Phantom Bullet 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “—get that top prize.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “I see…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Maybe…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Now, Shino had finally picked up the Procyon again.

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

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

  Who?

  It was…his.

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

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

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

  Who was screaming?

  It was…me.

  Shino didn’t know her father’s face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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