Phantom Bullet 2

  What if a player who had committed murder in the abnormal realm of SAO learned how to unleash murderous intent and hatred in a digital form that could be transmitted through the AmuSphere as data, traveling online and eventually reaching the nerve center of the target…with the signal to stop his heart?

  If that hypothesis were true, it might be possible for Death Gun’s virtual shooting to have real, fatal effects. And at the same time, it could be possible for Kirito’s virtual sword to kill Death Gun or someone else.

  After all, I had killed other players in Aincrad. And my kill count might have been higher than most of the red players who partook in the activity.

  Until this point, I’d been trying to forget about the lives that I ended with my sword. But yesterday, the lid that sealed those memories away had been opened.

  Then again, I’d never be able to forget those things anyway. All I did for the past year was look away, pretending I couldn’t see them. I tried to hide from the weight of the sin I ought to bear and pay the price for…

  “What’s wrong, kid? You look like hell.”

  The toe of a white slipper poked my knee. My shoulders twitched and I looked up to see the gentle gaze of Nurse Aki through her rimless glasses.

  “Uh…er, nothing,” I muttered, shaking my head, but I couldn’t stop myself from biting my lip. Just a few hours earlier I’d made Suguha uneasy for the exact same reason, and now I was doing it to Nurse Aki, who was stuck at this annoying duty for my sake. I felt pathetic.

  She gave me that same grin that had cheered me up so often during physical rehab and got up from her chair to sit next to me.

  “C’mon, this is your big chance for some free counseling with a pretty nurse. Lay it on me, kiddo.”

  “…I’m guessing I’ll be in trouble if I don’t take you up on that,” I noted with a long sigh. I looked down at the floor for a bit and asked, “Um, Miss Aki, you were in the surgical department before rehabilitation, right?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Well, this might be a rude or completely insensitive question, but…” I glanced quickly to my left and mumbled, “How much do you remember about the patients that…didn’t make it?”

  I was expecting to be scolded or get a dirty look. If I was in her position, I’d be annoyed having to listen to the opinion of a kid who thought he knew what it was like to work in medicine.

  But the gentle smile never left Aki’s face. She looked up at the white ceiling and said, “Well, if I actually sit back and try to remember, I can see the names and faces, all right. Even the patients who were only in the same surgery room for an hour…It’s strange, given that I only saw them while they were sleeping under anesthesia.”

  She must have meant that patients had died during operations where she was present. I knew it wasn’t something I should touch upon lightly, but I couldn’t keep myself from asking.

  “Have you ever wished you could forget?”

  I don’t know what she saw when she looked into my face. She blinked twice, but the smile never vanished from her lightly reddened lips.

  “Hmm…good question. I don’t know if this answers it for you or not, but,” she prefaced, her voice husky, “when people are meant to forget something, they will forget it, I think. They don’t even have to want to forget it. After all, the more often you think you want to forget something, the stronger you’re making that memory, aren’t you? It means that deep in your heart, in your unconscious, you believe it’s something you shouldn’t forget.”

  I took in a short breath. It wasn’t the answer I expected.

  The more I wished to forget something, the less I was meant to forget it…?

  The words sank into my chest and brought a bitter taste to my mouth. Eventually that turned into a sardonic smile.

  “Then I guess I’m a real bastard…”

  I looked down at the floor between my feet so I didn’t have to see the questioning look in Aki’s eyes. My arms squeezed together around my knees, pressing the words out of my chest.

  “Inside of SAO, I…killed three players.”

  My dry, croaking voice echoed off the white walls, sounding distorted when it reached my ears. Maybe it was actually the inside of my head producing those echoes.

  Aki was my personal nurse when I attended this hospital for physical rehabilitation—November and December of last year. So she knew that I’d been trapped in a virtual world for two whole years, but I’d never told her a word about what happened in there until now.

  Her job was to save people’s lives; there was no way she’d be happy to hear about someone taking them, no matter the reason. But I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out of my mouth now. I hung my head and let the dry cracking voice flow.

  “They were all reds—murderers themselves. But I had the option to pacify them without killing. And I killed them anyway. I let my anger and hatred and vengeance do the dirty work. And for the past year, I forgot all about them. Even as I’m telling you this now, I don’t remember the two men’s names or faces. So you see…I’m a guy who can even forget the people he’s killed himself.”

  A dense silence filled the room. Eventually, I heard the rustling of clothes and felt the shifting of the mattress. I figured Aki was standing up to leave the room.

  But she didn’t. I felt her hand reach around my back to my shoulder and squeeze me close. I froze with alarm as the left side of my body was pressed against her white tunic. Her gentle whisper hit my ear.

  “I’m sorry, Kirigaya. I know I said that I would give you counseling, but I can’t erase the weight on your shoulders, or bear it with you.” She lifted her hand off my shoulder and ruffled my hair. “I’ve never played any VR game, much less Sword Art Online, of course…so I can’t measure the weight of this ‘killing’ you’re talking about. But…I do know this much. You did that—you had to do it—to save someone, didn’t you?”

  “Uh…”

  Again, I hadn’t expected that answer.

  To save someone. Yes, that might have been part of the equation. But that didn’t mean…

  “In medicine, there are times when you have to choose lives. To abandon the baby to save the mother. To abandon the brain-dead to save those who are waiting for organ donors. When there are huge accidents or disasters, we have to set up a triage to determine the priority of patients. That doesn’t mean that we can kill people if we have the right reason, of course. The weight of a life that’s lost never changes, no matter the circumstances. But the people involved have the right to consider the lives of those who were saved. So do you. As long as you think about the ones you’re saving, you have the right to be saved as well.”

  “The right…to be saved?” I repeated in a husky voice. I shook my head fiercely with Aki’s hand still resting on it. “But…but, I forgot about the people I killed. I abandoned that weight…my responsibility to them. So I don’t have the right to be saved…”

  “If you really forgot about them, you wouldn’t be agonizing like this now,” she stated firmly. She put her hand on my cheek and forced my face in her direction. Beyond the rimless glasses, her sharp eyes were glowing.

  When her neatly trimmed thumb brushed the outer corner of my eye, I realized that I had been crying.

  “You do remember. When the time comes to remember, it all comes back. And when that happens, it all needs to come back, including the people you fought to protect and save.”

  Aki bumped her forehead against mine. The chilly contact seemed to quell the raging weight swirling around my head. I let my shoulders drop and eyelids close.

  A few minutes later, with my bare midriff covered in sticky electrodes for the heart monitor, I laid back on the bed with the AmuSphere in my hands.

  Fear and self-condemnation, a cold weight in my stomach that had plagued me since last night, felt distant now. But I was certain that if I ran into Death Gun again in the world of Gun Gale Online, it would rush back in moments.

  The VR interface felt as heavy as cas
t iron in my hands as I slipped it over my head and turned it on. It made a soft ping to indicate it was out of standby. I turned to where Miss Aki stood on the other side of the monitoring equipment, and spoke.

  “Thanks for watching over me. And also for…well, just thanks.”

  “Of course, dear,” she said kindly, tossing a thin blanket over my body. I breathed in the clean, soapy scent and shut my eyes.

  “I don’t think you’ll see anything until after eight o’clock…and I should be out by ten. Here goes… Link start!”

  A dazzling rainbow array appeared before my eyes and swallowed me whole. Just before all of my senses were shut out entirely, I heard Nurse Aki’s voice:

  “Have a good time then, Kirito the Hero.”

  ……What?

  But in the next moment, my mind was ripped from reality and transported into a wasteland of sand and gunpowder.

  8

  “So irritating—”

  Thunk.

  “—that guy!”

  Shino Asada seethed, kicking the steel support beam of the swing set with the toe of her sneaker. She was in a small playground fairly close to her apartment. The navy-blue sky above stretched over a single sandbox and two pieces of equipment; it was a lonely little place, especially without any children on a weekend as it was.

  Next to Shino, Kyouji Shinkawa was sitting on one of the swings, his eyes wide.

  “I-it’s strange to hear you speaking so…forcefully.”

  “Well, I mean…”

  She shoved her hands into the pockets of her denim skirt and leaned back against the sloped beam, pouting.

  “He was such an arrogant, harassing, show-off loser…I mean, who goes into GGO just to fight with a sword?”

  With each grumbled insult, she kicked a little pebble at her feet. “On top of that, he pretended to be a girl at first, and convinced me to guide him to the best shop and pick out his equipment for him! I almost lent him money, even! Ugh, and I even gave him my personal card…‘Would you mind resigning,’ indeed!”

  She had to stop grousing when there were no more stones of the right size to kick. When she glanced over, Kyouji was staring at her with an odd expression, somewhere between surprise and concern.

  “…What, Shinkawa?”

  “Nothing… I’ve just never seen you talking about someone else like that…”

  “Oh…really?”

  “Yeah. Most of the time you don’t seem to have any interest in other people, period.”

  “…”

  Perhaps he was right. On any given day, she made no proactive effort to interact with others. When people came to contact her, such as Endou and her gang of bullies, Shino found it irritating, but didn’t think anything more of it. She believed it would be a waste of her emotional energy.

  In fact, Shino already had her hands full with her own problems, so she didn’t spend any time worrying about others. And yet somehow, that one guy had gotten under her skin. Even now, over twenty-four hours after their first contact on Saturday afternoon, he ruled over a significant portion of her mind.

  But that was only natural.

  It had been half a year since Shino started playing the VRMMORPG Gun Gale Online. But not a single player there had approached her as directly as he had. And that wasn’t all. When he clutched her hand in his vulnerable state after the first round of the tournament, she was so shocked that she missed two easy shots at medium range in the second round.

  “You might be surprised to learn that I get angry easily.”

  She stretched out a leg to scrape more pebbles into range so that she could kick them toward the planter.

  “Oh…is that so?” Kyouji murmured, examining Shino. Eventually he thought of something and hopped up off the swing. “So…will you camp out in an open area and hunt him? If you want to snipe, I can be a decoy. But if it’s for revenge, you’d probably prefer a direct battle. I can get us two or three good machine gunners. Or you could use a beam stunner to arrange an MPK…”

  Shino blinked in surprise. She eventually raised her right hand to interrupt Kyouji’s fanatical PK planning.

  “Um…hang on, it’s not like that. He’s irritating, but he fights very honestly. I want to crush him in a fair fight. I might have lost yesterday…but now I know his style, and I’ll get a chance for a rematch.”

  She pushed up the bridge of her noncorrective glasses and pulled her cell phone out of her skirt pocket to check the time.

  “The BoB final starts in just three and a half hours. I’m going to blow a giant hole in that misleading avatar while everyone’s watching.”

  She pointed a finger into the eastern sky. The red rising moon was right in her sights.

  The preliminary tournament for the third Bullet of Bullets, GGO’s championship tournament, began on the evening of December 13.

  As Sinon, Shino had easily advanced through Block F until a supposed beginner appeared before her—and yet, despite “that man” being a beginner, it was a confrontation she felt had been inevitable, somewhere deep in her heart.

  His name was Kirito. He was a player who had used the Seed platform’s unique conversion function to transfer from an unfamiliar VRMMO over to GGO.

  On her way through the city of SBC Glocken to the regent’s office to enter the preliminary tourney, Sinon had run into Kirito the moment after his initial dive. When he had asked the location of a gear shop, she had rather surprisingly offered a personal tour, instead of her typical style—an unfriendly point in the right direction.

  The only reason she did that was because she had thought Kirito was a girl.

  From what she learned later, GGO’s male avatars contained a series called the M-9000s that on first glance looked like F-models instead. They were very rare, so many people who won them sold their entire accounts for huge sums. At any rate, Kirito’s avatar was quite beautiful, with lustrous black hair, big eyes like the night sky, wintry smooth skin, and a delicate build. He looked much more feminine than Sinon’s actually female avatar.

  Through her six months of GGO, Sinon had never met a true female beginner to the game. She knew other women in the game, of course, but they were all veterans with more experience than she had. She’d traded more gunfire with them than words.

  So when Sinon saw the lonely, confused girl—secretly a man—she remembered the girl she had been when she started, and she volunteered to act as a guide.

  She had outfitted him with weapons and armor at a major shop, had taught him about bullet lines and other GGO features, and had even explained how the tournament worked at the regent’s office. Then they had gone into the underground waiting area beneath the tower and had entered a changing room to put on their battle gear. Just at the moment Sinon had unequipped all of her gear except for underwear, Kirito finally, and extremely belatedly, revealed his name and gender.

  In her shame and rage, Sinon had slapped him across the face and made an ultimatum: Win your way through the prelims and face me. The last thing I will teach you is the taste of the bullet that spells your defeat.

  But at the time, she hadn’t thought it would actually happen that way.

  Kirito was a newbie who had just converted to GGO. For whatever reason, he didn’t choose a rifle or machine gun for his main weapon, but the ultra-close-range lightsword.

  But a sword couldn’t possibly beat a gun, Sinon sensed. She had been on the verge of forgetting all about Kirito.

  But somehow, he had kept his word to her. He had made his way through the sixty-four-player Block F from the first to fifth round with nothing but his lightsword and a small-caliber handgun, proceeding toward the block final against Sinon.

  On the sunset highway that served as their stage, Sinon had witnessed Kirito’s terrifying ability for herself. He had blocked her Ultima Ratio Hecate II’s deadly .50-caliber bullet—an antimateriel sniper rifle round—with his narrow energy blade; he had cut the round in half, in fact.

  Kirito had charged through the trajectories of
the two halves of the bullet and pressed the blade of the lightsword to Sinon’s throat.

  “Would you mind resigning, then? I’d prefer not to slash a girl in two.”

  “~~~~!!”

  Just remembering it brought the humiliation back as fresh as when it happened. She swung her fist down away from the direction of the moon. Shino looked around on the ground for more rocks to kick, but she’d already booted all of them toward the planter. She smacked the metal pole behind her with her heel instead.

  “Just you wait. I’ll pay you back twice over for this,” she vowed. Kyouji stood up from the swing and examined her, an even more concerned look wrinkling his brows.

  “…Wh-what?”

  “Is everything…okay? That isn’t going to, y’know…”

  Kyouji looked down at her hand. She noticed that her clenched fist had the index and thumb extended to form the shape of a gun.

  “Ah…”

  She quickly straightened out her hand and shook it. Normally, the action would have recalled the image of a gun in her head and caused a panic attack. For some reason, that didn’t happen this time.

  “Uh, yeah. I guess…I was fine because I was so mad.”

  “Oh…”

  Kyouji raised his head and looked Shino right in the eyes. He reached out and grabbed her right hand in both of his. She automatically looked down at his warm, slightly sweaty palms.

  “Wh…what’s this about, Shinkawa?”

  “I’m just…worried. You’re not acting like the usual you…If there’s anything I can do to help, I want to do it. I can’t do anything but cheer for you on the monitor tonight, but if there’s anything else…just say the word…”

  For just a moment, she glanced back at Kyouji. While his face was delicate and naïve, the eyes in the center of it burned with smoldering emotion.

  “I…I don’t know what you mean by the ‘usual me,’” Shino mumbled. She couldn’t even picture what her ordinary self was like.

  Kyouji squeezed harder, the words tumbling out of his mouth. “You’re always very cool and reserved…and in control, and never fazed by anything…You’ve suffered the same things I have, but you didn’t stay home and refuse to go to school. You’re strong; really strong. I’ve always admired that about you. You’re…you’re my ideal.”