Phantom Bullet 1

by Reki Kawahara

  Plus, based on what she said, Sinon had absolute confidence in her ability to reach the Bullet of Bullets final. If my expectation that Death Gun would be there was correct, that lowered my list of potential candidates to thirty. Sinon would be one of them.

  In all honesty, I did not want to consider that possibility. She had showed me to the shop and walked me through many facets of the game, and I never got a hint of murder from her personality. If anything, there was a sad loneliness about her.

  So which was the real Sinon?

  No use thinking about it now. Once we trade sword blows—er, gunshots—I might understand more.

  I raised my eyes at the exact moment the countdown hit zero. The teleportation effect surrounded me again.

  The next thing I saw was a gloomy sunset.

  Wind blew past, a high-pitched whistling in my ears. Scraps of yellow cloud floated by overhead, and dried grass rustled fiercely at my feet.

  Right nearby was a massive stone column, though I couldn’t have identified Ionian style from Corinthian. It was part of a pattern, a layout of columns in a three-sided square shape, each one about three yards from the next. Some of them had withered away at the top, and some were completely collapsed. It looked just like some ancient temple that had fallen into ruin ages ago.

  Out of instinct, I scrambled to the nearest column and scanned the surroundings.

  The faded grasses continued in all directions, and beyond the low hill I could see a number of other ruins like the one I stood in now. From what Sinon said, the maps were a thousand meters on each side, but it was clearly several dozen times that distance to the horizon. There must have been rivers or cliffs at the boundaries to prevent moving beyond the map.

  I remembered more of her explanation. The contestants were placed at least half of the full distance apart, but I didn’t see anyone. My opponent must have been hiding behind cover like me. There were no cursors to indicate enemy location, so I had to start by finding my foe.

  I could choose to hide until the other guy got tired of waiting and needed to act, but waiting wasn’t my style. It seemed liked a better idea to sprint to the nearest ruins in the hope of drawing fire so that I could discern the enemy’s location. I brushed the Five-Seven on my waist with my left hand.

  At that moment, a stronger breeze brushed past, snapping the nearby grass back and forth. Once the gust had passed, at the exact moment that the grass stood back up, a silhouette abruptly and silently got to its feet barely twenty yards away.

  He had an assault rifle in both hands, trained right on me. The image instantly burned into my mind through my retinas: brown stubble pressed up to the barrel, goggles covering the upper half of his face, and a helmet topped with dummy grass. We were the only two people on the map, so this had to be Uemaru.

  I had no idea how he’d approached so quickly. Clearly, a big part of the reason was the camo he was wearing. It was colored the exact same khaki as the grass around us, in a fine, vertical-striped pattern. That was an example of the sixty-second preparation period being put to good use.

  Dozens of red lines shot out of the black rifle on the enemy’s shoulder, bullet lines that showed where his shots would land, crossing entirely over me and the space around me.

  “Whoa!” I shrieked, jumping on instinct. That took me in the direction of the least dense number of bullet lines—directly upward.

  Katatatata! His rifle cracked loudly, and I felt two hard impacts on my right shin. The HP bar that was fixed in the upper left corner of my vision dropped about 10 percent. There were too many bullets to dodge them all—I belatedly remembered Sinon’s warning about full-auto fire.

  I did a flip in midair and landed atop the broken column behind me, pulling the Five-Seven out of its holster and preparing to shoot back.

  But Uemaru didn’t give me the time to get ready. More of the countless red lines intersected my chest.

  “Aaaah!”

  I wailed pitifully and fell backward off the pillar, but another of the bullets grazed my left arm, tearing away more HP.

  Most of the hail of gunfire hit the stone column, sending little shards flying. I held my limbs close, trying to keep my body safely hidden in the shadow of the pillar.

  This is nothing at all like a sword-on-sword battle!

  The bullet-dodging game I played with the NPC gunman featured a six-shooter with intervals in between, which required all of my nerves to conquer. But this level of bullet hell—over ten shots a second—was beyond my ability.

  If I was going to use that Kagemitsu to chop off Uemaru’s ugly whiskers, I needed to get right up in his face, but at this rate I would be riddled full of holes far before I got anywhere near him.

  Since full evasion was impossible, I’d have to defend against the bullets somehow. Sadly, this world only had defensive fields that neutralized lasers, and no magical shields that could stop a live round. Even in SAO, I could have used my sword as a shield using the Weapon Defense skill.

  I put my hand to the lightsword, still hooked to my belt by the carabiner. If only I could deflect some of the bullets with the sword. It shouldn’t be impossible—they did that in those old sci-fi movies about the wars among the stars. Since this game was made in America, they had to have considered the possibility. But if I was going to pull off such a maneuver, I’d need to accurately predict the trajectories of the incoming bullets…

  No, wait.

  That was possible. After all, what were the bullet lines for, if not seeing where the gunfire was going to be?

  I swallowed and pulled the sword off of my belt.

  The shots had stopped for the moment. If I had to guess, Uemaru had shrunk back down into the grass so he could flank me, either to the left or the right.

  I closed my eyes and let my ears take over.

  The wind was still blowing noisily. I shut the howling sound effects out of my mind. Next, I focused on the rustling of the dried-out plants around me. Amid the regular waving pattern of the sound, I searched for anything irregular.

  Being able to tell apart the different sound effects in a VR space was a considerable technique, a system-independent skill that served me well in SAO. I would never have been able to hunt down the S-rank Ragout Rabbit without being able to discern fine differences in sound.

  What about now?

  I detected an irregular noise moving slowly from my seven to my nine. It moved for two or three seconds, then stopped, testing my reaction.

  The enemy resumed moving, then stopped, then starting moving again.

  “Go!” I screamed, launching myself directly at his hiding spot.

  Uemaru clearly wasn’t expecting me to charge straight for the place where he was crawling on all fours. He got up to his knees from the dead grass and pulled his rifle up to a shooting position, but that action took him a second and a half.

  By that point, I had already closed half of the eighty feet between us. I clicked the switch of the photon sword in my hand as I ran. With a satisfying vumm, it produced a bluish-purple glowing blade.

  For the third time, Uemaru’s assault rifle showed a dozen or more bullet lines. I’d been evading on instinct alone before, but this time I kept my eyes forward. Ignoring the prickling of fear in my neck, I noted that all of the lines did not appear at the same time—there was a slight time lag between them. That was an indication of the order the bullets were fired from the rifle muzzle.

  Out of all of the bullets, only six of them were currently due to intersect with my body, which was quite a bit smaller than my real one. The rest were going to miss slightly to the sides, or above and below. Based on the fact that we were actually quite close, this level of accuracy told me that either the enemy’s gun or his personal skill were, in fact, not very precise.

  That familiar sense of tension that every PvP battle featured told me that my own gears had finally shifted into battle mode. It was that familiar sense of acceleration: edges of my vision stretched out, target in the center much clearer
than before. As time slowed down around me, my mind seemed to speed along much faster.

  The enemy’s rifle flashed orange. In that instant, my lightsword perfectly caught the first two of the six bullets that would hit me.

  Bzz, bzap! Orange sparks flew from the surface of the glowing sword. By the time I even processed that reaction, my right arm was already flashing like lightning, holding the photon sword over the line that connected the third and fourth bullet trajectories. Once again, the bullets were knocked aside by the high-density energy blade.

  It took a lot of concentration to keep charging while the bullets that weren’t meant to hit screamed past my ears, but I gritted my teeth and kept swinging away.

  Five…then six! Having successfully deflected all of the accurate shots, I redoubled my speed to close the remaining distance.

  “N-no way, man!”

  Uemaru’s heavily bearded chin dropped in shock. But his hands didn’t stop moving. He released the empty magazine with comfortable ease, pulled a spare from his waist, and moved to pop it in.

  I pointed the Five-Seven at him, hoping to prevent him from finishing the reload. The instant I touched the trigger, I was surprised to see a pale green circle over the enemy’s chest, but I pulled it five times in quick succession anyway.

  The recoil in my elbow and shoulder was much lighter than I expected, and two of the shots landed on Uemaru’s shoulder and side within the transparent circle. The other three disappeared into the grass behind him, but the two that hit must have broken through his armor to do damage. The HP gauge in the upper right lost a bit of ground. Uemaru stumbled and stopped for just a moment.

  That was all I needed.

  The instant I was within sword range, I twisted myself to the right—

  And launched myself off the virtual ground with all the added velocity of my sprint, slamming the enemy directly in the chest with what would have been called a Vorpal Strike back in SAO.

  The blade of light easily sank into his chest up to the hilt, roaring and rattling like a jet engine. For an instant, I felt all of that energy squirming around in his body without an outlet.

  The next moment, a cone of ferocious light and sound erupted from my right hand, and the enemy’s body turned into countless tiny polygons, expanding into nothingness.

  I slowly got to my feet, feeling the lasting numbness of battle in every inch of my body. Out of habit, I waved the lightsword back and forth and nearly stashed it over my back until I came to my senses and quickly shut it off.

  Only when the sword hilt was clicked onto the snap ring on my waist and the handgun was back in its holster could I let out the breath I’d been holding. Up in the evening sky, a giant message of congratulations was displayed over the hanging clouds.

  Somehow, I’d won my first-round match. The fact that I could defend against the bullets with my lightsword was a very good sign. But that kind of high-speed sword work required phenomenal concentration, and I could feel my nerves popping and smoking.

  Four more of these exhausting battles?

  I slumped my shoulders as the blue teleportation effect swallowed my body. The lonely whistling of the wind died away, to eventually be replaced by the bustling noise of the crowded waiting area.

  Apparently I had been teleported back to the same box seat against the wall. I looked left and right, but neither Sinon nor Spiegel was present. Sinon was probably still in a battle, but I couldn’t help but be curious where her male acquaintance had gone. I eventually spotted a familiar-looking urban camo closer to the center of the dome. He hadn’t noticed my return, and was watching the monitor hanging from the ceiling with great interest.

  I looked up to see that the giant screen, which had previously been running the pretournament countdown, was now displaying a number of battles at once. They were showing off players blasting rifles and pistols in desert, jungle and ruin settings with all the style and impact of an action movie.

  Most likely, these were only the ongoing battle scenes out of the hundreds of matches happening concurrently. When the occasional player took too much fire and burst into pieces, the crowd watching from the floor gave a great cheer.

  I took a few steps forward, hoping to see if I could get a glimpse of Sinon in action. I started checking each one in order from the upper left corner, but the camera work was so frantic that it was nearly impossible to tell them apart. It seemed like a better idea to concentrate on finding her distinguishing light blue hair.

  Which is why my heart nearly stopped when someone abruptly spoke into my right ear. It was as if the low, raspy, metallic voice was bypassing my eardrum to go straight to the sensory center of my brain.

  “Are you, the real thing?”

  “…?!”

  I jumped back and turned around out of sheer instinct.

  The first thought that crossed my mind was Ghost.

  Not a real ghost, of course. Around the sixty-fifth floor of Aincrad, which was themed after old castle ruins, there were common ghost-type enemies. They were covered with tattered dark gray cloaks, the hoods pulled low over absolute darkness except for faintly glowing red eyes.

  The person standing before me in the dim light of the dome was extremely similar in appearance to those ghosts. My unconscious reaction was to leap backward and draw my sword. The urge was so strong that I couldn’t prevent my hand from twitching.

  With a faint grunt, I looked down at his feet. Through the scraps of the ripped cloak, I could barely make out the tips of faded, grungy boots.

  This was a player, not a ghost. Recognizing that obvious fact, I let out a slow breath. Upon closer examination, the red eyes weren’t little glowing hellfires, but simply lenses within the black goggles that covered his entire face. Irritated at both my amateur reaction and his lack of manners in accosting another player at point-blank range, I didn’t feel in the mood to be polite.

  “What do you mean, ‘real thing’? Who are you?”

  But the gray-cloaked player did not name himself, and took another step forward to close the distance again. I didn’t back away this time, staring right back at the robotic gaze from just eight inches away.

  His unpleasant voice, obviously affected by some kind of voice modulator, rasped again.

  “I saw, your match. You used, a sword.”

  “Y…yeah. It’s not against the rules,” I replied. The AmuSphere unhelpfully re-created the unease I was feeling, causing my voice to crack. The gray cloak approached even closer, as if recognizing that weakness.

  The next statement came so quietly that I could barely hear it without concentrating, even at that distance.

  “I’ll ask, again. Are you, the real thing?”

  Before I even had time to process and understand his question, a bolt of lightning struck my brain out of the blue, stopping me still.

  I know him!!

  I was sure of it. I had met him somewhere before. We had come face-to-face and exchanged words.

  But where? The only people I’d spoken to since logging in to GGO were the avatar buyer right at the spawning point, Sinon during her assistance with my shopping and registration, and her friend Spiegel. So it wasn’t in this world.

  ALO, then? Did I meet him back in Alfheim, while we both had different avatars? I frantically consulted my memory index, trying to match the style of speech and general air to anyone I knew. But nothing turned up. I couldn’t remember meeting anyone with such a chilling presence.

  Where? Where have I met him before…?

  The tattered cloak waved, and a thin arm extended from the middle. I nearly jumped backward again, but the hand, clad in a similarly ragged glove, was empty.

  The empty hand called up a menu window where I could see, its movements dull and lifeless. The screen showed a tournament field with six blocks—the current bracket of the third Bullet of Bullets.

  His needle-like finger tapped at Block F, which expanded to fill the screen. He clicked again, and it zoomed into the center of the block.


  My gaze was drawn to the spot his finger indicated.

  There were two names: UEMARU on the left and KIRITO on the right. A glowing line extended from my name on the right. It had already been officially announced that I beat Uemaru and advanced to the second round.

  The finger moved slightly, tracing the name KIRITO from top to bottom. He spoke again.

  “This, name. That, attack. Are you, the real thing?”

  A moment later, I was struck by my third great shock.

  My knees trembled and nearly buckled, but I held my poise just in time.

  This guy knows me!

  He knew the source of the name Kirito, and the sword skill that I used to defeat Uemaru as well.

  Meaning…I hadn’t met him in GGO or in ALO.

  SAO. Sword Art Online. Somewhere in the floating castle Aincrad, the setting of that game of death, I had met this man.

  Whatever avatar was behind that tattered, creepy mask—no, whoever was on the other side of that avatar, lying down, connected to an AmuSphere—they were an SAO Survivor, just like me.

  My pulse was ringing like an alarm bell. If it wasn’t for the gloom of the dim room, it would have been quite apparent that I was white as a sheet.

  Calm down, just calm down, I repeated to myself, over and over.

  There was no need to panic just because I’d met another survivor of SAO. Not long before the collapse of Aincrad, there were plenty of articles and stories being shared about my Dual Blades extra skill, and my public duel with Heathcliff of the Knights of the Blood. And the Vorpal Strike I’d just used on Uemaru was a very commonly used One-Handed Sword skill. Any player of a decent level in Aincrad could have put two and two together after watching the footage and checking the tournament bracket. I probably would have tried the same thing if I recognized an old acquaintance from those days here in the dome.