Phantom Bullet 1

by Reki Kawahara

  So there was no reason to be afraid. There shouldn’t have been.

  Then why was I so…

  For an instant, just as he removed the bracket and was pulling his thin arm back into his cloak, my eyes caught sight of something.

  On the inside of his wrist, just above the glove that looked more like ragged bandages wrapped around his hand, there was a glimpse of pale white skin. And, clear as day, a tattoo about two inches across.

  The design was a caricature of a Western-style coffin. On the lid was an eerie, leering smile. That lid was lifted slightly off the hinges so that a white skeletal arm extended out from the darkness within, beckoning the viewer closer. It was the exact same mark that I’d seen on the arm of a man who paralyzed me with poisoned water and tried to kill me.

  A coffin, grinning.

  It was practically a miracle that I successfully avoided screaming, falling to the floor, or getting auto–logged out because of some kind of brain-wave trauma. Instead, I showed no reaction.

  The red, glowing goggles stared through me. Eventually, the player in the tattered cloak rasped again.

  “Did you, not understand, the question?”

  I slowly and deliberately nodded my head.

  “…Yes. I don’t understand. What do you mean, the real thing?”

  “…”

  The gray cloak took a silent step backward. The red gaze flickered once, as if he blinked. After several extremely long seconds, his voice was even more robotic than before.

  “…In that case, fine. But, if you are, a fake using the name…or, the real thing…”

  He finished his sentence as he was turning away.

  “…I will, kill you.”

  It did not strike me as a harmless bit of in-game role-playing.

  The tattered cloak disappeared into the crowd without a sound, just like an actual ghost. There were no lingering signs that any player had been there just seconds ago.

  This time I really did stagger, barely keeping my balance, and stumbled over to the nearby box seat. I hugged my slender legs and pressed my forehead against my knees.

  When I closed my eyes, I saw that tattoo again, bright and clear, even though it had only caught my eye for a fraction of a second.

  There was only one group in Aincrad who used that symbol as their identifier.

  The murderous red guild, Laughing Coffin.

  Over the course of those two long years trapped in SAO, it wasn’t long until the emergence of “orange” players, criminals who took out their frustrations by stealing money and items from other players. But those actions took place within certain bounds—usually a big group surrounding a few helpless victims and forcing them to trade, or perhaps using a paralysis venom.

  Since obliterating one’s HP bar with a direct attack would cause the player to die in real life, no one had the guts to go through with that. These were ten thousand people severely addicted to online games—not the type of people who went around committing violent crimes in regular life.

  It was the existence of one single player with a very different mentality that broke the unwritten rule not to take every last HP.

  The man’s name was spelled PoH but pronounced “pooh.” It was a silly-sounding name, but despite that—or perhaps because of it—his presence commanded attention wherever he went.

  The biggest reason for this was PoH’s exotic looks and his multilingual status—he seemed to be half-Japanese and half-Western. His Japanese was peppered with smooth, fluent English and Spanish slang, which made him sound like a cool pro DJ rapping at the table. It was easy for him to bring others around to his way of thinking, turning simple MMO gamers into cooler, tougher outlaws than they’d ever been, and be, in life.

  The second reason for his charismatic nature was PoH’s outright strength.

  His skill with the dagger was nothing short of genius. The blade flashed like an extension of his hand, and he attacked monsters and players alike without needing to rely on the system’s built-in sword skills. In the later stages of the game, once he’d found a terrifying dagger by the name of Mate-Chopper, he was a menacing enough force to unnerve even the front-line players.

  PoH’s leadership skills were on the same level as Heathcliff’s, but in the polar opposite direction. Very gradually, over time, he began to remove many of the mental roadblocks that kept his followers within certain bounds.

  A year after the game’s start, on New Year’s Eve, 2023, PoH’s gang of nearly thirty players attacked a small guild that was enjoying an outdoor party at one of the map’s sightseeing spots, and killed all of them.

  The next day, the various information dealers around Aincrad were trumpeting the formation of Laughing Coffin, the first unofficial “red” guild in the game.

  At the very least, I knew the gray-cloaked man who made contact was not PoH. His flat, broken speech was nothing in the least like PoH’s machine-gun staccato.

  But I couldn’t help but feel that I knew someone in Laughing Coffin who spoke this way. I must have come face-to-face with him and traded words, if not sword strikes. Not a rank-and-file soldier, but a very high-ranking officer. How could I guess all of these things, yet not remember his face or name?

  But in fact, I knew why—my own mind was refusing to remember.

  Laughing Coffin was formed on January 1, 2024, and obliterated on a summer night eight months later.

  It was not a spontaneous breakup, or the result of infighting. A large-scale raid party of over fifty of the game’s best front-line fighters put them to the sword.

  This method could easily have been taken much earlier. The reason it didn’t happen for eight months was because Laughing Coffin’s hideout took that long to pin down.

  Any houses or apartments available for players to buy in Aincrad, whether in a town or outside in the wilderness, could be easily and accurately located with an NPC real estate agent. We assumed that a place that could house thirty would need to be a mansion or fortress, so information dealers hired by the group began crosschecking all of the large-scale residences starting from the first floor and going up.

  Although this did turn up the bases of several smaller orange guilds, after several months there was still no sign of the crucial Laughing Coffin hideout.

  And there was good reason for that—they were actually using an already-cleared minor dungeon on a lower floor as their base of operations, crammed into the safe haven zone within. It was just a little cave, the kind of location the game designers would have set up and then forgotten completely. The powerful front-line players only bothered with the labyrinth towers that led to the next floor, and the midlevel types preferred the larger dungeons with more players around. Of course, one had to assume that a few unlucky souls coincidentally ran across that tiny cave, and it was all too easy to imagine how they were prevented from telling the tale.

  The suspected reason that Laughing Coffin’s base was finally identified after eight long months was that one of their members gave in to his guilty conscience and revealed the location to another player. A reconnaissance mission determined that it was indeed the cave in question, which led to the formation of the massive raid party. The leader was an officer from the Divine Dragon Alliance, the largest guild in the game. Several other principal members from the Knights of the Blood and other guilds were present, and even I participated as a solo.

  The assault on their base happened at three in the morning.

  Our numbers and levels were significantly higher than those of Laughing Coffin. We assumed it would be quite easy to seal off the ways out of the safe haven area and force them to surrender without bloodshed.

  But just as someone from their group had informed on the location of their hideout, they learned about our top secret plan through some means still unknown.

  When we charged into the dungeon, not a single member of Laughing Coffin was in the safe zone. But they had not fled ahead of time. They were all hiding in the dungeon’s offshoot branches, and attacked us
from behind once we were inside.

  They used traps, poison, blinding—every kind of sabotage they could attempt. Though the raid party was thrown into chaos at first, responding appropriately to unexpected circumstances was one of the most crucial qualities to the game’s best players. The raid regrouped quickly and led a furious counterattack.

  But there was one unforeseen difference between Laughing Coffin and the raid party.

  It was the resistance to the idea of killing. When we realized that the insane members of LC were not going to surrender, even when reduced to slivers of HP, our group was rattled.

  We had discussed this possibility before the operation. The consensus was that we would not hesitate to wipe out the enemy’s HP entirely if that was necessary. But it might have been the case that none of our entire raid, including myself, truly had what it took to deliver that final blow, knowing the enemy’s HP was down in the red. Some of us even threw our swords aside and took a knee.

  We were the first to lose a few members to the raid. When the front-line team fought back with rage and grief, several from Laughing Coffin died.

  After that, it was bloodstained hell.

  When the battle was over, the raid party was short eleven, while Laughing Coffin had lost twenty-one. Two of those had been at my hand.

  Among the names of the dead and captured, we did not find PoH, their leader.

  If the player in the tattered gray cloak was one of the twelve Laughing Coffin survivors who was sent to the prison in Blackiron Palace, then we must have had a conversation after the battle. If I could remember his style of speaking, but not his face or name, that was because I was actively trying to forget everything about that battle.

  …No.

  What if the man under that cloak was one of the two I killed?

  I shook my head violently, still clutching my knees on top of the chair. I clenched my teeth so hard they could have broken, and lashed my mind back into shape.

  The dead did not come back to life. The four thousand victims of the SAO Incident, whether I loved or hated them, would never come back. So the cloaked man had to be one of the twelve survivors of Laughing Coffin. And I knew all of those names. I grimaced against the pain, trying to dig deep, deep into that terrible memory…

  Then I gasped, realizing another possibility.

  The twisted, metallic voice—it was only a rasping whisper, but what would it sound like if shouted at full volume?

  The scream on the audio file I heard a week ago came back to echo in my ears.

  This is the true power, the true strength! Carve this name and the terror it commands into your hearts, you fools! My name, and the name of my weapon, is…Death Gun!!

  It was the same. The exact same. The voice was identical.

  Was the man in the gray cloak…Death Gun?

  If that was true, then I had already completed my duty: to attract attention in GGO and find myself targeted by Death Gun.

  But…I couldn’t have imagined that I would learn this fact—that Death Gun was a survivor of SAO, and a member of the murderous Laughing Coffin, to boot.

  A man who had possibly killed two players in real life with gunshots from within the game. What if that power…was real…?

  I nearly screamed when someone suddenly clapped a hand on my shoulder. I flinched and looked up to see pale blue hair.

  “…You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Sinon said, frowning. Somehow I managed to work my cheeks into a smile.

  “Uh…n-no, it’s nothing…”

  “Was it really that close of a fight? Seems like you came back pretty quick.”

  Only then did I remember that I was still an active participant in the Bullet of Bullets tournament. I blinked and looked around, noticing that the previously bustling dome was only half-full now. Most of the first round was finished, with the losers being teleported back to the surface. My next opponent would be determined very soon, with the second round to follow.

  But it was hard to imagine being able to fight anytime soon.

  I looked first at Spiegel, who was shooting me a suspicious gaze from a slight distance, then back to Sinon, who stood right in front of me, then sighed lifelessly though slackened lips.

  She put a dead-serious look on her face. “You’re never going to make it to the final if that’s how you’re feeling after one fight. Get it together—I’ve got to collect what you owe me, remember.”

  She clenched a fist and pounded my shoulder again.

  Without thinking, I grabbed her little hand with both of mine before it could be pulled away. I drew it toward my chest and put my forehead against it.

  “Wh-wh…what are you doing?!” she yelped, trying to extract her hand, but I held fast.

  Even the false warmth from that polygonal avatar’s hand was more comforting than I could put into words. I felt the terrible chill of fear that had settled over my heart, and my body began trembling, well after the fact.

  “…What’s the matter…?”

  As the seconds passed, I felt the resistance from that small, warm hand slowly ease away.

  7

  Sinon squinted, feeling a slight itch in her trigger finger.

  She tried to rub the sensation loose against the side of her thumb, but the prickling feeling that plagued the core of her finger did not ease up. And she knew why.

  It was Kirito. That rude, arrogant, insolent newcomer had squeezed her hand too hard.

  Her common sense told her that this was impossible. Sinon was in the midst of a full dive through her AmuSphere, and no matter how hard anyone squeezed her hand, it could not possibly affect the flow of blood or the pressure on her nerves in real life. Every physical sensation she felt in this world was false, a machine-created signal sent directly to her brain via electronic pulses.

  But…

  The fact remained that Sinon still felt the pressure and warmth of the black-haired swordsman’s grip. And that was two hours ago.

  She gave up on trying to eliminate the sensation and put her hand back on the antimateriel rifle, secure on its stand. Her index finger traced the trigger, its springs set to light sensitivity. The grip of the Hecate II, which had accompanied her through countless battles, melted into her hand like an extension of her arm. Even then, the itching continued.

  Sinon was crawling on her stomach beneath some bushes at the lip of a short cliff, waiting for her chance to snipe.

  The map was “Crossroads of the Wilds”: an intersection of two straight roads in the midst of parched highlands. The name of her opponent was Stinger. Roughly twelve minutes had passed since the start of their fifth-round battle, the first of the Block F semifinals.

  If she won this, then no matter what happened in the final, she would gain entrance to the BoB battle royale tomorrow, Sunday night. But Stinger had won the same number of matches as she had—this would be no walk in the park.

  Just because he shared a name with the portable Stinger missiles did not mean he had them at his disposal. His main weapon was the FN SCAR carbine rifle, which was quite dangerous on its own. With a high-functioning ACOG scope, the gun’s bullet spray was much tighter and deadlier. If he could get within naked visibility range, Sinon wouldn’t be able to stop him.

  Fortunately for her, the two roads split the map into four quadrants, and it was impossible to pass from one to the other without traversing the center intersection. Since the two players started at least half the map away from each other, there was no way they could be placed in the same block.

  So Stinger knew that he had to pass through the intersection in order to get Sinon within his SCAR’s range, and she knew that she had to succeed at sniping him when he did.

  Therefore, she expected that Stinger would delay his charge until the last possible moment, hoping to catch her when her concentration was exhausted. On the other hand, she couldn’t deny the possibility that he would defy that expectation and charge early, so ultimately, her only choice was to keep staring through the scope, every n
erve at full attention.

  At the present moment, over half of the fifteen tournament blocks from A to O had finished their entire lineup of matches, and there were only about ten other battles currently in progress. Back in the dome and the first-floor hall, as well as pubs around the world, her match was being broadcast without interruption—and anyone watching Sinon vs. Stinger had to be bored out of their minds. Twelve minutes, and not a single shot had been fired yet.

  On the other hand, the other Block F semifinal currently in progress had enough excitement to make up for the tedium of this one, with change to spare. That match featured a close-range specialist with two SMGs against an even closer-range fighter—one swinging a lightsword.

  She couldn’t lose concentration. But even still, Sinon couldn’t help but think about the mysterious black-haired girl—er, boy.

  When she finished her first-round fight in about ten minutes and returned to the waiting dome, Spiegel—Kyouji Shinkawa—greeted her with a rousing celebration. She thanked him briefly and returned to the original box seats, only to be surprised by Kirito beating her there. She hadn’t expected him to win before she did, and she was striding over to offer a bracing compliment when she was hit with a different kind of shock.

  Kirito, who had been so consistently impudent before the match, had his head in his knees and his hands around them, his downturned black head and slender shoulders trembling.

  Poor thing. Fighting against a proper gun put that much fear in him, even after he won the match.

  She reached out and patted the night camo jacket the boy was wearing.

  Kirito jumped in surprise, and slowly, fearfully raised his head to look at her.

  The pretty, delicate features that anyone would have assumed were feminine were painted with deep, terrible fear—like he had just peered over the abyss into Hell.

  “…You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Sinon muttered. Kirito blinked several times in rapid succession and put on an awkward smile.

  He muttered that he was all right, it was nothing, and Sinon asked him if the battle was really that bad. But the boy merely hid his face under that long black hair and sighed, offering nothing else.