Phantom Bullet 2

  Sinon sighed and muttered, “At any rate, we should move from this spot. All the other players who assumed you and I were fighting are bound to come snooping in to clean up after the battle.”

  “Good point,” Kirito murmured. He stared right into Sinon’s face. “I don’t suppose it would work to ask you to find an absolutely safe location to hide until the end of the battle royale, would it?”

  “O-of course I won’t!” she hissed back, just as loud as was safe. “Do I look like Richie the Camper to you?! Besides, there’s no safe place on this entire island. I know there are caves in the desert region to the north that won’t show up on the scan, but all anyone has to do is toss a grenade inside to finish me off!”

  “…All right. Let’s part ways here, then.”

  “Uh…” She hadn’t expected that. After a couple of quick blinks, she regained her cool. “Wh-what will you do?”

  “I’m going after Death Gun. I can’t let him shoot anyone else with that pistol. Besides, I feel like…I might remember, if I meet him face-to-face. What his old name was. And then…”

  Kirito’s smooth lips shut tight. He took a deep breath and faced Sinon directly. “Sinon, I want you to stay away from him as best you can. I’ll keep my promise: The next time we meet on this island, I’ll fight you for real. Oh, and…thank you for hearing me out without shooting me.”

  He bowed briefly, and the black-clad swordsman slid out from the bush.

  “Ah…hey!” Sinon yelped, but he was already standing on the reddish dirt in his assault boots, running for the bridge to the north without a backward glance.

  She followed his slender, retreating back for a few moments, then shut her eyes tight.

  “~~~…”

  With a silent argh! Sinon let out a long breath and forcefully jumped up from her spot under the bush. The terrain object was destroyed by her violent action, the branches and leaves scattering through the air before they disappeared entirely.

  “Wait, you!” she screamed. His figure stopped, a good forty paces away. She picked up the Hecate without looking at it, slung it over her shoulder, and dashed after Kirito. She didn’t so much as look at the expression of pure, undiluted suspicion on his face.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re going to fight Death Gun, aren’t you? He’s clearly really tough, even without the power of that gun. If you lose before I get to fight you, I’ll never have the chance for a rematch. Though I’m not exactly happy about it, I’ll fight at your side temporarily…which gives us the best chance at knocking him right out of the BoB,” she announced quickly, rattling off the lines she came up with while chasing him down, only to then shoot a sidelong glance at him. The lightswordsman’s brows were knitted, but his lips were curled into a slight smile—a very odd expression. But his concern won out, and he shook his black hair.

  “No…that’s not good enough. You saw how he fights, Sinon. He’s dangerous. If you get shot, you could suffer real-life harm…”

  “We don’t know where Death Gun went, so whether we’re separate or together, the danger of encountering him is the same. And don’t give me that crap about being worried for my sake, when you’re such a noob that you ran right out into the open without looking around you.”

  “…Okay, maybe you have a point…”

  After a few seconds’ hesitation, Kirito finally slumped his shoulders and nodded—when suddenly, his hand flashed, moving in a blur. She didn’t even process that he had pulled his lightsword from the carabiner on his belt until after the blue-purple energy blade had extended from the handle.

  No way, is he going to ambush me and pretend he’s done with our promise? Sinon wondered in a panic. But Kirito looked away to the west. She followed his gaze to see a number of red lines extending from the shadow of a large rock about a hundred meters away. Bullet lines.

  Their mystery attacker’s gun barked full-auto fire, while Kirito’s lightsword ducked and waved, leaving glowing afterimages and knocking down the storm of gunfire bullet by bullet. Sinon stood dumbly in place for a good second, blown away by a show of skill the likes of which she’d never seen in GGO, before recovering and lurching into motion. She dropped to the ground with her Hecate, getting into firing position and planting its bipod in the sand.

  Though she was already certain of this based on the full-auto fire, a peek through the scope confirmed that it was not the ghillie cloak of Death Gun shooting at them. She recognized the oddly shaped open helmet with a fluffy tassel on the crown, and the accuracy-improving eyepatch device. It was Xiahou Dun, an assault rifle gunman who had appeared in the previous two tournaments. He used a Norinco CQ rifle. Though he was a grizzled veteran, the gruff avatar’s jaw was agape, and for good reason—he never would have expected that an entire magazine of ambush fire could be deflected perfectly by the novelty weapon that was a photon sword.

  “No way, man!” wailed Xiahou Dun, an extremely inappropriate action for someone who looked so much like a stately, whiskered ancient Chinese general. He ducked behind the boulder.

  Kirito glanced down at Sinon and shrugged. “Might as well start with him. I’ll go in, you cover me.”

  “…Roger that.”

  It was an odd turn of events. How did it come to this?

  Sinon pressed her cheek into the familiar wooden stock of her gun.

  11

  “They sure aren’t showing much of Big Brother,” Leafa noted to Silica, her golden-green ponytail rustling over her back.

  Silica’s triangular cat ears twitched as they poked out of her light brown hair. “Yes, it’s quite a surprise. Knowing Kirito, I figured he would be raising hell from the very start.”

  “Nah, that son of a bitch is crafty, if anything. He might be hiding out in a safe spot while the crowd thins itself out for him.”

  That line came from Klein, who was manning the bar counter in the corner of the room. Leafa, Silica, and Asuna—on the sofa in the center of the room—couldn’t help but giggle a bit.

  “Even Kirito wouldn’t do something like that…I think,” Asuna added softly. On her shoulder, the palm-sized fairy—Yui the AI, “daughter” to Asuna and Kirito—flapped her tiny, fragile wings.

  “That’s right! Papa is sneaking up and ambushing his enemies so fast, the camera can’t even follow him!”

  To her left, Lisbeth couldn’t contain her laughter. “Ha-ha-ha, that sounds about right. And he went out of his way to use a sword in a gun game.”

  For a moment, everyone visualized that image. The room filled with cheerful laughter, and Pina, the little dragon familiar, perked up her ears from her resting position in Silica’s lap.

  This group of six people and one animal were not gathered in a real location. They were within the team’s favorite VRMMORPG, ALfheim Online, or ALO for short. Yggdrasil City was a settlement atop the massive World Tree that loomed over the center of the game’s map. The room that Asuna and Kirito rented together was host to today’s gathering.

  The 2,000-yrd monthly rent on the place bought them plenty of space. The large sofa set was in the center of the immaculate wooden floor, and there was even a home bar built into the wall. The countless bottles on the shelves had been gathered by the hearty drinker Klein from the home territories of all nine fairy races, and even Jotunheim below. According to him, some of them were as fine as thirty-year scotch, if you didn’t mind not getting drunk from it. As a minor, Asuna wouldn’t know the difference.

  The entire south wall was made of glass and offered them a stunning view of Ygg City whenever they wanted, but there was no view of the night skyline today. The glass also acted as a giant screen, and it was now showing them a different world entirely—courtesy of the net channel MMO Stream. It was the livestream of the Bullet of Bullets battle-royale final, the tournament to determine the greatest soldier of Gun Gale Online.

  They had gathered to either cheer on, or criticize, Kirito’s sudden and unannounced appearance in this tourname
nt. Unfortunately, the massive axe warrior Agil was not present. It was a busy hour for the real-life café/bar that he managed. On the other hand, Asuna was actually diving here from the second floor of that very business, Dicey Café. It was a convenient location in the middle of Tokyo for her, from which she could rush over and give Kirito a piece of her mind once the event was finished.

  “Why do you suppose Kirito would go to the lengths of converting from ALO, just to enter this tournament?” Lisbeth wondered, swirling a mysterious emerald-green wine. To her left, Leafa shot a look at Asuna. Only Asuna, Leafa, and Yui knew that Kirito was undertaking this GGO mission for the sake of their fellow ALO player, the undine mage Chrysheight—who was actually Seijirou Kikuoka, Virtual Division official for the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Asuna took Leafa’s glance to mean that it was up to her how to respond, so she took a second to think.

  “The thing is…it seems he took on some kind of weird job. Something about researching the current state of VRMMOs—the Seed Nexus, in particular. GGO’s the only game with a real-currency-conversion system, which is why he’s there.”

  That was exactly what Kirito had told her. But Asuna didn’t think for a second that it was the entire story. She didn’t think that he was lying, but there had to be something he was leaving out. It was obvious from his facial expression, voice, and demeanor when he explained that he was converting after their recent date.

  But Asuna didn’t press him for more at the time. There had to be a reason why he wouldn’t tell her. And she firmly believed that the reason was not a betrayal of any kind.

  So she wished him good luck and sent him on his way, then gathered up their friends to watch the event from their distant world. But she couldn’t deny that in the last few days, something odd was eating away at her.

  It wasn’t distrust of Kirito, but more of a vague premonition. The feeling that something was going to happen, or was already happening. It was a shapeless unease, the same sensation she felt in Aincrad when surrounded by a large group of monsters just outside of the radius of her Search skill…

  Lisbeth’s sixth sense of friendship seemed to pick up the worry that Asuna had kept out of her voice and expression. “A job, huh…Well, either way, if anyone can grasp the essentials of a game in no time, it’s him…”

  “But why’s he jumping right into this PvP tournament, then? If it’s just for research, couldn’t he simply walk around and talk to players in town?” asked Klein.

  All four of them had this same question.

  Eventually Silica suggested, “Maybe…he wants to win the tournament and earn a lot of money so he can convert it back into cash? I’ve heard that the minimum value to make use of that feature is really high…”

  Yui instantly piped up from Asuna’s shoulder with more detailed information. “The rate isn’t listed on the official site, but according to online articles, the minimum value is 100,000 in-game credits, and the ratio is 100 credits to 1 yen, which would mean 1,000 yen. It seems that the player’s registered e-mail address receives a code with the electronic cash already deposited. The top prize for the tournament is 3,000,000 credits, which would be 30,000 yen when cashed out.”

  It all sounded very fluid and comfortable coming from Yui’s lips, but she was pulling down the information and compiling it from the Net as she spoke it aloud. Her search-and-filter speed and precision were greater than any human’s. Kirito had frequently—and the girls, every now and then—called upon her ability to put together his homework reports.

  “Thanks, Yui,” Asuna said, rubbing the little fairy’s head with a finger. “It doesn’t sound like the cashing-out system itself is very complex. After all, we already trade electronic cash codes through e-mail ourselves. You wouldn’t think Kirito would need to confirm the process for himself…”

  “Though I can definitely see him getting lured in by a 30,000-yen pot!” Klein japed. Everyone grimaced.

  “No, he’s not you,” Lisbeth remarked immediately. “But in most PvP battle royales, it doesn’t work to hide somewhere and wait until there’s almost no one left. In ALO, they have automatic Searcher spells that reveal your location if you try to hide in the same location for minutes at a time, don’t they?”

  “Plus, it doesn’t really fit Big Brother’s personality. He’s not the type to sit still while listening to the sound of other people fighting. He wouldn’t be able to resist,” Leafa commented, with the convincing wisdom of one who’d lived with him for years. It made perfect sense to the group, so they resumed their pondering.

  As they did so, the enormous 300-inch screen-wall was positively jittering with flashy graphics. Because it was a gun-based game, most of the shots came from over the shoulder of an individual player. As the virtual camera followed them, the bottom of the screen displayed the name of the player being viewed, but none of the sixteen segments of the screen showed the name KIRITO. As a general rule, it didn’t show players not in battle, which meant that in the thirty minutes since the event started, Kirito hadn’t been involved in a single fight.

  Perhaps he was just being cautious, having transferred from a world of swords and magic to an unfamiliar gun-centric setting. But the Kirito that Asuna knew would face his foes headfirst, no matter the circumstance—he would find a way. Like Leafa said, it didn’t make sense that Kirito would appear in a big event and hide for thirty minutes. She could see him getting into an immediate battle with one of the heavy favorites right off the bat and dying with style—but the list of contestants on the right edge of the screen showed his status as ALIVE.

  “Does that mean…his purpose isn’t to make a splash in the tournament…but something more important?” Asuna wondered, right about the moment that one of the battles on the sixteen-segment screen reached a climax.

  The camera was from the perspective of a player named Dyne. He was set up with a simple machine gun at the base of a rusted-out bridge, spraying bullets. But his opponent, dressed in pale blue clothing, leaped up onto the bridge supports as nimbly as a cait sith to approach. He fired a big, mean-looking gun like a criminal in some Hollywood blockbuster, and Dyne was done for in moments.

  Lisbeth was watching the same fight among all of the different views, and she whistled softly. “Ooh, he’s good. Y’know, watching like this makes GGO look pretty fun. I wonder if you can craft your own guns…”

  Following her experience in SAO, Lisbeth had chosen to be a leprechaun blacksmith in ALO. Asuna couldn’t help but smile.

  “Don’t tell me you’re converting to GGO next, Liz. We’ve still got a long way to go to beat the New Aincrad.”

  “That’s right, Liz! Remember, there’s going to be that new update when we reach the twenties!” Silica piped up from the other end of the sofa. Lisbeth raised her hands in surrender.

  “All right, all right. I’m just remarking about how every game has its worthy opponents. I bet that blue guy’s one of the favorites to win it all…”

  Just at that moment, the “blue guy” collapsed on screen. The frame swung around, taking the viewpoint of the blue-clad man who’d just fallen. The name PALE RIDER flashed beneath the image.

  He was down, but not dead. Fine sparks shot from his damaged shoulder and crawled over his body, a visual sign that the avatar’s movement was contained.

  “It looks like that wind spell Thunderweb,” Leafa remarked. She was a sylph warrior.

  The salamander swordsman Klein shook his red hair, which was pinned behind an ugly bandana. “I hate those things. The homing’s way too good on them.”

  “Because every kind of debuff is bad for you! You need to raise your resistance skills already.”

  “Bah! A true samurai doesn’t take a single skill related to magic. You don’t do it!”

  “Don’t you know that for decades, the samurai class in RPGs has been basically just warriors with black magic?!”

  Asuna grinned at their argument and reached out with her right hand to focus on the window in question, spreading her index
finger and thumb apart. The feed of the prone Pale Rider expanded and pushed the other windows to the sides of the screen.

  He’d been paralyzed for over ten seconds, but no other player had entered the frame as of yet. There was only the reddened earth, the bridge, the river beneath it, and the forest on the other side, hazy through the dust…

  Flap.

  All five twitched at the same time. A black fabric came into view from the left side of the frame. The camera steadily pulled back so that a new figure came into full view on the screen.

  “A ghost…?” someone whispered in a hoarse voice, possibly Lisbeth or Silica—or Asuna herself.

  A dark gray cloak, tattered and waving in the breeze. A hood that shrouded what lay within in total darkness. And glowing like floating hellfires, two red eyes. It was eerily similar to the ghostly enemies that had tormented them so often back in the original Aincrad.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and looked again. Of course, it was a real player, a contestant in the tournament, not a ghostly figure. There were two legs sticking out of the bottom of the cloak, and a very large hunting rifle on the player’s right shoulder. This cloaked man must have been the one who had stunned Pale Rider. Even in ALO, the magic warrior who ensnared foes with capturing spells and approached to finish the job with physical attacks was a very popular build.

  Sure enough, just as Asuna imagined, the cloaked man reached to his waist and pulled out a black pistol. But if that was supposed to be his main source of damage, it seemed…kinda…

  “…Kinda wimpy, ain’t it?” Klein said, giving voice to her curiosity. He was scratching at his bearded chin in the way he always did. “No way that peashooter does more damage than that huge rifle on his shoulder. He should use that, instead.”