Phantom Bullet 2

  “An RMT,” Shino muttered to herself. She suspected that the tattered cloak with the Metamaterial Optical Camo effect had to be an ultrarare drop from a boss monster. It could easily go for a higher price than her Hecate II on the open market.

  “I would have to assume…it cost an incredible amount,” she said.

  Kikuoka affirmed her assumption, shaking his head in disbelief. “It apparently cost just over 300,000 yen. But that wasn’t much, given that Shouichi had a 500,000-yen monthly allowance from his father.”

  “Which means…his huge rifle and rare-material estoc were bought with real cash, too…I’m glad SAO had no monetization or auction systems,” Kirito murmured, his face deadly serious.

  Kikuoka nodded and continued the story. “Indeed. Once Shouichi was able to hide himself using that cloak, he began working on his ability to stalk other players in town without being detected. At that point, he was simply enjoying following them around…but one day, he followed a target to the hall of the regent’s office and noticed that they were using one of the game’s information terminals. On a whim, he took out his binoculars and watched the screen from the shadow of a pillar. To his surprise, the screen showed the real-life name and address of the player.”

  “Meaning that he didn’t buy the cloak in order to gain information, but the opposite…That he had the cloak before the idea came to him,” Kirito sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Hiding has always been a core skill in MMOs, going way back. It would be strange for a game not to feature it. But…I think that in a VRMMO, the full range of its uses is too heavily weighted toward bad behavior. They ought to outlaw it in town, at the very least. Can you submit a complaint to Zaskar about that, Sinon?”

  She was not expecting to have the conversation directed her way. “Wh-why don’t you do it? Anyway…it sounds like it was the cloak that caused the birth of Death Gun,” she said, directing the statement toward Kikuoka. The official nodded and looked down at his tablet. Something about his calm, pleasing face struck Shino as notable, but she decided that it didn’t matter now.

  Kikuoka’s hushed voice traveled over the sunlit table. “That would be correct. Shouichi automatically memorized all of the personal information he saw, logged out, and wrote it down. But at the time, he had no intention of doing anything with it. It was the act of stealing their information that excited him, and so he spent the next several days camped out in the regent’s office, waiting for players to enter their addresses. Ultimately, he gleaned the details of sixteen players over this stretch. That includes yours, Shino Asada.”

  “…”

  Shino nodded. If it was in early September, that was just before the second BoB. Assuming there were at least five hundred players who registered for the tournament, and roughly half of them would have put in their information in the hopes of getting a model gun, stealing the info of sixteen of them seemed quite possible.

  Kikuoka continued, “One day in October, Kyouji revealed to Shouichi that he had hit a wall with his character. He blamed it all on the false information spread by another player named Zexceed. Shouichi recalled that Zexceed was one of the very players whose information he’d stolen, and he told Kyouji about it.”

  That was it. That had to be the moment that the wall between Kyouji’s virtual and real lives began to crumble and disappear.

  “Shouichi claims that it wasn’t solely the idea of either of them,” Kikuoka said, his smooth voice passing right into Shino’s ear. “The two of them discussed how they should use Zexceed’s personal information to purge him, and thus the outline of the Death Gun plan came to be. Still, he explained that it was just a bunch of fun, imaginary games at first. Shooting a player in the game at the same time the player died in real life sounds easy when you say it, but in reality it is fraught with challenges. They debated for days, clearing hypothetical hurdles to the plan one after the other. It seems the biggest issues were getting the master code to undo the electronic lock, and acquiring the syringe and drugs…”

  “A big hospital should have legal master codes they can use to unlock a patient’s door in the case of an emergency. I would assume that goes for their father’s hospital as well,” Kirito pointed out.

  Kikuoka pursed his lips in a silent whistle of admiration. “Very good. As a matter of fact, the government’s support of keyless locks on residential homes was to strengthen control over the previously inviolable realm of private residences…but that’s supposed to be a secret. At any rate, the two brothers did indeed plan to steal the master code, high-pressure syringe, and succinylcholine from their father’s hospital. Shouichi claimed that up to this point, everything about the plan was just one big game—nothing different from the way they gathered info on a target party in SAO, scraped together the necessary equipment, then carried out an attack. It seems that he suggested to the detective who was questioning him that they must have felt the same way about their job. They listen to NPCs, gather intel, capture bounties, and turn them in for money. Being a police officer is no different than playing a game, he said.”

  “I wouldn’t take that at face value,” Kirito muttered.

  Kikuoka’s eyebrows rose. “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. In a sense, Shouichi might think that way. But when he was Red-Eyed Xaxa, he convinced everyone around him that it was all just a game, yet the only reason he was so fascinated by what he did was the knowledge that the players’ deaths were real. In either world, he just believes that whatever doesn’t suit his ends isn’t actually real. You might call it the dark side of VRMMOs. It makes reality less real.”

  “Ahh. And…what about your reality?” Kikuoka asked.

  Kirito was about to put on his usual sardonic smirk, but switched to a dead-serious look as he stared into space. “…There are absolutely some things I left behind in that world. And therefore, I’m currently lacking that much right now.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “Don’t ask me that. It’s tasteless,” Kirito said, grimacing. He glanced toward Shino. “What do you think about that, Sinon?”

  “Uh…”

  She wasn’t prepared to answer that question. Shino was not used to the practice of putting her thoughts into words. Nevertheless, she tried her best to say what she had felt.

  “Well…what you’re saying now isn’t what you said earlier, Kirito.”

  “Huh…?”

  “You said there was no such thing as the virtual world. You said wherever you are, that’s reality. There are lots of VRMMO games out there, but it’s not like the players are all divided up between them. I mean, this around us…” She reached over and traced his arm with her fingers. “This world is the only reality. If it turned out that all of this was just another virtual world created by the AmuSphere, to me…it’s reality.”

  Kirito’s eyes went wide, and he met her gaze long enough for her to feel self-conscious. Eventually, he put on a smile that surprisingly held not a hint of cynicism.

  “…I see. Good point.” He glanced back at Kikuoka. “You should jot down what Sinon just said. It might be the only truth with any value to this incident.”

  “Don’t tease me,” she said, bopping his shoulder with a fist. When she looked forward again, Kikuoka was staring at her, too. Feeling awkward, she examined the empty plate that had held her cake instead.

  “No, maybe it’s right. Maybe it was just the complete opposite for Shouichi. To him, reality was always the place where he wasn’t.”

  “He often repeated the phrase, ‘It’s not over yet.’ Perhaps he hasn’t completely returned from Aincrad yet…Perhaps Akihiko Kayaba’s goal of creating a world did not actually come about until the castle fell to ruin.”

  “That’s scary. There are too many mysteries to the way he died…but that has nothing to do with this case. To bring us back on topic, once Shouichi had finished the preparations to make the plan a reality, he had essentially eliminated any mental barriers to the act of actually breaking into his victims’ homes and admi
nistering the lethal drug directly. It was Shouichi himself who drugged the first victim: Tamotsu Shigemura, aka Zexceed. Around one o’clock on November the ninth, he used his master code to unlock the door and infiltrate the apartment. At half past the hour, while Shigemura was taking part in an interview on the MMO Stream channel, he used the high-pressure syringe to inject the drug into the underside of the man’s chin. It was a muscle relaxant called suxamethonium chloride, or succinylcholine, which immediately shut down Shigemura’s respiration and heartbeat and caused him to die. That would mean that the player in GGO who shot at Zexceed was his brother, Kyouji.”

  Shino’s shoulders twitched when she heard Kyouji’s name. Inside her head, she could hear his voice, full of loathing and hatred for Zexceed, as he straddled her in her apartment two nights ago.

  It seemed that the false rumors leaked by Zexceed about statistical choices that caused him to lose out on his chance to be the strongest player in the game—though the existence of Yamikaze, who was an incredible player with an AGI build like Kyouji, belied that conclusion—made for an even more unpardonable crime than those students at his school who bullied him and took his money.

  Or perhaps at this point in time, reality for Kyouji was already that other realm…

  “The one who carried out the actual deed against the second victim, Usujio Tarako, was again Shouichi. The method was almost exactly the same. They had chosen a final list of seven candidates who shared similar traits. They had to live in Tokyo, alone, with older electronic locks that didn’t keep a log, or would have spare keys hidden nearby…”

  “That had to be a lot of work to research,” Kirito noted.

  Kikuoka grimaced. “I’ve no doubt that it involved a great amount of time and effort. But it seems that even after taking the lives of two players, still no one took the rumors of Death Gun very seriously.”

  “Yes. Everyone thought they were just a stupid urban legend. So did I,” Shino murmured.

  Kikuoka nodded heavily. “And no wonder. Kirito and I brainstormed a number of possibilities, but our ultimate conclusion was that it had to be the product of baseless rumors. Of course, it was the very approach of our conjectures that was wrong…”

  “If only we’d noticed the truth just a day earlier…we could have prevented those two extra victims in the tournament itself,” Kirito said bitterly.

  Shino didn’t even raise her head. “But you did save me.”

  “No, I didn’t do anything. It was all you.”

  She threw him a glance, then realized that she hadn’t properly thanked him for his part in it yet.

  Kikuoka broke the brief silence. “If it weren’t for your hard work, it’s not hard to imagine that all seven people on that list would have been victimized. Please don’t blame yourselves.”

  “I’m not, actually…I just think it would be a shame if this tarnished the reputation of VRMMOs again.”

  “You know the buds growing from The Seed are too strong to die out because of this. Now there’s a gathering of countless little seedlings that will one day form a great World Tree of their own. What I want to know is, who could have planted such a thing?”

  “…Who, indeed? On with the story,” Kirito prompted, clearing his throat.

  “Of course. Well, I think you already know what happens next. Upset that the threat of Death Gun was not being taken seriously, the two brothers decided a more dramatic demonstration was necessary. They put together a plan to shoot three different players in the final round of the third Bullet of Bullets tournament. The players they singled out were Pale Rider, Garrett…and you, Sinon.”

  “…”

  Shino nodded. She already knew the name of Garrett, the fourth victim. He was a fashionable fellow who used an antique Winchester rifle. She thought of his trademark ten-gallon hat and said a silent prayer in his memory, then realized something.

  “Oh…by the way, maybe this is just a coincidence, but…”

  “What is it?”

  “I think there might be one more quality that all seven of the targets shared. All of them, including me, were non-AGI builds.”

  “Oh…? What does that mean…?”

  “Shinkawa…I mean, Kyouji played a pure Agility build, and that caused him to hit a dead end. I think he probably felt conflicted about players who tried out a different build…especially if they had more than a little STR to work with.”

  “Aha…” Kikuoka stared down at his tablet in silence for a bit. “So you’re saying…everything in the motive was rooted within the game itself. This will be a difficult thing for the prosecutors to use in court. But I don’t know…” He shook his head in disbelief.

  In a tone of regret, Kirito said, “No, it’s quite possible. An MMO player’s character stats are the basis for their essential values. I know someone who pranked his friend by pushing his hand and causing him to place a single point in the wrong stat, and it led to them killing each other for months…within the game, of course. But that’s how big of a fight it caused.”

  Shino could relate to that. But Kikuoka’s eyes went round, then he shook his head again.

  “That would require the prosecutor, lawyer, judge, and jury to all experience a VRMMO for themselves to process. Perhaps it might be time to take the court’s facilities into consideration…But in any case, that’s not for us to worry about. Now, where was I?”

  He prodded the tablet again. “Ah, yes. They chose three targets. But unlike the previous two cases, there was a big roadblock to pulling off the plan during the BoB—Death Gun and his collaborator in real life cannot be in contact. That made timing the shootings very difficult. It was technically made possible by the fact that the livestream was viewable from outside the game, but—”

  “—it’s still not easy. There’s the matter of moving around,” Kirito interrupted, his expression bitter. “That’s where I missed out. I assumed there were only two Death Guns…”

  “Yes, that’s correct. They chose the three targets who were closest together. While Pale Rider’s home in Omori and Garrett’s in Musashi-Kosugi are fairly close, Asada is quite a distance away from them in Yushima. And it seems that the usual Death Gun actor, Kyouji, was quite insistent on carrying out the real-life act in this case. Shouichi has a scooter, but Kyouji cannot drive. So Shouichi proposed adding a new partner. He is—let’s see… Atsushi Kanamoto, age nineteen. An old friend of Shouichi’s. Or more accurately…”

  He glanced at Kirito. “A fellow guild member from SAO. His character name was…Johnny Black. Does that ring any bells?”

  “It does,” Kirito said, closing his eyes. “He was the poison-knife guy who always teamed up with Xaxa in Laughing Coffin. They attacked and killed a number of players together back then, too. Dammit…If only I knew…If only I’d…”

  Shino reached out and squeezed his hand to stop him from finishing his sentence. She stared into his eyes and shook her head from side to side. That was all it took to get her message across.

  For a moment, Kirito’s face scrunched up like a child about to cry, but he indicated his understanding with his eyes. Then he was back to his usual poker face. Shino pulled her fingers free of his chilly hand and faced forward. Kikuoka stopped watching the two of them and continued his report.

  “Whether Kanamoto, aka Johnny Black, took an active role in this plan isn’t clear from Shouichi’s testimony. It seems that even to Shouichi, this Kanamoto fellow was hard to understand in certain ways…”

  “So why don’t you ask Kanamoto about all of this?” Kirito asked. It was a perfectly reasonable question.

  Kikuoka only shook his head. “He hasn’t been caught yet.”

  “Wha…?”

  “We captured Kyouji Shinkawa at Miss Asada’s apartment, and took his brother Shouichi into custody at his home forty minutes later, but when we searched Kanamoto’s apartment in Ohta two hours later, based on Shouichi’s statements, he wasn’t there. They’re still watching the place in case he returns, but I haven’t had a
ny reports of an arrest.”

  “…And you’re positive that he carried out the murders of Pale Rider and Garrett during the tournament?”

  “It’s almost certain. We haven’t found the high-pressure syringe and drug cartridge that Shouichi gave him, the same as Kyouji’s, but we did recover some hair in the victims’ apartments that was a DNA match for the stuff we found in Kanamoto’s residence.”

  “Cartridge…” Shino repeated, feeling a chill at the coincidence with gun terminology. She remembered when Kyouji had the syringe pressed to her neck, claiming that it was the true Death Gun.

  Kirito grimaced as well. “Did they use up all the drugs on the two targets?”

  Once again, Kikuoka shook his head. “No…A full cartridge of succinylcholine contains well over a fatal dose, but Shouichi gave him three, just in case. He might still have one of them. That’s why we had police escorts for you from Monday until this morning—particularly for Miss Asada.”

  “You’re saying that…Johnny Black might still be after Sinon?”

  “It’s just a precaution. The police aren’t giving it serious consideration. After all, their Death Gun project fell into ruin. He has nothing to gain by attacking her, and there’s no history or hatred between Miss Asada and Kanamoto. We’ve already got the metropolitan automated security cam net in a trial run, so he won’t be able to hide for long.”

  “…What is that?”

  “We call it the S2 System. Computers automatically analyze camera footage to recognize the faces of wanted criminals…but the details are all classified.”

  “Well, that’s not unsettling,” Kirito opined sardonically, sipping his coffee with a grimace.

  “I agree with you there. But I think we can agree that it’s a good thing that Kanamoto will be caught soon. Back to the incident…”

  Kikuoka traced the tablet and promptly shrugged. “I think you two probably know the details better than me after this point. Kyouji Shinkawa led an assault on Miss Asada’s residence just after the tournament, but was fortunately caught before he could carry it out. Shouichi Shinkawa was arrested soon after, and now Atsushi Kanamoto is wanted. The brothers are held at Motofuji Police Station, where their interrogation continues…and that is the full report of what happened. At least, as far as I understand it. Do you have any questions?”