a typical reaction for her.

“Oh, those are lightswords.”

“L-lightswords?”

“Yes. As in swords of light. The official title is ‘photon sword,’ but everyone just calls them laser blades, or lightsabers, or beam sabers, or whatever they want.”

“S-swords?! There are swords in this game?”

I leaned over to get a better look at the case. Now that she’d put the image in my head, they did indeed resemble the tools used by those force-wielding knights from the sci-fi movies of old.

“Sure there are, but no one actually uses them.”

“Why not?”

“Because…you have to be at point-blank range to hit anyone, and you’ll be pumped full of lead before you can get close enough to…”

She trailed off and stared at me, her mouth hanging open. I nearly gave her a nasty grin back, but salvaged it into a gentler, reassuring smile.

“So I just need to get close enough.”

“L-look, I know you’re real good at dodging, but against a full-auto rifle—ah!”

I had already turned away from her and tapped on a particular photon sword whose matte black finish I liked. When the pop-up menu appeared, I hit BUY, and an NPC employee came rushing over at top speed with a smile and a metal panel. When it dawned on me that the panel had the same green scanner that the game cashier did, I knew to put my palm on it.

It made another register sound, and the black photon sword buzzed into existence on top of the panel. I picked it up, and the employee thanked me for my purchase, then hurried back in the direction she’d come from.

“Well, no taking it back now,” the girl said, giving me a look with her head tilted at forty-five degrees. “To each their own, I guess.”

“Hey, if they’re selling this, it must be possible to fight with it.”

I gripped the short cylinder and held it out in front of me. When I clicked the switch with my thumb, it vibrated with a deep sound and a three-foot blade of purplish-blue energy crackled out of the base.

“Ooh,” I murmured. I’d used my fair share of swords, but never one that was made of insubstantial light. Upon further examination, the blade was nondirectional—a narrow, circular cylinder like the handle.

I held it out at midlevel and tried the motions for the old SAO One-Handed Sword skill Vertical Square, which was so familiar that I didn’t need the system to give me any help with it.

The blade of light growled satisfyingly as it cut a complex path in the air and came to a dead stop. Naturally, I felt no inertial resistance, as the blade weighed essentially nothing.

“Wow,” the girl exclaimed with surprise, clapping her hands. “You seem to know what you’re doing. So that was a move from a fantasy world, huh? Maybe you’re tougher than I gave you credit for.”

“I’m not that special…This thing sure is light, though.”

“Of course it is—that’s about the only thing it has going for it. But assuming you’re fine with using that as your main weapon, you’ll still want an SMG or a handgun for your sub. You need something to keep folks from getting too close.”

“…I see. I suppose you’re right.”

“How much do you have left?”

I checked my window and found that out of the 300,000 credits I had, only half was left. She blinked in surprise and slumped.

“Ugh, those lightswords are so expensive. Only 150K left…Since you’ve got to pay for ammo and armor, too, we might be limited to handguns.”

“Um, I’ll leave all the decisions up to you.”

“You’ll want a live-ammo gun for the BoB. For keeping people at bay, accuracy might be better than power. Hmm…”

She walked slowly past a case of handguns, then pointed to one.

“It’ll leave you with very little, but this FN Five-Seven would be good.”

Her slender finger pointed out a small automatic pistol with a smooth, rounded grip.

“Five…Seven?”

“It’s the caliber—5.7 mm. That’s smaller than your average 9 mm Parabellum, but the bullets are shaped like rifle rounds, which gives them an advantage with accuracy and penetration. Because they’re special bullets, you can only share them with the FN P90 submachine gun, but that doesn’t matter if this is the only gun you use.”

“Uh, I see…”

The explanation flowed out of the pale-haired girl’s mouth so naturally that it made me slightly more curious about her.

As GGO had fixed genders, I knew the player herself had to be female, too, but her race and age were beyond me. My instinct told me that her age wasn’t that far from mine.

Of course, anyone who played an MMORPG long enough learned about the items within. Asuna and Leafa could spend minutes and minutes talking about the swords and magic in ALO.

But I couldn’t help but feel that something was different about guns. And from what I understood, half of the guns in GGO were actual weapons that existed in the real world. All I could envision after hearing about these weapons was blood and slaughter. This girl around my age dove into this world enough to be a veteran player with detailed knowledge of all kinds of guns. I had to wonder what motivated her to do all of this…

“Are you listening?”

“Uh, yes, of course.” I snapped back to reality. “I’ll take it, then. What else should I get?”

I purchased the Five-Seven handgun she recommended, along with plenty of backup ammunition, a thick bulletproof jacket, a beltlike accessory called an anti-optical defense field generator, along with a few other odds and ends. The 300,000 credits I’d won from the bullet-dodging game were clean gone.

The photon sword on my right hip and the Five-Seven on my left tugging with an unfamiliar weight, I walked out of the store to see the sunset had turned a shade redder.

“Well, you’ve really been a huge help. Thank you very much,” I said. She grinned behind her muffler and shook her head.

“It’s fine. I didn’t have any plans until the prelims begin anyway. Oh!” She stopped and checked the simple chronometer on her left wrist. “Crap, the entry deadline is at three o’clock. We might not make it to the regent’s office unless we sprint…”

“Huh? You hadn’t registered yet, either?”

“Nope.”

Following her pale-faced lead, I checked my brand-new digital watch. The time read 14:51.

I looked up and quickly asked, “Are there any means of teleportation or something like that? Items, or spells, or special powers?!”

“I’ll explain as we run!” she shouted, turning around and racing north up the street. I followed the waving muffler. Within a few seconds I had caught up, and she looked over to see that I was close before she continued.

“Here in GGO, there’s only one method of instant travel the player can control: dying and returning to the resurrection point. The spawn point in Glocken is close to the regent’s office, but you can’t lose HP in town, so that’s off the table…”

We ran at full speed, weaving around the NPCs and players walking the street. It was all I could do to keep up. It was already hard enough to get used to the lower vantage point than what I enjoyed in ALO, but she was also extremely quick. It was the absolute body control of someone who had mastered full-dive movement, not just the effect of good stats.

She checked her watch again and pointed down the street.

“The regent’s office is over there. It’s at the north end of the market, which is still nearly two miles away. It takes five minutes to register, so we need to get there in three minutes!”

Far away down the length of the straight main street was a giant tower glowing red with the light of the setting sun. It was a straight shot there, but even without the worry of cramping up, it would be extremely difficult to cover two miles in three minutes while avoiding pedestrians.

If I failed to make it in time for the registry period, that was my own fault for inadequate preparation, but the blue-haired girl running beside me would have easily made it if she hadn’t been sidetracked helping me. I looked over, feeling guilty. She had her teeth gritted and her eyes straight ahead, full of determination. In between virtual breaths, I heard quiet words escaping her lips.

“…Please…please, be in time…”

The first round of the upcoming Bullet of Bullets tournament had to mean more to this girl than just some game event, I sensed. She had some important reason that compelled her to participate…

I looked around the area, searching desperately for some means to get her to the tower in the less than three minutes we had remaining. Immediately, a sign caught my eye.

Part of the street to our left had been expanded into a kind of parking area, featuring three small automobiles in primary colors. The panel behind them featured a glittering neon sign reading RENT-A-BUGGY! The meaning was clear.

“That’s it!”

I grabbed her hand and tilted her to the side. She stammered in surprise as I practically pushed her over the shoulder of the street into the buggy rental area.

The machines were all three-wheeled cars with one in the front and two in the back. I practically tossed the girl onto the rear step of the red buggy in front and jumped into the driver’s seat. The meter nearby had another fingerprint scanner like the ones I used to shop for gear, so I slapped my hand on it. It rang me up and the engine came to life.

Fortunately, the front half of the buggy worked exactly like a motorcycle did. It even operated in manual. I squeezed the handlebars and hit the throttle. The gas engine roared and the buggy shot out into the street, the front wheel floating off the ground.

“Aaah!”

A cute little scream reached my ears from behind, and two small hands grabbed me around the stomach.

“Hang on tight!” I yelled unhelpfully, then broke into a pavement-burning right turn and hit the gas. With a few shifts into higher gear, we were quickly moving at over sixty miles an hour. The overwhelming power of it finally made me glad that I’d bought that antique manual bike in the real world, rather than an electric scooter like everyone else.

I darted left and right around the futuristic four-wheel cars on the road, shifting up and down rapidly. The girl’s voice hit my ear again.

“H-how is this possible?! These buggies are supposed to be so hard to drive, even the guys can barely handle them!”

Sorry, I actually fall under that category, I thought to myself, but found an excuse.

“Umm…well, I did play some racing games years ago—whoa!”

The large bus ahead of us abruptly changed lanes, forcing me to squeal the rear tires in an evasive maneuver. I dropped a gear and accelerated again to pass the bus. It was the year 2025—it made sense that very few people had experience with stick shifts anymore. Even at the driving school, the standard vehicle everyone learned on was an electric scooter. I went to the trouble of getting that midclass license with manual training because Agil’s friend was giving me the motorcycle for free, but it wasn’t until later that I realized pawning off the Thai-made machine on me was actually just a scheme to save him the junking fee. Some people said that it was only a few years until it was outright illegal to ride gas-engine vehicles…

I was torn out of my thoughts by sudden laughter just behind my head.

“Ha-ha-ha…Wow, this feels great!”

It took some time to recognize that the voice was coming from the cat-eyed girl. It never occurred to me that someone so tense and somehow lonely would have such a carefree laugh.

“Go, go…Go faster!” she shouted. I glared at the approaching regent’s office tower, still more than half a mile away, and returned her encouragement. Head down, kicked into top gear, the engine screamed, and the speedometer said we were nearly up to 125 mph.

At that speed, we would close the distance in just a matter of seconds.

But the brief cheers of delight the girl emitted during that short period left a strong impression in my memory.

The three-wheeled buggy came sliding to a sideways stop in front of the wide stairway leading up to the regent’s office.

I checked my watch: just over five minutes until three o’clock.

“We can still make it! This way!”

The girl hopped off the rear step, grabbed my hand, and started running. Her profile had already regained that sharpness that reminded me of a blade—or a high-powered gun. I tried not to waste too much brainpower wondering which of the two was her real side.

At the top of the twenty-step staircase was the unbelievably huge metal tower. It had long, streamlined curves on the front and back, with the occasional antenna disc or radar dome poking out.

“This is the regent’s office, which most people call the Bridge. It’s exactly on the opposite side of town from Memorial Hall, where you started,” she explained, pulling me along.

“Bridge? It doesn’t look like a bridge,” I noted. She tilted her head.

“No, it’s because it’s the bridge of a ship. They call it that because it was the command center when Glocken was still a spaceship.”

“A spaceship…No wonder this place is so vertical, then.”

“Exactly. The SBC in the name stands for Space Battle Cruiser. Every time you enter an official event or do some kind of in-game registration, it happens here,” she noted. We passed through the entrance to the first floor of the Bridge.

On the inside, it was a very large, circular hall. Round pillars with detailed, futuristic designs rose up to the tall ceiling in a cross pattern. Large panel monitors lined the walls, lighting the dim interior with the color of upcoming-event advertisements and commercials for real-life companies. Most notable of all was a promotional video for the third Bullet of Bullets tournament, which was playing on the big screen dead ahead.

But I didn’t have the time to stand around and stare. The girl pulled me along to the far right corner. There were several dozen tall, narrow machines along the wall. They looked a lot like the ATMs or multicontent vending machines you’d see at a convenience store.

The girl pulled me over to one of them and explained as quickly as she could.

“This is where you enter the tournament. It’s just a common touch-screen machine. You know how to use them?”

“Yeah, I’ll give it a shot.”

“Good. I’ll use the one next to you, so just ask if you need help,” she said, taking her spot on the other side of the panel that separated all of the machines. I thanked her and looked down at the panel.

The home screen on the monitor said SBC GLOCKEN REGENT’S OFFICE, and to my surprise, all the menus were in Japanese. When I checked out the game’s official site before diving into GGO, everything was in English. Fortunately, they had at least put some work into localization.

I poked through the menu for a few seconds until I found the Bullet of Bullets entry button and pressed it. That brought up a form asking for name, occupation, and other data. There were 180 seconds left.

The form was annoying. Why couldn’t the system fill in my character name automatically? And what was my occupation, anyway? Then I noticed a small caveat at the very top.

It read: Please enter your real name and address into this form. You may still participate with missing or falsified information, but you will be unable to receive the high-ranking prizes if you do.

My fingers stopped still. My intention in entering this tournament was to make a name for myself and get Death Gun to target me, but my MMO instincts couldn’t help but salivate at the word prizes. Usually that meant ultrarare gear that couldn’t be won normally…

I started drifting toward the K key for Kirigaya before my better sense won out.

This wasn’t a game excursion for pleasure. My primary duty was to make contact with the player known as Death Gun and ascertain the true nature of his powers. If Death Gun actually had some kind of supernatural power within the game, revealing any private details was unwise. There was no guarantee that Death Gun wasn’t actually involved with the game’s administrators somehow, and able to access private player data.

I shook off the temptation of that rare loot and sadly left the entire form blank, hitting the SUBMIT button at the bottom.

The screen refreshed with a message saying that my entry had been accepted, along with a notice of the time for the preliminary tournament. The date was today—the time, thirty minutes from now.

“All done?” the blue-haired girl asked from next door. She had finished her entry as well. I nodded, relieved.

“Just barely. Really, I can’t thank you enough for everything. Plus, I caused you plenty of trouble…”

She grinned. “It’s all right. The buggy ride was fun. Anyway, what’s your opening block?”

“Umm…” I looked down at the screen again. “Block F, it says. F-37.”

“Oh…I see. They must have put us in F together since we registered at the same time. I’m number twenty, so that’s good. We can only meet in the final.”

“What do you mean, ‘good’?”

“As long as you reach the final of your prelim bracket, you’ll still be in the battle royale, whether you win or lose the last match. So there’s a greater than zero chance we can both make it in. But if we do meet in the final, just because it’s the prelims…” Her catlike eyes sparkled. “Doesn’t mean I’ll go easy on you.”

“Yeah…I get it. If we meet up, it’s all-or-nothing.” I smiled back, and returned the monitor to its home screen. A question occurred to me.

“For being a Western game, why is all the Japanese on this console so solid? The official site only had English on it.”

“Oh, that. Zaskar, the company that runs GGO, is based in America, but they have some Japanese people running the JP server. From what I hear, GGO kind of works in a gray area both here and there, legally speaking.”

“Because of the money conversion system,” I followed. She smirked.

“Yep. In a way, it’s like private gambling. That’s why their public home page only has the bare minimum of information—not even an address. It’s also why managing your character or setting up an electronic money account to transfer your credits to real funds can only be done in-game.”

“It’s…quite a game.”

“And that’s why it’s kept almost entirely isolated from the real world…but because of that, it feels like my current self and my real self are two different people…”

I blinked in surprise, as a shadow seemed to briefly fall across her eyes.

“…?”

“Uh, n-nothing. Forget it. Anyway, we need to get going for the competition. It’s just below us, in fact. You all ready?”

“Yes,” I said, and she took me by the hand. Toward the rear of the first-floor hall, a number of elevators were lined up on the wall, and she hit the DOWN button on the rightmost one with a slender finger.

The door slid open at once and she slipped inside, then hit the B20F button. Clearly the tower extended both upward and downward from here. I felt a very real sense of dropping, which eventually slowed and stopped. The door opened.

When I saw the darkness beyond, my breath caught in my throat.

It was a circular dome, about the same size as the hall we’d just been in. The lights were as dim as possible, with most of the illumination coming from sad little arc lamps set into metal cages.

The floor, pillars, and walls were all a mesh of gleaming black metal and rusted fencing. Crude, simple tables lined the walls of the dome. A giant multiscreen holopanel hung from the ceiling. But the screens were black, displaying only the words BOB3 PRELIMINARY ROUND with a bloodred countdown, currently under twenty-eight minutes.

But what made me nervous wasn’t that sight, nor the quiet strains of heavy-metal BGM playing.

It was the sensation coming from the many silhouettes lounging at the tables and leaning against the pillars that lined the outer half of the dome.

Despite being inside a video game, not a single one seemed to be excited or enjoying himself. Everyone was either whispering in small groups or sitting alone in silence. They were clearly the other participants in the BoB Prelims, and they were also clearly VRMMO veterans, hardened players with virtual marrow in their bones.

On the other hand, I probably had more sheer playing time than anyone else in this room. After all, I’d spent about two years stuck in a game without a second of interruption.

But each player had his own play style. I was almost exclusively a PvE (player vs. enemy) type, yet I could tell these grubby bastards were all tried-and-true PvPers. I could sense it from the sharp, seeking gazes sent my way from under their darkened helmets and thick hoods—they wanted every piece of information they could glean.

Since ALO transferred to its current administrators earlier this spring, I had essentially experienced no man-to-man combat. There was no way that much time away hadn’t dulled my PvP instincts. The way I wilted under their piercing stares was proof of that.

This job is looking harder and harder by the minute, Mr. Kikuoka.

Something nudged my right elbow. I looked over to see the blue-haired girl staring at me curiously.

“…What’s wrong?”

“Uh, n-nothing…” I stammered. She gave me a reassuring nod and kept her voice low.

“Let’s go to the changing room. You’ll want to equip the fatigues you just bought, after all.”

She started walking through the midst of the players, completely at ease. There was no sign of tension in her stride. But it wasn’t as if she was being ignored, either. As a matter of fact, the men around us seemed to be pouring even more antagonism on her than they were on me. One of them even menacingly expelled an empty round from the terrifying gun sitting on his knees.

She had to have nerves of steel to ignore pressure of this kind. I followed the sand-colored muffler, more surprised at her than ever.

At the back of the dome, there was a space that traded the tables for a few simple steel doors. She opened one with a blinking indicator, showed me inside, then fiddled with the control panel on the backside of the door when it closed. The lock clicked shut and the indicator turned red.

On the inside, it looked like a cramped locker room. We were the only ones in the space, of course.

“…Whew,” she sighed, once she was in the middle of the room. “They’re all such ditzes.”

“Uh…ditzes?! You mean all those terrifying-looking people out there?!” I asked, picturing the fearsome soldiers who filled the dome. She nodded, as if it was perfectly clear who she meant.

“Of course. Showing off their main weapons a half hour before the event even begins? It’s like they’re asking us to work up a plan to deal with them.”

“Ah…I see…”

“You should wait to equip your lightsword and Five-Seven until just before your match,” she said, smiling gently. I nodded in understanding and she turned her back to me.

What she did next shocked me ten times more than what she’d said just a moment ago.

She swung her right hand to call up the main menu and hit the UNEQUIP ALL button on her equipment mannequin.

The sand-colored muffler disappeared, then the khaki jacket, the loose-fitting cargo pants, and the plain T-shirt.

All she was left wearing was a skimpy set of underwear that gleamed like some kind of multipurpose textile.

“Wh-wha—?!” I yelped, covering my face with my hand. Between my fingers, I saw her give me a quizzical glance.

“What are you doing? You’d better get changed.”

“Er, yes, b-but…”

My mind raced, even as it grappled with by far the greatest shock it had received since the dive into GGO began.

There weren’t many options available to me in this situation. One: I could find an excuse to escape the changing room. Two: Pretend to be a woman and just equip my body armor. But neither choice was in any way fair or honest to the girl who had given me so much help.

So I plunged headlong into option three before she could take off any more clothing and cause a true catastrophe.

My head shot down at maximum speed and I produced my namecard from the menu, then held it out to her with both hands.

“Umm…I’m sorry! I haven’t introduced myself until now…Um, this is my name…man!”

“Huh? M-man?”

I felt her take the card from my fingers.

“Kiri…to. Hmm, that’s an interesting name………wait………”

Because I didn’t belong to any guild—known as “squadrons” here—the only other information on the card aside from my name was a sex indicator.

“Male…? What…? But, you’re……”

She trailed off in confusion. Within my field of vision, which was pointed straight down at the floor, I noticed one of her cute little feet take a step back.

“No way…You’re……a man? With that avatar………?”

Silence.

Unable to bear the tension that filled the locker room, I started to raise my head a tad.

The next instant, something white flashed in my face with incredible speed and exploded on my left cheek. Purple splash effects covered my eyes.

It wasn’t until after I spun around like a top with the force of the impact, then slumped to the floor with little stars blinking in and out around my head, that I realized it had been the palm of her hand.

“Don’t follow me.”

“B-but I don’t know what to do after this…”

“Don’t follow me.”

“B-but I don’t know anyone else here…”

“Don’t follow me.”

I tried my best to keep up with the blue hair as she strode away, hissing back at me.

The girl had switched to a military jacket and bulletproof armor in a desert-colored scheme, with combat boots to round it out. The only thing that was the same as her in-town outfit was the muffler around her neck. As she warned me against earlier, she did not have a weapon out for show.

My equipment was similar in look, but mine was in a much darker, almost black shade—night camo, I guessed. I was prepared to abandon my usual style and go for something more ordinary, but when she told me it would take too much money to get enough styles to blend in to all of the randomly selected map types, I went with my usual fashion sense.

The very person who gave me that advice was now several feet ahead of me, determinedly not looking back. While her anger was quite justified, I also hadn’t identified myself as a woman, nor had I used any specifically feminine speech. Maybe I unjustly profited from that confusion, but she also could have said something about changing clothes before she launched into it…

I shook my head to keep my thought process from getting too whiny, and stubbornly followed that waving muffler. Abruptly, she came to a stop. We had gone halfway around the dome.

I stopped as well, and she turned around to face me. Her deep blue eyes looked directly into mine. They had struck me as catlike before, but now she was more of a panther. Her tiny lips sucked in a harsh breath, and I tensed in preparation for a proper shout. What emerged was only a brisk sigh.

She thudded down into the box seat beside her and turned her head away from me. Hesitantly, I took the seat across from her.

Up on the holo-panel, the countdown to the first preliminary matches was now under ten minutes. I had no idea what to do after this. Was I supposed to move somewhere else once the countdown hit zero? Was there some extra registration step? I didn’t even know where to look to find this kind of information.

I hunched my shoulders and fidgeted nervously. She shot me another look. Another deep, deep sigh.

“…I’ll give you the bare minimum of information. After that, we’re enemies for real,” she growled. I felt the tension leave my face.

“Th-thanks.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not forgiving you. Anyway, once that countdown hits zero, every entrant in here will be automatically teleported to a private battlefield with their first-round opponent.”

“Ah, I see.”

“The battlefield’s a square arena, exactly one kilometer to each side. The terrain type, weather, and time of day are all randomized. You’ll be spawned at least half the distance of the arena apart. When the battle’s finished, the winner comes back here to the waiting area, while the loser is teleported to the first-floor hall. None of your gear drops at random if you lose. If you win and your next opponent has already won, the second round starts immediately. If their match isn’t over, you wait. There are sixty-four players in Block F, so if you win five times, you’ll be in the block championship and thus in the tournament finale. No more explanation needed or offered,” she finished brusquely, though her explanation was quite helpful. The general flow of the tournament made sense to me now.

“Okay, I think I get it. Thank you,” I replied.

She sent another look my way and turned to the side yet again. I could barely make out the words she said next.

“You’d better get to the final. After all the things I’ve taught you, I want to be able to give you the final piece of information you need.”

“Final?”

“The taste of that bullet of defeat.”

I had no choice but to smile. Not sarcastically or ironically, but a true smile. I couldn’t help but like people with that kind of mentality.

“…Looking forward to it. Are you sure you’ll be all right, though?”

She snorted. “If I actually lose in the prelims, I’ll retire. This time—”

Those lapis-blue eyes cast a fierce gaze out at the sea of rivals filling the dome.

“—I’ll kill every last one of them.”

Those last few words had no volume to them, and reached my ears as nothing but tiny vibrations on her lips. Those lips then curled into the smile of a predator. A chill like ice that I hadn’t experienced in ages ran down my back.

Clearly, she did not feel an ounce of the pressure all the men in the dome were putting on her. She was undoubtedly far more powerful than they were. She had the skill as a VRMMO player—and the underlying mentality to support it.

I held my breath and stayed quiet. The smile vanished from her face, and her eyes traveled off in thought for a moment. She waved her menu open and within seconds had produced a little card.

She slid it across the table and waited for me to pick it up before saying, “This will probably be the last time we speak like this, so I’ll introduce myself here. It’s the name of the one who will defeat you.”

I looked down without comment. The card read Sinon. Sex: F.

“Sinon,” I muttered, and her blue hair waved as she nodded. I tried introducing myself properly this time.

“I’m Kirito. Nice to meet you.”

I extended a hand over the table without thinking, but Sinon completely ignored it and turned aside. Chastised, I retracted my hand.

After that, she said nothing.

The monitor at the top of the dome showed there were still five minutes left. Either I could sit in my chair and cross my legs, or I could try talking to her again. Approaching footsteps co-opted my decision.

I looked up to see a tall man with long silver hair hanging over his forehead coming straight for our table.

He wore an outfit of dark gray and slightly lighter gray in a camo pattern that was all right angles. Slung over his shoulder was a slightly larger gun—probably an assault rifle rather than a submachine gun. His sharp features matched up well with his slim figure. There was only a bare minimum of armor on him, and he looked very capable of traversing the battlefield with speed and agility. He gave off the air of a special forces agent rather than a hardened veteran soldier.

The man did not spare a single glance for me in the shadows, but looked directly at Sinon instead with a smile on his lips. Suddenly, those hawkish features took on a boyish roundness that surprised me.

“Hey, Sinon. You sure got here late—I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

His tone of voice was so casual and familiar that I couldn’t help but wince, expecting her to hurl more of her withering vocal fire in his direction. But to my surprise, the veil of iciness that surrounded the pale-haired girl softened, and she almost seemed to smile.

“There you are, Spiegel. I got distracted by some stuff that I didn’t expect to come up. Wait a minute…I thought you weren’t going to compete.”

The man named Spiegel smiled shyly and brushed his head with his hand in embarrassment.

“Actually, I’m here to root you on—hope you don’t mind. You get to watch the matches on the big screen from here.”

These two were at least friends, if not guildmates. Sinon scooted over, and Spiegel sat down right next to her without even asking.

“So what was it that distracted you?”

“Oh…Well, I was guiding that person over there around,” Sinon answered, signaling me with a short, cold stare. I straightened up reluctantly and gave a brief bow to Spiegel, who had finally noticed my presence.

“Hi, I’m ‘that person.’”

“Oh, er…nice to meet you. Are you a…friend of Sinon’s?”

Spiegel had an air about him, to be sure, but he turned out to be more courteous than his appearance suggested. Either that, or he was also confusing my gender.

I was figuring out which answer would be the most entertaining when Sinon cut off my fun.

“Don’t be fooled. He’s a man.”

“Huh?”

Spiegel went wide-eyed. I had no choice but to introduce myself normally.

“Uh, I’m Kirito. Male.”

“M-male…Which, um…means you’re, uh…”

He still looked confused. Sinon and I shared a glance. It looked like he was having trouble processing the fact that Sinon had been working with another male player.

Intrigued by this reaction, I decided to toss a little fuel onto the fire.

“Actually, I’ve got a lot to thank Sinon for, in a variety of ways.”

Sinon turned her blue lasers on me and growled through pursed lips. “I…I haven’t done any such thing. And you’re in no position to call me by name…”

“What’s with the cold shoulder all of a sudden?”

“Cold?! We’re complete strangers!”

“Even though you helped me coordinate my outfit?”

“Th…that was because I thought you were—”

Suddenly, our bickering was interrupted by the quiet BGM in the dome fading away, to be replaced by a blaring electric guitar lead. Next, a soft, electronically generated voice boomed over the heads of the hundreds in attendance.

“Thank you for your patience. The preliminary blocks of the third Bullet of Bullets tournament will now begin. All players registered will be automatically teleported to the first-round field map at the end of the countdown. Best of luck.”

A great cheer chose from the room. The rattle of automatic fire and the screech of lasers followed, the various types of gunfire shooting up to the ceiling like fireworks. Sinon quietly got to her feet and jabbed a finger at me.

“You’d better make it to the final. I need to blow your head off.”

I rose in turn and grinned. “Well, I was never one to turn down an invitation to a date.”

“Wh-why, you…”

The twenty remaining seconds of the countdown trickling away, I waved to Sinon and faced forward in preparation for the teleport. As I did so, I met Spiegel’s gaze.

When I saw the wariness and hostility in his eyes, I was briefly struck by the idea that I’d gone too far, and its accompanying regret.

But the next moment, my body was surrounded by a pillar of blue light that flooded my vision.

When I could see again, I was atop a hexagonal panel floating in the midst of darkness.

There was a pale, red holo-window in front of me that loudly proclaimed Kirito vs. Uemaru. Unlike SAO, in which all players had to spell their names in the Western alphabet, GGO allowed proper Japanese characters, so his name was spelled in actual kanji. I didn’t recognize the name, of course. At the bottom of the window it said, Preparation time: 58 secs. Field: Lost Ancient Temple.

I interpreted the minute of prep time to be meant for optimizing equipment for the chosen map, but that meant nothing to me without any backup gear or knowledge of GGO’s terrain. I called up the menu and switched to my equipment window—which resembled that of ALO’s—and set the Kagemitsu G4 lightsword as my main weapon, and the Five-Seven as my sidearm. Once I’d ensured that none of my armor was forgotten, I closed the window.

As the remaining time slowly counted down, a sudden possibility struck my brain.

That ferocious smile I’d seen Sinon wear for just a moment. It was like pure, distilled lethality, a rifle bolt that could pierce any armor or shield.

Her voice sounded inside my head so clearly that it could have been telepathy.

This time, I’ll kill every last one of them, she’d said. The words were trite, even childish, but they succeeded in delivering that familiar chill I’d experienced so many times since the SAO days that I couldn’t count. It was as if real, tangible will, transcending any kind of in-game role-playing, was radiating out from her tiny body.

I’d met few players who could make me feel that sort of willpower within the virtual realm. And as far as female players went, the only one who had reached this level was Asuna, and at her most extreme. Actually, even Asuna the Flash, previously known as the Mad Warrior, had never given off such a fierce energy.

Was it possible? Could this blue-haired girl in fact be the very Death Gun I was seeking?

The ugly, metallic rasp of Death Gun’s voice in the recording that Kikuoka played for me was completely unlike Sinon’s pure, crisp tones. But unlike SAO, GGO was a normal game. A single player could easily have multiple characters that she could switch between at the log-in screen.

Plus, based on what she said, Sinon had absolute confidence in her ability to reach the Bullet of Bullets final. If my expectation that Death Gun would be there was correct, that lowered my list of potential candidates to thirty. Sinon would be one of them.

In all honesty, I did not want to consider that possibility. She had showed me to the shop and walked me through many facets of the game, and I never got a hint of murder from her personality. If anything, there was a sad loneliness about her.

So which was the real Sinon?

No use thinking about it now. Once we trade sword blows—er, gunshots—I might understand more.

I raised my eyes at the exact moment the countdown hit zero. The teleportation effect surrounded me again.

The next thing I saw was a gloomy sunset.

Wind blew past, a high-pitched whistling in my ears. Scraps of yellow cloud floated by overhead, and dried grass rustled fiercely at my feet.

Right nearby was a massive stone column, though I couldn’t have identified Ionian style from Corinthian. It was part of a pattern, a layout of columns in a three-sided square shape, each one about three yards from the next. Some of them had withered away at the top, and some were completely collapsed. It looked just like some ancient temple that had fallen into ruin ages ago.

Out of instinct, I scrambled to the nearest column and scanned the surroundings.

The faded grasses continued in all directions, and beyond the low hill I could see a number of other ruins like the one I stood in now. From what Sinon said, the maps were a thousand meters on each side, but it was clearly several dozen times that distance to the horizon. There must have been rivers or cliffs at the boundaries to prevent moving beyond the map.

I remembered more of her explanation. The contestants were placed at least half of the full distance apart, but I didn’t see anyone. My opponent must have been hiding behind cover like me. There were no cursors to indicate enemy location, so I had to start by finding my foe.

I could choose to hide until the other guy got tired of waiting and needed to act, but waiting wasn’t my style. It seemed liked a better idea to sprint to the nearest ruins in the hope of drawing fire so that I could discern the enemy’s location. I brushed the Five-Seven on my waist with my left hand.

At that moment, a stronger breeze brushed past, snapping the nearby grass back and forth. Once the gust had passed, at the exact moment that the grass stood back up, a silhouette abruptly and silently got to its feet barely twenty yards away.

He had an assault rifle in both hands, trained right on me. The image instantly burned into my mind through my retinas: brown stubble pressed up to the barrel, goggles covering the upper half of his face, and a helmet topped with dummy grass. We were the only two people on the map, so this had to be Uemaru.

I had no idea how he’d approached so quickly. Clearly, a big part of the reason was the camo he was wearing. It was colored the exact same khaki as the grass around us, in a fine, vertical-striped pattern. That was an example of the sixty-second preparation period being put to good use.

Dozens of red lines shot out of the black rifle on the enemy’s shoulder, bullet lines that showed where his shots would land, crossing entirely over me and the space around me.

“Whoa!” I shrieked, jumping on instinct. That took me in the direction of the least dense number of bullet lines—directly upward.

Katatatata! His rifle cracked loudly, and I felt two hard impacts on my right shin. The HP bar that was fixed in the upper left corner of my vision dropped about 10 percent. There were too many bullets to dodge them all—I belatedly remembered Sinon’s warning about full-auto fire.

I did a flip in midair and landed atop the broken column behind me, pulling the Five-Seven out of its holster and preparing to shoot back.

But Uemaru didn’t give me the time to get ready. More of the countless red lines intersected my chest.

“Aaaah!”

I wailed pitifully and fell backward off the pillar, but another of the bullets grazed my left arm, tearing away more HP.

Most of the hail of gunfire hit the stone column, sending little shards flying. I held my limbs close, trying to keep my body safely hidden in the shadow of the pillar.

This is nothing at all like a sword-on-sword battle!

The bullet-dodging game I played with the NPC gunman featured a six-shooter with intervals in between, which required all of my nerves to conquer. But this level of bullet hell—over ten shots a second—was beyond my ability.

If I was going to use that Kagemitsu to chop off Uemaru’s ugly whiskers, I needed to get right up in his face, but at this rate I would be riddled full of holes far before I got anywhere near him.

Since full evasion was impossible, I’d have to defend against the bullets somehow. Sadly, this world only had defensive fields that neutralized lasers, and no magical shields that could stop a live round. Even in SAO, I could have used my sword as a shield using the Weapon Defense skill.

I put my hand to the lightsword, still hooked to my belt by the carabiner. If only I could deflect some of the bullets with the sword. It shouldn’t be impossible—they did that in those old sci-fi movies about the wars among the stars. Since this game was made in America, they had to have considered the possibility. But if I was going to pull off such a maneuver, I’d need to accurately predict the trajectories of the incoming bullets…

No, wait.

That was possible. After all, what were the bullet lines for, if not seeing where the gunfire was going to be?

I swallowed and pulled the sword off of my belt.

The shots had stopped for the moment. If I had to guess, Uemaru had shrunk back down into the grass so he could flank me, either to the left or the right.

I closed my eyes and let my ears take over.

The wind was still blowing noisily. I shut the howling sound effects out of my mind. Next, I focused on the rustling of the dried-out plants around me. Amid the regular waving pattern of the sound, I searched for anything irregular.

Being able to tell apart the different sound effects in a VR space was a considerable technique, a system-independent skill that served me well in SAO. I would never have been able to hunt down the S-rank Ragout Rabbit without being able to discern fine differences in sound.

What about now?

I detected an irregular noise moving slowly from my seven to my nine. It moved for two or three seconds, then stopped, testing my reaction.

The enemy resumed moving, then stopped, then starting moving again.

“Go!” I screamed, launching myself directly at his hiding spot.

Uemaru clearly wasn’t expecting me to charge straight for the place where he was crawling on all fours. He got up to his knees from the dead grass and pulled his rifle up to a shooting position, but that action took him a second and a half.

By that point, I had already closed half of the eighty feet between us. I clicked the switch of the photon sword in my hand as I ran. With a satisfying vumm, it produced a bluish-purple glowing blade.

For the third time, Uemaru’s assault rifle showed a dozen or more bullet lines. I’d been evading on instinct alone before, but this time I kept my eyes forward. Ignoring the prickling of fear in my neck, I noted that all of the lines did not appear at the same time—there was a slight time lag between them. That was an indication of the order the bullets were fired from the rifle muzzle.

Out of all of the bullets, only six of them were currently due to intersect with my body, which was quite a bit smaller than my real one. The rest were going to miss slightly to the sides, or above and below. Based on the fact that we were actually quite close, this level of accuracy told me that either the enemy’s gun or his personal skill were, in fact, not very precise.

That familiar sense of tension that every PvP battle featured told me that my own gears had finally shifted into battle mode. It was that familiar sense of acceleration: edges of my vision stretched out, target in the center much clearer than before. As time slowed down around me, my mind seemed to speed along much faster.

The enemy’s rifle flashed orange. In that instant, my lightsword perfectly caught the first two of the six bullets that would hit me.

Bzz, bzap! Orange sparks flew from the surface of the glowing sword. By the time I even processed that reaction, my right arm was already flashing like lightning, holding the photon sword over the line that connected the third and fourth bullet trajectories. Once again, the bullets were knocked aside by the high-density energy blade.

It took a lot of concentration to keep charging while the bullets that weren’t meant to hit screamed past my ears, but I gritted my teeth and kept swinging away.

Five…then six! Having successfully deflected all of the accurate shots, I redoubled my speed to close the remaining distance.

“N-no way, man!”

Uemaru’s heavily bearded chin dropped in shock. But his hands didn’t stop moving. He released the empty magazine with comfortable ease, pulled a spare from his waist, and moved to pop it in.

I pointed the Five-Seven at him, hoping to prevent him from finishing the reload. The instant I touched the trigger, I was surprised to see a pale green circle over the enemy’s chest, but I pulled it five times in quick succession anyway.

The recoil in my elbow and shoulder was much lighter than I expected, and two of the shots landed on Uemaru’s shoulder and side within the transparent circle. The other three disappeared into the grass behind him, but the two that hit must have broken through his armor to do damage. The HP gauge in the upper right lost a bit of ground. Uemaru stumbled and stopped for just a moment.

That was all I needed.

The instant I was within sword range, I twisted myself to the right—

And launched myself off the virtual ground with all the added velocity of my sprint, slamming the enemy directly in the chest with what would have been called a Vorpal Strike back in SAO.

The blade of light easily sank into his chest up to the hilt, roaring and rattling like a jet engine. For an instant, I felt all of that energy squirming around in his body without an outlet.

The next moment, a cone of ferocious light and sound erupted from my right hand, and the enemy’s body turned into countless tiny polygons, expanding into nothingness.

I slowly got to my feet, feeling the lasting numbness of battle in every inch of my body. Out of habit, I waved the lightsword back and forth and nearly stashed it over my back until I came to my senses and quickly shut it off.

Only when the sword hilt was clicked onto the snap ring on my waist and the handgun was back in its holster could I let out the breath I’d been holding. Up in the evening sky, a giant message of congratulations was displayed over the hanging clouds.

Somehow, I’d won my first-round match. The fact that I could defend against the bullets with my lightsword was a very good sign. But that kind of high-speed sword work required phenomenal concentration, and I could feel my nerves popping and smoking.

Four more of these exhausting battles?

I slumped my shoulders as the blue teleportation effect swallowed my body. The lonely whistling of the wind died away, to eventually be replaced by the bustling noise of the crowded waiting area.

Apparently I had been teleported back to the same box seat against the wall. I looked left and right, but neither Sinon nor Spiegel was present. Sinon was probably still in a battle, but I couldn’t help but be curious where her male acquaintance had gone. I eventually spotted a familiar-looking urban camo closer to the center of the dome. He hadn’t noticed my return, and was watching the monitor hanging from the ceiling with great interest.

I looked up to see that the giant screen, which had previously been running the pretournament countdown, was now displaying a number of battles at once. They were showing off players blasting rifles and pistols in desert, jungle and ruin settings with all the style and impact of an action movie.

Most likely, these were only the ongoing battle scenes out of the hundreds of matches happening concurrently. When the occasional player took too much fire and burst into pieces, the crowd watching from the floor gave a great cheer.

I took a few steps forward, hoping to see if I could get a glimpse of Sinon in action. I started checking each one in order from the upper left corner, but the camera work was so frantic that it was nearly impossible to tell them apart. It seemed like a better idea to concentrate on finding her distinguishing light blue hair.

Which is why my heart nearly stopped when someone abruptly spoke into my right ear. It was as if the low, raspy, metallic voice was bypassing my eardrum to go straight to the sensory center of my brain.

“Are you, the real thing?”

“…?!”

I jumped back and turned around out of sheer instinct.

The first thought that crossed my mind was Ghost.

Not a real ghost, of course. Around the sixty-fifth floor of Aincrad, which was themed after old castle ruins, there were common ghost-type enemies. They were covered with tattered dark gray cloaks, the hoods pulled low over absolute darkness except for faintly glowing red eyes.

The person standing before me in the dim light of the dome was extremely similar in appearance to those ghosts. My unconscious reaction was to leap backward and draw my sword. The urge was so strong that I couldn’t prevent my hand from twitching.

With a faint grunt, I looked down at his feet. Through the scraps of the ripped cloak, I could barely make out the tips of faded, grungy boots.

This was a player, not a ghost. Recognizing that obvious fact, I let out a slow breath. Upon closer examination, the red eyes weren’t little glowing hellfires, but simply lenses within the black goggles that covered his entire face. Irritated at both my amateur reaction and his lack of manners in accosting another player at point-blank range, I didn’t feel in the mood to be polite.

“What do you mean, ‘real thing’? Who are you?”

But the gray-cloaked player did not name himself, and took another step forward to close the distance again. I didn’t back away this time, staring right back at the robotic gaze from just eight inches away.

His unpleasant voice, obviously affected by some kind of voice modulator, rasped again.

“I saw, your match. You used, a sword.”

“Y…yeah. It’s not against the rules,” I replied. The AmuSphere unhelpfully re-created the unease I was feeling, causing my voice to crack. The gray cloak approached even closer, as if recognizing that weakness.

The next statement came so quietly that I could barely hear it without concentrating, even at that distance.

“I’ll ask, again. Are you, the real thing?”

Before I even had time to process and understand his question, a bolt of lightning struck my brain out of the blue, stopping me still.

I know him!!

I was sure of it. I had met him somewhere before. We had come face-to-face and exchanged words.

But where? The only people I’d spoken to since logging in to GGO were the avatar buyer right at the spawning point, Sinon during her assistance with my shopping and registration, and her friend Spiegel. So it wasn’t in this world.

ALO, then? Did I meet him back in Alfheim, while we both had different avatars? I frantically consulted my memory index, trying to match the style of speech and general air to anyone I knew. But nothing turned up. I couldn’t remember meeting anyone with such a chilling presence.

Where? Where have I met him before…?

The tattered cloak waved, and a thin arm extended from the middle. I nearly jumped backward again, but the hand, clad in a similarly ragged glove, was empty.

The empty hand called up a menu window where I could see, its movements dull and lifeless. The screen showed a tournament field with six blocks—the current bracket of the third Bullet of Bullets.

His needle-like finger tapped at Block F, which expanded to fill the screen. He clicked again, and it zoomed into the center of the block.

My gaze was drawn to the spot his finger indicated.

There were two names: UEMARU on the left and KIRITO on the right. A glowing line extended from my name on the right. It had already been officially announced that I beat Uemaru and advanced to the second round.

The finger moved slightly, tracing the name KIRITO from top to bottom. He spoke again.

“This, name. That, attack. Are you, the real thing?”

A moment later, I was struck by my third great shock.

My knees trembled and nearly buckled, but I held my poise just in time.

This guy knows me!

He knew the source of the name Kirito, and the sword skill that I used to defeat Uemaru as well.

Meaning…I hadn’t met him in GGO or in ALO.

SAO. Sword Art Online. Somewhere in the floating castle Aincrad, the setting of that game of death, I had met this man.

Whatever avatar was behind that tattered, creepy mask—no, whoever was on the other side of that avatar, lying down, connected to an AmuSphere—they were an SAO Survivor, just like me.

My pulse was ringing like an alarm bell. If it wasn’t for the gloom of the dim room, it would have been quite apparent that I was white as a sheet.

Calm down, just calm down, I repeated to myself, over and over.

There was no need to panic just because I’d met another survivor of SAO. Not long before the collapse of Aincrad, there were plenty of articles and stories being shared about my Dual Blades extra skill, and my public duel with Heathcliff of the Knights of the Blood. And the Vorpal Strike I’d just used on Uemaru was a very commonly used One-Handed Sword skill. Any player of a decent level in Aincrad could have put two and two together after watching the footage and checking the tournament bracket. I probably would have tried the same thing if I recognized an old acquaintance from those days here in the dome.

So there was no reason to be afraid. There shouldn’t have been.

Then why was I so…

For an instant, just as he removed the bracket and was pulling his thin arm back into his cloak, my eyes caught sight of something.

On the inside of his wrist, just above the glove that looked more like ragged bandages wrapped around his hand, there was a glimpse of pale white skin. And, clear as day, a tattoo about two inches across.

The design was a caricature of a Western-style coffin. On the lid was an eerie, leering smile. That lid was lifted slightly off the hinges so that a white skeletal arm extended out from the darkness within, beckoning the viewer closer. It was the exact same mark that I’d seen on the arm of a man who paralyzed me with poisoned water and tried to kill me.

A coffin, grinning.

It was practically a miracle that I successfully avoided screaming, falling to the floor, or getting auto–logged out because of some kind of brain-wave trauma. Instead, I showed no reaction.

The red, glowing goggles stared through me. Eventually, the player in the tattered cloak rasped again.

“Did you, not understand, the question?”

I slowly and deliberately nodded my head.

“…Yes. I don’t understand. What do you mean, the real thing?”

“…”

The gray cloak took a silent step backward. The red gaze flickered once, as if he blinked. After several extremely long seconds, his voice was even more robotic than before.

“…In that case, fine. But, if you are, a fake using the name…or, the real thing…”

He finished his sentence as he was turning away.

“…I will, kill you.”

It did not strike me as a harmless bit of in-game role-playing.

The tattered cloak disappeared into the crowd without a sound, just like an actual ghost. There were no lingering signs that any player had been there just seconds ago.

This time I really did stagger, barely keeping my balance, and stumbled over to the nearby box seat. I hugged my slender legs and pressed my forehead against my knees.

When I closed my eyes, I saw that tattoo again, bright and clear, even though it had only caught my eye for a fraction of a second.

There was only one group in Aincrad who used that symbol as their identifier.

The murderous red guild, Laughing Coffin.

Over the course of those two long years trapped in SAO, it wasn’t long until the emergence of “orange” players, criminals who took out their frustrations by stealing money and items from other players. But those actions took place within certain bounds—usually a big group surrounding a few helpless victims and forcing them to trade, or perhaps using a paralysis venom.

Since obliterating one’s HP bar with a direct attack would cause the player to die in real life, no one had the guts to go through with that. These were ten thousand people severely addicted to online games—not the type of people who went around committing violent crimes in regular life.

It was the existence of one single player with a very different mentality that broke the unwritten rule not to take every last HP.

The man’s name was spelled PoH but pronounced “pooh.” It was a silly-sounding name, but despite that—or perhaps because of it—his presence commanded attention wherever he went.

The biggest reason for this was PoH’s exotic looks and his multilingual status—he seemed to be half-Japanese and half-Western. His Japanese was peppered with smooth, fluent English and Spanish slang, which made him sound like a cool pro DJ rapping at the table. It was easy for him to bring others around to his way of thinking, turning simple MMO gamers into cooler, tougher outlaws than they’d ever been, and be, in life.

The second reason for his charismatic nature was PoH’s outright strength.

His skill with the dagger was nothing short of genius. The blade flashed like an extension of his hand, and he attacked monsters and players alike without needing to rely on the system’s built-in sword skills. In the later stages of the game, once he’d found a terrifying dagger by the name of Mate-Chopper, he was a menacing enough force to unnerve even the front-line players.

PoH’s leadership skills were on the same level as Heathcliff’s, but in the polar opposite direction. Very gradually, over time, he began to remove many of the mental roadblocks that kept his followers within certain bounds.

A year after the game’s start, on New Year’s Eve, 2023, PoH’s gang of nearly thirty players attacked a small guild that was enjoying an outdoor party at one of the map’s sightseeing spots, and killed all of them.

The next day, the various information dealers around Aincrad were trumpeting the formation of Laughing Coffin, the first unofficial “red” guild in the game.

At the very least, I knew the gray-cloaked man who made contact was not PoH. His flat, broken speech was nothing in the least like PoH’s machine-gun staccato.

But I couldn’t help but feel that I knew someone in Laughing Coffin who spoke this way. I must have come face-to-face with him and traded words, if not sword strikes. Not a rank-and-file soldier, but a very high-ranking officer. How could I guess all of these things, yet not remember his face or name?

But in fact, I knew why—my own mind was refusing to remember.

Laughing Coffin was formed on January 1, 2024, and obliterated on a summer night eight months later.

It was not a spontaneous breakup, or the result of infighting. A large-scale raid party of over fifty of the game’s best front-line fighters put them to the sword.

This method could easily have been taken much earlier. The reason it didn’t happen for eight months was because Laughing Coffin’s hideout took that long to pin down.

Any houses or apartments available for players to buy in Aincrad, whether in a town or outside in the wilderness, could be easily and accurately located with an NPC real estate agent. We assumed that a place that could house thirty would need to be a mansion or fortress, so information dealers hired by the group began crosschecking all of the large-scale residences starting from the first floor and going up.

Although this did turn up the bases of several smaller orange guilds, after several months there was still no sign of the crucial Laughing Coffin hideout.

And there was good reason for that—they were actually using an already-cleared minor dungeon on a lower floor as their base of operations, crammed into the safe haven zone within. It was just a little cave, the kind of location the game designers would have set up and then forgotten completely. The powerful front-line players only bothered with the labyrinth towers that led to the next floor, and the midlevel types preferred the larger dungeons with more players around. Of course, one had to assume that a few unlucky souls coincidentally ran across that tiny cave, and it was all too easy to imagine how they were prevented from telling the tale.

The suspected reason that Laughing Coffin’s base was finally identified after eight long months was that one of their members gave in to his guilty conscience and revealed the location to another player. A reconnaissance mission determined that it was indeed the cave in question, which led to the formation of the massive raid party. The leader was an officer from the Divine Dragon Alliance, the largest guild in the game. Several other principal members from the Knights of the Blood and other guilds were present, and even I participated as a solo.

The assault on their base happened at three in the morning.

Our numbers and levels were significantly higher than those of Laughing Coffin. We assumed it would be quite easy to seal off the ways out of the safe haven area and force them to surrender without bloodshed.

But just as someone from their group had informed on the location of their hideout, they learned about our top secret plan through some means still unknown.

When we charged into the dungeon, not a single member of Laughing Coffin was in the safe zone. But they had not fled ahead of time. They were all hiding in the dungeon’s offshoot branches, and attacked us from behind once we were inside.

They used traps, poison, blinding—every kind of sabotage they could attempt. Though the raid party was thrown into chaos at first, responding appropriately to unexpected circumstances was one of the most crucial qualities to the game’s best players. The raid regrouped quickly and led a furious counterattack.

But there was one unforeseen difference between Laughing Coffin and the raid party.

It was the resistance to the idea of killing. When we realized that the insane members of LC were not going to surrender, even when reduced to slivers of HP, our group was rattled.

We had discussed this possibility before the operation. The consensus was that we would not hesitate to wipe out the enemy’s HP entirely if that was necessary. But it might have been the case that none of our entire raid, including myself, truly had what it took to deliver that final blow, knowing the enemy’s HP was down in the red. Some of us even threw our swords aside and took a knee.

We were the first to lose a few members to the raid. When the front-line team fought back with rage and grief, several from Laughing Coffin died.

After that, it was bloodstained hell.

When the battle was over, the raid party was short eleven, while Laughing Coffin had lost twenty-one. Two of those had been at my hand.

Among the names of the dead and captured, we did not find PoH, their leader.

If the player in the tattered gray cloak was one of the twelve Laughing Coffin survivors who was sent to the prison in Blackiron Palace, then we must have had a conversation after the battle. If I could remember his style of speaking, but not his face or name, that was because I was actively trying to forget everything about that battle.

…No.

What if the man under that cloak was one of the two I killed?

I shook my head violently, still clutching my knees on top of the chair. I clenched my teeth so hard they could have broken, and lashed my mind back into shape.

The dead did not come back to life. The four thousand victims of the SAO Incident, whether I loved or hated them, would never come back. So the cloaked man had to be one of the twelve survivors of Laughing Coffin. And I knew all of those names. I grimaced against the pain, trying to dig deep, deep into that terrible memory…

Then I gasped, realizing another possibility.

The twisted, metallic voice—it was only a rasping whisper, but what would it sound like if shouted at full volume?

The scream on the audio file I heard a week ago came back to echo in my ears.

This is the true power, the true strength! Carve this name and the terror it commands into your hearts, you fools! My name, and the name of my weapon, is…Death Gun!!

It was the same. The exact same. The voice was identical.

Was the man in the gray cloak…Death Gun?

If that was true, then I had already completed my duty: to attract attention in GGO and find myself targeted by Death Gun.

But…I couldn’t have imagined that I would learn this fact—that Death Gun was a survivor of SAO, and a member of the murderous Laughing Coffin, to boot.

A man who had possibly killed two players in real life with gunshots from within the game. What if that power…was real…?

I nearly screamed when someone suddenly clapped a hand on my shoulder. I flinched and looked up to see pale blue hair.

“…You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Sinon said, frowning. Somehow I managed to work my cheeks into a smile.

“Uh…n-no, it’s nothing…”

“Was it really that close of a fight? Seems like you came back pretty quick.”

Only then did I remember that I was still an active participant in the Bullet of Bullets tournament. I blinked and looked around, noticing that the previously bustling dome was only half-full now. Most of the first round was finished, with the losers being teleported back to the surface. My next opponent would be determined very soon, with the second round to follow.

But it was hard to imagine being able to fight anytime soon.

I looked first at Spiegel, who was shooting me a suspicious gaze from a slight distance, then back to Sinon, who stood right in front of me, then sighed lifelessly though slackened lips.

She put a dead-serious look on her face. “You’re never going to make it to the final if that’s how you’re feeling after one fight. Get it together—I’ve got to collect what you owe me, remember.”

She clenched a fist and pounded my shoulder again.

Without thinking, I grabbed her little hand with both of mine before it could be pulled away. I drew it toward my chest and put my forehead against it.

“Wh-wh…what are you doing?!” she yelped, trying to extract her hand, but I held fast.

Even the false warmth from that polygonal avatar’s hand was more comforting than I could put into words. I felt the terrible chill of fear that had settled over my heart, and my body began trembling, well after the fact.

“…What’s the matter…?”

As the seconds passed, I felt the resistance from that small, warm hand slowly ease away.