6

I turned on my blinker, leaned the frame sideways, and passed through the large gate.

Instantly, I felt the accusing stares of the pedestrians on either side of the tree-lined street, and abruptly slowed the motorcycle down.

In the midst of the increasing use of electric scooters, the crappy old Thai 125 cc two-stroke dirt bike I got through Agil’s help made an astonishing amount of noise. Every time Suguha sat on the back, she complained that it was noisy, smelly, and uncomfortable. I tried to tease her by saying that she couldn’t be like the wind if she didn’t understand that sound, but secretly I wished that I had bought one of the four-stroke scooters made after the exhaust regulations kicked in.

Especially when I was riding it on the grounds of a hospital.

I puttered along the street with the speed of a donkey pulling a cart until eventually a parking garage came into view. With a sigh of relief, I drove inside and stopped the bike at the special motorcycle section in the corner, pulling out the archaic ignition key and pulling off my helmet. The chilly winter air brought a faint scent of disinfectant with it.

It was the Saturday after my high-priced-cake meeting with Kikuoka.

He sent me a message saying that the location was prepared for me to log in to Gun Gale Online. I made the trip with heavy heart, but was surprised to find the address was for a large municipal hospital in Chiyoda Ward.

I hardly ever had a reason to visit the city center of Tokyo, but I didn’t get lost along the way. The physical rehabilitation center attached to this hospital complex was the place where I’d rebuilt my strength after escaping SAO.

Even after the monthlong stay there, I had to make the trip time after time for tests and other procedures. I hadn’t been here in six months, but the sight of that familiar white building filled me with a strange, confusing mix of nostalgia and loneliness. I shook my head to brush off the sentiment and headed for the entrance.

The conversation I had with Asuna six days ago at the Imperial Palace nearby, where I first explained the situation, played back in my head.

“Wh-whaaat?! K-Kirito, you’re…quitting ALO?!”

Asuna’s wide, shocked eyes were beginning to well up, so I quickly shook my head to put her at ease.

“N-no, no! It’s just for a few days! I’ll convert back as soon as it’s done! A-as a matter of fact…I need to go and observe this other VRMMO for a bit…”

Asuna’s panic melted away, to be replaced by a skeptical look.

“Observe…? Haven’t you been just making new accounts up until now? Why would you need to convert?”

“Well, it’s because…of the four-eyes in the Ministry of Internal Affairs…”

With great difficulty, I explained how a large part of the reason I’d chosen the palace for our date spot was based on Seijirou Kikuoka’s summons, intentionally leaving out certain details of the story.

The story finished up just as we reached the gate. We returned our tickets there and were crossing the Hirakawa Gate bridge when Asuna gave voice to her feelings, looking conflicted.

“Well, if Mr. Kikuoka’s asking you, I guess you don’t have a choice…but sometimes I wonder if he can really be fully trusted. I mean, I know we owe him a lot, but still…”

“I completely agree with you.”

We grinned wryly at each other. The smile quickly vanished from her face, and she squeezed my hand.

“…Just come back as quickly as you can. There’s only one home for us.”

I nodded and looked down at the surface of the moat.

“Of course. I’ll be back in ALO before you know it. I’m just doing a bit of research on what’s happening inside Gun Gale Online.”

…That’s right.

I did not say a single word to Asuna about the true nature of Kikuoka’s request—that I would be making contact with the player Death Gun, who (supposedly) wielded a mysterious power beyond the bounds of the game. I knew if I explained that, she would either stop me or demand to infiltrate the game with me.

I knew it was a selfish desire, but I had no intention of letting her anywhere near any virtual world with a hint of real danger about it.

Of course, I was sure the stories about Death Gun were 99 percent fictionalized.

A man who could kill a virtual player in real life.

At no point could I bring myself to believe it was true. The AmuSphere was nothing but an extension of the classic television set. It was easy to think of the full-dive virtual worlds as a kind of technological magic, but in reality, they were simple, useful tools—not magical items that transported the user’s soul to a far-off land.

But it was that last 1 percent that had brought me here.

Several months ago, I was organizing some old digital magazines that had built up on my PC’s drive, and I stumbled across a short interview with Argus’s development director, Akihiko Kayaba, just before SAO launched. In it, I found the following quote.

THE NAME AINCRAD IS AN ABBREVIATION OF “AN INCARNATING RADIUS,” MEANING AN ACTUALIZED WORLD. WITHIN THIS WORLD, PLAYERS WILL SEE THEIR DREAMS COME TO LIFE. SWORDS, MONSTERS, LABYRINTHS—THIS WORLD NOT ONLY BRINGS THESE SYMBOLS OF GAMING INTO REAL FORM, IT HAS THE POWER TO CHANGE THE PLAYER HIMSELF.

I had indeed changed. So had Asuna. And Agil, and Klein, and Liz, and Silica. Everyone who experienced those two years inside the game had changed to a degree that they could never be their old selves again.

But what if Kayaba’s “change” was more than that…? Thanks to The Seed—the VRMMO creation package—there was now a VR Nexus made of infinitely multiplying virtual worlds. Was it possible that somewhere, in some tiny corner of the Nexus, there was some element that freely overwrote the boundary between virtual life and real life?

The automatic door buzzed open and brought a wave of heated air and disinfectant that cut through my uncollected thoughts.

In any case, if two players had died in the real world, I couldn’t guarantee with absolute certainty that there was no danger in contacting Death Gun. If I admitted this to Asuna after returning to ALO, she would be mad, but in the end, she would understand.

She would know that as Kirito, the man who prematurely ended the Aincrad time line and unleashed The Seed upon the world, I didn’t have any other choice in the matter.

After a quick stop in the restroom, I followed the instructions on the printout of Kikuoka’s e-mail to reach a third-floor room in the hospital’s inpatient ward. There was no patient name in the placard on the wall. I knocked on the door and opened it up.

“Hey! Good to see you again, Kirigaya!”

It was a familiar nurse I’d known while I was in rehabilitation.

The long hair beneath her nurse’s cap was tied into one thick, three-strand braid with a little white ribbon waving at the end. Her tall frame, packed into the light pink nurse’s uniform, created a tempting silhouette for any new patient to behold. A small name tag on her left breast read AKI.

The put-on smile she wore was as purifying and welcoming as an angel’s, but I knew that she could be every bit as frightening as the situation warranted, and I wasn’t fooled. After a second of paralysis and surprise, I hastily bowed.

“Ah…h-hello, it’s been a while.”

Nurse Aki stretched out her arms and abruptly grabbed my shoulders, squeezing my upper arms and the sides of my stomach.

“Wh-whoa!”

“Look at you, you’ve got some meat on those bones again. But not enough yet. Have you been eating properly?”

“I-I have, I have. But why are you here, Ms. Aki…?”

I looked around the cramped room, but she was the only one inside.

“I got the story from that government man with the glasses. He says you’re doing some kind of virtual…network? Research thingy? And not even a year after you got out, you poor boy. Well, he said that since I was in charge of your physical rehab, he wanted me to monitor your condition here, so I’m off my regular shift for today. Those government agents really do have that national power to push people around—he cleared it with the chief nurse and everything. So here’s to some more time together, Kirigaya!”

“Ah…i-it’s a pleasure, ma’am…”

Very clever of you, knowing I can’t argue back against a pretty nurse, Kikuokaaaaa, I cursed the absent agent. Instead, I was all smiles for Nurse Aki as I shook her hand.

“…So the four-eyed agent isn’t here, then?”

“No, he said there was a meeting he couldn’t skip. He had a message for you, though.”

I took the manila envelope and pulled out a handwritten note.

Send your report to the usual e-mail address. Be sure to expense all costs incurred, as you will be reimbursed along with your payment when the operation is complete. P.S. Don’t let your hormonal urges get the best of you while you’re alone in the room with that pretty young nurse.

I immediately tore the note and envelope into shreds and stuffed the pieces into my jacket pocket. If Nurse Aki happened to see that, I’d be taken to taken to a real court for harassment.

She blinked at me suspiciously. I answered that look with a nervous smile.

“Well, uh…Let’s get connected to the Net, then…”

“Ah, of course. It’s all set up for you.”

She showed me to a gel bed with a number of imposing monitoring tools next to it. A brand-new silver AmuSphere hung gleaming over the headrest.

“Out of your clothes now, Kirigaya.”

“P-pardon?!”

“I’ve got to pop the electrodes on. No use being shy—I saw it all when you were hospitalized here.”

“…Is…just the top okay…?”

She thought it over for a moment, then mercifully nodded a yes. I obediently took off my jacket and long-sleeved shirt before lying down on the bed. She quickly slapped a few electrodes in various places on my upper half, to help monitor my heart activity. The AmuSphere itself had a heart rate monitor, but Kikuoka wanted to be thorough, just in case the unit itself was hacked into. That, at least, reassured me that he really was concerned about my safety.

“And that should do it…”

The nurse performed one last check of the monitoring tools and nodded. I reached up for the AmuSphere, fitted it over my head, and turned it on.

“Okay, well…here I go. It’ll probably be a four- or five-hour dive, just so you know…”

“Sure thing. I’ll be watching your body very closely, so don’t worry about anything back here.”

“Th-thanks a lot…”

I closed my eyes at last, wondering how exactly I’d gotten myself to this position. A little ticking sound in my ears let me know the device was powered up and ready to go.

“Link Start,” I commanded. Familiar beams of light covered my vision, tearing my mind free of my body.

The moment I landed in the world, something felt off.

A few seconds later, I understood why. The entire sky was yellow with a trace of pale red.

As I understood it, time inside Gun Gale Online was synchronized with real time. So just after one o’clock in the afternoon, the sky should have been the same shade of blue that I’d seen through the hospital window a moment ago. What was the reason for this gloomy shade of twilight, then?

After a few moments of wondering, I shrugged my shoulders to clear my head. The setting of GGO was the wasteland of Earth after the Last Great War. The coloring might just be an effect to add to the postapocalyptic setting.

Ahead of me was the majesty of the capital city at the center of the world of GGO, SBC Glocken. As befitting the king of sci-fi VRMMOs, the vibe it gave off was completely different from the fantasy cities of ALfheim’s Yggdrasil, atop the World Tree, and the major cities of Aincrad.

A host of metallic-looking high-rises loomed tall and dark in the sky, connected by a network of midair walkways. Colorful neon holograms were plastered in the spaces between the buildings, and increased in number closer to the ground to form a flood of color and sound.

I looked down to see that I was standing not on dirt or rock, but a street fitted with metal plating.

Behind me was a domed structure that was apparently the spawning point for newly created characters, while ahead of me was the wide main street heading into town. Weird little shops crowded the sides of the street, reminding me of the back alleys of Akihabara in real life.

The players I saw walking the street all had a distinctly dangerous air about them.

And there were, overwhelmingly, more men than women. Perhaps it was because my home game was the more female-popular ALO, with its world of dainty fairies, but the sight of so many imposing, well-muscled men in camo military jackets and black body armor was imposing, to say the least. Calling it energetic would be putting it nicely; the word I’d choose was sweaty. Every last one had a mean look in his eyes that said, Don’t talk to me.

There were other reasons to be intimidated. Such as the fact that the majority of the players were carrying large, black guns over shoulder or waist.

Unlike the more decorative aspects of swords or spears, guns existed for one purpose: to be weapons. They were all designed and shaped in order to best defeat the enemy and nothing more.

It occurred to me that this was something that could be said about this entire world.

The aims of this game world were refined and distilled into three simple things: fight, kill, take. Everything that made ALO what it was, the idea of living another life in a world of fantasy, was stripped clean out of GGO.

If anything, an appearance that suggested delicacy or prettiness was only a downside. How much menace you could inflict upon the opponent in battle with appearance alone was clearly a significant variable here. Most of the men wore scruffy beards or had large, ugly facial scars to help achieve this effect.

So what did my avatar look like?

I realized that I didn’t know yet, and looked down at my body. If I was going to draw the attention of Death Gun by being an infamous badass, I’d want to look like a macho soldier out of some Hollywood action flick…

…but I had a bad premonition.

Both of my hands were pale and smooth, with shockingly slender fingers. My body, clad in black military fatigues, seemed even more fragile than my real body in places. Based on my line of sight, I didn’t feel very tall, either.

As I told Asuna earlier, I hadn’t created my own character from scratch for Gun Gale Online. If I did, who knew how long it would take for me to encounter Death Gun, who only targeted the game’s most powerful players.

All of the game worlds based on the VRMMO support package known as The Seed—technically called the Cardinal system—shared just one meta-rule that applied to each and every one: the character conversion system. As long as your game was created with The Seed, you could not deactivate this feature.

By using the conversion system, a player could take a character’s data from one game and transfer it to a different game run by an entirely different company. It was similar in concept to the SIM cards that allowed one to transfer their phone data to a new model from an entirely different carrier.

Let’s say you had a character in Game A that had a Toughness of 100 and Speed of 80, and you wanted to transfer that character to Game B. Your strength in Game A would run through a relative value converter, which might give you a Strength of 40 and Agility of 30 in Game B. In short, an above-average muscular warrior in ALO would become an above-average soldier in GGO.

Naturally, this was not designed for copying characters. The moment an avatar was converted, the original in the old world disappeared entirely. Not just that, it was only the character that moved, not the items and equipment, so while the process was convenient, it did require some courage to go through with. In transferring “Kirito the Spriggan” from ALO to GGO, I had no choice but to dump nearly all of my items into Agil’s new pawnshop storage back in Yggdrasil City. Anyone else who wasn’t as lucky to know a trustworthy partner like him would have to get rid of their entire material fortune.

So the conversion process gave me a character equal in strength to Kirito in ALO, although given that I had started over from scratch there, I wasn’t as all-powerful as the Kirito from the original SAO. But since I couldn’t bring my appearance and items with me, I had no idea what sort of look I’d be given. Hopefully, I was blessed with a menacing soldier look, but…

I looked around the area, a bad premonition crawling up my neck, and noticed that the outer wall of the dome I’d just exited was made of reflective glass.

My eyes went wide.

“Wh-what the hell is this?!”

The person I saw in the reflection was a hundred light-years away from the look I was hoping to get.

The height was even shorter than my Spriggan form, and more slender. The hair was still black, just as before, but now it flowed smoothly from the back of my head down to my shoulder blades. Like my hands, the skin of my face was pale white, with brilliant red lips.

Although the color of my eyes was still the black of my previous character, they were much larger and shinier. In fact, framed by the long eyelashes, the innocently bewitching gaze that came back at me from the reflection was so different that I momentarily forgot it was me and looked away shyly. I straightened up and let out a long sigh.

Asuna used to tell me that the SAO Kirito had quite a girlish face, but this went way beyond that. I stood there, wondering how in the world I would turn myself into a menacing soldier looking like this, when a guy who had been eating something off to the side rushed up behind me.

“Oooh, miss, you’re so lucky! That’s an F-1300 line avatar! You hardly ever see that type generated. Hey, since you just started, feel like selling your account? I’ll give you two mega-credits!”