Phantom Bullet 1

by Reki Kawahara

  “Ahhh…”

  Asuna murmured, feeling a nostalgic, melancholic urge escaping her breast. Kazuto looked over at her. Their eyes met, and she smiled.

  “I think I understand why you brought me here.”

  “Uh…y-you do?”

  “Yes. If the world is built from the axis of time and the plane of space, then the center of Tokyo, the real world where we live now, is this place right here. And the central axis of the virtual world, which is even now expanding thanks to The Seed, was that old castle. That’s why the color of this sunset feels so nostalgic…”

  Kazuto blinked a few times, then beamed widely.

  “I see…Yeah, good point. Actually, I hadn’t thought about it that hard. But…what you just said did help me realize one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The shape of Aincrad. Maybe that spherical cone shape was meant to be a symbol of the axis of time and plane of space.”

  Asuna thought it over and eventually agreed.

  “Yes…maybe you’re right. But if that’s the case, the world that our guild leader sought to create eventually tapers down to a point and disappears. At least, until a certain someone blew the entire thing up.”

  “G-geez, I’m sorry…Vice Commander.”

  They shared a silent chuckle. A few seconds later, Kazuto sucked in a deep breath and stood up from the bench, still holding her hand.

  “Well, time to get going. This place closes at five.”

  “Okay. We should bring Liz and Leafa next time. I bet it would be fun to have a picnic on the grass.”

  “Yeah. Maybe in the spring.”

  Using his grip to get to her feet, Asuna took one last look at the sunset in all directions.

  She wanted to go home. Not to the Yuuki household, in the Miyasaka neighborhood of Setagaya Ward. To their little forest cottage that had temporarily existed on the twenty-second floor of the old Aincrad.

  The little log cabin was obliterated in the destruction of the floating castle, but Asuna had a secret plan percolating in her heart. Until that plan came to fruition, the room they rented in Yggdrasil City atop the World Tree in Alfheim was home to her, Kirito, and Yui.

  As they walked toward Hirakawa Gate on the north end, Asuna turned to Kazuto and asked, “Can you log in tonight? I want to tell Yui about what we just talked about.”

  “Yeah, sure. Is ten o’clock okay?” he answered with a smile. It was soon wiped away.

  “What’s wrong? Do you have something else to do?”

  “No, it’s not that. I’m pretty sure I can do it tonight, but… actually, Asuna…”

  It was rare for him to be at a loss for words like that. He mumbled for a few seconds, but what he said next froze Asuna’s heart with fear.

  “…Pretty soon, I might be converting my ALO Kirito to a different game…”

  “…Wh-what?!” she screamed. Startled, a few birds took off from a nearby branch.

  3

  Dusk.

  The low-hanging clouds were painted yellow by the tilt of the setting sun.

  The shadows of the ruined high-rise buildings, remnants of the former age, steadily grew across the wasteland of rock and sand. If she was going to be on standby for another hour, she’d have to think about switching to her nighttime loadout.

  Sinon didn’t like fighting with night-vision goggles, because it diminished the tension of that kill-or-be-killed mentality. She sighed atop the shadowed concrete, wishing the party that was her target would show up before the sunlight disappeared. The other five people in the depressing ambush with Sinon had to be thinking the same thing.

  As if to give voice to the entire party, an attacker, with his small-caliber submachine gun at his waist, grumbled, “Damn, how long are we gonna be waiting here…? Hey, Dyne, you sure they’re coming? The lead wasn’t a bust, was it?”

  Dyne, the craggy, burly leader of the squadron, shook his head. The large assault rifle hanging from his shoulder clattered.

  “They’ve been hunting the same route, same time, nearly every day for three weeks. I’ve confirmed it all myself. They’re a little late on the return today, but it’s probably just because the mob spawn rate’s a little higher than usual, and they’re cleaning up more of ’em. We’ll get better rewards for it, so don’t complain.”

  “Yeah, but,” the man in front pouted, “today’s target is the same group we attacked last week, right? Won’t be they be on guard and change their route…?”

  “It’s been six days since our last ambush. And they’ve been visiting the exact same hunting ground every time. Their squadron’s built for mob hunting…”

  Dyne’s lips curled into a mocking smile.

  “No matter how many times they get attacked and lose their earnings, they’ll just keep trying to make it up by hunting more. The perfect prey for a manhunting squadron like us. We can pull this off another two or three times; you’ll see.”

  “I dunno if I can believe that. Anyone’s going to put together a plan after they get attacked the first time.”

  “Maybe they’d be on the lookout the day after, but they’ll forget soon enough. Field mob algorithms are the same every day. After a while, they get to be just as robotic and automatic as the monsters they kill. Weak losers—no pride at all.”

  Sinon buried her face deeper into her muffler, disgusted by the conversation. The presence of emotions only dulled one’s trigger finger, yet she couldn’t prevent her irritation at Dyne’s boastful gloating.

  Apparently Dyne felt that parties who hunted mobs on a routine were lower than him, a PvPer, yet lying in wait to ambush the same party over and over had no effect whatsoever on his pride. If they were going to spend hours in wait here on neutral ground, they could have earned a lot more fighting another high-level squadron in the underground ruins.

  Naturally, that increased the chance that they’d die and respawn in town without their equipment. But that was battle. Only trial by fire truly disciplined the soul.

  She’d been working with Dyne’s squadron for the last two weeks. She regretted the decision to join almost immediately. Despite their proud claims of fighting only other players, they were a safety-first party, only setting their sights on inferior opponents and disengaging at the very first sign of danger.

  But Sinon raised no complaints about the focus of the squadron. She followed Dyne’s orders and pulled the trigger when she was supposed to. She wasn’t trying to make a name for herself through loyalty. She wanted to be sure that when she faced off against Dyne as an enemy, she had as much data and knowledge as possible to land the perfect head shot.

  While she had nothing good to say about his personality, Dyne’s eighteenth-place finish in the last Bullet of Bullets and the rare SIG SG 550 assault rifle that sprayed 5.56 mm rounds were the real deal. So she shut her mouth, kept her eyes bright, and absorbed all of the information he carelessly dispersed.

  Dyne blathered on.

  “…The thing is, they’ve all got optical guns for hunting mobs, so they can’t arrange for live-ammo guns for the entire group on a whim. At best, they might have one for covering fire, but no more. And Sinon’s got her sniper rifle to help take out whoever uses that one. There’s absolutely no flaw in our plan. Right, Sinon?”

  Sinon barely nodded with her face still stuffed in the muffler, suddenly the unwanted focus of the conversation. She did not speak up, hoping that would indicate she didn’t want any part of it.

  Dyne snorted in annoyance, while the attacker grinned at her and said, “Yeah, that makes sense. With Sinon’s long-distance fire, we’ve still got the advantage. By the way, Sinocchi…”

  He crawled over toward her, never leaving the shade of their cover, the lazy smile still plastered on his face.

  “You got any time later? I was hoping to raise my Sniping skill and I could use a few pointers. Feel like getting a cup of tea?”

  Sinon glanced quickly at the weapon on his waist. His main weapon was an H&K UMP, a live-ammo s
ubmachine gun. He played an Agility-first build, so his evasion in a head-on battle was notable, but level-wise and equipment-wise, he was not worth remembering. She wracked her brains to recall his name and dipped her head.

  “I’m sorry, Ginrou. I’ve got something to do IRL later…”

  Her voice was high-pitched, clear and adorable, not at all like her real voice. Sinon felt sick to her stomach; this was why she hated talking. Despite the fact that she’d just turned him down, Ginrou’s leering smile did not vanish from his lips. A subsection of the male players in the game seemed to feel some kind of pleasure from hearing her voice. The skin of her back crawled at the thought.

  The first time she dove into the VRMMORPG Gun Gale Online, she chose a bland, crude male body for her avatar. When the game made it immediately known that switching genders from player to character was not allowed, she wanted to pick as tall, muscular, and soldierlike a body as possible.

  Instead, the randomly generated body was that of a petite, fragile, doll-like little girl. When she made to delete her account and build a new character, the friend who had invited her to try the game said it would be “such a waste” to get rid of it right away, and eventually she leveled the character up to the point that it really would have been a waste to start over.

  Because of that, she had to deal with the occasional unwanted offer like this. Sinon played to fight, not to deal with this nonsense.

  “Oh, right, you’re a student in real life, aren’t you, Sinocchi? College? Got a report to write?”

  “…Yeah, sure…”

  It felt like after she’d accidentally admitted something about school when logging off one day, the come-ons had gotten much more insistent. She could never admit that she was actually in high school.

  The other two front-line players, who had been fiddling with their menus through all of this, finally approached to keep Ginrou away. One of them, a man with green bangs that hung over his smoke-styled goggles, said, “Ginrou, can’t you see you’re bothering her? Don’t bring up RL.”

  “Yeah. Just because you’ve been playing solo here and in real life for years doesn’t mean you have to bug her,” said the other man, who had a camouflage helmet tilted at a rakish angle. Ginrou knuckled both of their heads.

  “Like either of you have had a girlfriend in years!”

  The three of them cackled and Sinon scrunched up even smaller in disbelief.

  If you played GGO to battle against other players, there were much better ways to spend your downtime—maintaining focus, checking equipment, and the like. If you were trying to earn enough in-game money to cash out, you were better off in a mob-hunting squadron. And if you wanted to meet people, even among the gender-fixed games, there were much more fantastical worlds with a better gender ratio than this miserable, blasted ruin of a landscape. What did these people think they were doing here?

  She buried her face back in the muffler and traced her fingers along the massive rifle barrel, propped up on its bipod.

  Someday, I will destroy your avatars with this gun. Will you still be laughing and bothering me then?

  Her foul mood was absorbed by the chill of the barrel, and slowly subsided.

  “Here they come.”

  The last member of the party, spying with binoculars through a hole in the collapsed concrete wall, announced the presence of their target a full twenty minutes later.

  The three attackers and Dyne stopped chatting at once, and the mood in the air turned serious.

  Sinon glanced up at the sky. The yellow clouds were taking on a tiny bit of red, but there was plenty of light left.

  “Finally decided to show up,” Dyne growled softly. He leaned forward and took the binoculars from the scout at the wall. He peered through the same hole, checking the status of the enemy for himself.

  “…Yep, that’s them. Seven…that’s one more than last week. Four in front with optical blasters. One with a large-bore laser rifle. Plus…ooh, one with a Minimi. That one had an optic last week, so they must’ve switched over to live ammo in response. If you’re gonna snipe anyone, that’s the one. Last one’s…wearing a cloak, so I can’t see a weapon…”

  Sinon lay flat and pressed her face to her rifle’s high-power scope. Their group of six was lying in wait in a ruined building from the old civilization; the building sat on a hill with some vantage over the surrounding terrain. The ragged concrete walls and steel rebar skeletons made for good cover, and the view made it perfect for surveying the wasteland ahead.

  She looked up to the sky again to ensure that the virtual sun would not reflect in her lens, then flipped up the scope covers, front and rear.

  With her right eye pressed to the lens and the scope set to the lowest magnification, she could see small dots moving across the landscape. She tweaked the magnification dial with her fingertips. With each click of the dial, the little black sesame-seed dots grew until she saw seven players.

  As Dyne said, four of them had optical assault guns, two of which were constantly checking their surroundings with binoculars of their own. But unless the group had nearly mastered the Search skill, they would not find Sinon’s squadron lying in wait.

  In the middle of the pack were two players with large guns on their shoulders. One had a semiautomatic optical laser rifle, while the other had a live-ammo light machine gun, the FN Minimi. In real life, that was an excellent squad infantry support weapon—even the Japanese Self-Defense Force used it. Indeed, because over half the power of the optical gun attacks would be neutralized by their defensive field, it was the Minimi that posed the most threat by far.

  There were two main types of weapons in Gun Gale Online: live-ammo guns and optical guns. Live ammo delivered plenty of damage per round and could penetrate defensive fields. But they also required the user to lug around heavy ammo clips, and bullet trajectories were susceptible to the effects of wind and humidity.

  Meanwhile, optical guns were much lighter to carry, and featured longer range and higher precision. The energy packs that served as clips were much more compact as well, but the strength of the guns was diminished by the defensive fields that players wore as armor.

  Therefore, it was common wisdom that optical guns were better against monsters, while live-ammo guns were better suited for human players. But there was another feature that distinguished the two categories.

  All the optical guns were designed from scratch with fictional names, but the live-ammo guns were based directly on actual, existing firearms. Therefore all the gun fanatics—such as Dyne and Ginrou—who made up a significant portion of the GGO player base happily preferred to carry around live-ammunition guns, only switching to optics when hunting monsters.

  The rifle Sinon had her cheek pressed against was also a live-ammo gun. But before she’d come to this game, Sinon couldn’t have told you a single gun manufacturer. She learned their names as items within the game, but she had not developed even the slightest bit of interest in learning more about their real-life counterparts. To her, the unlimited number of guns in the world of GGO were nothing more than 3D-modeled objects, and she didn’t even like the thought of seeing a real gun in the regular world.

  All she did was destroy her virtual enemies with virtual bullets in this land of slaughter—until her heart turned hard as stone, and her blood cold as ice.

  Sinon would pull the trigger again today to keep that process in motion.

  She swept aside any unnecessary thoughts and budged the rifle slightly. At the back of the enemy formation was a player wearing enormous face-covering goggles and a large camouflage cloak. As Dyne had said, the player’s equipment was hidden.

  He was extremely large. There must have been a hefty backpack slung over his shoulders, because the cloak bulged alarmingly over his back. The hands peeking out of his sleeves were empty. Whatever weapon hung from his waist, it couldn’t be any larger than a submachine gun.

  “Can’t see his face because of the cloak?” Ginrou’s voice floated up from behind. H
e spoke in a joking tone, but there was no hiding the note of tension. “Think it’s him? You know…Death Gun.”

  “Hah! Like he exists,” Dyne snorted. “Besides, didn’t they say that guy was short, and wearing a ghillie suit? This one’s huge. Six feet at a minimum. I’m thinking he must be a Strength-build hauler. He’s carrying their loot haul, ammo, and energy packs in that bag. Probably doesn’t have anything decent to shoot with. Ignore him in combat.”

  Sinon watched the man through her scope.

  The heavy goggles hid his expression. Only his mouth was exposed. The lips were tightly shut and absolutely still. The other members, though on guard, seemed to be chatting—she caught the occasional flash of white teeth—but the large man in the back was completely silent. There was no wavering in his silent march.

  Half a year of experience in GGO taught Sinon’s instincts that this man was the true threat, much more than the one with the Minimi. But aside from the backpack, there were no other obvious bulges in his cloak. Perhaps he was hiding a small but high-powered elite weapon. But anything that good and that small would have to be an optical gun, and not powerful enough to make the difference in PvP. Perhaps the pressure she felt emanating from him was her imagination…

  After some hesitation, Sinon spoke up in a soft voice.

  “I get a bad feeling from him. I want to snipe the guy in the cloak first.”

  Dyne pulled the binoculars away and looked at her, eyebrow cocked.

  “Why? He’s barely got any gear on.”

  “…I have no proof. I just don’t like him being such an uncertain variable.”

  “If that’s the case, shouldn’t the Minimi be the obvious variable to worry about? If the blasters sneak up on us while you’re still getting rid of that one, we’ll have trouble on our hands.”

  While protection fields were effective against optical guns, their benefit lessened as the distance between gun and target shrank. At very close range, it was quite possible for a laser blaster with its much larger magazine to overpower the alternative. Sinon had no leg to stand on, so she withdrew her opinion.