Phantom Bullet 2

by Reki Kawahara

  “…”

  She took a small breath and waited for him to continue.

  “I didn’t realize he was hiding in wait, either. If we’d taken the opposite roles, it could have been me who got stunned. And if that was the case, you’d save me, right?”

  That peaceful, sensible voice pierced Sinon’s heart deeply. She closed her eyes, feeling it throb with pain.

  He’s consoling me. I thought he was my rival…I thought I’d be fighting him on equal footing. And all this time, he saw my inner weakness. He’s been cheering me up, like I was a child in need of encouragement.

  And even harder to bear, harder to forgive, was the realization that somewhere within her, just as strong as her humiliation, was a desire to give in to his comfort, physically and mentally.

  Sinon…no, Shino knew that if she admitted to the fear and pain that agonized her and reached out just a few feet, the mysterious but honest and simple lightswordsman would accept her and buoy her with all of his feelings and words. He might even give her the forgiveness that Shino had always sought but no one had ever given her since the post office attack five years ago.

  But if she did that, the other part of Shino, that icy sniper, might disappear for good. And even before that, she didn’t know how she could reveal her innermost thoughts to a person she had just met the day before—a person whose real name or face she didn’t even know. Shino hadn’t truly spoken her mind even to Kyouji Shinkawa, who’d been her friend in the real world for six months.

  Trapped between desperation, helplessness, hesitation, and confusion, Sinon could do nothing but clutch her knees.

  Long, long seconds passed.

  Eventually, Kirito spoke again. “Well, I’m going. You should stay here and rest a bit more. I really wish you’d just log out, but…it is the tournament, after all…”

  “Huh…?” She automatically perked up and looked over. Kirito had stepped away from the wall and was checking the battery level on his lightsword. “You’re going…to fight Death Gun…on your own?” she rasped.

  He nodded, just barely. What he said next was not an assurance of victory, but just the opposite. “Yeah. He’s tough. Even without the power of that pistol, his other gear, stats, and his skill as a player put him head and shoulders above the rest. In fact, it’ll be nearly impossible to keep him from firing that gun at least once. It was half a miracle that we got away from him just now. The next time that gun is pointed this way…I don’t know that I’ll be able to stay standing. I might actually abandon you and run away this time. So I can’t force you to take part in this any longer.”

  “…”

  This caught her by surprise; she assumed the swordsman had ultimate confidence in his ability. She stared at his face. The light in his big black eyes seemed to be wavering with a sudden lack of will.

  “Even you’re afraid of him?” she asked.

  Kirito snapped his lightsword back onto the carabiner and grinned weakly. “Yeah, I am. The old me…well, he might have fought him, even knowing it could be fatal. But now…I’ve got things to protect. I can’t die, and I don’t want to die…”

  “Things to…protect?”

  “Yes. In the virtual world…and the real world.”

  She felt like he was referring to a connection to someone else. Unlike Sinon, Kirito had forged close bonds with many different people. Her heart throbbed again, and words poured out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  “Then…just stay hidden in this cave. You can’t log yourself out of the BoB, but if we let the event proceed, and it’s down to us and one other person, we can escape. We’ll commit suicide and let whoever else win. Then it’s over.”

  Kirito’s eyes widened. He grinned in understanding briefly, then shook his head. It was what Sinon expected of him.

  “You’re right, that’s an option. But…not one that I can take. Death Gun’s probably recovering his HP somewhere else right now, but if we let him reign free over this event, there’s no telling how many more he might shoot with that pistol…”

  “…I see.”

  You really are strong.

  Even after claiming he had something to protect, he hadn’t lost the courage to risk his life standing up to that angel of death. When she had been ready to give up both.

  Sinon smiled a lifeless smile and thought about what would happen to her once she left this island.

  When Death Gun had pointed his black pistol at her in the street of the ruined city, she was completely lost. Her bones turned to ice. She screamed and shrieked while on the escape, and couldn’t even pull the trigger of her beloved Hecate. Sinon, sniper of ice, was on the verge of obliteration.

  If she stayed hidden in this cave, she’d never be able to trust her own strength again. Her heart would shrivel, her fingers would stiffen, and every shot would miss its mark.

  Not only would she not overcome her memories, but even in the real world, she would quiver in fear of the man’s appearance from every shadowed corner, through every door or window. That was the fate that awaited Sinon and Shino, virtual or real.

  “…I…” She looked away from him and mumbled, “I won’t run.”

  “…Huh?”

  “I won’t run. I won’t hide here. I’ll go out there and fight him, too.”

  Kirito squinted a bit and leaned closer to her. “You can’t, Sinon. If he shoots you…you might actually die. I’m a red-blooded close-combat fighter with defensive skills, but you’re not. If he sneaks up on you and strikes from point-blank range, you’ll be in much greater danger than me.”

  She clamped her lips shut, then found one simple conclusion.

  “I don’t care if I die.”

  “…Wha…”

  His eyes went wide again. She explained slowly, “I…I was terrified earlier. I was afraid of dying. I was weaker than I was five years ago…so I acted pitiful, and screamed…and that’s not going to cut it. If I’m just going to keep living life that way, I’d be better off dead.”

  “It makes sense to be afraid. Everyone’s afraid of dying.”

  “Well, I don’t like being afraid. I’m tired…of living in fear. I’m not asking you to help me with this. I can fight on my own,” Sinon claimed, willing strength into her limp arms to get up. But Kirito leaned over and grabbed them. His voice was tense and quiet.

  “So you’re saying you’ll fight alone…and die alone?”

  “…Yes. That’s probably my fate…”

  Shino had never suffered any judgment for her grievous crime. That was why the man came back for her. To punish her for what she’d done. Death Gun was not a ghost—he was fate. An ordained result.

  “…Let go of me. I need to leave.”

  She tried to shake him off, but Kirito only held on tighter. His black eyes glittered. Those small, elegant lips formed uncharacteristically harsh words.

  “You’re wrong. It’s not possible for people to die alone. When someone dies, they also die within others around them. There’s already a Sinon within me!”

  “I didn’t ask for that. I’ve never put myself within anyone!”

  “We’re involved right now, aren’t we?!”

  Kirito yanked Sinon’s hand upward until she was right in front of his face. In that instant, the raging emotion that had been held in place at the very bottom of her frozen heart erupted. She clenched her teeth so hard they might crack, and used her free hand to grab Kirito’s collar.

  “Then…”

  Her weakness in search of soothing and her urge for destruction brought forth an emotion that she had never held toward anyone, and forced words she had never said before from her mouth. With all of the fire in her eyes that she could summon, Sinon shouted at Kirito, “Then protect me for the rest of your life!!”

  Her vision warped suddenly. Her cheeks felt hot. Sinon didn’t realize at first that it was because tears were spilling from her eyes. She yanked her hand out of his grasp, made a fist, and slammed it against Kirito’s chest. Twice, three times,
she pummeled him with all of her strength.

  “You don’t know a damn thing about me…You can’t do a thing for me, so don’t act like you know! This is…this is my fight, and my fight alone! If I lose and I die, no one has the right to criticize me for it! Or are you going to bear my burden all of your life?! Are you…”

  She thrust her clenched fist in Kirito’s face. The hand that had pulled the bloody trigger of a gun and stolen a human life. The filthy hand that still had the tiny spot from where the particles of gunpowder had infiltrated her skin.

  “Are you going to hold…this murderer’s hands?!”

  A number of voices from Shino’s memories emerged, accosting her. In the classroom, when she accidentally touched other students or their belongings: “Don’t touch me, murderer! I don’t want blood on me!!” She was tripped and pushed away. Since then, she had never actively touched another person. Not once.

  She smacked him with her fist one more time. There was no system-provided protection here; the entire island was a battlefield. So each blow had to be doing some tiny bit of damage to Kirito’s HP, but he did not budge an inch.

  “Ah…aah…”

  The tears kept coming, without end. She turned her face away, not wanting him to see her cry, and her forehead thumped against his chest.

  She squeezed her face against him, still gripping his collar, sobs escaping between her clenched teeth. Even as she was wracked with uncontrollable childlike gasps, she couldn’t help but marvel that this kind of energy had been within her all this time. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d cried in front of someone.

  Eventually, she felt Kirito’s hand on her shoulder. But Sinon batted it away with her clenched fist.

  “I hate you…I hate you!” she shouted, her virtual tears falling one after the other, fading into Kirito’s thin shirt.

  She couldn’t tell how long she stayed like that.

  The tears dried up at last, and Sinon felt as empty and powerless as if her soul had left her body and evaporated into the air. She leaned with all of her weight against the swordsman. The sweet pain that took hold in her chest after her cathartic explosion of emotion felt comfortable now. She kept her forehead against his shoulder, breathing in and out.

  Eventually, it was Sinon who broke the long, long silence.

  “I still hate you…but let me lean on you a bit longer,” she mumbled. He murmured in the affirmative. She budged, leaning over atop Kirito’s jutted-out legs. She still didn’t want him to see her face, so she turned her back to him, and saw the three-wheeled buggy, its rear bumper punctured with bullet holes, and the last dying light from outside of the cave entrance.

  Her head felt dull and fuzzy, but unlike the lack of thought when she was under attack by Death Gun, this felt more like the floating liberation of removing tight, heavy clothes. Eventually, the words found their way to her lips.

  “The thing is…I killed someone.” She didn’t wait for Kirito’s response. “Not inside a game. I killed a real person, in real life. Five years ago, there was an attempted robbery of a post office in a small town in Tohoku…The media reported that the culprit shot one of the employees, then died when the gun backfired. But that’s not what happened. I was there. I stole the robber’s gun, and shot him with it.”

  “Five years ago…?” Kirito whispered. She nodded.

  “Yes. I was eleven at the time…so maybe it was only because I was a child that I could do it. I broke two teeth, sprained both wrists, bruised my back, and dislocated my shoulder, but other than that, I was unharmed. My injuries healed right away…but some things don’t heal.”

  “…”

  “Ever since then, I’ve vomited and passed out whenever I see a gun. Even on TV and in manga…even when someone makes a gun gesture with their hand. When I see a gun…I see the face of the man I killed…and I get scared. Terrified.”

  “But—”

  “Right. But I’m fine in this world. Not only do I not have the spasms…” She looked over at the graceful design of the Hecate II on top of the nearby sand. “I’ve even learned to love some guns. So I thought, if I can be the strongest person in this world, I’ll be stronger in reality, too. I’ll be able to forget that memory…but when Death Gun attacked us earlier, I nearly had an episode. I was terrified…somehow I had gone from ‘Sinon’ back to my real self…That’s why I have to fight him. I have to fight him and win…or Sinon will be gone forever.”

  She clutched herself. “Of course I’m afraid of dying. But…but more than that, I’m tired of living in fear. If I run from Death Gun and my memory without fighting…I’ll be weaker than I was before. I won’t be able to have a normal life anymore. So…so…”

  She shivered suddenly, struck by a terrible chill.

  “Me too…” Kirito mumbled, the weak cry of a little lost child. “I’ve killed someone before, too.”

  “Huh…?”

  This time it was Kirito’s body, still stuck to her back, that shivered.

  “I told you earlier…that I knew the cloaked man…Death Gun, in a different game.”

  “Y-yeah.”

  “The name of that game was…Sword Art Online. I assume you’ve heard of it?”

  “…”

  It was largely what she expected to hear, but she couldn’t help but turn her head to look up at him. He had his back against the wall of the cave, his dim eyes staring out into space.

  Sinon recognized the name, of course. There couldn’t be a VRMMO player in Japan who hadn’t heard of it—the cursed game that trapped ten thousand people inside of it for two years, ultimately stealing four thousand of those lives.

  “Then, you’re—”

  “Yes. They called us SAO Survivors on the Net. And so is Death Gun. I’m positive that we fought there, each trying to kill the other.” Kirito’s eyes floated in space, seeing only the distant past. “He was a member of a red guild named Laughing Coffin. In SAO, based on the color of your cursor, we called criminals ‘orange players,’ and groups of thieves ‘orange guilds.’ Those who actively pursued and enjoyed killing were ‘red.’ And there were lots of them…lots.”

  “B-but…didn’t you actually die in that game, if your HP went down to zero…?”

  “That’s right. But that was exactly the point. A number of players found killing to be the ultimate pleasure. Laughing Coffin was a group of them. They attacked parties in the fields and dungeons where the system wouldn’t protect them, stealing their gold and items, then killing them. The other players started to watch out for them, but they came up with ways to continue finding victims…”

  “…”

  “So finally, we formed a giant party to vanquish them, and I was in the group. When I say ‘vanquish,’ we weren’t hoping to kill the members of Laughing Coffin, we just wanted to neutralize their threat and send them to jail. We found their hideout at great pains, got together players that we knew could handle them, level-wise, and ambushed them at night. But…the info got out somehow. They trapped their lair and waited for us. We managed to rebound, but it was a terrible battle…and at some point, I…”

  His body trembled again, eyes wide and breath short.

  “I killed two of them with my own hands. I chopped…one’s head off with my sword. The other, I stabbed through the heart. The plan was just to imprison them, but I forgot about all of that. My mind was racing…but…that’s just an excuse. I could have stopped, if I’d thought of it. But I let my fear and anger drive me. At heart, I’m no different from them. In a way, my crime might be even worse. I mean…”

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then continued, “I mean, I completely forgot about what I did. Ever since I came back to the real world, I never once thought about the face or name of the two I killed then, or the one other I killed much later. Not until I met Death Gun…in the dome beneath the regent’s office yesterday…”

  “So you’re saying Death Gun was one of those…Laughing Coffin members…”

  “Yeah. H
e must have been one of the members who survived and was taken to prison. I remember his attitude, the way he talked. I can almost…almost remember what his name was at the time…”

  He shut his eyes tight and pressed his knuckles to his forehead. Sinon just watched him, her back pressed against his knees.

  The boy named Kirito was a player of Sword Art Online.

  For two years, he had fought with his actual life on the line, and survived.

  She’d had her suspicions about him. But until he told her in his own words, she hadn’t appreciated the weight of those facts. She recalled his question during the preliminary final yesterday.

  If that bullet could actually kill a player in real life…and if you didn’t kill them, either you or someone you care about would die, could you still pull the trigger?

  That was the exact dilemma that Kirito had traversed. In a way, it was extremely similar to the incident that befell Shino in that post office five years ago.

  “Kirito…”

  Sinon got up and grabbed his shoulders. The boy’s gaze was just a bit out of focus, staring at some point in his past. She stuck her face in his anyway, looking right into his eyes.

  She rasped, “I can’t say anything about what you did. I don’t have the right. So I really don’t have the right to ask you this, either…but I want you to tell me just one thing. How…how did you overcome those memories? How did you beat your past? How can you be so strong right now?”

  It was such a careless and self-centered thing to ask someone who had just spelled out his own sins for her. But she had to ask him. Kirito claimed that he forced himself to forget, but Sinon couldn’t even do that.

  And yet…

  Kirito blinked two or three times, then looked right into her eyes. Slowly, he shook his head.

  “…I haven’t overcome them.”

  “Uh…”

  “Last night, all my dreams were about the battle against Laughing Coffin, and the three people I killed with my sword. I barely got any sleep. I’ll probably never forget the looks on their faces, their voices, their words…in the moment they disappeared…”