The fear hadn’t left me. But it was a necessary emotion. I had to make sure I didn’t choose the escape route of forgetting again.
I strode down the street with clenched fists, my assault boots clacking against the pavement. The enormous tower of the regent’s office was up ahead.
In ALO, and even in SAO, I fell prey to the excitement of a good PvP tournament. To think that I’d enter into one with nothing but dread…
I snorted at my own timidity and headed up the long stairs toward the tower. Just outside the glass doors of the entrance, I spotted a familiar sand-colored muffler waving like the tail of a cat.
I didn’t need to see the pale blue hair or the legs extending from the hem of her jacket to know that it was Sinon the sniper, my opponent in yesterday’s preliminary block final. She was the only person I knew in GGO, but I wasn’t sure if I should approach her or not.
After all, when I got lost right off the bat upon logging in to GGO for the first time yesterday, I brazenly asked the bystander Sinon for help, chose not to correct her obvious assumption that I was a girl like her, acted like a newbie girl to elicit all kinds of advice and explanation about the game’s systems and what equipment to buy, then took a trip into the changing room to get a solid look at her underwear.
And that wasn’t even everything.
After an unexpected encounter with Death Gun himself in the middle of the preliminary round, I was stunned by the revelation that he was a fellow SAO survivor, and a member of the killer guild Laughing Coffin. In my shock, I abandoned the final round against Sinon. As soon as the battle started, I simply walked forward without a strategy, ready to receive her fatal shot so I could lose on purpose.
But Sinon didn’t shoot me.
She shot six rounds of pale, burning fury, all of which missed me. When she abandoned her advantage and came face-to-face with me, she screamed, “Screw you, die on your own time. Don’t get me involved in your view; that this is just a game, just a single match.”
Those words tore deep, deep into my chest.
Much, much earlier, I’d spoken very similar words to someone else.
It was nearly four years ago. Just as I started my second year of middle school, to my incredible fortune (or misfortune) I was selected to join the Sword Art Online closed beta test. At the end of each school day, I plunged into the still-free world of Aincrad until the next morning.
At the time, I was a Kirito with an almost embarrassingly typical hero look, and I made a bit of a name for myself by placing highly in PvP events. Because I was even feebler at personal skills back then, I didn’t have any real friends. One of the few who I thought I might one day be friends with was a person I saw often in duel tournaments, a swordsman with plain brown hair.
He possessed both a logical mind and an innate talent for swordsmanship. I secretly hoped that I might cross swords with him at an event, and when that moment finally came, I was in for a shock. At the very end of a pitched battle, he intentionally chose to take an attack that I knew he could avoid. I suspected that he threw the match for the sake of a huge payday from the oddsmakers running the market, and I confronted him about it—using the same words that Sinon said to me just yesterday.
It was the pain of being shamed by myself from four years ago, and I immediately apologized to Sinon. Though we faced off in a classic duel to settle the fight, I was sure that Sinon had to be unhappy about the result. She was a sniper, and her strength lay in firing an unstoppable single round from long distance. No doubt she was burning with the desire to place that bullet between my eyes in tonight’s final competition.
Thanks to the above complications—almost entirely my own fault—I wasn’t sure if I should approach Sinon, even though she was just a few feet away. After a few seconds, I made up my mind and raced up the stairs to greet her.
“Hey, Sinon. Good luck today.”
The tail of the muffler came to a stop and the blue hair seemed to arch just like a cat’s. The sniper girl spun around on her right heel with a tremendous glare on her face. She snorted, “What do you mean, good luck?”
The dangerous glint in her dark blue eyes told me immediately that this was a mistake, but I had a reason to talk to her. I had to choose my words carefully so that she didn’t shut the door in my face before I could get to that point.
With my best serious face, I said, “I just mean, let’s both do our best and see what happens.”
“You’re shameless.”
Right off the bat, I was not doing good. I soldiered onward.
“Anyway, you’re sure diving in early. We’ve got three hours until the event.”
“Gee, I wonder whose fault it was that I nearly failed to register on time yesterday,” she shot back, turning away even as she shot me a sidelong glare. A cold sweat broke out on my face. “And besides, you’re here early, too. Don’t act like I’m some kind of loser with nothing better to do.”
“Sh-shall we find a meaningful use of our time? While we’re waiting for the event to start, maybe we could get some tea…er, trade some intel…”
I could never say this to her in the real world. In fact, given that I had Asuna, I shouldn’t even be saying it in the virtual world. But this was, cross my heart, hope to die, not a VR come-on, but a necessary step for not just my own duty and fate, but Sinon’s safety as well.
Naturally, Sinon couldn’t have known all of this, but after several seconds of a very probing look, she snorted and made the smallest of nods.
“Fine. It’ll probably end up with me giving you all the advice again, anyway.”
“Th-that’s not my plan…Well, not entirely,” I mumbled, hurrying after Sinon as she strode away.
After we concluded our tournament check-in process at the ground floor terminal with plenty of time to spare, Sinon took me to a large tavern zone on the first-basement level of the tower. The gamma levels were so low that the faces of the players milling at the countless tables were nearly indistinguishable. The only light in the room came from the large panel monitors hanging from the ceiling, spitting out bright, primary colors.
Sinon slid into a booth in the back and examined the metal menu placard, eventually pushing a small button on the side corresponding to an iced coffee. A hole opened in the center of the metal table, and a glass filled with a black liquid emerged. It certainly wasn’t as warm and friendly as the Aincrad system, where NPC waiters took orders and brought the food themselves, but it suited GGO’s general atmosphere better.
I pressed the button for a ginger ale and downed half of the glass in one go when it appeared. Once the virtual carbonation stopped tickling my throat, I initiated the conversation.
“Tell me if I have the battle royale straight: Thirty players are placed randomly on the same map and open fire once they find each other, until the last remaining survivor is crowned the winner?”
Sinon glared at me over her coffee glass and said, “I knew you were just trying to get me to explain things to you. All of these details are laid out in the e-mail the developers sent to the contestants.”
“Y-yeah, I read it, but…”
In truth, I skimmed through it once, intending to read it in detail once I was in the game. But when I saw Sinon the veteran right in front of me, it seemed that asking her in person would be quicker…not that she wanted to hear it. I coughed uncomfortably.
“I was just hoping that you might, um, confirm my understanding…”
“It’s all in how you say it,” she noted in an exceedingly chilly voice that froze my spine. Fortunately for me, she was nice enough to launch into a quick explanation of the rules once she’d returned her glass to the tabletop. “Basically, as you said, it’s a battle between thirty finalists on the same map. The starting locations are random, but you’re guaranteed to be at least a kilometer away from any other player, so you don’t have to worry about spawning right in front of someone.”
“A k-kilometer? So the map must be pretty huge, then,” I interrupted. Her bl
ue lasers cut me off.
“Did you really read the message? It says right at the very top. The battle takes place on a circular map ten kilometers across. It’s a composite stage with mountains, forests, and valleys, so there’s no overall advantage or disadvantage to any one loadout or character build.”
“Ten kilometers?! That’s huge…”
It was the same size as the first floor of Aincrad. In other words, an area that ten thousand people were able to comfortably inhabit and hunt in was now the exclusive domain of just thirty, spaced entirely apart.
“Will we…even find each other? What if the entire event passes without anyone seeing anyone else?”
“First of all, it’s a shooting game—you need that much space. A sniper rifle’s range is close to a kilometer, and an assault rifle can hit a target nearly half that distance. If you had thirty people in a tiny map, they’d start firing the moment it started, and half the group would be dead in moments.”
“Ahh, good point…”
She continued her patient explanation. Behind the gruff posturing, it seemed like there really was a helpful, considerate girl—one who would be furious if I ever let on that I was realizing this. I shut up and listened.
“But as you say, there’s no point if nobody manages to make contact. On the other hand, someone’s going to get the idea to hide until the very end, right? So all of the contestants are given an item called a Satellite Scan terminal.”
“Like…a spy satellite?”
“Yes. An observational satellite passes overhead every fifteen minutes. At that point, it sends locational data on all players to all of the terminals. If you touch the blip on the map, you can even see their names.”
“Hmm… So you only get fifteen minutes at best to camp out in any one location. Once your location is shown to the others, they could sneak up on you anytime.”
“Exactly,” Sinon nodded.
I grinned and asked, “But doesn’t that rule hurt a sniper? Isn’t it your job to hide in the bushes like a potato with your rifle held still?”
“Enough about potatoes,” she snapped, tossing navy-blue sparks in my direction before snorting confidently. “Fifteen minutes is more than enough time to fire a shot and kill a target, then move a kilometer.”
“Oh…I see.”
I took her word for it. Anyone trying to use the satellite data to ambush Sinon would end up sniped from long distance anyway. I committed that warning to memory and cleared my throat, hoping to sum up everything I’d learned.
“So basically, once the match starts you stay on the move, spotting enemies and trying to stay alive until you’re the last one standing…right? And every fifteen minutes, each player learns the locations of everyone else on their map. Which means that you also know who’s still alive at the time. Is that correct?”
“Essentially, yes.” Sinon downed the rest of her iced coffee and set it down on the table with a high-pitched clank. She got to her feet. “Well, that’s all. The next time I see you, I’ll be pulling the trigger without—”
“Hey, hang on! I’m just getting to the point,” I yelped, reaching out to pull on Sinon’s sleeve in a gesture that reminded me of a certain government official I knew.
“…There’s more?”
She shot me the dirtiest glance and checked the military watch on her wrist, but I was too close to back down now. Sinon sighed heavily and sat down again. She put her elbows on the table, rested her chin on her folded hands, and prompted me to continue with her eyebrows.
“W-well, um…this might be an odd question, but,” I prefaced, waving my left hand to bring up the menu window. All VRMMOs built on the Seed’s engine shared nearly identical menu systems, so I knew exactly how to make my window’s contents visible to her.
After flipping through a few tabs, I showed her the message from the devs containing the list of names of all thirty finalists for the BoB. Around the middle was Kirito, first-place finisher in Block F, and Sinon, second-place in Block F.
Sinon looked at my window. The bridge of her nose wrinkled up like a cat’s—a jaguar’s, if anything.
“What is this? Are you bragging to me again about the results of yesterday’s prelims?” she hissed.
I took a deep breath and shook my head, trying to sound as grave as possible. “No, absolutely not.”
She sensed the change in my attitude and squinted with her shapely brows. “Then…why are you showing this to me?”
“Are there a few names on this list that you don’t recognize?”
“Huh…?” She glared at me with open suspicion. I ran a finger down the short list.
“Please, tell me. This is important.”
“…Oh, all right…”
Sinon looked down at the purple holo-window floating over the table, though she was still clearly suspicious. Her navy-blue eyes flicked right and left.
“Let’s see, this is the third BoB, so I would recognize most of these people. The ones that I don’t recognize, aside from a certain cocky lightswordsman…are three.”
“Three. Which names?”
“Hmm… There’s Musketeer X, Pale Rider, and…I think that’s supposed to be ‘Steven’?” Sinon read awkwardly. I checked the names for myself. “Musketeer X” was displayed in kanji, while the other two names were in the Western alphabet. I closed my eyes and repeated the three names to myself.
Sinon turned to me with equal parts suspicion and irritation. “So what’s your point? You keep asking me these questions, but you’re not explaining what’s going on.”
“Yeah…um…”
I let the moment drag out, thinking frantically. She had singled out three names…
One of them, if my hunch was correct, was the character name for Death Gun—the reason that I was here, a survivor of SAO and former member of Laughing Coffin, related to two unexplained deaths.
This suspicion stemmed from the fact that Death Gun must have taken considerable care to hide his true identity. He probably wanted to go with “Death Gun” for a character name, except that it would open him up to all kinds of spam messages, and he would have gotten involved in trouble during the preliminaries. On the other hand, if his actual character handle was spread around, it would dim the “Death Gun” image he’d gone to so much trouble to build. Instead, he’d kept his identity a secret from everyone. It was no wonder Sinon didn’t know it.
The problem was, which of the three was Death Gun?
A white hand passed through my view as I pondered. The nail of the index finger tapped on the tabletop. I looked up to see Sinon glaring at me through narrowed eyes.
“…I’m really getting mad now. What’s going on? Is this an elaborate setup to irritate me and get me off my game in the battle?”
“No…no, it’s not that…”
I bit my lip in the face of that ultrahot stare. I wasn’t sure if I should explain everything or not. In the world of GGO, most people knew the rumors that there was a player calling himself Death Gun who performed public shootings in crowded places, and the people who were shot hadn’t logged in since. However, very few of them seemed to actually believe that he’d really killed them. Sinon was in the majority on that one.
In truth, I wasn’t completely convinced, either. In my recent conversation with Kikuoka, we determined that no matter what logic was used, killing a player in real life with virtual bullets was absolutely impossible.
But at the same time, I couldn’t just laugh off Death Gun’s power. If he was indeed a central member of Laughing Coffin, that made him a homicidal player who had actively conspired and acted to end the lives of multiple people in Aincrad. I couldn’t discount the possibility that someone with such an extreme background could find some logic that transcended the common sense that Kikuoka and I followed.
If I confessed everything that I knew to Sinon, told her that Death Gun’s power might be real, that she might die if he shot her, and that she should cancel her appearance in the final, would she accept my word fo
r it? Absolutely not. I thought of the desperation in her face yesterday, when we were racing against the clock to get to the entry desk in time after she helped me with shopping. She had to have her own very serious reason for competing in this tournament…
The dark blue eyes stared holes in me as my silence continued—but eventually, they softened. Her thin-colored lips barely moved as she spoke.
“…Does this have something to do with the sudden change that came over you during the prelims?”
“Huh…?”
I looked up, straight into Sinon’s eyes, lost for words. Within seconds, I forgot all the logic and calculations running through my head, and simply nodded. The words were whispering out of my throat before I knew it.
“…Yeah… That’s right. I was greeted out of the blue in the waiting dome by someone who played the same VRMMO as me, years ago… I’m sure he’s going to be in tonight’s match. One of the three names left has to be his…”
“Was it a friend?” Sinon asked.
I shook my head violently, hair spinning. “No. Just the opposite—an enemy. I’m pretty certain that we tried to kill each other once. And yet…I can’t even remember his original name. I have to remember. I need to make contact again during the battle…and find out why he’s here, what he’s doing…”
At that point I realized that Sinon was not going to understand anything I was saying. In a normal VRMMO, even rivals in competing guilds were still comrades in a way, fellow enthusiasts of the same game. Calling him an “enemy” was a bit dramatic.
But the blue-haired sniper didn’t laugh at me, or do anything other than widen her eyes a bit. She spoke with the bare minimum of vocalization, just loud enough for the system to recognize it as speech. “Enemy…tried to kill…each other…”
She continued by asking me a question that shot deep into my mind, despite the same nearly silent volume. “Do you mean…your play styles didn’t match? Or you had a falling out in your party, that kind of in-game thing? Or was it—”
I interrupted, shaking my head. “No. An actual fight to the death, with both of our lives on the line. He…his group did something unforgivable. Peace and understanding weren’t an option. We had to settle it with the sword. I don’t regret that part. But…”