So, as she did each day of middle school, every afternoon after she left the school gates, Shino performed her ritual of counting down the days.
Shino’s solitary apartment was about halfway between the JR train station and school. It was a cramped place, the main room less than a hundred square feet with a small kitchen, but it was adjacent to a shopping arcade, which was convenient.
At three thirty in the afternoon, the arcade street was relatively uncrowded.
Shino stopped first at the display table of the bookstore and noticed a new book from one of her favorite authors, but it was in hardcover, so she decided to hold off. If she put in a reservation online, she’d be able to rent it from the local library in a month or so.
Next she bought an eraser and a graph-paper notebook at a stationery store, checked her remaining cash, and made her way to the supermarket at the center of the shopping district. Shino’s dinners were always extremely simple, so as long as her meal balanced nutrition, calories, and price, she didn’t care what it looked or tasted like.
She was passing by the video arcade next to the market, planning on a carrot and celery soup with tofu cubes, when someone called her name.
“Asada!”
It came from the narrow alleyway between the two buildings. She automatically tensed and slowly rotated ninety degrees to her right.
In the alley were three girls wearing the same school uniform as Shino, but with considerable differences in the length of their skirts. One was squatting down and fiddling with her phone, while the other two leaned against the wall of the supermarket and leered at Shino.
She stood there without responding until one of the two leaners arrogantly beckoned her over with a wave of her head.
“Come here.”
Shino didn’t move.
“…What do you want?”
The other one quickly strode over and grabbed Shino by the wrist.
“Just get over here.”
She had no choice but to be pulled along. They shoved her back down to the far end of the alley, well out of sight from the main walkway, where the squatting student looked up at her. She was Endou, the leader of the trio. With her black eyeliner, slanted eyes, and pointy chin, she looked like some kind of predatory insect.
Endou’s glitter-sparkling lips twisted menacingly. “Hey, Asada. We were just doing a ton of karaoke, and now we can’t afford the train fare home. We’ll pay you back tomorrow if you lend us this much.”
She held up a finger. She didn’t want 100 yen, or 1,000. That meant 10,000.
Shino silently thought of a number of logical rebuttals to this demand—how could they have sung a “ton” of karaoke in the twenty minutes since school let out? Why did they need train fare when all three of them had passes? Why did they need 10,000 yen just to ride the train? But none of these questions would change her fate.
It was the second time this trio had demanded money from her. The last time, she claimed she didn’t have that much. Shino figured that excuse wouldn’t fly a second time, but she tried anyway.
“Of course I don’t have that much.”
For an instant, Endou’s smile disappeared, then returned.
“Then go withdraw some cash.”
“…”
Shino tried to walk back out to the street without responding. They weren’t going to follow her to a bank where people would be watching, and nobody was stupid enough to wander back into trouble once they were in the clear. But Endou wasn’t done.
“Leave your bag. And your wallet. All you’ll need is your card, right?”
Shino stopped and turned back. Endou was still smiling, but her narrowed eyes glinted like a cat toying with its prey.
At one point, she’d actually thought these three were her friends. Shino cursed her own stupidity.
Shino was fresh to Tokyo from the country when school started, so she didn’t know anyone and had nothing in common to discuss with anyone. It was Endou’s group who reached out to her first.
They invited her to eat lunch, and eventually the four of them would stop to get fast food after school. Shino mostly listened, and occasionally found herself irritated by the topics, but she still appreciated the gesture. At last, she had friends that didn’t know about what happened. At least she could be a normal student here.
It wasn’t until much, much later that she realized they’d singled her out because they checked her address in the class registry and figured out she lived alone.
When they asked if they could come visit, Shino gladly accepted. The girls praised her apartment, raved jealously about it, and they sat chatting and snacking until it got dark.
The girls came to Shino’s apartment the next day as well. And the day after that.
Soon the three of them came to her place to change outfits and then take the train for a night on the town. They would leave their belongings in the apartment, and soon the closet was stuffed with the girls’ clothes.
Shoes. Bags. Cosmetics. Endou’s and her friends’ items grew and grew. By May, the three were often stumbling back drunk and sleeping in the one-room apartment with her.
One day, near her breaking point, Shino timidly pointed out that with the way they visited every day, she had no time or ability to study.
Endou’s only answer was, “Aren’t we friends?” The next day, she demanded a spare key.
Then, on the last Saturday of May, Shino came back to her door from the library to hear raucous laughter coming from inside. It wasn’t just Endou and the two others.
She held her breath and listened intently. The fact that she had to go to these lengths over the state of her own apartment filled her with misery.
There were clearly several men in her apartment.
Unfamiliar men in her home. Shino collapsed with fear. Then came rage. She understood the truth at last.
She walked down the stairs of the building and called the police. The officer who responded was quite confused by the testimony from both sides, but Shino stayed firm and said she didn’t know any of them.
When the officer insisted that she report to the station with him, Endou glared at Shino in fury, said, “I see how it is,” then gathered up her things and left.
Her vengeance came swift.
Endou exhibited a demonic ability for research that was unthinkable given her typical demeanor. She looked up the reason Shino was living alone—an incident that had occurred in a distant prefecture five years ago, the details of which could barely be found on the Net anymore—and revealed it to the entire school. None of the students talked to her anymore, and even the teachers avoided looking at her.
Everything went back to the way it was in middle school.
But Shino was fine with that.
It was her weakness, her desire for friends, that had clouded her judgment. She was the only one who could save herself. She had to get stronger on her own, heal the scars of the past on her own. She didn’t need friends for that. Enemies were better. Enemies for her to fight. Everything around her was an enemy.
Shino held a deep breath and stared Endou in the eyes.
There was a dangerous glint in those narrowed slits. Endou’s smile vanished for good.
She growled, “What? Get going.”
“No.”
“…Huh?”
“No. I’m not giving you money,” Shino said, eyes locked.
Firm refusal would only bring more hostility and harassment. But Shino certainly wasn’t going to give in to their demands, and she didn’t want to pretend to go along with it and run off, either. She hated the idea of exposing her own weakness, not to Endou, but to herself. She’d lived the last five years wanting to be stronger. If she crumbled now, that effort would have gone to waste.
“What…? You think this is funny?”
Endou took a step forward, her right eyelid twitching. The other two quickly circled around Shino’s back and leaned in close.
“I’m leaving now. Get out of the way,” Shino said q
uietly. She knew that no matter how menacing an air they might affect, Endou’s trio didn’t have the guts to turn that into action. They were relatively good girls when they went back home. After the last incident that involved the police, they’d learned their lesson about that.
But.
Endou knew Shino’s weakness—the sore point that would bleed if prodded.
Her brightly colored lips twisted into a mocking smile. Endou held up her fist and pointed it at the bridge of Shino’s glasses. The index and middle fingers extended outward into the universal child’s symbol of a gun, a harmless caricature.
But that gesture was all it took to cast a chill over Shino’s entire body.
Her legs gradually lost strength. Her sense of balance abandoned her. The color drained from the alleyway. She couldn’t take her eyes off the glittering fingernails trained directly on her face. As her heart rate rose, so did a high-pitched whine in her ears…
“Bang!” Endou shouted. A pitiful shriek squeaked out of Shino’s throat. Her body trembled uncontrollably.
“Ka-hah…Listen, Asada”—Endou chuckled, fingers still held in position—“my big brother has a couple of model guns. Maybe I’ll bring them to school sometime. You like pistols, don’t you?”
“…”
Her tongue wouldn’t move. It was shrunken and useless inside her desiccated mouth.
Shino shook her head, trembling. If she saw an actual model gun in class, she might pass out on the spot. Just imagining the picture made her stomach churn. She doubled over.
“Don’t start puking, Asada!” said a pleased voice from behind her.
“That time you barfed and passed out in history class was a real headache to clean up.”
“Then again, it’s nothing you don’t see around here with old drunk guys.”
High-pitched giggling.
She wanted to get away. To run and never look back. But she couldn’t do that. The two opposing voices in her head ranted on.
“Look, just give me what you have on you and I’ll cut you some slack. You don’t look too good, after all.”
Endou reached out for the bag in Shino’s hand, but she couldn’t resist. The more she told herself not to think about it, not to remember, the more the black glimmer came back on the movie screen of her memory. The feeling of that heavy, slick metal. The pungent smell of gunpowder tickling her nose.
Somewhere behind them, a voice shouted.
“This way, Officer! Hurry!”
It belonged to a young man.
Endou’s hand instantly left her bag. The three bullies burst off running toward the exit and melted into the crowd milling through the arcade.
Shino’s strength truly left her now, and she fell to her knees. Her focus was fixed entirely on controlling her breathing and preventing the onset of a panic attack. Eventually the sounds of the bustling shoppers and the wafting smell of grilled chicken outside the supermarket returned to her senses. The nightmare flashback was fading.
She must have sat there for most of a minute. Eventually the voice returned, hesitant.
“Um…are you all right, Asada?”
Shino took one deep breath and put some strength into her wilted legs to stand. She turned and straightened her glasses to see a short, skinny boy.
He wore jeans and a nylon parka, with a dark green daypack on his shoulder. His rounded face had a black baseball cap on top. In his personal clothes, he simply looked like a middle schooler. Only the dark, sunken bags around his eyes belied his youthful appearance.
Shino knew this boy’s name. He was the only person in this city she could trust, the only person who wasn’t an enemy, and a good battle comrade in her other world.
Sensing that her palpitations were finally under control, Shino gave him a weak smile.
“…I’m all right. Thank you, Shinkawa. Where’s the officer?”
She looked around him, but the dim alleyway was still empty, and it didn’t seem like anyone was about to show up.
Kyouji Shinkawa scratched the back of his cap and grinned.
“That was a bluff. They do that all the time in TV shows and manga, right? I always wanted to try it—I’m glad it worked.”
“…”
Shino shook her head in disbelief.
“…I can’t believe you thought to pull off a stunt like that on the spot. Why are you here?”
“Oh, I was just over at the game arcade. I left out of the back entrance, and…”
He turned around and pointed. There was indeed a small gray door set in the middle of the stained concrete wall.
“I saw them surrounding you. Almost called the cops for real, but then I had that idea instead…”
“No, you did great. Thanks.”
She smiled again, and for a moment Kyouji’s face crumpled into a grin before returning to a worried expression.
“Um, does this…happen a lot? I mean, I know it’s not technically my business…but maybe you should inform the school…”
“That’s not going to be any help. Don’t worry, if it actually escalates higher than it is now, I’ll go straight to the police. Besides, don’t fret about me…What about you?”
“Oh…I’m fine. I’m not going to see them anymore,” the slender boy said, his smile tinged with self-deprecation.
Kyouji Shinkawa had been Shino’s classmate until summer vacation. He hadn’t been to school since the start of the semester.
From what the rumors said, Kyouji had undergone severe hazing at the hands of the upperclassmen in his soccer club. His small size and his wealthy family’s clinic made him the perfect target. Though they hadn’t been as carelessly blatant about it as Endou’s group, they’d apparently sucked him dry of a preposterous sum of money through meals and other entertainment. But Kyouji had never told her the truth directly.
They’d first met at the local library back in June.
Shino had been looking through a large comparison graph in a book titled Firearms of the World. At the time, she’d gotten to the point where looking at photos of guns didn’t cause her to have panic attacks. But when she got to the page with The Gun on it, she could only look at it for ten seconds before slamming the book shut. At that exact moment, someone spoke up behind her back.
“Do you like guns?”
It was several moments before she realized he was a member of her class.
Shino was about to instantly and firmly declare that it wasn’t true—in fact, it was just the opposite—but then he would wonder why she was looking through such a book, and she didn’t think she could come up with a logical answer for that question. So, her response was ambiguous.
These days, Kyouji knew that Shino suffered from a terrible phobia of guns. But at the time, he misconstrued her answer and excitedly sat down next to her.
He pointed out the various guns on the graph and dropped pieces of knowledge on each of them. Shino let him speak, trying to hide her alarm, but eventually he reached the topic of another world he visited.
She knew that full-dive game machines had come to market a few years ago, and had even heard the term VRMMO before. But Shino had no familiarity with video games as a child, and assumed that the world of swords and sorcery were best left to fantasy novels.
But the virtual world that Kyouji described to her on their first meeting did not contain any swords or magic spells. It had guns.
This world’s name was Gun Gale Online. It was a brutal wasteland in which players slaughtered one another with incredibly detailed models of actual guns.
Shino cut him off and asked in a quiet voice, “Does this game have a gun called…?”
The boy blinked in surprise, then nodded as if the answer should have been obvious.
She wondered to herself if she might be able to face The Gun again in the virtual world. Another chance to come across, fight against, and perhaps finally get past the black gun that had left deep, permanent scars on her heart five years ago, at the age of eleven…
Shino clen
ched hands cold with sweat and asked Kyouji another question, her throat ragged. How much did she need to play this game?
That was half a year ago.
The girl named Sinon who existed within Shino was now a ruthless sniper who terrorized the wastes of GGO. Sadly, she had not yet encountered a foe who wielded The Gun. And because of that, her question remained. Was she, Shino Asada—not Sinon—truly any stronger in the real world…?
The answer was still beyond her grasp.
“…You want to get something to drink? I’ll buy,” Kyouji asked.
Shino was pulled back to reality. She looked up to see that what little light made it into the narrow alley was starting to redden.
“…Really?” She smiled and Kyouji nodded happily.
“Tell me more about that huge fight you had. There’s a quiet little café through the back street here.”
A few minutes later, seated in the back of the café with a cup of fragrant milk tea in her hands, Shino finally felt relaxed. Endou’s gang would be after her again soon, but she could worry about that when the time came.
“I heard about your big battle the other day. Seems you were quite the hero.”
She looked up and saw the skinny boy poking at the scoop of vanilla ice cream in his iced coffee with a spoon and staring at her.
“…It’s not true. The entire operation was a failure. We lost four out of our six squadron members. Given that we were the ones waiting in ambush, that’s hardly what you’d call a victory.”
Imagining a real gun while in reality was more than enough to trigger a panic attack for Shino, but thanks to the virtual rehabilitation program that was GGO, discussing the game in real life gave her enough stability to remain calm.
“Still, it was amazing. Apparently Behemoth has never died in a group battle like that before.”