Phantom Bullet 2

  …Sorry, Sinon mentally whispered to the rare, powerful gun—not its owner—and pulled the bolt handle again. The next bullet slotted in with a reassuring clank, but without her scope, Sinon couldn’t pull off any more long-distance sniping.

  “It’s up to you now, Kirito,” she murmured to the racing lightswordsman’s back.

  There were less than two hundred meters between Kirito and Death Gun now. Even if he activated the Optical Camo, escape was impossible in this terrain. His footprints would remain, plainly visible.

  The cloaked player slowly emerged from under the cactus and stood up, apparently not in any hurry. The lengthy barrel of his L115 still hung from his hand. He began to slide forward. Was he going to use it as a club? Kirito had cut a Hecate bullet in two with his lightsword; the man wouldn’t last a second.

  The distance between them closed rapidly. Kirito charged forward, kicking up huge waves of sand. Death Gun scraped out footprints, practically dragging his feet. Thanks to her Eyesight skill, Sinon could see them both clearly, even without her scope.

  Kirito drew the sword up over his shoulder as he ran, holding his free hand out in front of him. It was the stance for the astonishingly powerful thrust attack that she’d seen him do several times during the preliminary tournament.

  Meanwhile, Death Gun moved the gleaming barrel to his left hand, brushing the mouth of the gun with his right. They would intersect in five seconds.

  Sinon could see a live camera behind each player. None of the people watching the stream in GGO’s pubs or the outside world had any idea about Death Gun’s crimes or Kirito’s mission, but they had to be holding their breaths nonetheless. Sinon had forgotten everything in the world but what she was seeing with wide eyes.

  Kirito raced onward, stomping the desert in half during his charge. Death Gun held the barrel level with both hands. A sharp light glinted there.

  “Ah!!” Sinon gasped.

  Death Gun spread his arms wide. The barrel flew out of his left hand behind him, detached and spinning. And in his right hand was a narrow metal pole that he had removed from the barrel—the cleaning rod. Was that his final weapon? The rod was just a maintenance tool. It didn’t even have offensive value. You could whack someone with it and not take down a single pixel of HP…

  No…wait. That wasn’t a tool for cleaning out the barrel of his gun. The point of such an implement was supposed to be expanded with a little hole, but this was as sharp as a needle. A sword? But the base of the blade was barely a fraction of an inch across. Could he even do any damage with it? And more important, there were no metal blades in the world of GGO aside from combat knives.

  But the lightswordsman did not stop, thrusting his glowing energy blade before him. Even atop her rocky outpost, Sinon could hear the jet-engine roar of the sword. The deadly point of its blade plunged toward the chest under the cloak. It lunged, reached out—but did not connect. Death Gun bent over backward, his upper half entirely level, as if he knew exactly when and how Kirito was going to attack.

  All the force of Kirito’s thrust did nothing more than singe the air, vanishing harmlessly behind the target.

  After his grand attack was evaded, the lightswordsman’s body froze for an instant. He moved again just as quickly, trying to leap forward to his right, but Death Gun’s right hand, still tilted parallel to the ground, snaked forward like it had a mind of its own. The two-foot metal rod plunged forward…

  And sank deep into the black fatigues over his left shoulder.

  “…Kirito!!” Sinon screamed, as a crimson visual effect splattered into the darkness like blood.

  Just a second after pressing her phone to the payment pad to bring up the cashier sound, Asuna Yuuki was out of the taxi, shouting a hasty “Thanks!” over her shoulder

  Facing the roundabout was a large building entrance that still had some of its lights on, despite being nearly ten o’clock. The automatic doors were off, naturally, but there was a small glass door nearby for nighttime entrance. She ripped open the door and plunged through.

  Asune strode through the chill air of the lobby that smelled like disinfectant, and headed for the reception counter. Seijirou Kikuoka had already contacted the hospital, so when the nurse looked up, Asuna had the right message to deliver: “I’m Yuuki, meeting scheduled for Room 7025!”

  She pulled her student ID from her pocket and slapped it on the counter. As the nurse took it and compared the photo to the real thing, Asuna busied herself studying the floor plan on the back wall.

  “Asuna Yuuki. Here’s your visitor pass. Don’t forget to turn it in on your way out. You can reach the room via the elevator on the right…”

  “Got it. Thank you!”

  Asuna snatched the pass, bowed briefly and rushed off to the elevator, leaving the bewildered nurse behind. Kirito—Kazuto Kirigaya—was entered into the system as a routine checkup, not treatment or hospitalization, so she had to be wondering why Asuna was in such a hurry, but that wasn’t Asuna’s problem.

  There was a turnstyle gate before the elevator, much like the kind at a train station. She swiped her pass and pushed through as soon as the metal bar rose. Only once she’d hit the UP button and jumped through the open door did she take a short breather.

  Kazuto must have felt the same way a year earlier, when he was rushing to see Asuna after he’d freed her from the birdcage in ALO. He should be fine. Nothing had happened. She knew these things with her rational mind, but she couldn’t stop her heart from pushing her onward.

  Ding. Ding. With each floor passed, the elevator rang pleasantly. It was only a seven-floor ascent, but it was taking an eternity.

  “It’s all right, Mama,” a young voice echoed suddenly from the speaker of the cell phone she still clutched in her hands.

  It was Yui, her AI “daughter” with Kirito. Yui’s core program was contained in a desktop machine in Kazuto’s bedroom, and when needed, she could dive into ALO as a Navigation Pixie, or speak to them through the phone in real life. She couldn’t stay present all the time or she’d drain the battery, but she’d been connected since Asuna left Dicey Café.

  “Even the strongest foe can’t stop Papa. After all, he’s Papa.”

  “…Yes. You’re right,” she whispered back into the mic, practically kissing it. At last, it felt like her freezing-numb fingers were thawing, but the nerves hadn’t left her yet.

  Kirito had gone into GGO on Kikuoka’s request to investigate the mysterious “Death Gun.” Whoever was controlling his avatar was once a member of SAO’s killer guild, Laughing Coffin. And two people shot by Death Gun in the game had died in real life under mysterious circumstances.

  Something was happening—that much was clear. Kikuoka claimed that Kazuto was in no danger in middive, but even he did not fully believe that the two deaths were a mere coincidence.

  Ding. The elevator passed the sixth floor and gently slowed, coming to a stop on the seventh floor with another pleasant sound. As the door opened, Yui pointed out that he was fifty feet to the right, then after a left, another twenty-five feet. This time, Asuna ran at full speed through the empty halls.

  She noted the metal plates to the sides of each spaced-out sliding door along the walls. 7023…24…25! She pressed her pass to the plate, the indicator turned from red to green, and the door opened.

  It was a personal room coordinated in off-white. Right in the center was a density-adjusting gel bed of the kind that Asuna herself had once depended upon. The room’s partition curtains were drawn. Right in front was a menacing monitor. The various cords extending from the machine split apart here and there, ending in electrodes on the exposed chest of the boy lying on the bed. Around his head was a familiar silver crown: an AmuSphere.

  Kirito! she was about to shout, sucking in a huge lungful of the warm room air. But before she could let it out, someone else’s voice echoed off the walls.

  “…Kirigaya!”

  Asuna nearly fell face-forward. She craned her neck right, noticing a si
mple metal-frame chair to the far side of the bed, previously hidden by the monitoring equipment. Someone was sitting on the chair.

  She was wearing a white uniform and a nurse’s cap, and featured braided hair and fashionable glasses. It was the nurse. Now that she thought about it, Kikuoka had mentioned that someone was watching over Kazuto.

  But she couldn’t resist an unhappy grumble at the fact that his security was a young and very pretty nurse, who was leaning over Kazuto’s shirtless form on the bed. That only lasted a moment, however. When the nurse looked up to see Asuna’s entrance, her face was a mask of nerves.

  “Oh, are you Miss Yuuki? I heard you’d be coming—have a seat,” the nurse chattered huskily, getting up and motioning to the left side of the bed. Asuna hadn’t bothered to wait for the offer, already racing over and bowing briefly before she got a good look at Kazuto’s face.

  His eyes were closed, naturally. But he wasn’t sleeping or unconscious. All five of his senses were isolated from the real world by the AmuSphere and taken to a far-off, alien realm. Meanwhile, the device intercepted all of the signals from brain to body, so his face and limbs were utterly still. Yet the moment Asuna saw Kazuto’s face, she could tell that what was happening on the inside was far from peaceful tranquility.

  “What’s going on with Ki…Kazuto?!” Asuna asked, raising her head. The nurse, who had a name tag reading AKI, frowned and shook her head quickly.

  “Don’t worry, he’s not in any physical danger. But his pulse just shot up to 130 a moment ago…”

  “His pulse?” she murmured, and looked over at the heart monitor. The LCD panel featured a classic cardiogram graph of the kind you’d see in movies, and a readout that said 132 BPM. Right before Asuna’s eyes, the graph shot into sharp peak after peak.

  It was not abnormal at all for the heart rate to rise while playing a VRMMO. After all, a player faced with a huge, terrifying monster while in a full dive was bound to get nervous, sending the pulse racing. In a way, that was what the games were meant to do.

  But this was Kirito. The solo conqueror of Aincrad, the man who had risked death more than any other in a game chock-full of it. What circumstances in a safe, normal game could cause this reaction in him? In the year they’d been playing ALO together, Asuna had never once seen Kirito lose his cool.

  What’s happening in there?

  Asuna bit her lip, tracing a drop of sweat on his forehead with the tip of her finger. Suddenly, Yui’s voice rang out from the phone in her other hand.

  “Mama, look at the touch-PC on the wall! I’ll patch the live footage from MMO Stream onto the screen!”

  Asuna raised her head with a start. There was indeed a forty-inch flatscreen monitor on the wall facing the bed. Yui had somehow managed to connect to it wirelessly from Asuna’s phone, then activated the screen and set its browser to full-screen mode.

  It was the exact same thing they were watching from the apartment inside ALO. In the top left was the rough logo of Gun Gale Online. Next to it, a narrow strip of text announcing that it was the exclusive livestream coverage of the third Bullet of Bullets battle-royale final.

  On the right side of the screen was a list of player names. But most of the screen was taken up by a multiangle, multipicture visual feed. At this point, there were only two large windows left.

  Both pictures showed a nighttime desert presided over by pale moonlight. It looked like a single, close-range battle, with cameras positioned behind either player. In the left window was a short, small avatar, clad in black fatigues darker than the night, long hair flapping in the wind. The player held a glowing purple sword in one hand, while the other dangled below. Dark red damage effects spilled out of one shoulder. The player’s name was listed in a small font below: KIRITO.

  “That’s…Kirito…?”

  The avatar was far different from the “black swordsman” of SAO and the spriggan he used in ALO. From behind, his delicate form looked exactly like a girl’s. But the stance and the way he held himself were undoubtedly Kirito.

  On the other side of the bed, Nurse Aki wondered, “Does that mean that’s Kirigaya’s avatar, there? So while he’s right here, he’s controlling that character in real time?”

  “That’s right. He’s in battle… I think that’s why his heart rate is so high,” Asuna replied immediately. But some things she couldn’t explain so easily. That Kirito had already suffered severe damage to his left shoulder—and that the person who did it to him was probably a murderous SAO survivor. On top of that, that the man might have actually killed two players from within GGO.

  She turned to look at the right half of the screen, dreading what she would see.

  As she expected, it was the back of the tattered cloak facing the camera. From behind he looked lifeless and lax. But Asuna could tell from experience that he had the stance of someone very familiar with virtual reality. She watched the cloaked player thrust out his hand, holding her breath.

  “Wha…” she gasped, involuntarily.

  He wasn’t holding the huge rifle she had seen earlier, near the bridge, nor the black pistol. It was just a narrow metal rod…

  No. No, it wasn’t. It was tapered down from the bases, and pointed as sharp as a needle at the end. It was a sword. A weapon much like Asuna’s rapier, sharp at the end but without a cutting blade, meant for thrusting only.

  “An estoc? Oh…oh…”

  Asuna didn’t even realize she was speaking aloud. It was as though the estoc was jabbing right out of the screen and prodding her distant memories. There was…There was a major member of Laughing Coffin who used an estoc. But his name…What was his name?

  Naturally, the person in the tattered cloak was not going to use the same alias as in SAO, the way that Kirito did. But Asuna couldn’t help but glance at the avatar’s feet.

  Like Kirito’s, the player name displayed there was written in the Western alphabet.

  STERBEN.

  She stumbled over the name, not sure how it was meant to be pronounced.

  “St…Ste…ben? Is that a typo of ‘Steven’…?”

  “No…not quite, Mama,” Yui answered from her phone, at almost the same time that Nurse Aki said, “No,” herself. Asuna looked over in surprise to see the nurse’s fine eyebrows knitted in concern, her face more worried than before.

  “That’s German. I know it because it’s a medical term. It’s pronounced more like shter-ben.”

  “Shter…ben.”

  Asuna had never heard the word before. After a moment’s hesitation, Nurse Aki rasped, “It means…‘death.’ In hospitals, it’s used…when a patient has passed away…”

  All the hairs on Asuna’s arms stood on end. She tore her gaze away from the screen and over to the face of the boy lying on the bed.

  “Kirito…”

  Her voice was trembling so hard that she barely registered it as her own.

  GGO was built and managed using the free VRMMO tool package known as The Seed.

  The Seed was a very versatile and easy-to-use system, but there existed certain “black boxes” that even an administrator could not tamper with. Any title that had been open to the public for three months was automatically and irrevocably set to allow the conversion system that made it possible for players to bring over their characters from other games. In a similar fashion, while it was possible to fiddle with the settings of the pain-absorption system that prevented players from receiving pain signals, there was no way to disable it entirely.

  Meaning that no matter how many bullets you took in GGO—even if they blew off an arm or a leg—the worst you would feel was numbness.

  Which meant the pain in my shoulder, like a needle of ice penetrating it, was an illusion. In fact, the pain absorber even canceled out illusionary pain, so it wasn’t real at all. It was a memory, the return of a sensation I’d suffered in the same spot from the same weapon, in a different world.

  Death Gun stood about fifteen feet away, the gleaming point of his estoc waving back and fo
rth as if keeping some kind of rhythm. He would thrust from that stance without any warm-up. Just watching the sword wouldn’t help me dodge it.

  I had to have thought the same thing in Laughing Coffin’s cave hideout. Back then, I must have noted the rarity of his weapon. But the midst of that battle was no time to remark on it.

  A year and a half later, I finally said what I hadn’t then.

  “That’s an…unusual weapon. In fact…I thought there weren’t any metal swords in GGO to begin with.”

  A hissing laugh emerged from the depths of Death Gun’s hood. Next came his halting voice. “That’s very, poor study, for you, Black Swordsman. The Bayonet Creation skill, an offshoot of, the Knife Creation skill, lets you, make this. This is the, longest and, heaviest, I can do.”

  “…Sadly, I doubt you can make my kind of sword, then,” I snapped back. He hissed again.

  “So you still, like those, high-STR swords. Then you must, be unhappy, with that toy.”

  The Kagemitsu lightsword in my hand did not like being referred to as a toy. It crackled with a few tiny sparks.

  I shrugged and spoke up for my weapon. “It’s not that bad, really. I always wanted to use one of these things. Plus,” I continued, bringing the point up to midheight with a buzzing growl, “a sword’s a sword. As long as I can cut you and take down your HP bar, I’m happy.”

  “Heh, heh, heh. You’ve got, spunk. But can you, pull it off?”

  The red glowing eyes blinked unevenly. The metal mask, fashioned into a skull, seemed to smirk somehow.

  “Black Swordsman, you have breathed, too much, foul air, in the, real world. If the old you, saw that clumsy, Vorpal Strike, he would be, disappointed.”

  “…Yeah. Maybe. But the same goes for you. Or do you still think of yourself as a member of Laughing Coffin?”

  “Ahh, so you, remember now.”