Phantom Bullet 1

by Reki Kawahara

  “…All right. First target is the Minimi. If possible, I’ll take the cloak with my next shot.”

  The problem was that when it came to sniping, the only truly effective shot came before the target knew it was under attack. Once the enemy knew where she was firing from, evasion was as simple as staying out of her line of fire.

  “Hey, no more time to talk. Distance of 2,500,” said the recon man, who had taken the binoculars back from Dyne. The leader nodded and turned to the three attackers behind him.

  “All right. We’re going to follow the plan, move up to the shadow of the building ahead, and wait for them. Sinon, once we’re on the move, we won’t be able to see them, so you need to alert us if anything changes. I’ll give you the signal to snipe.”

  “Roger.”

  Sinon put her eye back to the rifle scope. Nothing had changed in the party. They still marched across the wasteland, their pace slow and easy.

  As the scout had said, two and a half kilometers separated Sinon’s squadron from the enemy. Just slightly closer than halfway in between, an even larger ruined building loomed over the landscape. Dyne and the rest were going to use that as cover and ambush their prey as they approached.

  “All right, move out,” Dyne commanded. Aside from Sinon, the others muttered quick acknowledgments. Their boots scraped on the gravelly sand as they slid down the backside of the sloping hill. Sinon waited for the whistling evening wind to drown out their footsteps, then pulled out a small headset from below her muffler and affixed it to her left ear.

  For the next few minutes, Sinon would be fighting the sniper’s lonely battle against pressure. The next bullet she fired would have an enormous influence on the fight that ensued. The only things she could rely on were her trigger finger and the silent gun. She rubbed the massive barrel with her left hand. The black metal answered her with chilly silence.

  More than anything else, it was this gun that had cemented Sinon’s infamy in this world as a very rare type of sniper. It was called a PGM Ultima Ratio Hecate II. At four and a half feet long and just over thirty pounds, it fired enormous .50-caliber (12.7 mm) rounds.

  In the real world, from what she’d heard, it was categorized as an antimateriel sniper rifle, meant for piercing military vehicles or structures. It was so powerful that some fancy-named treaty prohibited it from being used against human targets. There was no such law here.

  She’d earned it three months ago, around the time she was experienced enough to be considered a veteran of GGO. On a whim, she’d been playing solo in a massive ruined dungeon beneath the capital city SBC Glocken when she fell into a chute trap.

  Gun Gale Online took place after a massive war in the distant past caused civilization to collapse, and the players were the descendants of space colonies who had returned to Earth. Glocken itself was the giant ship they’d used to reach the planet, and beneath the ship was the ruin of one of the giant cities that had been wiped out in the war. The city’s ruins were crawling with automatic fighter drones and genetically modified creatures that greeted the adventurers, who dreamed of unearthing ancient treasures. Sinon fell right into the bottom level of that dungeon, its most deadly region.

  It was not the kind of place a solo player should be able to handle. Soon she had resigned herself to dying in the very first encounter and spawning back at the save point in town. Eventually, she ended up in a huge, stadiumlike round space, which featured an extremely grotesque creature.

  Based on the size and name, it appeared to be a boss monster, but she had never seen it on any of the news sites or wikis. Upon this realization, what little of a gamer’s soul Sinon had was stimulated into action. If she was going to die, she’d die fighting this thing. She hid in the exhaust vents over the stadium and trained her rifle on the beast.

  The battle did not turn out as she expected. The boss had a number of attack styles—heat ray, claws, poisonous gas—but the range of all these attacks was just short enough to miss her position. Meanwhile, Sinon’s rifle did paltry amounts of damage to a target that was barely within its effective range. Based on the stock of ammo she was carrying, it would be impossible for her to beat the creature unless she hit its weak forehead with essentially every bullet she had remaining.

  With ice-cold calculation and concentration, Sinon pulled it off. The boss collapsed and exploded into vanishing shards three hours after the battle began.

  What it dropped was an enormous rifle she’d never seen before. By design, both NPC and player craftsmen could not forge powerful live-ammo guns, and the only ones for sale in town were low-power models. If you wanted anything midlevel or higher, the only option was excavating them from ruins. The Ultima Ratio Hecate II that Sinon found was in the very rarest tier of excavated weapons.

  It was said that there were only ten antimaterial rifles on the server, including Sinon’s Hecate II. They commanded an extraordinary price on the market, of course—the last one to be auctioned off went for twenty mega-credits, or twenty million credits. The exchange rate of credits to yen was a hundred to one, meaning the player had earned about 200,000 yen for the sale.

  Sinon was a high school student living alone and stretching her monthly budget as far as it could humanly go, so she was sorely tempted by that number. Recently she’d been earning enough to pay 1,500 yen, half the cost of her monthly subscription, but that was still half of her allowance. And if she dove any more often than she already did, she couldn’t maintain her grades. But 200,000 yen was enough to cover all the money she’d sunk into the game with a majority to spare.

  Yet Sinon did not sell the gun. Making money wasn’t the reason she played GGO; it was to defeat her enemies—every player stronger than her—so she could conquer her own weakness. And on top of that, for the first time ever, she felt a soul within that simple item.

  Because of the Hecate II’s massive bulk, it required a considerable amount of strength to carry. Fortunately for Sinon, she’d spent more of her stat points on Strength than Agility, and she just barely met the required value. The first time she brought it into battle and caught an enemy in its scope, she felt strength and will within the heavy, cold pile of metal. It was a cruel soul that desired slaughter and demanded death. It was every bit the unflinching, unyielding, unsentimental being that Sinon wished herself to be.

  Much later, she learned that the name Hecate came from the Greek goddess of the underworld. That was the moment she decided this gun would be her first, and last, partner.

  The party continued to move through her scope finder.

  Sinon lifted her head and looked down on the wasteland directly to see that Dyne’s group of five was approaching the large building that separated her and the target. The distance between the two was already down to 700 meters—under half a mile. She put her eye back to the scope and waited for Dyne’s order.

  Less than a minute later, a crackling voice came through the earpiece.

  “We’re in position.”

  “Roger that. Target hasn’t changed course or speed. Distance to you, 400. Distance to me, 1,500.”

  “They’re still a ways off. Are you ready?” he asked.

  She gave him a bland affirmative.

  “…Okay. Begin sniping.”

  “Roger.”

  Their conversation over, Sinon held her mouth shut and placed her right index finger against the trigger guard.

  Through the scope, she saw her first target, the man with the Minimi on his shoulder, saying something as he walked. In last week’s battle, Sinon had not been on sniping duty, but had charged into battle with an assault rifle. She surely would have seen him at such a close range, but she didn’t remember his face. Based on his support weapon, however, he must have been at a considerable level.

  She moved the reticle delicately, trying to stifle the increased pulse of her heart. Correcting for distance, wind direction, and the target’s movement speed, she placed her aim over a yard in the air to the upper left of the man. Her finger traced the trig
ger.

  In that instant, a translucent, light green sphere appeared in her field of vision.

  The sphere, shifting and wavering periodically, covered from the center of the man’s chest to around his knees. It was called a “bullet circle,” an offensive assistance system that only Sinon could see. When the bullet left the gun, it would land at a random point within the circle. At its current size, the amount of the circle occupied by the man’s body was about a third, meaning she had a 30 percent chance of hitting the target. On top of that, even with the power of the Hecate II, it was impossible to get an instant kill by hitting the limbs alone, which dropped her chances of a one-hit kill even lower.

  The size of the bullet circle was affected by distance, the gun’s stats, the weather, the amount of light, and the player’s skill and stat values, but the most important parameter of all of them was the shooter’s pulse.

  The AmuSphere monitored her real-life heart rate as she lay on the bed, sending that information to the game engine. The instant her heart thumped, the circle expanded to its maximum size. Then it would shrink and shrink until the next heartbeat pushed it out again. If a sniper wanted to raise her accuracy, she had to pull the trigger in the space between heartbeats.

  The problem was that a relaxed, resting heart rate might be sixty BPM, one per second, but under the stress of sniping, that could rise to twice the speed, causing the circle to expand and contract wildly. Under those circumstances, it was impossible to time the shot between pulses.

  This was the main reason there were so few snipers in GGO.

  You couldn’t land a hit. There was no way to eliminate tension when sniping. The heart rate had an effect in close combat as well, of course, but at that distance even an affected shot could land at times—especially with fully automatic SMGs and assault rifles. But when sniping a target over half a mile away, the bullet circle expanded to several times the size of a person. The fact that Sinon had gotten this one to a 30 percent accuracy size was nothing short of a miracle.

  But, Sinon thought to herself, how bad is that pressure, that anxiety, that fear, when you really get down to it? Fifteen hundred meters? That’s like making a basket with a wadded-up piece of paper. It’s not that bad—

  Not compared to what happened back then.

  Her head went ice-cold. Her heart was as still as if it never beat.

  Ice. I am a machine of coldest ice.

  The pitch of the bullet circle’s shifting dropped precipitously. Her sense of time slowed until she could easily, clearly, identify the moment the circle was at its smallest size.

  One…two…three times the circle shrank, and when it covered only the heart of the man lugging the Minimi on his shoulder, Sinon pulled the trigger.

  The world shook with a blast like thunder.

  A gout of fire erupted from the muzzle brake on the end of the Hecate II’s barrel, and the projectile burst forward faster than the sound of the blast. The recoil pushed the rifle and Sinon herself backward, but she held firm with both feet.

  Beneath her reticle, the man looked up, perhaps noticing the muzzle flash in the distance. His gaze met hers through the scope.

  And in that very instant, the man’s chest, shoulder and head exploded into tiny shards and disappeared. Just a moment later, the rest of his body crumbled into nothing, like a broken glass statue. Unfortunately for him, the extremely expensive-looking Minimi on his shoulder was selected as a random drop and fell into the sand. When he rematerialized back in town, he’d be hit by the double shock of a one-hit fatality and the loss of his gear.

  Sinon observed all of the above without emotion. Her right hand moved automatically, pulling the Hecate II’s bolt handle. It spit out an impressively sized cartridge, which hit a nearby rock with a heavy clang and vanished.

  Even as she loaded the next round, Sinon adjusted the rifle to the right, catching her secondary target, the large cloaked man, in the sight. His goggled face was pointed straight at her. She placed the sight just above his body and brushed the trigger. The green projection circle appeared again and instantly shrank to a point.

  Three seconds had passed since the first bullet left the gun. A semiautomatic rifle could continue firing, but the bolt-action Hecate II was not that convenient. However, your average player, upon the shock and momentary petrification of seeing his partner’s body exploding, needed at least five seconds to mentally recover, identify the firing direction, and begin taking evasive maneuvers. She figured that with the ensuing chaos, she’d have time to succeed at a second shot.

  But the cloaked man showed not a single sign of panic. He stared straight at Sinon through his large goggles. He had to be a serious veteran, probably a player whose name others would recognize. She pulled the trigger.

  At this point, the man would be seeing a pale, translucent red “bullet line” that indicated the arc of incoming enemy fire. This defensive aid was implemented to increase the fun of the gunfights, augmenting the guessing game of when and where an attack would come from. Bold players with excellent reflexes and high Agility could evade more than half the bullets from an automatic assault rifle at a distance of fifty yards.

  The greatest benefit to playing the sniper class was that the very first shot did not cause the bullet line to appear to the target. Since Sinon had already taken her first shot and revealed her location, that advantage was now lost.

  There was another roar. The Hecate II’s bullet, a missile of pure death launched by her unfeeling finger, ripped through the pale yellow atmosphere.

  As Sinon feared, the man calmly took one wide step to the right. The next instant, the 12.7 mm round tore through the space several feet away. A large circular mass disappeared from a concrete wall jutting up out of the wasteland far behind him.

  Sinon’s hand moved automatically to the bolt to load the next bullet, but she did not return her finger to the trigger.

  Any further sniping would be pointless. If she wanted to hit her target, she needed to move locations, hide from his line of sight, and wait out the sixty seconds for the recognition system to reset and allow her that first sneak attack again. But by then, the battle would essentially be decided. She whispered into the com next to her mouth, eye still pressed to the scope.

  “First target clear. Second target failed.”

  Dyne’s response was immediate.

  “Roger that. Begin attack…Go, go, go!!”

  Sinon heard the faint scrape of boots hitting ground through the com. She hissed the breath she’d been holding in.

  Her duty was over. The Hecate II was an extremely valuable gun, so charging into close battle with it could be disastrous if she died and it was dropped for the enemy to claim. Dyne told her that she could wait on standby after her job was done. She wasn’t happy that her second shot missed, but all she could do now was pray that the bad feeling she had was an illusion.

  Despite knowing her role was done, Sinon moved the rifle again and bumped down the magnification on the scope to get a view of the entire enemy squadron. The four lead gunners were scrambling toward rocks and concrete walls for cover, while in the back, the man with the large laser and the cloaked—

  “Ah!”

  She gasped. The large man had just thrown his arms up and ripped away the camouflage cloak. There were no weapons in his hands. Or at his waist.

  The bulky object on his back, which she’d taken to be a backpack for hauling items, was exposed at last.

  A metal rail curved from shoulder to broad shoulder. Hanging from it was a delicately framed metallic object.

  It was a spherical machine cradled in a Y-shaped frame. At the top was a thick carrying handle, and below that, a bundle of six gun barrels. It was easily over three feet long. There was a belt feeder affixed to the machine, which was connected to a high-capacity ammo belt that also hung from the frame.

  This dreadful thing, too enormous and menacing to be called a “gun,” itched at Sinon’s memory. She had seen this weapon once in an index on
a GGO fansite.

  It was called a GE M134 minigun, and belonged to the Heavy Machine Gun category—the largest type of weapons found in Gun Gale Online. Those six barrels rotated at high speed, loading, firing, and expelling cartridges nearly instantly. It could fire a hundred 7.62 mm bullets in a single second, making it more than worthy of its demonic reputation. This was not just a gun—it was a war machine.

  Naturally, such a thing was tremendously heavy. From what she recalled, the body alone weighed forty pounds, and with that much ammo, the whole thing had to be pushing ninety. Even the most extreme STR-heavy build couldn’t fit all of that under the personal weight limit. He had to be suffering a movement penalty for overencumbrance.

  The squadron wasn’t moving slowly because their hunt went long. They were going at the maximum speed that man could move.

  Stunned, Sinon watched through the scope as the large man reached around his back to grab the handle of the minigun. The massive machine slid smoothly across the rail and rotated ninety degrees to point forward when it reached his right side. He planted his legs wide, pointed the six-barreled gun forward, and for the first time, the mouth below his goggles curved into a triumphant smile.

  She hurriedly spun the scope’s dial to the minimum magnification. In the bottom left of her view, Ginrou and the two other attackers were charging in with submachine guns. The enemy party’s front-line shooters were firing back with laser blasters, but the pale blue lasers all fizzled out and vanished into a rippling waterlike surface about three feet in front of her teammates. The anti-optical defense fields were doing their job.

  Their live-ammo SMGs spit return fire, and one of the targets, caught a little too far out from his rock cover, flailed with a few red hit blips and collapsed. Ginrou’s group charged farther, up to the closest concrete wall between them and their targets.

  The large man squatted. His minigun spun into life, spraying a brilliant curtain of bullets for just a third of a second.