Phantom Bullet 2

  Copyright

  SWORD ART ONLINE, Volume 6: Phantom Bullet

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Stephen Paul

  Cover art by abec

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  SWORD ART ONLINE

  ©REKI KAWAHARA 2010

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2010 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2015 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: June 2017

  Originally published in paperback in December 2015 by Yen On.

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-56091-7

  E3-20170525-JV-PC

  7

  “Big Brother!”

  That a cheerful smile from my beloved sister—at a lunch table on a beautiful Sunday afternoon—would cause me to sense impending disaster should tell you just how guilty I felt about my present actions.

  I stopped my fork just before the cherry tomato reached my mouth. “Wh-what’s up, Sugu?” I asked, only to find the premonition come to fruition when my sister—nay, cousin—Suguha Kirigaya picked up something from the seat next to me.

  “Listen, I found this article on the Net this morning.”

  She shoved a full-sized A4 printout into my face. It was a hard copy of the news column from the nation’s biggest VRMMO gaming website, MMO Tomorrow, typically abbreviated to M-Tomo.

  The bold headline proclaimed: THIRTY FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR 3RD BULLET OF BULLETS BATTLE-ROYALE FINAL IN GUN GALE ONLINE.

  After a short lead, the article ran the list of names. Right beneath Suguha’s neatly clipped index nail, it said “F Block, 1st Place: Kirito (Debut).” I tried an empty bluff.

  “W-well, well, funny that someone else is using a similar name.”

  “Similar? It’s the exact same name.”

  Under Suguha’s trimmed bangs was a grinning face with forthright, crisp features, the very image of a healthy, athletic girl. In real life, she was a talented kendo practitioner, who helped her team reach both the high school nationals, known as the Inter-High, and the Kendo association tournament nationals at the high school level, striving for what was known as the Gyokuryuki prize—all in just her first year of high school. In comparison, my spindly, scrawny figure was no match for her physical stamina. In the virtual world of ALfheim Online, where skill reigned supreme, she was the fairy warrior Leafa, whose graceful, hardy sword occasionally overpowered my own self-taught style.

  So I’d have to give up and apologize immediately if I ever got into a fight with Suguha in real life or VR, but fortunately for me, that never had to cross my mind. In the year since I’d come back to the real world, we were closer than we were before we’d grown apart. Even my dad, who temporarily returned during summer vacation from his transfer to America, was jealous of us.

  So for lunch today—Sunday, December 14, 2025—with my mother stuck in the editor’s office, Suguha and I went out shopping for groceries so we could fix poached egg Caesar salad and seafood pilaf. We sat across from each other at the table to eat our lunch in blissful peace—until the article entered the picture.

  “Uh…yeah. So it is,” I noted, tearing my eyes away from the printed “Kirito” and tossing the tomato into my mouth. As I chewed, I mumbled, “B-but it’s not such an uncommon name. I mean, in my case, it’s just an abbreviation of my real name, Kazuto Kirigaya. I bet this Kirito in GGO has a name like, um…Tougorou…Kirigamine. Yeah.”

  The baldfaced lie to my trusting sister prickled at my heart. After all, the Kirito that Suguha was singling out was 100 percent me, without a doubt.

  The reason I had to hide that fact was that in order to enter the Bullet of Bullets tournament in the first-person shooter MMO Gun Gale Online, I had to convert my Kirito avatar from its home world of ALO into the world of GGO.

  Character conversion was a feature made possible by the Seed platform, the engine on which all VRMMOs ran, which allowed a player to move a character they’d built up in one game to another game while maintaining the same level of strength—a system that was unthinkable just a few short years ago.

  There were limitations, of course. The biggest one was that only the character itself transferred, not any items or money. Because of that, conversion was useful only for permanent transfers, not for the tourist desire to check out a different game for a week or two.

  I knew that if I told her I was leaving ALO for a different game, Suguha would be terribly shocked; she loved the fairy realm with all her heart. Not to mention that I very much did not want to explain the reason that I had had to convert Kirito to GGO. The seedy underbelly of the VRMMO world was deeply involved with the move.

  Seijirou Kikuoka, a government official, had asked me to investigate something in GGO. He was once a member of the government’s SAO Incident Team, and was currently situated in the “Virtual Division”—the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Virtual Network Management Division.

  The previous Sunday, Kikuoka summoned me for a meeting and described a very odd event that had happened.

  In the main city of GGO, an avatar shot at another avatar, claiming the work of some kind of “judgment.” It would be unremarkable, a simple stunt, if that was all that happened. But the two players whose figures were shot by the avatar in question both died of heart attacks at the very moment they were shot in the game.

  It was just a coincidence—I was 90 percent sure of that.

  But that last 10 percent possibility in my mind was something I just couldn’t shake. So I agreed to Kikuoka’s bothersome, dangerous request: that I log in to the world of GGO and make contact with the mysterious shooter myself.

  I didn’t have the time to build up a new character from scratch, so I converted Kirito from ALO and entered the BoB preliminary competition yesterday in an attempt to catch the shooter’s eye. While I struggled mightily with learning to adapt to the unfamiliar gun battles, the good fortune of finding an extremely helpful player right off the bat got me through the preliminary round somehow—and I even made first contact with the gunman I believed to be my target.

  Whether the man calling himself Death Gun truly had the power to kill players from within the game was unknown still.

  But one thing became very clear. There was a completely unexpected connection that tied me and Death Gun together:

  Just like me, Death Gun was a survivor of Sword Art Online, the game of death. And beyond that, we had cros
sed swords in a battle for our lives—

  “Big Brother, you look scary.”

  My body jolted with surprise. My eyes focused on a single point again to see Suguha’s face, her eyes full of concern. She put the hard copy down on the table, clasped her hands together, and stared at me.

  “Um, listen…I’ll be honest. I already know that you converted Kirito from ALO to GGO,” she admitted out of the blue. My eyes bulged. There was a grown-up, understanding smile on my younger sister’s lips. “Do you really think I wouldn’t notice that you were gone from my friends list?”

  “B-but…I was going to convert back once this weekend was over…and people don’t check their list every day…”

  “I don’t have to look to be able to feel it,” she stated confidently. There was a strange light in her big eyes. Oddly enough, I was struck by her femininity in that moment. I looked away with the shyness of that realization and the guilt at trying to hide my conversion.

  Suguha said softly, “I noticed that ‘Kirito’ was gone last night, and logged out so I could barge right into your room. But you wouldn’t leave ALO without telling me for no good reason. I realized there must have been a reason, so I contacted Asuna.”

  “Oh…great,” I muttered, wincing.

  I had only related my secret conversion from ALO to GGO to Asuna Yuuki and our “daughter,” the AI named Yui. That was because Yui had limited access to the game’s system and would know if I disappeared from ALO for two measly seconds, let alone two days. There was no hiding it.

  Yui didn’t like it when I kept things from Asuna. She might have accepted it if I explained that I had a very good reason for it, but I certainly couldn’t cope with the thought of placing undue stress on Yui’s core programming.

  So I told Asuna and Yui—and only them—that I was leaving for GGO at Seijirou Kikuoka’s request, explaining that it was “to investigate the Seed Nexus.” I just couldn’t tell them what that investigation actually entailed: contact with Death Gun, and the connection between his in-game shootings and two real-life deaths…

  It was all preposterous, but its absurdity was eerie enough to eat away at me. That was the biggest reason that I hadn’t told Suguha or my other friends about the conversion.

  I looked down and didn’t explain any further. I heard the sound of a chair scraping. Soft footsteps. Then hands on my shoulders.

  “…Big Brother,” Suguha whispered, leaning onto my back, “Asuna told me, ‘He’s going to go on a little rampage in GGO like he always does, and then he’ll be back.’ But I think she was secretly worried about it. I am, too. I mean…when you came back so late yesterday, you had this terrible look on your face.”

  “Oh…I did?”

  Suguha’s short hair brushed my neck. She breathed out directly beside my ear.

  “You’re not…doing anything dangerous, are you? I don’t want you to wind up someplace far away again…”

  “…I won’t,” I said, loud and clear this time. I put my hand on the one pressing my left shoulder. “I promise. When GGO’s tournament ends tonight, I’ll come back. Back to ALO…and to this home.”

  “…Good.”

  I felt her nod, but Suguha’s weight stayed on me for a while.

  For the two years I was trapped in SAO, my sister had been stricken with terrible grief. And now I was putting her through the possibility of something similar happening. It was unconscionable.

  I had the option of messaging Seijirou Kikuoka and canceling the whole operation. But after having been through yesterday’s prelims, two reasons made that choice very difficult now.

  For one, I promised a rematch to Sinon, the sniper with the preposterously huge rifle who kindly taught me all about the game while I let her assume that I was a female player.

  For another, there was a score to be settled between me and Death Gun.

  I had to face the gray-cloaked man again and be sure. I needed to know his former name within the game—and those of his two comrades who I killed with my own sword. That was my primary responsibility, after coming back to the real world…

  I patted the hand on my shoulder and reassured Suguha: “Don’t worry, I’ll be back. Now let’s eat, before this food gets cold.”

  “…Okay.”

  Her voice was a little more forceful than before, and she squeezed my shoulder tight for a moment before letting go. When she trotted back around the table to her chair to sit down, Suguha’s face was wearing its usual energetic smile. She shoved a huge spoonful of pilaf into her mouth and chewed for a moment, twiddling the spoon.

  “By the way, Big Brother…”

  “Hmm?”

  “From what Asuna tells me, the job you’re doing this time is going to pay you really well.”

  “Urk.”

  In the back of my brain, the image of the 300,000 yen Kikuoka promised me, and the cutting-edge PC it could build, sprang to life, complete with an old-fashioned cash register sound effect. I told myself that a slightly smaller hard drive wouldn’t be the worst compromise for Suguha’s cooperation, and thumped my chest clear.

  “Y-yep! A-and I’ll buy you whatever you want with it.”

  “Yay! Well, you see, there’s this nanocarbon kendo shinai I’ve always wanted…”

  …Maybe I’d have to make do with less RAM, as well.

  I left the house on my crappy old motorcycle during at three PM, to avoid rush hour traffic. Making my way east along the Kawagoe Highway, I passed through Ikebukuro and headed down Kasuga Street for the center of the city. I turned south at Hongo to go from Bunkyo Ward to Chiyoda Ward. In minutes, the general hospital that was my destination appeared ahead.

  I was here only yesterday, but my memories of that trip seemed so distant now.

  The reason was obvious. When I slipped into my bed last night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there in the darkness, eyes wide open, thinking about the past. Reliving the memories that had been dormant in my mind so long—the destruction of the PK guild in SAO known as Laughing Coffin.

  Just before four in the morning, I gave up on sleep and put my AmuSphere on to dive into a local VR space. I called up my “daughter” Yui from her PC, which was hooked up via LAN, so we could have a chat that would eventually get me to fall asleep. It worked, but I never hit truly deep sleep, and the dreams I found instead were long.

  Fortunately, I didn’t remember most of them, though there was a voice that had been continually ringing in my ears from the moment I woke up until now.

  Are you Kirito?

  It was what the player I took to be Death Gun whispered to me in the midst of the BoB preliminaries yesterday. And it was also a question from a member of Laughing Coffin, two comrades of which I killed with my own sword. Three, if you included the man who was Asuna’s sworn guard.

  Is it you? Are you the Kirito who killed us?

  Whether it was in the BoB waiting hall or in my dreams, my only answer could be “yes.”

  At today’s final, which began at eight, I was sure I would come face-to-face with that ghost of a man again. If he asked me the same thing, I had to respond in the affirmative. But at this point in time, I didn’t have the confidence to do that yet.

  “If I’d known this would happen…”

  …I wouldn’t have converted Kirito from ALO. I’d have started a brand-new GGO character from scratch.

  I grimaced at my own stubbornness to accept what had happened to me as I stopped the bike and headed for the inpatient lobby.

  I made sure to message before I left the house, so Nurse Aki was already set up in the same room as the previous day. Her hair was adorned with the same braids, but there was a pair of rimless glasses on her nose this time. She was sitting on the chair next to the bed, long legs folded as she read an anachronistic old paper book. When I opened the door, she looked up and shut the book quickly with a smile.

  “You’re here early.”

  “I’m sorry to put you through this chore again today, Miss Aki,” I said, bowing. The clo
ck on the wall said it wasn’t even four yet. That meant I had over four hours until the BoB started, but it would be foolish to wait until the last second and rush to the event in a panic again. It would be a much better use of my time to log in early and get some shooting practice in.

  As I hung up my jacket on a hanger, I told Nurse Aki, “My event doesn’t start until eight, so you don’t need to monitor my heart signals until then.”

  The nurse, dressed in her white uniform, shrugged. “It’s fine, I’m on the graveyard overtime shift tonight. I’ll be here as long as needed.”

  “Uh…i-in that case, I feel even worse…”

  “Oh? Well, if I get sleepy, I might just borrow your bed here,” she remarked with a wink. As a VRMMO addict with zero real-life skills, all I could do was mumble and look away. She laughed at that. She’d seen what a pushover I was during my post-SAO physical therapy. There was no winning against her.

  I hid my embarrassment by plopping down on the bed and looking at the imposing monitoring equipment and the silver, double-ringed AmuSphere headgear lying on the pillow.

  The unit Kikuoka prepared for me was still brand-new; the aluminum polish and the artificial leather interior were spotless. Compared to the crude helmet that was the NerveGear, the AmuSphere was much more refined and resembled a fashion accessory more than a piece of electronics.

  In keeping with its promise of “absolute safety,” it didn’t even look like a machine capable of the lethal microwaves that the NerveGear produced. It was designed to send only the faintest possible signals.

  So common sense said that it wasn’t at all necessary to be strapped to a heart-monitoring device in a hospital with electrodes on my chest and a nurse on watch around the clock. No matter what anyone tried to do, the chances of anyone being able to harm me through this AmuSphere were zero. Nil.

  But.

  Zexceed and Usujio Tarako, two of the best GGO players around, were dead.

  And I knew that Death Gun, the man who fired virtual bullets at their avatars, was once a red player in SAO—someone who knowingly, intentionally, killed other players.

  What if there was still some unknown, dangerous effect of full-dive technology?