I was sure of it. I had met him somewhere before. We had come face-to-face and exchanged words.

But where? The only people I’d spoken to since logging in to GGO were the avatar buyer right at the spawning point, Sinon during her assistance with my shopping and registration, and her friend Spiegel. So it wasn’t in this world.

ALO, then? Did I meet him back in Alfheim, while we both had different avatars? I frantically consulted my memory index, trying to match the style of speech and general air to anyone I knew. But nothing turned up. I couldn’t remember meeting anyone with such a chilling presence.

Where? Where have I met him before…?

The tattered cloak waved, and a thin arm extended from the middle. I nearly jumped backward again, but the hand, clad in a similarly ragged glove, was empty.

The empty hand called up a menu window where I could see, its movements dull and lifeless. The screen showed a tournament field with six blocks—the current bracket of the third Bullet of Bullets.

His needle-like finger tapped at Block F, which expanded to fill the screen. He clicked again, and it zoomed into the center of the block.

My gaze was drawn to the spot his finger indicated.

There were two names: UEMARU on the left and KIRITO on the right. A glowing line extended from my name on the right. It had already been officially announced that I beat Uemaru and advanced to the second round.

The finger moved slightly, tracing the name KIRITO from top to bottom. He spoke again.

“This, name. That, attack. Are you, the real thing?”

A moment later, I was struck by my third great shock.

My knees trembled and nearly buckled, but I held my poise just in time.

This guy knows me!

He knew the source of the name Kirito, and the sword skill that I used to defeat Uemaru as well.

Meaning…I hadn’t met him in GGO or in ALO.

SAO. Sword Art Online. Somewhere in the floating castle Aincrad, the setting of that game of death, I had met this man.

Whatever avatar was behind that tattered, creepy mask—no, whoever was on the other side of that avatar, lying down, connected to an AmuSphere—they were an SAO Survivor, just like me.

My pulse was ringing like an alarm bell. If it wasn’t for the gloom of the dim room, it would have been quite apparent that I was white as a sheet.

Calm down, just calm down, I repeated to myself, over and over.

There was no need to panic just because I’d met another survivor of SAO. Not long before the collapse of Aincrad, there were plenty of articles and stories being shared about my Dual Blades extra skill, and my public duel with Heathcliff of the Knights of the Blood. And the Vorpal Strike I’d just used on Uemaru was a very commonly used One-Handed Sword skill. Any player of a decent level in Aincrad could have put two and two together after watching the footage and checking the tournament bracket. I probably would have tried the same thing if I recognized an old acquaintance from those days here in the dome.

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.