14

When I separated from Sinon and left the cave, the red of the sunset was almost entirely gone, with only a purple brushstroke across the sky to mark the dying of the light.

I’d been under the impression that GGO was stuck in a perpetual twilight, so it was a surprise to me that night could actually fall. I looked up at the sky. Then again, it was nearly ten PM in the real world, so it made sense that it would be dark here.

There were hardly any stars in the sky. In this world, a large-scale space war in the distant past had doomed civilization, leaving humanity to scrape by on the technological remnants of its former glory. Obviously, they hadn’t destroyed the stars in their war, but the emptiness of the sky almost made it seem that way.

A small light cut across from the southwest, splitting the infinite darkness.

It was not a shooting star, but a satellite—launched by the old civilization, still mindlessly sending information without anyone to manage it anymore.

It was nine forty-five PM, which made this the seventh Satellite Scan since the start of the Bullet of Bullets final competition.

I turned away from the vast sky, pulled out a thin terminal from my pouch and touched the screen. The panel lit up and displayed a map of the area. Nearly the entire northern half of the island that served as the battleground was desert, and aside from the occasional rocky outcropping and oasis, the terrain was flat. Not a place that suited snipers—or so I thought.

I put my back to the side of the rock I’d just emerged from, taking care to hide myself as much as possible so I could study the terminal in peace. A few seconds later, a little blip appeared in the center of the map without a sound. I didn’t need to touch it to know that it represented me. As Sinon was lying in wait in the nearby cave, she didn’t appear on the map, of course.

To my surprise, in the desert zone there were no other dots for living players within five kilometers. It made sense that Death Gun—or ‘Steven’—would not appear, thanks to his Optical Camo, but I had been expecting a gathering of enemy players who had figured out our hiding spot, ready to toss their grenades into the cave.

Instead, there was a scattering of dark gray blips throughout the desert. They were the players who had already been eliminated, but it was eerie to know that so many bodies were lying around, yet we hadn’t heard any sounds of battle whatsoever.

I zoomed out. There was one dot about six kilometers to the southwest. Tapping the dot told me that it belonged to Yamikaze. That name was familiar.

Farther to the south, in the ruined city, there were two dots approaching one another and a host of gray spots. The survivors were No-No and Ferney. A further zoom-out showed the entire island on the panel. But to my surprise, there were no other lit dots. Even the dot that had set up shop on the peak of the southern mountain at the very start of the game, the one Sinon had derisively called “Richie the Camper,” was now gray. There were two blips of the same color nearby, which suggested that he’d been teamed up on.

That meant, if you included Sinon and Death Gun, who wouldn’t show up on the screen, there were currently six players left on the vast island.

Naturally, I couldn’t deny the possibility that other players were hiding in caves or water, but unless they had a special ability like Death Gun, they wouldn’t be able to receive the satellite information, either. Not many could afford to sit through the climactic stage of a battle without knowing what was happening…

“…Ah!”

As I stared at the terminal, lost in thought, something changed significantly on the screen. It wasn’t more dots, but the opposite. The two blips clustered in the city both went dark at once.

My guess was that until the scan started, neither of the two knew the other was there. Perhaps they were surprised to see on the screen that an enemy was just beyond the wall, and they each threw a desperate grenade at the other, blowing themselves up. If that was the case, it had to be a bitter end for contestants who had fought hard to get this far. I just barely resisted the urge to say a brief prayer in their memory.

At any rate, this meant that only four players were left out of the original thirty. But out of those, only Yamikaze and I showed up on the map. Finally, I did a quick count of lit dots and shaded dots on the map. When I was done, I gasped.

“Wha…”

I had to recount. Then again. But the number did not change. There were two white dots on the terminal screen for survivors. And twenty-four in gray for the losers.

The numbers didn’t add up. Even if you added the hidden Sinon and Death Gun, that only made twenty-eight. With Pale Rider, who didn’t show up because he was shot by the black pistol and disconnected, that was twenty-nine. One short.

Were my assumptions incorrect, and one more person was hiding?

Or had Death Gun managed to “erase” another combatant?

The possibility of the latter was slim. After all, Death Gun’s real-life accomplice had to be either in Sinon’s house or in her immediate environment. I didn’t want to think of her as bait, but as long as Death Gun was going after her, his accomplice couldn’t leave to travel to a different target.

No, wait… Maybe I’m missing something huge here…

No good. I couldn’t be waffling about this. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook off the chill settling in on me.

When I opened my eyes again, the dots on the screen were blinking—the satellite was nearly done with its pass. It was possible—no, likely—that there wouldn’t be a next scan. I offered the satellite a silent thanks for its work, then looked at my surroundings. Nothing moved or shone in the gloomy desert. I returned the terminal to my pouch and headed back for the cave.

The sniper with her massive rifle was waiting for me just around the curve, rather than in the very back with the buggy.

“How was it? What’s the situation?!” Sinon demanded, her tied-up hair waving on either side of her face.

I gave her a concise but accurate account. “In the middle of the scan, two players knocked each other out, which probably leaves just four. You, me, Yamikaze, and Death Gun, who didn’t show up. Yamikaze’s about six kilos to the southwest. Death Gun’s probably somewhere in the desert, on his way here. And there might be one other person hiding in a cave, like us.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say that the missing person might possibly be a second victim of Death Gun’s. Sinon didn’t seem to pick up on it.

She muttered, “Only four or five left,” but accepted it at once. “It’s already been an hour and forty-five minutes, though. Last time it took just about two hours, so the pace fits the prior pattern. It’s almost a mystery to me that no one came by to toss a grenade into the cave, though…”

“Yeah. Maybe Death Gun was wandering around searching for us, and he picked everyone else off with that rifle of his. There were plenty of gray dots in the desert.”

“In that case, he’s going to wind up with the Max Kills prize,” she said unhappily, then switched topics. “The problem now is Yamikaze. The only other survivor that appeared on his screen would be you, so he’s got to be on his way over.”

“I recognize the name…Is he good?” I asked.

Sinon gave me an exasperated look. “He was the runner-up of the last tournament. Plays an extreme Agility build; they call him the Run and Gun Demon.”

“Run and…Gun?”

“Just what it sounds like—a playstyle where you run around and shoot. He uses an ultralight Calico M900A submachine gun. He came in second to Zexceed’s rare gun and armor, but some say Yamikaze’s actually the better player when it comes to skill.”

“So…he might be the best on GGO’s Japanese server…?”

It made sense that someone who had lasted this long would be very good. I frowned, wondering what to do.

Sinon spoke up, her voice resolute. “Listen…if your conjecture that it’s actually an accomplice doing the killing in real life is correct, then Death Gun can only kill me right now. After all, the accomplice has to be staked out at my place to do it.”

“…”

I was more than a little surprised. I stared at the little, catlike face across from me.

An unfamiliar killer had his sights on her unprotected body in real life. The horror of that situation was, in a way, even greater than the shackles of the NerveGear and game of death that I endured. But Sinon’s dark eyes, even with her fright, showed a will to face that threat directly.

I was at a loss for words, so Sinon calmly continued, “That means we don’t need to seriously worry about Death Gun killing Yamikaze. So, while I mean no disrespect to him, perhaps we could let Yamikaze be our decoy? If Death Gun shoots him with the L115, we’ll know his location. That’s a more solid plan than having you be the bait. Plus…depending on how you think of it, that’s kind of what I’m doing now.”

I took her last sentence to mean that she was using her real body as a lure to keep Death Gun’s accomplice present. While her voice did quaver a bit at the end, the willpower needed to say it at all was impressive.

“…You’re real tough, Sinon,” I murmured. The sniper blinked, then her lips pursed a bit.

“No…I’m just trying not to think about it. I’ve always been good at shutting my eyes to scary things,” she remarked ruefully. “At any rate, what do you think of the plan? I think we ought to make use of whatever we can at this point.”

“Yeah…you’re right, I agree. For the most part, I’m in…but…”

I bit my lip, then elaborated on the concern that had been eating away at me for the last few minutes. “The thing is…there’s one thing that worries me. I counted up all the survivors and losers in the last satellite scan, but there were only twenty-eight. Even if one is Pale Rider, that leaves us one short.”

“…You mean…Death Gun might have killed someone else?” Sinon’s eyes went wide, but she promptly shook her head. “Th-that’s impossible! I mean, his accomplice is after me, right? It’s not virtual reality—he can’t just teleport anywhere he wants. Unless you’re trying to say that one of the other contestants just so happens to live in my apartment building!”

“Right…that’s the point…But if you think about it, it’s a bit unnatural…”

I glanced at my watch to see that two minutes had already passed since the scan. I tried to explain what was on my mind in as short a time as possible. “Only thirty minutes passed between when Death Gun shot Pale Rider at the bridge, and when he tried to shoot you near the stadium. That means that in the real world, Pale Rider’s home is within thirty minutes’ travel from yours. Maybe it’s not impossible, but it seems awfully convenient to me.”

“But…that’s the only possibility, isn’t it?” Sinon asked, her brows furrowed.

I revealed the thought that had plagued me since the Satellite Scan. “No, it’s not. What if…Death Gun has more than one accomplice? If he has a strike team with multiple members, he could have one of them on standby, ready to kill you, at the same moment he’s busy killing someone else. That means we can’t deny the possibility that Yamikaze might be another target.”

“…!”

She sucked in a sharp breath and clutched her sniper rifle tighter. The pale face floating in the gloom shook slightly.

“N-no…You mean there are three or more people working together to commit these horrible crimes?”

“…I know there are at least ten surviving members of Laughing Coffin. And they were locked in the same prison for half a year in SAO. They easily could have traded real-life contact information…even planned out this whole horrible strategy in all of the time they had there. I doubt that all ten of them are in on this…but there’s no proof that there’s only one accomplice.”

“…Why would they…Why would they go to such lengths to keep PKing…? Why, when they were finally released from that horrible game…?” she whimpered.

I wrung the answer from my dry, painful throat. “Maybe…it’s the same reason I decide to be a swordsman, and you decide to be a sniper…”

“…”

I thought she would be angry, but Sinon only bit her lip. Her skinny body stopped trembling, and her navy blue eyes turned hard and resolute. “If that’s the case…we can’t let them win. I just said they were PKing, but I take that back. There are plenty of people who PK in this game, and I’ve joined squadrons who did that, but PKing has its own pride and determination. Poisoning an unconscious victim while they’re in a full dive isn’t PKing. It’s a sickening crime…It’s murder.”

“Yeah. That’s right. We can’t let them keep getting away with this. We’ll beat Death Gun in here, then make his accomplices pay for their crimes.”

That message was to myself as much as to her.

Yes, it was my primary duty. I had to start over from there. I killed two people on that night of madness, then another one later, and I had to atone for those stolen lives.

Normally this would be my battle alone, but now I’d involved the sniper girl in my sins. I stared at her.

If I was prioritizing her safety, I’d let Yamikaze and Death Gun fight, then when one of them was victorious, we’d both commit suicide, ending the tournament immediately. The worst possible scenario would be if the one person missing from the map wasn’t one of Death Gun’s victims but had been hiding in the river or caves after all. The tournament would not be over, and after defeating Yamikaze, Death Gun could appear and shoot Sinon’s temporary body before my eyes. Plus, if Yamikaze happened to be one of Death Gun’s targets, we’d only be increasing the number of his victims.

I had to fight. I had to protect Sinon, eliminate Yamikaze, and defeat Death Gun. It wouldn’t be easy, but it all had to be done…

Sinon herself interrupted my thoughts with her own offer: “I’ll take out Yamikaze.”

“Huh…?”

“He’s very good. Even you won’t be able to wipe him out instantly. And while you’re fighting, Death Gun will go after you.”

“Um…okay, but,” I mumbled. Sinon took her hand off the gun and slapped me lightly on the chest.

“Knowing you, you’ve probably got some idea in your head that you need to ‘protect me’ or something.”

I had no response; she was right on the money. A smile appeared on the sniper’s lips, followed by a grimace.

“Well, that’s crap. I’m the sniper, and you’re the spotter. If you help me out by revealing their location, I’ll take care of Yamikaze and Death Gun.”

I wasn’t sure what she called me, but I smirked and nodded anyway. “Okay. It’s up to you, then. They should both be real close by now. I’ll zip out in the buggy, and you pop out behind me and find a good sniping location.”

We were back to the original plan. Sinon nodded her agreement. She stared right back at me, her eyes serious once again, and said, “Let’s do it, partner.”

Sinon pressed her right eye to the scope of the Hecate II, which had been switched to night-vision mode.

Nothing moved on the vast desert for now. But Yamikaze was approaching from the southwest, and Death Gun would be converging from wherever he was hiding, she figured.

For her sniping position, Sinon chose the top of the rocky structure that housed the cave she’d been hiding in. She was hard to see from the ground, and she had a good vantage over the area. But there was a risk, too. Though it wasn’t particularly tall, the stone outcropping was over thirty feet off the ground at its peak, which meant that with her low Vitality stat, Sinon couldn’t just hop down safely. There was only one way up to the top, so if an enemy got close, she’d be shot before she could escape.

But this was the time to abandon any negative thoughts. She kept her mind flat, panning the rifle to her right.

In the center of her view, right at the top of a large dune, stood a silent figure. The occasional breeze rustled his long, back-length hair. The black fatigues covering his slender body melted into the night, making him look less like a gun-toting soldier than a fairy swordsman presiding over the desert of a fantasy realm.

Beyond Kirito was the trusty steed that had taken them into the desert from the ruined city—the three-wheeled buggy. There was hardly any gas left when he took it out of the cave, so it was probably done for good. But the buggy had performed its final task admirably. Thanks to the cover of its large chassis, Kirito could be seen easily, but would be difficult to snipe from the north.

To the south of him was the rock where Sinon hid, and her vision was equally limited. That meant that if Death Gun shot with the L115, it would be from the west or the east. Given that Yamikaze was most likely approaching from the west, he would be coming from the east. Kirito had already come to the same opinion, as his girlish face was turned to the pale moon appearing through the thick, trailing clouds.

Death Gun would probably shoot Kirito with the .338 Lapua Magnum, rather than the electric stun round. If the shot landed on his head or heart, he would die instantly. If it hit one of his limbs, he would lose half his HP from the impact. But evasion would not be easy, either. Not only would Death Gun’s first shot not give away a bullet line, the enemy’s Metamaterial Optical Camo meant that he could get into sniping position while invisible. He couldn’t get too close, as he’d still leave visible footprints in the sand, but it was clear that he held an overwhelming advantage at this point.

But if anyone can do it, it’s you. You beat the Untouchable dodging game on your first try, and you cut my point-blank Hecate bullet in two. You can dodge it, Kirito, Sinon thought, setting her rifle back in position.

Her job was to give Kirito all the concentration he could muster. In order to do that, she had to eliminate the incredibly agile attacker Yamikaze as he approached from behind, as soon as she could.

If she had enough time and a safe way to do it, she could explain the situation to Yamikaze, and perhaps convince him to evacuate or assist them. But it would be very difficult to convince anyone that real murder was taking place during the BoB final. Even Sinon would have laughed off everything that Kirito had told her, if she hadn’t come face-to-face with the chilling sight of that black pistol pointed at her face-first.

So she had to shoot now. In a tournament without Zexceed, she had to take down the player everyone agreed was the most likely champion, with a single shot.

…Am I even capable of that?

Sinon fought off the encroaching hesitation and fear as she scanned the desert with scope and naked eye alike.

Her attempted shots atop the buggy while they were escaping the city were pathetic. She had missed the cloaked player by a mile, and it was sheer coincidence that she had hit the truck’s gas tank at all. All the pride she had built up in the game had evaporated in that instant.

As Sinon the sniper, if she racked up kills, honed her craft, and one day won the BoB, then Shino Asada, real-world girl, would find the same strength. She would shed her fear of guns, no longer remember the events of her past, and finally have a normal life. That had been her belief ever since Kyouji Shinkawa had invited her to play GGO.

But perhaps that desire was just a little bit off-target.

At some point, she began to think of Sinon and Shino as separate people within her mind. There was strong Sinon and weak Shino. But that was a mistake. Sinon still had Shino’s weakness within her. It was why she trembled in fear at Death Gun’s Black Star and missed her shot.

Both of them were her. She only noticed this once she had seen the mysterious boy named Kirito. He had to be the same way in real life. He had to resist his own weakness and fight every day to be strong—even without a lightsword at his waist.

In that case, Sinon’s strength had always been inside of Shino.

I’ll fire this bullet as Shino. The same way I did in that incident five years ago.

She’d been running from that moment this whole time. She tried to forget, to erase it, to shut her eyes, to paint over the memories.

But that’s over now. I’ll face my memory, my sin, head-on. I’ll go back to that moment so I can start walking from there. That’s the moment I’ve been waiting for all this time, I think.

If that’s the case…then this is that moment.

Through the scope, Sinon’s right eye caught sight of a figure moving at high speed: Yamikaze.

Her finger touched the trigger. No pressure on it yet. This would be a one-chance shot. She didn’t have time to move and reset her locational data.

If she missed, Yamikaze would charge on Kirito first. Even Kirito couldn’t handle Death Gun and Yamikaze together. He would fall from one of their attacks. If Death Gun downed Yamikaze, the reaper would turn his Black Star on Sinon again. The 7.62 mm virtual bullet would hit Sinon, and the accomplice waiting in the real world would see it on the stream and administer the fatal drug to Shino’s body, stopping her heart.

That all meant that Shino’s actual life depended on this shot. Just as it had once before.

Oddly enough, her heart was calm. Maybe it was just because she couldn’t fully process the situation. But that wasn’t the whole story. Something, someone, was giving her strength. The warmth she felt in the fingertips of her freezing, numb hand belonged to…

…the Hecate II. Her indispensable counterpart, the weapon that had pulled her through countless battles.

…Oh, right. You’ve always been here with me. Not just in Sinon’s arms…but by Shino’s side as well. Even when I couldn’t see you, you’ve been there, encouraging me.

Please…I am weak. Give me your strength. The strength to stand, and walk again.

Through the weeks and months of battles in the late Aincrad, the front-line warriors developed and mastered a number of extra-system skills.

There was reading ahead, the ability to predict an opponent’s first move in a duel, based on his sword position and center of weight. There was discernment, to predict the attack trajectory of long-distance monster or human attacks based on eye location. There was hearing, pinpointing locations of approaching enemies out of the midst of the ambient sound mix. Misleading was taking advantage of the monster’s AI patterns to put them at a severe disadvantage. Then there was the switch tactic, which allowed for a group to heal individual members at the same time it attacked.

Out of all these skills that you’d never find in the player menu, the most difficult to master, and thus the one treated like some kind of occult magic, was hyper-sensing—the ability to detect spirit.

It worked quicker than eyesight or hearing to detect the presence of hostile enemies. In short, it was the ability to sense ill intent focused on the user.

Those who denied that this ability existed claimed that a person’s “killer intent” was physically impossible in the virtual world. After all, anyone in a full dive was perceiving the world solely through the digital signals the NerveGear passed to their brain. All information had to be represented as code, and there was no way to program something as dubious and imaginary as ill will or sixth sense.

Their argument made perfect sense. I certainly wasn’t going to argue that some kind of extrasensory skill really existed.

But over the two years I spent in that floating castle, on multiple occasions, I experienced what I could only describe as sensing bloodlust. Without seeing or hearing anything, I sensed that I was being targeted by someone, and hesitated from proceeding in the dungeon. As a matter of fact, I had saved my own life doing that.

I tried telling my “daughter” Yui about the experience this year. Yui was once a low-level subroutine of the Cardinal System that ran SAO. She assured me that in SAO and its replica system The Seed, there was no means of informing a player about the presence of other players or monsters outside of the standard five senses.

Therefore, it wasn’t possible to detect a foe waiting in perfect silence out of the line of sight, she said. I tried explaining something I’d secretly imagined for many years.

While diving into a VRMMO, a player is always connected to the version of himself that exists on the game server as data. While alone in the wilderness or a dungeon, only the player can observe that data. But if something else was waiting in ambush, it required twice as much data to be accessed from the server. Perhaps this extra processing, an infinitesimal lag in the data transfer, could be interpreted by the player as killer intent…

Yui put on an extraordinarily skeptical face and suggested that any server that lagged over a load that tiny ought to be put out to pasture for good. But she did add that theoretically, she could not state with 100 percent confidence that it was impossible.

In the end, chalking it up to ESP might have been a more convincing explanation.

But at the current point, the reasoning did not matter.

For the first time in my long history of VRMMO playing, I had nothing to rely upon other than this Hyper-Sensing skill.

Beyond the very last traces of light left in the sky, a hazy disc of pale white rose. The moon was full. But thanks the presence of heavy clouds, it was much darker than a full moon night in Alfheim. The curves of the dunes melted partially into the night sky, making it difficult to tell if the occasional jutting shadow was a cactus or a rock formation.

If someone was hiding at the foot of such an object and pointed a gun at me, I might not be able to detect the movement with my eyesight. To make matters worse, the foe who had to be watching now had the unbelievable advantage of invisibility. The only visual clue I could use was footprints in the sand. At a distance of over half a mile, such an effect might not even be displayed. It was a waste of time to try to spot it. Similarly, the sound of such an approach would be completely lost in the howling of the wind.

So just shut your eyes. Turn off your ears.

I closed my eyelids, shaking off my fear. One by one, I purged the whistling of the wind, the dry chill, and the scraping of the sand beneath my feet from my mind.

From the very far distance came a barely perceptible vibration. Someone was running at a very high speed. That would not be Death Gun. The distance was southwest. It had to be Yamikaze.

I withstood the urge to turn and look for him. Yamikaze was Sinon’s target; she would stop him. I eliminated even those footsteps from my mind. I focused all of my senses forward, utilizing them for nothing more than picking up any kind of change in the environment.

Oh…that’s right. Now I remember. On the night of the Laughing Coffin battle, it wasn’t movement or sound that tipped me off to their ambush. It was just “the willies.” I turned around on instinct alone to spot the silent, creeping shadows in the side branches of the cave.

What was the name of the man who led the ambush charge? It wasn’t PoH, the leader of the group. He probably wasn’t there at all. So it was one of the lieutenants. The man wielded an estoc, a very long, pointy sword. It had no blade, only a point for stabbing. The tiniest little glimmer of that deadly prong, snaking forward…

Did I kill him? No, I didn’t. When his HP got down to half, he switched with a comrade, drawing back to lick his wounds. As he retreated, he hissed something at me. It wasn’t some cocky boast. It was a halting, unpleasant hiss.

“…Kirito. Later, I will, kill you.”

That way of speaking. That attitude. The two reddened eyes that seemed to glow beneath his hood…

Something prickled between my eyebrows.

It was that feeling. The inorganic, clinging, freezing bloodlust—coming for me.

I opened my eyes.

Across the desert, at the foot of a cactus just a shade north of east, a tiny light glimmered.

The point of an estoc. The firing of a rifle.

I leaned to the right. But in fact, by the time I was starting the lean, a tiny mass of pure compressed damage bore down on my forehead. The flow of time shifted. It turned heavy, so heavy, freezing the air itself—

The tip of the rotating bullet barely grazed the temple of my tilting face, clipping my hair as it passed by.

“Aaaahhh!!”

I let out a roar, launching off the sand and leaving a lock of black hair floating in the wind.

He’s fast!!

Yamikaze’s speed through her scope exceeded Sinon’s imagination. His maxed-out AGI and extreme dashing skill produced a pace that matched his name: dark wind.

He wore a dark blue combat suit with a minimum of protection covering his small frame. He had no sidearm, and only a single plasma grenade on his belt. He didn’t even have a helmet on to cover his pointed, stern face. The thin M900A was cradled in his arms as he leaned forward into his sprint, and even at full speed he hardly shook at all. Only his legs appeared to move, a furious blur beneath him. The sight made him less a soldier than a ninja, and he showed no signs of slowing.

Even the quickest player normally ran a bit, then found cover, checked his surroundings, and ran again. For a sniper like Sinon, that brief pause was her best chance to attack.

But Yamikaze, though he used cacti and rocks as cover, never stopped behind them. He knew that a player with his level of agility was actually safest on the move at max speed.

…What to do? She could try to read ahead and fire in front of him. But Yamikaze didn’t sprint in a straight line. He circled around the dunes and occasionally over one, randomizing his movement so that predicting his course was impossible. She could also intentionally put the first shot at his feet, making him panic and giving her a chance to hit him when he dove for cover. But it was unlikely that such a plain, familiar trick would work on a hardened veteran like him. And once she used that first shot, he would have her bullet line to make use of. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to waste the sniper’s greatest opportunity like that…

Sinon couldn’t decide. But unlike when she was on the buggy, this indecision was not caused by fear and hesitation. Her mind was cold and clear. She had strength from the smooth wooden stock of the Hecate against her cheek, and the boy who kept his back to Yamikaze out of his faith in her.

I shouldn’t just fire a desperate shot at Yamikaze while he’s sprinting, she finally decided, letting her trigger finger relax just a bit.

That wasn’t sniping. When she shot, she needed absolute confidence. Yamikaze would stop just once before he got Kirito into the firing range of his M900A. That was her chance. She would wait for the final moment, when that opportunity presented itself.

The navy blue ninja was already within a kilometer of Kirito. As long as Kirito kept his back to the man and did not move, Yamikaze would assume that he hadn’t noticed his presence yet, and move to the hundred-meter range that AGI types preferred best.

I can wait until then. You hold out too, Kirito. Trust in me.

There were no communications items in the battle royale, so all Sinon could do was send her message mentally. But she felt like her thoughts reached him. That was the last thought she had. Her whole existence fused with the Hecate, her vision becoming the scope; her touch, the trigger. Even her breathing and heartbeat faded away. All she sensed was the speeding target and the crosshairs trained over his heart.

She didn’t know how long that state lasted.

Finally, the moment arrived.

A white light shot across her view from the lower right to the upper left: a bullet. It was not from the Hecate, obviously. It was a .338 Lapua bullet, shot by Death Gun from the east end of the desert. Kirito dodged the bullet, and it reached all the way near Yamikaze to the west, thanks to the L115’s incredible range.

Yamikaze clearly wasn’t predicting a massive bullet to come bearing down on him from the other side of Kirito, whom he assumed wasn’t aware of the racing pursuer. He didn’t hit the deck entirely, but he did crouch down and put on the brakes, swiveling over to a nearby rock.

This would be her one and only chance to snipe.

Her finger began to pull the trigger, largely following the will of the Hecate. The light green bullet circle appeared and shrank to the size of mere pixels in an instant. The point was centered on the middle of his chest. The trigger clicked, the hammer struck the firing pin, the .50 BMG cartridge exploded in the chamber, and a massive bullet instantly rocketed out at supersonic speed.

Through the scope, Sinon’s right eye met the wide, shocked gaze of Yamikaze as he noticed the Hecate’s muzzle flash. There was surprise, frustration, and a certain element of admiration there.

A bright flash erupted from the chest of the championship contender ninja. The avatar flew several yards into the air, tumbled onto the sand, and came to a stop, facing upward. At his side, his M900A and grenade fell, rattled loose by the impact. The DEAD tag began to rotate over his stomach, but Sinon did not see it—she was already turning 180 degrees with the Hecate.

Kirito!! she cried, a silent scream.

The swordsman in black was running straight for the pale moon rising beyond the horizon. His running form was not at all like Yamikaze’s compact machinery. His chest was puffed out and his chin was tucked down, legs pumping in a wide stride like some kind of dance. His right hand flashed and unhooked the lightsword from his belt. The violet-blue blade crackled and shone in the darkness.

Ahead of Kirito, an orange light momentarily flickered. Gunfire.

The curve of the lightsword’s swing intersected the bullet. Then again. And again. Now that he’d dodged the first shot, Kirito could see the bullet lines. No matter how many times he fired that bolt-action rifle, Death Gun could not break his target’s ultraquick reaction speed.

Sinon flipped the scope’s night-vision on and raised the magnification level to maximum, pinpointing the source of the gunfire.

There he was. Below a large cactus. She saw the recognizable sound suppressor poking out from the tattered cloth, as well as the cleaning rod affixed to the barrel. It was Death Gun, a true murderer, with his “Silent Assassin” L115A3.

She kept her eye open in the scope, battling the fear that suddenly welled up at the sight of him.

You’re not a ghost. You killed many people in Sword Art Online, and you’re sick enough to have plotted and carried out this ghastly plan after regaining your freedom—but you’re a human being who lives and breathes. That means I can fight you. I can hold to my belief that the Hecate and I are more powerful than you and your L115.

She pulled the bolt handle and reloaded the next bullet as she swung the crosshairs into the darkness of the cloak’s hood.

She could see flickering red eyes in the darkness. But it was not the hellfire of the dead. It was simply the lens of a full set of goggles. The only thing behind them was the face of an ordinary in-game avatar.

Sinon brushed the trigger and squeezed very slightly.

The next moment, Death Gun’s head twitched. He saw the bullet line. Thanks to her shot on Yamikaze seconds earlier, Sinon’s location was officially revealed. But that only meant they were on equal footing.

You’re on!!

Through the scope, Sinon saw Death Gun swivel his L115 toward her. A bloodred line extended from its black maw and chillingly caressed her forehead. Sinon didn’t wait for the circle to contract; she pulled the trigger.

The gun blasted at the same moment that Death Gun’s rifle spit a tiny flame. Sinon pulled her head away from the scope, catching sight of both her own bullet and the oncoming projectile with the naked eye. Their trajectories seemed to be perfectly aligned.

For a moment, she thought the bullets might collide, but that miracle did not happen. Instead, they very nearly touched in midair, throwing each round just slightly off course.

She heard a high-pitched kwang right next to her ear—the scope on the top of the Hecate vanished without a trace. She’d have been dead if her eye was still pressed into it. Death Gun’s .338 Lapua brushed Sinon’s right shoulder and passed behind her.

Meanwhile, the Hecate’s .50 BMG missed its mark as well, colliding with the L115’s receiver.

In GGO, each major gun part had its own durability rating. In normal use, only the barrel suffered degradation, which could be recovered with maintenance. However, if a bullet struck any part, it would suffer massive damage. Even then, it rarely resulted in total destruction, and repair was possible if some HP was left—just not when the delicate receiver got hit by a high-caliber blast. Such as in this case.

A small fireball erupted in Death Gun’s arms, and the center of the L115 burst into a mass of polygons. The stock, scope, and barrel all collapsed into the sand. Those parts could be reused, but the receiver was gone forever. The Silent Assassin was dead.