“…”

I stared at him, my mind a total blank. Suddenly, an uncomfortable possibility occurred to me, and I hastily patted my chest. Fortunately, what I felt was flat and solid, and not the rounded softness I was afraid of finding. My features were feminine, but my avatar hadn’t undergone a sex change in the conversion process.

In almost every VR game nowadays, players were forbidden from playing the opposite of their real-life sex. Long-term use of an avatar of the opposite sex apparently caused undeniable mental and physical effects. But because the player’s sex was determined based on reading brain waves, there were very rare occasions that one was identified as the other side, and suffered quite a shock when they dove in for the first time.

Based on what we knew now, Kayaba must have already understood the ill effects of crossing those streams—at the start of the original SAO, gender choice was free to the player, but we were all forcibly reverted to our original state soon after being trapped inside…

I realized that I was getting lost in my own thoughts, so I concentrated on the fellow before me and shrugged.

“Uh…Sorry, I’m a dude.”

Even my voice was high enough to be a reasonably alto female voice. Disappointed, I waited for his answer, but he was at a loss for words. When he found his tongue again, it was actually twice as excited as before.

“Then…you’re an M-9000 series?! N-no way! I’ll pay four—no, five mega-credits. Please, just sell it to me!!”

On the contrary, I’d have been happy to give it to him for free, or even exchange looks, but that was sadly not an option.

“Umm…Listen, this isn’t a new character, it’s a conversion. Can’t sell this one for money, sorry.”

“Oh…I see…”

He took one last regretful, thorough examination of my face from all angles, then recovered his spirits somewhat.

“Some people say that having a really well-used account before conversion ups your chances of snagging a rare avatar. If you don’t mind me asking, how much playing time did you put into your previous game?”

“Huh? P-playing time?”

I thought it over. The total playing time for Kirito the swordsman, the account I’d taken from SAO to ALO, was at least two years long…Which would be 730 days times 24 hours…

“Let’s see…ten thou…” I started answering honestly, then quickly covered it up. The VRMMO genre itself was barely three years old, so the only players who could have ten thousand hours logged were former SAO players, and I didn’t want to reveal that about myself.

“Er, I mean, a year. It’s probably just a lucky coincidence.”

“Oh, I see…Well, let me know if you ever change your mind.”

He took out a clear card of some kind and pushed it into my hands before reluctantly trudging off. As I stared at the card, which featured his name, gender, and guild, it began to glow and disappeared. That probably meant the information had automatically been added to my in-game data file.

Unable to get over this betrayal, I glared at my reflection in the glass. It didn’t seem like there was anything I could do about it.

My conversion history was saved into my character data, so if I converted back to ALO I would once again be the spiky-haired Spriggan, but any time I tried to switch to GGO, I would still be this unidentifiable avatar somewhere between girl and boy.

Determined to live up to my motto of finding the silver lining in any cloud, I spent a few minutes until I came up with one definitive “good thing” about it.

The only reason I was in this game was to make contact with the player known as Death Gun, and observe and assess his powers for myself, hopefully not by getting shot. In order to achieve that goal, I had to garner attention by displaying my strength.

Given the type of game GGO was, there were doubtless very few female players, so my feminine appearance, while not what I was hoping to look like, would at least help me stand out. I wouldn’t be imposing any kind of pressure in battle, so I’d have to make up for it with skill.

As far as advertising my strength, I already had a plan for that.

It took time to make a name for yourself with standard play—conquering dungeons, or the unsavory practice of PKing. But fortunately for me, this was the very day that they were starting an event called the Bullet of Bullets, a tournament for determining the best player in GGO. I’d enter the tournament and jump into the battle royale. If I could hit the upper ranks and get my name out there, Death Gun would take notice—and he might even be in the tournament already.

I had no idea how well I could fight in a game I’d never played before, but there was no better alternative than trying it out. I knew that fighting with guns wasn’t the same as the ranged battles with archers and mages in ALO, but as long as they were both VRMMOs, there would be some common ground. I’d do the very best I could—and if that wasn’t good enough, the ultimate fault lay with Kikuoka for putting this ridiculous mission on my shoulders.

At any rate, first came registering for the tournament, and then came equipment.

I gave one last glance at my reflection and snorted before heading off down the main street. When I realized that I was unconsciously stroking the long hair off of my cheeks, I felt a deep gloom settle over my mind.

Within minutes, I was lost.

The strangely named SBC Glocken was made of a number of vast floors stacked atop one another. As I looked upward, it seemed to be like a compressed version of Aincrad’s many floors looming overhead, with a small opening far above that admitted the sunset sky. Large buildings cut through the floors, and a variety of floating hallways, escalators, and elevators crossed here and there in beautiful disarray, but the complexity of it all was worthy of a dungeon.

I could call up a detailed map from the menu screen, of course, but it was not easy to match the location noted on the map with what I was actually seeing in real time.

In a single-player RPG, I would wander around in a daze, never to return to my original location, but this was an MMO—there was only one thing to do.

I checked out the crowd of people around me, looking for another player rather than an NPC, then trotted over and called out for help.

“Um, excuse me, could you give me directio—”

I immediately regretted my decision. The person I’d caught ended up being a girl.

Her pale blue hair was cut short in a careless style, but the fine braids tied at the sides of her forehead made for a memorable accent. Below her sharp eyebrows gleamed large, dark blue eyes with a feline hint to them, followed by a petite nose and lightly colored lips.

Wondering on the spot if this might be another misleadingly feminine avatar like mine, I made a quick inspection of the player’s body, but the unzipped jacket beneath her sand-colored muffler bulged in the properly feminine ways. On top of that, she was quite small; I just didn’t notice because my line of sight was lower than usual.

In a VRMMO, a good three-quarters of the time that a male player asked a female for directions, he was actually just hitting on her.

As I feared, the look on her face was of obvious suspicion—but it didn’t last very long.

“…Is it your first time here? Where are you going?” she asked in a beautifully clear voice. There was a hint of a smile on her lips. I wondered what had prompted this response, then realized the answer. She was making the same mistake that the avatar buyer had just minutes ago: She thought I was a girl. Well, that was just great.

“Uh, erm…”

I nearly corrected her about my gender on the spot, but stopped myself in time.

In a way, this was the perfect situation. If I backed out here and found a male player to ask, and he mistook me for a girl as well, it would only complicate matters. My second motto was to make use of whatever I could, which in this case meant that this poor girl would have to stay under her mistaken assumption for a while.

“Yes, it’s my first time playing. I need to find a cheap weapons shop and this place called the regent’s office,” I answered, my voice slightly lower and huskier than hers. She looked confused.

“Regent’s office? Why?”

“Um…I was going to enter the battle-royale event that’s coming up…”

Her large eyes blinked in surprise and went wide.

“You…just started playing today, right? There’s nothing stopping you from entering, but you might not be good enough to last…”

“Oh, this isn’t a brand-new character. I converted from another game.”

“Ahh, I see.” Her indigo eyes sparkled, and an honest smile broke across her lips this time. “Do you mind if I ask why you decided to switch to this dusty, greasy game?”

“Because…um, I’ve played all fantasy games until this point, and I was in the mood to try something more cyber-ish…And I’m kind of curious about what it’s like to have a gunfight.”

This wasn’t exactly a lie. After honing my VRMMO skills on close-range sword combat for so long, I wondered how well that skill would translate to the vastly different style of GGO.

“I see. Well, you’ve got real guts to challenge the BoB right off the bat,” she chuckled. “All right, I’ll show you where to go. I was on my way to the regent’s office too, anyway. But before that, a gun shop. What kind of firearms are you into?”

“Umm…”

I didn’t have an immediate answer. As it became clear that I didn’t know, she grinned once more.

“We should visit a nice big market with lots of selection, then. That’ll be this way.”

She spun around and took off. I hurried after the swaying muffler.

We passed through so many twisting alleys and moving walkways and stairs that I was certain I’d never be able to recall the path we took. After several minutes, we came on another wide-open street. Directly in front was a huge, flashy store that looked like a giant foreign supermarket chain.

“That’s it,” she said, pointing to the building as she weaved through the crowd.

The interior of the vast store was full of color, light, and sound, like an amusement park. The NPC shopkeepers were all beautiful women in revealing silver outfits flashing dazzling smiles, which made it all the more shocking to see them holding, and surrounded on all sides by, menacing dark handguns and machine guns.

“This is…quite a store,” I muttered, and the girl next to me chuckled.

“It’s usually easier to get the good bargains at the deeper specialty shops than these all-round stores that sell to newbies. But you can also use this place to find the type of gun you’d like, and then go do your shopping elsewhere.”

Now that she mentioned it, the players milling about the establishment seemed to be wearing more colorful attire than the average, and compared to her veteran desert-colored fatigues, they came across as amateurish.

“All right. What type of build are you playing?”

I paused. Though I had converted between very different worlds, my character’s general leanings should have been preserved.

“Um, mostly strength, followed by speed…I guess?”

“So you’re a STR-AGI type, then. You could be a midrange fighter with a heavier assault rifle or a large-caliber machine gun as your main weapon and a handgun for your sub…Oh, but you just converted, didn’t you? So you won’t have much money…”

“Ah…r-right.”

I waved my right hand to bring up the menu. Though I kept my statistics, I lost all my items and money in the transfer. So the number displayed at the bottom of my item storage said…

“Um, one thousand credits.”

“…Exactly the starter sum.”

We looked at each other and laughed nervously.

“Hmm,” she murmured, putting her fingers to her chin and tilting her head in thought. “With that amount, you might only be able to get a small raygun. Or on the live-ammo side, a used revolver, perhaps…But then again, if you’re interested…”

I sensed what she was about to suggest and quickly shook my head. No matter the MMO, it was never wise for a newbie to get too much assistance from a veteran player. I wasn’t here to enjoy the game, but there were still rules that a gamer had to follow.

“N-no, that’s all right. So…is there somewhere that I can earn a bunch of money really fast? I thought I heard there was a casino in this game…”

The girl looked troubled at this idea.

“That kind of thing is best to jump into when you’ve got plenty of money and expect to lose what you wager. But it’s true that there are places you can gamble, big and small. In fact, even in here…”

She spun around and pointed toward the back.

“There’s a game just over there, see?”

Her slender finger was pointing to a large machine, flashing with electric lights. Upon approaching it, I found that it was too big to be called a game machine—it covered the entire wall.

It had to be nearly ten feet tall and sixty feet wide. It was surrounded by a waist-high fence set into the metallic floor tiles, and an NPC dressed like an Old West gunman stood watch in the back. There was no fence at the near end, only a revolving metal bar and a square pillar that looked like a cashier box.

Behind the gunman, who regularly drew his oversized revolver from its holster to spin it on his finger and offer challenges to passersby, was a brick wall riddled with countless bulletholes. At the top of that wall was a pink neon sign reading UNTOUCHABLE!

“What’s this?” I asked. She pointed out the features for me.

“It’s a game where you go in the gate at the front and see how close you can get to the NPC at the back without being hit. There, see where the high score is?”

Her finger indicated a glowing red line on the floor behind the fence. It was just over two-thirds down the length of the space.

“Oh…and how much do you win?”

“Well, it costs five hundred credits to play, and you get a thousand for reaching ten meters, and double that for fifteen. Oh, and if you actually touch the gunman, you win back all of the money that’s been put into the game so far.”

“All of it?!”

“See the carryover amount on the sign? Ten, hundred…three hundred thousand credits and change.”

“That’s…quite a sum.”

“Yeah, well, it’s impossible,” she said flatly. “Once you get past the eight-meter mark, the gunman starts doing this high-speed firing pattern that’s a total cheat. He’s got an ultra-fast reload and three-point burst somehow, even though it’s just a revolver. By the time you see the bullet line, it’s already too late.”

“Bullet line…”

She pulled on my sleeve and whispered into my ear, “Look, someone’s going to add to the pool right now.”

I tore my eyes from the gunman to see that a group of three men were approaching the game.

One of them, clad in a wintry white-and-gray camo jacket, strode up to the gate with purpose. He pressed his palm to the cashier terminal, which erupted into a bright fanfare to indicate that a transaction had taken place. Nearly a dozen people wandered up from elsewhere in the store to watch.

The NPC gunman drawled something in English that I took as a threat to “blast your ass to the moon,” and put a hand to the gun in his holster. A large, green, holographic number three appeared in the air before the Arctic camo challenger, then beeped down to zero, at which point the metal bar clanked open.

“Rrraaagh!”

He roared and raced forward, then abruptly threw his legs wide to come to a stop, his eyes wide-open. He tilted his upper half to the right and lifted his left hand and leg up into the air in a truly comical stance.

Before I could wonder what kind of dance he was doing, three shining red bullets passed to the left of his head, through the space under his left arm, and below his left knee. While I’d been distracted, the gunman had fired three quick bullets in succession. The man’s evasion was impressive—but it seemed as though he knew where the bullets would be fired.

“Were those…trajectories?” I murmured to the blue-haired girl, who nodded and answered:

“Yes, he evaded the bullets by watching the bullet lines.”

The man in the camo took off on another mad dash when the lines of fire were gone, then stopped again, just as quickly. This time he opened his legs wider and bent over ninety degrees at the waist.

With a high-pitched whine, two bullets flew over his head and another passed through his legs. Another rush forward, another abrupt stop. It was like a game of “Red Light, Green Light.”

The camo man showed considerable agility in proceeding forward seven meters. Just three more, and he’d be able to win back double what he paid to play—but that’s when it all went wrong.

Until now, the NPC gunman had been firing three shots in the same pattern: pause, two shots, one shot. The man jumped to evade the last shot, but lost his balance and put a hand to the ground when he landed. By the time he recovered, it was already too late—the gunman’s hand flashed, and the shot caught him on his white vest, shooting orange sparks.

The sound system played another flare, this one droopy and mocking. The gunmen swore in triumph, and the pool total on the wall behind him shot up 500 with a jingle. The Arctic camo man slumped back toward the gate.

“…See?” The girl shrugged, hiding a grin behind her muffler. “It would be one thing if you could dart left and right, but it’s pretty much a straight shot forward, so you always get beat right around there.”

“Hmm…I see. So it’s already too late by the time you see the trajectory lines,” I muttered to myself, heading for the gate.

“Oh…Hey, wait,” she called out in surprise, trying to stop me. I grinned back with one cheek and put my palm against the cashier. It made an old-fashioned cha-ching sound.

The onlookers and the previous challenger’s group both murmured in surprise, either at another foolish attempt so soon, or at seeing my appearance. The girl with the muffler had her hands on her hips, shaking her head in disapproval.

The gunman drawled a different taunt this time, followed by the same countdown.

I dropped my hips and took a dashing stance. The instant that it hit zero and the metal bar swung open, I burst forward.

Within a few steps, the gunman’s hand rose and three red lines appeared from the end of his gun. They pointed at my head, right breast, and left leg.

As soon as this registered in my head, I leaped forward to the right as hard as I could. An orange bullet tracer shot past my left side. I kicked the panel on the right and returned to the center of the lane.

Naturally, this was my first experience against a gun within a VRMMO.

There were many monsters who used ranged attacks like arrows, poison projectiles, or magic spells in ALO and even SAO. There was one way to evade these attacks. You had to read the enemy’s eyes. It had to have been a sticking point with Akihiko Kayaba—every VRMMO monster run by the Cardinal system looked directly at its target when it attacked…but only if the creature actually had optical organs that could be classified as eyes.

That golden rule had to apply to the NPC gunman as well.

I focused not on the red bullet lines or the black muzzle of the gun, only on the gunman’s eyes. I could sense the trajectories of his shots just from the lifeless twitching of those eyes. When they moved, I darted just enough to avoid them, left and right, up and down, weaving my way around the silent lines. Each time a bullet passed, I was already in position for the next leap forward.

I must have passed the ten-meter mark by the time he finished the second set of three, because a brief sound effect played. I barely even registered it.

The gunman released his empty cylinder, sprayed the spent cartridges behind him and popped in a full six bullets with one motion, then clicked the frame back into place within the span of half a second—cheating, indeed—then pointed it at me again.

His next attack was not the same crisp three-shot pattern. The shots came irregularly; two, one, then three. I evaded out of sheer instinct, closing another five meters. There was another brief jingle, and the gunman’s lightning-quick reload.

There were only five meters left. I could see his whiskered face, twisted in what I imagined was disgust.

Beneath the ten-gallon hat, his black beady eyes swiped sideways across my chest. I determined that dodging to the side was impossible, so I flopped down and slid on the tile. The six shots flew like machine-gun fire, but I’d bought myself half of the remaining distance.

The enemy was out of bullets again. With another half a second to reload, I had enough time to reach him. But as I got to my feet, I thought I saw the gunman’s eyes twinkle with pleasure.

On the spot, I changed gears and leaped as high as I could.