“Wh-wha—?!” I yelped, covering my face with my hand. Between my fingers, I saw her give me a quizzical glance.

“What are you doing? You’d better get changed.”

“Er, yes, b-but…”

My mind raced, even as it grappled with by far the greatest shock it had received since the dive into GGO began.

There weren’t many options available to me in this situation. One: I could find an excuse to escape the changing room. Two: Pretend to be a woman and just equip my body armor. But neither choice was in any way fair or honest to the girl who had given me so much help.

So I plunged headlong into option three before she could take off any more clothing and cause a true catastrophe.

My head shot down at maximum speed and I produced my namecard from the menu, then held it out to her with both hands.

“Umm…I’m sorry! I haven’t introduced myself until now…Um, this is my name…man!”

“Huh? M-man?”

I felt her take the card from my fingers.

“Kiri…to. Hmm, that’s an interesting name………wait………”

Because I didn’t belong to any guild—known as “squadrons” here—the only other information on the card aside from my name was a sex indicator.

“Male…? What…? But, you’re……”

She trailed off in confusion. Within my field of vision, which was pointed straight down at the floor, I noticed one of her cute little feet take a step back.

“No way…You’re……a man? With that avatar………?”

Silence.

Unable to bear the tension that filled the locker room, I started to raise my head a tad.

The next instant, something white flashed in my face with incredible speed and exploded on my left cheek. Purple splash effects covered my eyes.

It wasn’t until after I spun around like a top with the force of the impact, then slumped to the floor with little stars blinking in and out around my head, that I realized it had been the palm of her hand.

“Don’t follow me.”

“B-but I don’t know what to do after this…”

“Don’t follow me.”

“B-but I don’t know anyone else here…”

“Don’t follow me.”

I tried my best to keep up with the blue hair as she strode away, hissing back at me.

The girl had switched to a military jacket and bulletproof armor in a desert-colored scheme, with combat boots to round it out. The only thing that was the same as her in-town outfit was the muffler around her neck. As she warned me against earlier, she did not have a weapon out for show.

My equipment was similar in look, but mine was in a much darker, almost black shade—night camo, I guessed. I was prepared to abandon my usual style and go for something more ordinary, but when she told me it would take too much money to get enough styles to blend in to all of the randomly selected map types, I went with my usual fashion sense.

The very person who gave me that advice was now several feet ahead of me, determinedly not looking back. While her anger was quite justified, I also hadn’t identified myself as a woman, nor had I used any specifically feminine speech. Maybe I unjustly profited from that confusion, but she also could have said something about changing clothes before she launched into it…

I shook my head to keep my thought process from getting too whiny, and stubbornly followed that waving muffler. Abruptly, she came to a stop. We had gone halfway around the dome.

I stopped as well, and she turned around to face me. Her deep blue eyes looked directly into mine. They had struck me as catlike before, but now she was more of a panther. Her tiny lips sucked in a harsh breath, and I tensed in preparation for a proper shout. What emerged was only a brisk sigh.

She thudded down into the box seat beside her and turned her head away from me. Hesitantly, I took the seat across from her.

Up on the holo-panel, the countdown to the first preliminary matches was now under ten minutes. I had no idea what to do after this. Was I supposed to move somewhere else once the countdown hit zero? Was there some extra registration step? I didn’t even know where to look to find this kind of information.

I hunched my shoulders and fidgeted nervously. She shot me another look. Another deep, deep sigh.

“…I’ll give you the bare minimum of information. After that, we’re enemies for real,” she growled. I felt the tension leave my face.

“Th-thanks.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not forgiving you. Anyway, once that countdown hits zero, every entrant in here will be automatically teleported to a private battlefield with their first-round opponent.”

“Ah, I see.”

“The battlefield’s a square arena, exactly one kilometer to each side. The terrain type, weather, and time of day are all randomized. You’ll be spawned at least half the distance of the arena apart. When the battle’s finished, the winner comes back here to the waiting area, while the loser is teleported to the first-floor hall. None of your gear drops at random if you lose. If you win and your next opponent has already won, the second round starts immediately. If their match isn’t over, you wait. There are sixty-four players in Block F, so if you win five times, you’ll be in the block championship and thus in the tournament finale. No more explanation needed or offered,” she finished brusquely, though her explanation was quite helpful. The general flow of the tournament made sense to me now.

“Okay, I think I get it. Thank you,” I replied.

She sent another look my way and turned to the side yet again. I could barely make out the words she said next.

“You’d better get to the final. After all the things I’ve taught you, I want to be able to give you the final piece of information you need.”

“Final?”

“The taste of that bullet of defeat.”

I had no choice but to smile. Not sarcastically or ironically, but a true smile. I couldn’t help but like people with that kind of mentality.

“…Looking forward to it. Are you sure you’ll be all right, though?”

She snorted. “If I actually lose in the prelims, I’ll retire. This time—”

Those lapis-blue eyes cast a fierce gaze out at the sea of rivals filling the dome.

“—I’ll kill every last one of them.”

Those last few words had no volume to them, and reached my ears as nothing but tiny vibrations on her lips. Those lips then curled into the smile of a predator. A chill like ice that I hadn’t experienced in ages ran down my back.

Clearly, she did not feel an ounce of the pressure all the men in the dome were putting on her. She was undoubtedly far more powerful than they were. She had the skill as a VRMMO player—and the underlying mentality to support it.

I held my breath and stayed quiet. The smile vanished from her face, and her eyes traveled off in thought for a moment. She waved her menu open and within seconds had produced a little card.

She slid it across the table and waited for me to pick it up before saying, “This will probably be the last time we speak like this, so I’ll introduce myself here. It’s the name of the one who will defeat you.”

I looked down without comment. The card read Sinon. Sex: F.

“Sinon,” I muttered, and her blue hair waved as she nodded. I tried introducing myself properly this time.

“I’m Kirito. Nice to meet you.”

I extended a hand over the table without thinking, but Sinon completely ignored it and turned aside. Chastised, I retracted my hand.

After that, she said nothing.

The monitor at the top of the dome showed there were still five minutes left. Either I could sit in my chair and cross my legs, or I could try talking to her again. Approaching footsteps co-opted my decision.

I looked up to see a tall man with long silver hair hanging over his forehead coming straight for our table.

He wore an outfit of dark gray and slightly lighter gray in a camo pattern that was all right angles. Slung over his shoulder was a slightly larger gun—probably an assault rifle rather than a submachine gun. His sharp features matched up well with his slim figure. There was only a bare minimum of armor on him, and he looked very capable of traversing the battlefield with speed and agility. He gave off the air of a special forces agent rather than a hardened veteran soldier.

The man did not spare a single glance for me in the shadows, but looked directly at Sinon instead with a smile on his lips. Suddenly, those hawkish features took on a boyish roundness that surprised me.

“Hey, Sinon. You sure got here late—I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

His tone of voice was so casual and familiar that I couldn’t help but wince, expecting her to hurl more of her withering vocal fire in his direction. But to my surprise, the veil of iciness that surrounded the pale-haired girl softened, and she almost seemed to smile.

“There you are, Spiegel. I got distracted by some stuff that I didn’t expect to come up. Wait a minute…I thought you weren’t going to compete.”

The man named Spiegel smiled shyly and brushed his head with his hand in embarrassment.

“Actually, I’m here to root you on—hope you don’t mind. You get to watch the matches on the big screen from here.”

These two were at least friends, if not guildmates. Sinon scooted over, and Spiegel sat down right next to her without even asking.

“So what was it that distracted you?”

“Oh…Well, I was guiding that person over there around,” Sinon answered, signaling me with a short, cold stare. I straightened up reluctantly and gave a brief bow to Spiegel, who had finally noticed my presence.

“Hi, I’m ‘that person.’”

“Oh, er…nice to meet you. Are you a…friend of Sinon’s?”

Spiegel had an air about him, to be sure, but he turned out to be more courteous than his appearance suggested. Either that, or he was also confusing my gender.

I was figuring out which answer would be the most entertaining when Sinon cut off my fun.

“Don’t be fooled. He’s a man.”

“Huh?”

Spiegel went wide-eyed. I had no choice but to introduce myself normally.

“Uh, I’m Kirito. Male.”

“M-male…Which, um…means you’re, uh…”

He still looked confused. Sinon and I shared a glance. It looked like he was having trouble processing the fact that Sinon had been working with another male player.

Intrigued by this reaction, I decided to toss a little fuel onto the fire.

“Actually, I’ve got a lot to thank Sinon for, in a variety of ways.”

Sinon turned her blue lasers on me and growled through pursed lips. “I…I haven’t done any such thing. And you’re in no position to call me by name…”

“What’s with the cold shoulder all of a sudden?”

“Cold?! We’re complete strangers!”

“Even though you helped me coordinate my outfit?”

“Th…that was because I thought you were—”

Suddenly, our bickering was interrupted by the quiet BGM in the dome fading away, to be replaced by a blaring electric guitar lead. Next, a soft, electronically generated voice boomed over the heads of the hundreds in attendance.

“Thank you for your patience. The preliminary blocks of the third Bullet of Bullets tournament will now begin. All players registered will be automatically teleported to the first-round field map at the end of the countdown. Best of luck.”

A great cheer chose from the room. The rattle of automatic fire and the screech of lasers followed, the various types of gunfire shooting up to the ceiling like fireworks. Sinon quietly got to her feet and jabbed a finger at me.

“You’d better make it to the final. I need to blow your head off.”

I rose in turn and grinned. “Well, I was never one to turn down an invitation to a date.”

“Wh-why, you…”

The twenty remaining seconds of the countdown trickling away, I waved to Sinon and faced forward in preparation for the teleport. As I did so, I met Spiegel’s gaze.

When I saw the wariness and hostility in his eyes, I was briefly struck by the idea that I’d gone too far, and its accompanying regret.

But the next moment, my body was surrounded by a pillar of blue light that flooded my vision.

When I could see again, I was atop a hexagonal panel floating in the midst of darkness.

There was a pale, red holo-window in front of me that loudly proclaimed Kirito vs. Uemaru. Unlike SAO, in which all players had to spell their names in the Western alphabet, GGO allowed proper Japanese characters, so his name was spelled in actual kanji. I didn’t recognize the name, of course. At the bottom of the window it said, Preparation time: 58 secs. Field: Lost Ancient Temple.

I interpreted the minute of prep time to be meant for optimizing equipment for the chosen map, but that meant nothing to me without any backup gear or knowledge of GGO’s terrain. I called up the menu and switched to my equipment window—which resembled that of ALO’s—and set the Kagemitsu G4 lightsword as my main weapon, and the Five-Seven as my sidearm. Once I’d ensured that none of my armor was forgotten, I closed the window.

As the remaining time slowly counted down, a sudden possibility struck my brain.

That ferocious smile I’d seen Sinon wear for just a moment. It was like pure, distilled lethality, a rifle bolt that could pierce any armor or shield.

Her voice sounded inside my head so clearly that it could have been telepathy.

This time, I’ll kill every last one of them, she’d said. The words were trite, even childish, but they succeeded in delivering that familiar chill I’d experienced so many times since the SAO days that I couldn’t count. It was as if real, tangible will, transcending any kind of in-game role-playing, was radiating out from her tiny body.

I’d met few players who could make me feel that sort of willpower within the virtual realm. And as far as female players went, the only one who had reached this level was Asuna, and at her most extreme. Actually, even Asuna the Flash, previously known as the Mad Warrior, had never given off such a fierce energy.

Was it possible? Could this blue-haired girl in fact be the very Death Gun I was seeking?

The ugly, metallic rasp of Death Gun’s voice in the recording that Kikuoka played for me was completely unlike Sinon’s pure, crisp tones. But unlike SAO, GGO was a normal game. A single player could easily have multiple characters that she could switch between at the log-in screen.

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.