Phantom Bullet 2

  At the same time, Death Gun removed his empty left hand from his cloak and lifted it slowly, ponderously. Two fingers touched his hooded forehead. Though she hadn’t noticed it before, there was a three-layered, pale blue circle in the air behind Death Gun’s head with a blinking red [•REC] in the middle—the stream camera. Countless viewers within and without GGO were watching footage of Death Gun in the midst of his triumphant cross gesture, with Sinon collapsed miserably on the ground in front of him.

  His bony hand, clad in black leather, crossed his breast to the left shoulder. Meanwhile, Sinon had the grip of the MP7 in her palm at last.

  The guns in GGO had safeties, of course, but nearly all players left them off in battle, prioritizing the increased quickness to fire over the infinitesimal chance of firing accidents. Sinon was one of them. She just had to aim and pull the trigger. She had time. She would make time.

  Death Gun finished his cross, stuck his right hand into his cloak, and began removing it just as quickly. Sinon did her best to raise the MP7 with her numbed hand. She nearly fumbled it several times, but recovered desperately in each case. The ultrasmall, three-pound SMG was impossibly heavy. But Death Gun would still need to cock the hammer before he fired. She would surprise him by firing at that moment…

  But the instant he removed his hand and she saw the automatic pistol, Sinon’s entire body turned to ice, gun hand included.

  Why? It was just an ordinary pistol. She’d been face-to-face with much bigger Desert Eagles and M500s in the past. She shouldn’t be intimidated by this one. She just had to grip the MP7, point it at the enemy, and pull the trigger.

  But before she could jolt her arm into motion again, Death Gun put his left hand against the slide, and she caught sight of the left face of the gun. In particular, she saw the all-metal grip with vertical serrations, and the little logo in the middle.

  A star inside a circle.

  A black star.

  The Black Star. Type 54. The Gun.

  Why…? Why now, why here, why that gun?

  The SMG that was her final hope slipped out of her powerless hands. She didn’t even register the sound of it hitting the ground.

  The hammer cocked with a click. His left hand enveloped the grip, and he took aim at Sinon with the sideways Weaver stance. Suddenly, the darkness under the hood of the cloak twisted eerily. It wavered and dripped like a viscous liquid, revealing two eyes.

  Bloodshot whites. Small black irises. Dilated pupils that looked like deep holes.

  It was him. The man who had barged into the post office at that little northern town five years ago with a Type 54 and tried to shoot Shino’s mother. Little Shino had leaped onto the gun in a mindless panic, wrested it away, and shot him with it—they were the eyes of that very man.

  He’s here. He was here, hiding in this world, waiting for his moment of vengeance.

  She had no more sensation in any part of her body, not just the right hand. The red sun and gray of the ruins was gone, leaving only two eyes in the darkness and the barrel of the gun.

  The sound of her heartbeat was huge in her ears. If she passed right out, the AmuSphere’s safety measures would automatically log her out, but her mind stayed intact, waiting for the moment he pulled the Black Star’s trigger. The trigger creaked. Just a fraction of an inch more, and the hammer would hit the firing pin, releasing the .30-caliber full metal jacket. It wouldn’t deliver numerical, game damage. It was a real bullet. It would pierce Shino’s heart, turn it off, and kill her.

  Just as she did to that man.

  This was fate. There would be no escape. He would have tracked her down and found her, even if she hadn’t chosen to play GGO. It would have happened one way or another. Everything was pointless. She shouldn’t have even bothered trying to cut herself free from her past.

  Amid that torrid whirlpool of resignation, there was one tiny feeling like a single grain of sand.

  She didn’t want to give up. She didn’t want this to be the end. She was finally about to understand the meaning of strength. The meaning of fighting. If she stayed with him and watched him go, one day, it would all click…

  The gunshot cut that line of thought short.

  She didn’t know where she’d been shot at first. Sinon closed her eyes, waiting for the moment her mind turned to nothing.

  But…

  It was the cloaked player who lurched forward. The eyes inside his hood vanished, returning to red glowing points. An orange damage effect was gleaming on his right shoulder. Someone had shot Death Gun. Before another thought could penetrate her mind, there was a second shot. This bullet grazed the left shoulder of the cloak from behind. Based on the impact of the sound, it was a very high-caliber gun. The cloaked man crouched and promptly ducked through the hole of the nearby building to hide.

  Sinon could still see Death Gun from her angle. He put the Black Star back in its holster and pulled the L115 down from his shoulder, exchanging the magazine—from the stun round to its deadly .338 Lapua rounds, she guessed. Even Sinon, as a sniper herself, had to admit that his movements were quick and precise as he pointed the lengthy rifle, looked through the scope, and fired without hesitation.

  The silenced shunk of his shot happened at the exact same moment that a third attack came from behind. But this wasn’t a gun. An object like a small gray can of juice rattled into the street between Sinon and Death Gun—a grenade. Death Gun withdrew further into the building.

  She shut her eyes tight. She’d take massive damage if a grenade went off this close to her. Still, that was better than being shot by the Black Star. In fact, dying normally was much preferable. She’d bow out of the tournament, then leave GGO and VRMMOs entirely, living quietly in the real world. Living in fear of when the man would track her down again…

  But once again, things did not play out as Sinon expected.

  The grenade that exploded half a second later was not the popular plasma type, or ordinary gunpowder or napalm—it was a smoke grenade that emitted harmless gas.

  “…!”

  Sinon held her breath as her entire vision was shrouded in white smoke.

  If she was going to escape, this would be her final chance, but the stun effect hadn’t worn off yet. If she could pull the stun dart out of her arm, she’d regain mobility at once, but she couldn’t even get her right arm to move around that far. More important, she no longer had the spirit to stand.

  She lay there on the ground, mind essentially nonfunctioning, her eyes wide open—when someone grabbed her left arm.

  She was dragged upward. Whoever it was dropped the large, unfamiliar gun and pressed a hand to Sinon’s back. Before she had time to topple over, she and the Hecate on her shoulder rose up into a pair of arms.

  After that, she felt acceleration nearly crush her body. The wind whipped in her ears. Eventually the surrounding smoke thinned out, and as her vision returned, she caught sight of the player who was running with her in his arms.

  Pure white skin. Eyes black as obsidian. Long hair trailing in the wind.

  Kiri…to.

  She couldn’t form the sounds. His girlish face was too beautiful, and the expression on his features too serious—no, desperate—for her to speak. She could tell that he was giving the commands to his avatar so fiercely and intently that his nervous system was practically charring itself.

  It made sense. Even if Kirito was a STR-first player with only a lightsword and handgun for equipment, adding Sinon and the Hecate had to put him just at his weight-carrying limit. The fact that he could run this fast in those circumstances was nothing sort of miraculous. And on second examination, he wasn’t unharmed. There were fresh damage splashes on his right shoulder and left arm. The brightness and volume of light said that the cause was very high-caliber bullets. As an American VRMMO, GGO was programmed with a fairly low pain-absorption level, so while serious wounds like this wouldn’t actually hurt, there would be significant numbness.

  It’s okay…Put me down and go.
/>
  But she couldn’t say it aloud. Her entire body, her whole mind, was numb.

  So when the high-caliber round came screaming just past her face from behind, Sinon did no more than blink. In its slowed-down state, her mind processed the details. She didn’t hear a gunshot, which meant the bullet came from Death Gun’s L115. It was way too close and precise a shot to have passed through the smoke, which meant he was pursuing them. She didn’t know what kind of build Death Gun had, but he had to be at least as fast as Kirito. He’d catch them eventually.

  Kirito had to understand that as well. But the lightswordsman never slowed down or made a move to drop Sinon. He just gritted his teeth, panted heavily, and kept sprinting.

  They circled around the east side of the stadium, trying to pass into the north half of the ruins. Just as on the south side, a main street went straight north. There were more abandoned cars and buses here, but not enough for them to stay out of sight until they left the city. Where was Kirito taking her…?

  That question was answered by a half-busted neon sign that appeared on the side of the road.

  The blinking sign, barely visible in the evening light, advertised RENT-A-BUGGY & HORSE. It was an unmanned rental vehicle business, just like the one in Glocken. Nearly all of the three-wheeled buggies in the parking lot were destroyed, but there was one that seemed like it might still be functional.

  But that wasn’t the only vehicle. As the sign advertised, next to the buggies were several large, four-legged animals—horses. But these were not living creatures. They were robot horses whose metal frame and gearworks were exposed to the air. Once again, there was one that might be functional.

  Kirito raced into the parking lot and waffled for just a second between the three-wheeled buggy and the robot horse. Through her stiffened jaw, Sinon was just able to grunt, “No…horse. It moves fast, but…too difficult to ride.”

  Very few people could master the manual-shift buggy, either, but the robot horses were even harder. It was more of a player skill issue than a statistical numbers game, so lots of tedious practice was necessary to master it. With less than a single year in the books for GGO, no player had had enough time to dedicate to learning such a task yet.

  Somehow, her advice didn’t make up Kirito’s mind for him, but he eventually gave in and trotted over to the surviving buggy. He touched the start-up panel and turned on the engine, put Sinon on the rear step and hopped into the seat, kicking the accelerator on. The thick rear wheels screeched, and the buggy turned hard, sending up a cloud of smoke.

  Once he had the vehicle pointed north with the street, Kirito shut off the machine for a second and shouted, “Sinon, can you blow up that horse with your rifle?”

  “Huh…?”

  As movement finally started to return to her right arm, she pulled out the stun round at last. Only when she turned back to look at the robot horse did she understand. Kirito didn’t want Death Gun chasing after them with it. That seemed quite unlikely to her, but she nodded anyway.

  “F-fine, I’ll try…”

  Her arms were still trembling as she tried to hoist the Hecate back up. She pointed the gun toward the cold, gleaming horse barely twenty yards away. That was close enough that her skill level would automatically hit the target, even without looking through the scope. She put her finger on the trigger to bring up a pale green bullet circle, then focused it tight on the horse’s flank. She squeezed…

  Click.

  Her eyes went wide. It didn’t give.

  She couldn’t pull the trigger. She looked down at the side of her trusty gun to make sure she hadn’t somehow turned on the safety, but that wasn’t the case. She squeezed again. But the sensation was as tough as if the trigger was welded into place.

  “Huh…? Why…?”

  Click. Click. It was still the same. She looked down at her finger and saw something she never expected: her finger wasn’t even touching the trigger. Between her pale fingertip and the smooth steel was empty space a fraction of an inch wide. No matter how hard she squeezed, she couldn’t close the gap…

  “I can’t…pull it… What the…? I can’t pull the trigger!” she wailed in a little squeak. It wasn’t the voice of Sinon, the sniper with ice in her veins, but the whimpering of Shino Asada in the real world.

  Just then, a black figure came into view through the haze of smoke around the east end of the stadium.

  It wore a tattered cloak that flapped and kicked violently in the wind. A massive rifle in the right hand. It was Death Gun—or the man who had always tormented her, taking Death Gun’s form.

  Her vision went dark. Her legs went limp. Her body was cold.

  No…no, it’s the onset of one of my spasms. I’ve never had one while I’m here, while I’m Sinon. And I was even fine on my very first dive, when they shoved a pistol into my hand…

  “Sinon! Hang on!” came a loud voice, and a hand gripped her arm hard. She clutched Kirito’s torso as he guided her. A moment later, the ancient fossil-fuel engine roared. The front lurched up into a wheelie, and the buggy shot forward onto the road.

  Each time Kirito stomped on the shift pedal, the corresponding lurch in acceleration threatened to pull Sinon off the vehicle. She just barely kept her wits from surrendering to terror and clung to the skinny body with all she had. Only the faint bit of body heat she felt from him kept the encroaching darkness from swallowing her entirely.

  Now in top gear, the buggy’s screech echoed off the walls of the ruins as it raced up the main street.

  Are we going…to escape?

  She didn’t have the courage to look around and see. It was at this point that she realized her whole body was shaking.

  Sinon moved her shaking fingers and pushed the Hecate back up onto her shoulder just before Kirito shouted nervously, “Crap, not yet! Stay alert!”

  She turned around out of habit to see the robot horse she’d failed to destroy leaping out of the now-distant parking lot. Her eyes went wide with disbelief, but she didn’t need to check who was riding it.

  The rider’s cloak billowed out like the black wings of an ominous raven. The L115 was slung over his back, and his hands clutched the wire reins. The way he stood up in the saddle and bucked with the movement of the horse was that of an experienced rider. The heavy rumbling of its hooves as it galloped churned up the innermost part of her brain.

  “But…how…?”

  He shouldn’t be able to ride it. She’d heard that even experience with real horses didn’t prepare one to ride these mechanical horses. But the black knight smoothly steered around the husks of cars in the street, leaping over one on occasion, pursuing the buggy at the same pace.

  He no longer looked like a player to her, but an incarnation of the fear that poured out of her. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t help but focus on the face of the rider over two hundred yards behind them. It was too far a distance to make it out on sight, but even still, Sinon saw two eyes and a large, leering mouth in the darkness of the hood.

  “He’s going to catch us… Go faster…faster…faster!” Sinon shouted shrilly, nearly a shriek.

  Kirito responded by gunning the gas even harder. But just as he did, one of the rear wheels went over a piece of debris and lost its grip, causing the buggy to slide to the right.

  Sinon screamed and leaned left, trying to regain her balance. If the buggy spun out here, Death Gun would be upon them in barely ten seconds. Kirito desperately tried to control the lurching vehicle, swearing at it with all he had.

  After several seconds of high-pitched tire squealing and snaking back and forth, Kirito had it under control and speeding up again. But in that short delay, Death Gun closed much of the distance.

  More and more obstacles appeared on the highway that split the city, taunting them and forcing the buggy to corner to the best of its ability. On top of that, small piles of sand formed here and there on the road, making it harder for the wheels to maintain their grip. It swayed to the sides with each little dune,
causing Sinon’s heart to skip a beat each time.

  These conditions applied to their pursuer as well, but the obstacle course was more of a handicap for the buggy than the four-legged mount, and Death Gun smoothly piloted it around the broken vehicles, gaining ground all the way. On top of that, he had one absolute advantage.

  Both the three-wheel buggy and robot horse were meant to seat two. One of them was carrying two people, while the other had a single rider. The buggy’s acceleration was clearly slower than the horse’s.

  Each time it passed behind cover and showed up again, the rider’s silhouette grew steadily larger. Though it was much too far away to reach her, Sinon felt the hissing, grating breath against the back of her neck.

  Just when he closed the gap to about a hundred yards, Death Gun took his right hand off the reins and pointed it at them. In his grip was the black handgun: the Type 54 Black Star.

  Sinon stared at the gun, her body frozen, unable to hide on the back step of the buggy. Her teeth trembled and chattered irregularly. Without a sound, a red bullet line touched her right cheek. Sinon’s neck craned to the left on its own, without her willing it to move.

  The next moment, the barrel of the gun flashed orange like a demon opening its jaws…

  Clang! The deadly bullet passed about four inches to the right of Sinon’s cheek with a high-pitched roar.

  Even after the bullet raced in front of the buggy and hit a wrecked, old car in front of them, tiny little particles of light hung in the air and touched her cheek. She felt a sharp, cold pain, as if she’d just touched dry ice to the spot.

  “Aaaah!!” she screamed, turning away from the grim reaper behind her and burying her face in Kirito’s back. A second bullet hit the rear fender of the buggy, sending a hard shock through her legs.

  “Oh no, oh no…help…help me…”

  She shrank up like a baby, whimpering. The gunfire stopped, but the hoofbeats grew steadily louder as Death Gun switched to a new strategy that would get him a better shot.