Phantom Bullet 1

  “…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 loo
k, 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 col
ored 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?”