Night fell.
Low clouds were stained yellow by the pale light of the sinking sun. Twilight settled over the land little by little.
Across the rocky, sandy wasteland, the shadows of high-rise ruins from a dead age stretched longer and longer. Before them lay a textbook post-apocalyptic scene: sparse vegetation, shattered walls from some old war, and a lonely stretch of earth with no sign of life.
Even the air carried a faint, stubborn smell of gunsmoke.
If they stayed on standby for another hour, they would have to consider switching to night-combat gear.
Night-vision equipment existed to strip away the tension of killing and being killed.
That was not what Sinon wanted.
Would the target team really fail to appear before the sunlight disappeared?
Crouched in the shadow of a concrete barrier, she sighed without making a sound. The five companions lying beside her, all in the same foul mood, were no doubt thinking the same thing.
As if speaking for everyone, one of the vanguard players, a man with a small-caliber submachine gun hanging at his waist, muttered under his breath.
"Seriously, how long are we supposed to wait...? Hey, Dyne, are they really coming? The intel isn't fake, right?"
The squad leader, a large man with rough features named Dyne, shook his head while adjusting the big assault rifle slung under his shoulder.
"Those guys have gone out hunting at almost the same time, along the same route, nearly every day for the past three weeks. I confirmed it myself. They're late today, sure. Maybe they got held up by monsters on the way. I'll pay you extra, so stop whining."
"Yeah, but..."
The vanguard still sounded unhappy.
"Today's prey really is the group we hit last week, right? They might've changed routes because they're being cautious... And come on, who is that stupid? A whole party of them?"
"I've been lying in wait here for six days. Even after getting attacked, they still use this same route to reach the same hunting ground. They're a dedicated monster-grinding party..."
A sneer tugged at Dyne's mouth.
"No matter how many times they get attacked, even if their savings are stolen, they just figure they can hunt the money back later. That's how they think. For an anti-player squad like ours, they're perfect prey. We could hit them two or three more times and still get away with it."
"Tch, I still don't buy it. Normally, after getting killed once, they'd at least come up with some kind of countermeasure."
"They might stay cautious for a day. Then they forget. Because of the monster respawn algorithm in this area, they gather every day and go hunting on a routine. Looks like they've turned as dumb as the code they're farming. A bunch of people with no ambition at all."
The way he said it grated on her.
Sinon buried her face deeper into her scarf. That small ripple of emotion dulled the finger hooked around her trigger. She understood the logic, but she still could not bring herself to like Dyne or his smug tone.
He sneered at parties who leveled themselves up by hunting wild monsters on a daily schedule.
But what did anti-player squads like his do every day?
They waited at planned locations and ambushed people.
Instead of wasting hours in neutral zones, it would be far better to enter the underground ruins or labyrinths and fight a high-level party once. The income difference would be huge.
Of course, if they lost and died, there was a high chance their equipment would drop.
But that was combat.
Only inside that tension could the soul be tempered.
Dyne's squad had invited Sinon two weeks ago, and she had regretted joining almost immediately. They called themselves an anti-player unit, but in practice they only attacked opponents when they held an overwhelming advantage. The instant things looked dangerous, even before it could really be called danger, they retreated. Safety came first with them.
Even so, Sinon had never objected to their policy. She simply obeyed Dyne's instructions and pulled the trigger in silence.
It was not loyalty.
She was gathering data for the day she stood opposite Dyne on the battlefield. She wanted to read his thoughts and movements, then pierce his forehead with one bullet and end it in a single shot.
She disliked him personally.
Still, in the last Bullet of Bullets, this man had placed eighteenth. His stats were real, and so was the power of the 5.56mm rounds fired from the rare SIG SG550 assault rifle under his shoulder.
Dyne looked over the squad.
"...Basically, the people who gather to farm monsters are carrying optical guns. They shouldn't have much anti-player ammunition prepared. At most, they'll have one support weapon. To beat them today, Sinon's sniper rifle should be enough. There are no blind spots in this plan. Right, Sinon-chan?"
At the sudden change in tone, Sinon only gave a small nod from behind her scarf. She said nothing, making it clear she had no intention of joining the conversation.
Dyne snorted, bored. The others suddenly seemed interested and smiled at Sinon.
"Right, right. Sinon's long-range sniping is obviously our advantage. That hasn't changed, has it, little Sinon?"
Their expressions softened into grins. Even so, they remained prone in the shadow of cover as they crowded near Sinon and began doing what male players in online games loved most.
Flirting.
"Got time today? I want to improve my gathering function, so I was hoping we could talk. Maybe have tea with me?"
Sinon's gaze flicked to the weapon hanging at the man's waist. It was a live-ammo submachine gun and his main weapon. He seemed to be an AGI type, so his evasion in a frontal fight was probably decent, but she had no information on his level or equipment in her memory. It even took her a while to remember his name.
She lowered her head slightly.
"...Sorry, Mr. Silver Dragon. I have something to do in the real world today."
Her voice, both like and unlike her real one, came out high, clear, and sweet. Sinon found it deeply irritating. This was exactly why she did not like speaking much.
The man called Silver Dragon did not seem bothered by her cold refusal. If anything, his smile only grew more captivated. Some male players seemed to fall for her the moment they heard her voice.
The thought made Sinon shudder.
When she first entered this VRMMORPG, Gun Gale Online, she had hoped her avatar would be a rugged man. Only later did she learn that the game did not allow a character's sex to be reversed. In that case, she had thought, she would at least become a tall, muscular, soldier-like woman.
But the avatar generated by random parameters had been a small, slender, doll-like girl.
At the time, Sinon had wanted to scrap the account and make a new one. The friend who had invited her into this world had insisted that would be a waste, so forcefully that Sinon had lost her escape route. She had raised the character bit by bit until it reached its current level.
It was too late to start over now.
Because of that, she sometimes ran into trouble like this. For Sinon, who only wanted to fight, it was nothing but depressing.
"By the way, little Sinon, you're a student in real life, right? College? Is it some report or something?"
"Mm..."
She answered as vaguely as possible.
Ever since she had carelessly mentioned school while logging out, people had started pestering her with invitations. There was no way she could let it slip that she was actually a high school student. Not even if her mouth were torn open.
The other two vanguard players, who had been squatting nearby and operating their status windows, came over as if to stop Silver Dragon. One of them, a man with green bangs hanging over smoke-blackened goggles, patted him on the shoulder.
"You're making Sinon uncomfortable. You're not supposed to ask about real life, you know."
"Yeah, yeah. She's a lonely single like the rest of us."
The other man, who wore a camouflage jacket hanging diagonally across his shoulders, laughed. Silver Dragon pressed his fists against both their heads and ground them in place.
"What are you talking about? Neither of you has had any luck with women in years."
Beside the three laughing men, Sinon curled in tighter and felt her irritation rise.
If they were playing this game to fight other players, they should be using downtime to focus their minds or check their equipment. Something useful. If they were earning money by selling in-game currency, they would be better off joining a dedicated monster-hunting party.
And if they were looking for romance, even among fixed-gender games, they should not have chosen this bleak world of slaughter. A more fantasy-like game with more female players would suit them better.
Why had they picked this place at all?
Were there no slightly more decent male players? Someone strong and calm. Not a blockhead who could not read the room, but someone who knew what mattered and understood the larger picture. Most important, someone who did not use age as an excuse to look down on people or flirt with them, but held himself to a harsher standard of maturity.
This game skewed older, and far too many male players let their wildness and personalities spill out unchecked. They seemed to think that throwing sexual jokes into conversation or speaking crudely made them look seasoned and experienced. Perhaps they were terribly repressed in the real world.
No matter how she looked at it, it was just low-class behavior.
Even now, aside from the classmate who had invited her, Sinon still had no real acquaintances in this game. Thoughts like these were part of the reason.
She buried her face in her scarf again. The fingertips of her left hand traced the body of the huge bipod-mounted rifle beside her.
When would she get to use this gun to blow their virtual bodies away?
After that, would they still laugh and talk to her like this?
As she muttered the thought deep inside herself, it was as if she had breathed in a bucket of cold air. Her frustration slowly cooled.
"They're here."
Another squad member, who had kept scanning beyond the damaged concrete wall with binoculars, whispered those words after another twenty minutes had passed.
The chatter between Dyne and the three vanguard players stopped. The air around them tightened all at once.
Sinon lifted her head and looked at the sky. The yellow clouds were turning red, but the light was still bright enough.
"Finally," Dyne muttered.
He bent low and moved to the scout by the wall, taking the binoculars and observing through the same opening to confirm the enemy's strength.
"It's them, all right. Seven people. No, one more than last week. Four vanguard with optical assault guns. One large-caliber laser rifle. One with a Minimi. That guy had an optical gun last week, so he rushed out and switched to a live-ammo weapon. If they have a sniper, it's him. As for the last one... wearing a trench coat. Can't see his weapon."
Hearing that, Sinon kept her prone firing position and brought her face close to the rifle's high-magnification scope.
The place where the six of them were hiding sat on slightly higher ground, among ruins from the previous civilization. Crumbling concrete walls and exposed rebar served as cover, and the wide wasteland ahead could be monitored from there. It was an excellent position.
She glanced up at the sky again. Once she confirmed that the virtual sun was no longer at an angle where it would reflect off the lens, she flipped open the filters over the front and rear of the scope.
With her right eye pressed to the lens, she could see tiny moving dots at the lowest magnification. She adjusted the magnification knob with her fingers. With a faint clicking sound, the sesame-seed-sized black points slowly expanded until they became seven players.
Just as Dyne had said, four of them carried optical assault guns. Two of them were frequently using binoculars to watch their surroundings, but without an extremely high Search skill, it would be impossible for them to spot Sinon and the others hiding across the field at a glance.
Two players in the group walked with large firearms slung over their shoulders. One carried a semiautomatic optical laser rifle. The other carried a live-ammo light machine gun, an FN Minimi, an excellent squad support weapon used by the Self-Defense Forces in the real world.
Because defensive shields could reduce the damage of optical gun attacks by more than half, the Minimi was overwhelmingly dangerous.
The weapons that appeared in Gun Gale Online were divided into two major categories: live-ammo firearms and optical firearms.
The advantage of live-ammo firearms was that each round had high power and could penetrate defensive shields. Their drawbacks were that the guns were heavy, they could not carry much ammunition, and wind and humidity had a large effect on the bullet trajectory.
Optical guns, by contrast, were lightweight, long-ranged, and highly accurate. Their energy packs, which served as magazines, were also small. Their weakness was that their power could be dispersed by player armor equipped with defensive shields.
For those reasons, the general rule was to use optical guns against monsters and live-ammo guns against players. Beyond performance, the two categories also differed greatly in character.
All optical guns had fictional names and designs. Live-ammo guns, on the other hand, were copied almost directly from weapons that existed in the real world. That alone had attracted many military enthusiasts.
The sniper rifle pressed against Sinon's cheek was also live-ammo. Before coming to this game world, however, Sinon knew nothing about firearms. She had memorized their names only because they were necessary tools for playing the game. In truth, she had no interest in real guns at all.
Real guns disgusted her the moment she saw them.
Only because, in this world of killing, she could keep destroying virtual enemies with virtual bullets could she harden her heart like stone, freeze the blood running through her veins, and not be... afraid.
Because of that, she would pull the trigger again today.
Pushing away unnecessary thoughts, Sinon moved the rifle by a fraction.
The last person in the enemy line had most of his face hidden by a hood. From her angle, she could only see the calm line of his mouth. A standard male mouth, wide, long, thin, with a little stubble. The oversized brown trench coat covered his whole body, so as Dyne had said, she could not see his equipment.
He had a plain, lean build. His steps were relaxed, and he did not seem to be carrying any overweight weaponry. Both hands, visible beyond his sleeves, were empty. At most, whatever weapon he could carry at his waist would be something in the short submachine-gun class.
Sinon watched the man through her scope and studied him carefully.
It was worth noting that he seemed to be on guard too. Unlike the teammates using binoculars, his attention was on the collapsed walls a little farther away. Those were also excellent ambush positions. Even while Sinon was watching him, his head turned toward their side for an instant.
She still could not see his face from that glance, but his behavior made Sinon wary.
Her instincts, built over half a year of wandering GGO, told her that this plain man was more dangerous than the Minimi wielder.
Still, no matter how uneasy he made her, there was nothing threatening visible on that simple outfit. His thin trench coat swayed lightly. It did not look as if any lethal weapon was hidden underneath.
Was the pressure she sensed from him only an illusion...?
After a moment of hesitation, Sinon spoke quietly.
"The man at the back of the team. I have a bad feeling about him. I want to snipe the trench-coat man first."
Dyne lowered the binoculars from his face and looked at Sinon with raised brows.
"Why? He clearly doesn't have any large weapon."
"I don't have proof. He's just an uncertain factor. Something feels wrong."
"By that logic, shouldn't that Minimi be the obvious unstable factor? If we lose the timing because of him and the optical-gun users get close, we'll be in trouble."
Defensive shields were effective against optical guns, but their effect weakened as the distance between attacker and target narrowed. At point-blank range, optical weapons could become overwhelmingly dangerous because each energy pack held so many shots.
Sinon had no choice but to accept that argument. She nodded.
"Understood. First target is the Minimi. If possible, I want the next bullet to go into that man."
Even so, a sniper's effective success was limited to the first bullet fired before the enemy noticed the sniper. Once the firing point was known, the enemy could use the Bullet Line to evade with ease.
"Hey, we don't have time to talk anymore. Range is only twenty-five hundred."
The man in charge of detection looked forward through the binoculars he had taken back from Dyne. Dyne nodded, then turned toward the three attack members behind him.
"All right. Same as the plan. Wait in the shadow of the building ahead until the enemy comes in. Sinon, once the operation starts, we won't be able to see them. If the situation changes, notify us. I'll give the order when the sniping window arrives."
"Understood."
After that short answer, Sinon pressed her right eye to the rifle scope again. The target team had not changed at all. They were still moving across the wasteland at a slow pace.
A wide expanse of wasteland, two and a half kilometers across, lay between them and Sinon. Slightly closer to her side of the center stood the ruin of a huge building. Dyne's five-man group would use the target team's blind spot around that building to launch a violent surprise attack.
"All right. Move."
At Dyne's brief command, everyone except Sinon answered shortly. The sounds of boots scraping and stepping over sand remained as the group slid down behind the rise. Sinon waited until the evening wind completely erased their footsteps before taking the small earpiece from her neck and putting it in her left ear.
For the next several minutes, Sinon would have to fight a battle of pressure and isolation as the sniper. One bullet she fired would greatly alter the flow of the fight to come. All she could rely on were her own finger and the silent firearm. Her left hand touched the massive gun body set up on its two supports.
The black metal answered her only with cold silence.
To Sinon, the fact that she had become a famous player as one of the rare snipers in this world was largely because this live-ammo gun existed.
PGM Ultima Ratio Hecate II.
According to its specifications, it had an overall length of 138 centimeters and weighed 13.8 kilograms. Its caliber was .50, meaning it could fire enormous bullets with a diameter of 12.7 millimeters.
In the real world, it was classified as an anti-materiel sniper rifle. In other words, a firearm intended to pierce vehicles and buildings. Because of its extreme power, some very long-named treaty supposedly prohibited its use against people. Of course, such legal rules did not exist in this world.
Sinon obtained this gun three months ago, after reaching a high-level area as a GGO player.
Irritated and alone, she had entered the vast underground ruin labyrinth beneath the capital, SBC Glocken. Through carelessness, she had fallen into a shooting trap.
The world setting of Gun Gale Online said that humanity, aboard an immigrant spaceship, had returned to Earth after civilization had been destroyed in a war long ago and now lived there again. The city of Glocken had originally been that spaceship, and beneath it slept a great city ruined by the ancient war.
Countless automatic combat machines and genetically modified creatures crawled through the city ruins, waiting for adventurers seeking sudden wealth. The place where Sinon had fallen was the deepest part of the highest-danger labyrinth.
Naturally, she had not planned to come to such a place alone. She was certain she would meet her first defeat there and had prepared herself to revive at the save point in town.
Then, as she walked through the streets, a vast circular stadium appeared before her. Many grotesque creatures were crouched inside.
Their size and names both suggested boss-class monsters, but she had never seen any information about them on the strategy sites. The moment she realized that, the gamer in Sinon's heart was faintly stirred.
If she was going to die anyway, she might as well try fighting.
With that thought, Sinon climbed into an air duct above the arena and raised her gun.
The battle took an unexpected turn. The boss monster had many attack methods, including heat rays, claws, poisonous gas, and more. Yet none of them could reach the place where Sinon was hiding. It was almost like a bug.
On the other hand, her rifle's effective range was just barely enough, and the damage she dealt was tiny. Considering the ammunition she carried, she could not afford to miss even once. Every bullet had to hit the boss's weak point, the small eye on its forehead, or defeating it would be impossible.
She did it.
With absolute concentration, she brought the boss down. When its polygonal body exploded and scattered, three hours had already passed since the battle began.
The item dropped by the boss monster was an enormous rifle she had never seen before. In GGO, powerful live-ammo firearms, supposedly manufactured in NPC or player workshops, were not sold in town except as a few low-power models. To obtain anything above mid-grade, players had to excavate it from ruins.
PGM Ultima Ratio Hecate II belonged to the highest rarity class among excavated weapons. In another fantasy-style game, it would probably be a demonic sword-grade weapon.
Its price was terrifying as well. Converted into yen, it would sell for around two hundred thousand.
Sinon was a high school student in the real world and lived alone. Every month, she scraped together enough money just to barely cover living expenses. When she learned the price, she was honestly shaken. Her monthly connection fee had finally been cut in half, and she could convert about fifteen hundred yen into cash, but even so, that still consumed half her spending money. If she kept increasing her Dive time, it would not be strange for her grades to slip. With two hundred thousand yen, she could recover all the connection fees she had spent so far and still have most of it left.
But Sinon did not sell the gun.
She had not entered GGO to earn money.
She wanted to defeat every player stronger than her and overcome her own weakness. That was all.
And for the first time, from a gun that should have been nothing more than an item, she felt something like a heart.
Because of its enormous form and weight, Hecate II required a high STR value to equip. As a sniper, Sinon had raised STR more than AGI and had finally managed to wield it. The first time she carried it onto the battlefield and saw an enemy through the scope, Sinon felt power from the heavy, cold lump of iron in her hands.
And she felt the gun's will.
It was a cold piece of iron that thirsted for slaughter and sought death.
That was how Sinon understood it. The name Hecate came from the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology.
This gun was her first and last partner.
The target team inside the scope was still moving.
She lifted her face and looked directly down at the wasteland. The targets were heading toward the collapsed building in the road and approaching Dyne's five-man group. The distance between the two groups had already shrunk to seven hundred meters.
Sinon pressed her right eye back to the scope and waited for Dyne's order.
Several dozen seconds later, a voice mixed with static came through the earpiece.
"Report enemy position."
"Their route and speed haven't changed. You're four hundred meters from them. I'm fifteen hundred meters out."
"That's still pretty far. Can you do it?"
To Dyne's question, Sinon only answered, emotionless, "No problem."
"...Good. Begin sniping."
In the scope, her first target, the man with the Minimi over his shoulder, was still walking and talking as if nothing were wrong.
Sinon suppressed the fierce beating of her heart and moved the crosshair inside the scope. Considering distance, wind direction, and the target's movement speed, she aimed about one meter above and to the left of him. Her index finger settled on the trigger.
The size of the bullet prediction circle changed according to distance from the target, weapon performance, weather, lighting, and skill values. But the most important factor was the sniper's heartbeat.
The AmuSphere could monitor the heartbeat of the player's real body lying in the real world and transmit that data to the system. At the instant of a heartbeat, the circle expanded to its maximum size, then slowly shrank until the next beat made it expand again. In other words, to improve accuracy, a sniper had to fire in the valley between two heartbeats.
But during an intense battle, the heart was not so obedient.
That was the greatest reason snipers were rare in GGO. They could not hit. They could not stop the tension during sniping.
However.
Sinon whispered in her heart.
How far could this pressure, unease, and fear really go?
Fifteen hundred meters.
At this distance, it was like throwing a crumpled ball of paper into a wastebasket.
Ice.
I am a machine made of cold ice.
The fluctuating ring of the bullet circle slowed sharply. At the same time, time itself seemed to stretch. The instant the ring reached its smallest diameter became clear to her.
One. Two.
On the third contraction, the ring locked near the heart of the man carrying the Minimi. Sinon pulled the trigger.
If she only hit an arm or leg, even a sniper rifle's damage would not kill a player outright.
Immediately after, a thunderous roar shook the whole world.
A massive flash burst from the muzzle brake of Hecate II. The fired bullet surged forward with the gunshot. The recoil pushed Sinon's body slightly back with the gun, but she stamped her foot against the ground and stopped herself.
At the other end of her line of aim, perhaps noticing the muzzle flash, the man suddenly lifted his head.
The instant his eyes met Sinon's through the scope, his body from shoulder to head shattered into tiny fragments and scattered.
A moment later, the rest of his body broke apart like a struck glass statue. Unfortunately for him, the extremely expensive light machine gun on his shoulder became a random drop and rolled onto the sand.
Once he returned to town and revived, the double blow of being killed in one shot and losing his weapon would probably keep him away from combat for a while.
When Sinon confirmed that none of that stirred her emotions, her right hand moved on its own. She pulled back the bolt. With a metallic sound, the huge spent casing popped free, struck a nearby rock, and vanished.
As the next round loaded, Sinon moved the rifle slightly to the right and caught her second target, the trench-coat man, in the scope.
His face had been looking straight toward her since her first shot.
She aimed a little high on his body and gently pulled the trigger again. A green bullet prediction circle appeared once more and immediately began converging to a point.
Only three seconds had passed since the first bullet had been fired.
A semiautomatic rifle could fire continuously, but Hecate II, which released only one round at a time, could not.
Even so, for an ordinary player, the shock and stiffness caused by watching a companion's body shatter right in front of them would take time to overcome. Recognizing the sniping point and preparing to evade would take about five seconds. If she used that confusion, the second shot could succeed.
The trench-coat man showed no panic at all.
Because he was facing her directly, she could finally see his whole face. It was a simple, plain character face with no distinctive features. Only his eyes stared at Sinon across the long emptiness, dim and steady.
He really was an experienced veteran.
As that thought crossed her mind, Sinon pulled the trigger.
A sniper's greatest advantage was that the first bullet did not give the opponent a Bullet Line. But that applied only to the first bullet. Sinon had already fired once and exposed her position. That advantage was gone.
The roar sounded again.
Hecate II released a bullet condensed with the meaning of death beneath her merciless finger, tearing through the pale yellow air.
But just as Sinon had expected, the man calmly stepped to the right. There was no wasted motion. The 12.7mm bullet passed through the space one meter beside his slender body and punched a round hole in a concrete wall rising from the wasteland far behind him.
"..."
Sinon saw the trench-coat man raise a thumb toward her.
At fifteen hundred meters, accurately killing one person was already an extraordinary result. She deserved praise.
Yet to her, the gesture felt strangely mocking.
Her right hand moved unconsciously and chambered the next round, but the finger gripping the stock did not return to the trigger.
Another shot would probably be useless. If she wanted to snipe him again, she would have to move from her current firing point, leave the man's field of view, hide, and wait the sixty seconds needed for the recognition data to reset. But in that time, the battle's outcome would be decided.
Sinon kept watching the enemy through her scope and spoke quietly into the communicator by her mouth.
A light step, the sound of someone running over the ground, came through.
Sinon slowly released the breath she had been holding.
Her assigned task was complete. Hecate II was an ultra-rare firearm. If she carried it into the fight and died, the weapon might drop. That would be a disaster. She could only apologize for staying back. Besides, Dyne had told her to stand by after sniping.
She regretted missing the second shot, but now all she could do was pray, unpleasant as that felt.
With that in mind, Sinon adjusted the rifle again, lowered the scope's magnification, and brought every enemy into view.
The four vanguard players hurriedly ducked behind nearby rocks and concrete walls. The rear guard with the large laser weapon had already shouldered his gun.
And the trench-coat man from before was...
Running...?
A small sound escaped Sinon. She stared in astonishment at the figure racing forward, almost low enough for his upper body to skim the ground.
It was frighteningly fast. In pure speed, he could even rival a low-end vehicle inside the city. As he charged alone, his trench coat flared wide, exposing a shirt underneath with no extra protection at all.
When he had dodged her shot, he had seemed almost still.
Now he was like a brown hawk suddenly spreading its wings over the ground.
After her first surprise, Sinon was left with deep confusion.
She had heard of the theoretical build where a character invested the absolute minimum into Strength and poured every remaining resource into Agility. The person before her was probably the physical embodiment of that extreme.
But if that were the case, his Strength would be so low he could barely carry a proper submachine gun. How could he kill anyone?
With that doubt heavy in her mind, she moved the scope and followed the man.
Then, at last, she saw the weapon in his right hand.
A clean, snow-white gun body. A thin, narrow muzzle.
In terms of weapon damage, it probably could not compare with the many submachine guns and heavy machine guns in the game. But in terms of fame, it could stand as a symbol.
A six-shot revolver.
Aside from the long guns they used as main weapons, many players liked to purchase an affordable handgun as a sidearm. Among handguns, revolvers traded smaller ammunition capacity for higher damage.
Still, a handgun was a handgun. Its damage could not match a long gun's.
A few excellent handguns were exceptions, such as the well-known Desert Eagle. At a short distance, its seven rounds of total damage could not be ignored.
And then there was the Peacemaker revolver in the trench-coat man's hand.
It had even fewer shots than the Desert Eagle. Only six. Reloading required inserting rounds one by one into the cylinder, and even with a matching speedloader item, it indirectly limited how much ammunition the player could carry. In return for all those costs, it had outstanding range and damage within the handgun category.
It suffered from long-range damage falloff, but at reasonable distances, the damage of a Peacemaker headshot was extremely high. Against anything other than a tank-type build, two headshots could even finish off a fragile player.
"He chose the best weapon type that wouldn't affect his Agility...?"
Sinon felt a strange excitement rise in her despite herself. Players who took a single path to its extreme gave her a sense of challenge.
But no matter how surprised she was, the trench-coat man was now sprinting straight toward Dyne's ambush point.
How could one person break through five or six fully equipped players?
She watched his figure.
Sinon hurriedly adjusted the dial and lowered the magnification to minimum.
The trench-coat man was terrifyingly fast. In only five or six seconds, he was already closing in on Dyne's group.
What burst out toward Dyne's team was not a panicked party, but a silent lone gunman. For a second, they froze in shock. Then they snapped up their weapons and opened fire on him.
Unlike the full-auto guns, the Peacemaker in the trench-coat man's hand gave a crisper, sharper report. A revolver fired one shot at a time by nature. His bullets drew faint blue trails, pierced layer after layer of wind, and struck Silver Dragon directly in the head.
For an instant, Silver Dragon's vision filled with red system warnings. He was just about to show anger and counterattack when the next bullet copied the first bullet's trajectory and sank into his forehead a second time.
Two headshots.
Silver Dragon's whole head snapped backward, and his virtual body burst into shards as it fell.
"What...?"
Sinon stared in shock at the result. He had taken one member of their team with only two shots.
And his movements had not stopped in the slightest. Facing the barrage from five players ahead of him, he still chose to charge forward. Only now did he begin weaving left and right.
His pure AGI parameters gave him superhuman speed. Like some unreasonable character from a movie, he stabbed toward Dyne's group in a jagged bolt of motion.
If the distance were long enough, accepting that he could dodge bullets was one thing.
But at the final range of barely fifty meters, he was still grazing past shots. That was unheard of. At that distance, bullets crossed the gap in an instant. By the time someone noticed the Bullet Line, it should already be too late.
He went in.
Just like that, he entered the middle of Dyne's group.
In Sinon's sight, he finally showed the faintest smile.
A smile that sealed victory.
He was confident he could wipe out all of them.
When a gun was pointed at you, it was both easiest to dodge and easiest not to dodge. If you reacted too late, you would simply be shot through. But at extremely close range, you could visually judge the muzzle's point of aim.
That was different from being a thousand meters away. Even if you knew the gun was pointed at you, you could not tell from a tiny speck of a muzzle whether it would shoot your head or your foot.
The Peacemaker fired again and again. Every round struck their heads with frightening precision. During the empty gap while he reloaded, the trench-coat man even pressed close to the enemy.
His combat style was bizarre for a gun game. Give him a knife or dagger and it would have suited him better. He was like an assassin who had entered the formation.
The gun was only his means of closing the distance.
Sinon bit her lip, lifted Hecate II from the ground, folded the bipod, looped the sling over herself, and carried it on her back.
Hecate II was 138 centimeters long, and Sinon's body was only 155 centimeters. Even so, it remained within her weight limit, both because she had raised her STR and because Hecate II's magazine carried only seven rounds.
"Damn it, where the hell did this bastard come from?"
Dyne fired wildly at the trench-coat man almost directly in front of him. But the enemy only rushed up to him and struck the gun upward with a knee, completely throwing off Dyne's aim.
When the other teammates fired at the trench-coat man, he slipped sideways like a shadow behind Dyne and used their leader as a shield.
The muzzles about to roar froze.
Immediately after that, a continuous series of blasts spread from behind Dyne.
"Wha... what?!"
Dyne stiffly turned his head, but before he could finish, his entire body burst into shards.
Behind the glittering fragments of Dyne's corpse stood the trench-coat man, who had fired all six rounds in one motion. He walked leisurely through the crystal remains, showing not the slightest fear of the guns pointed at him, and slowly began reloading.
"Don't... don't screw with me!"
One of them aimed at him from where he stood and tried to fire. But at this distance, the man had already anticipated it and rushed right up to him. His left hand pulled the gun barrel aside, letting the muzzle flame explode uselessly past his body, while he lightly pressed the revolver under the man's jaw.
The crisp sound of the Peacemaker rang out again, smashing the man's head apart at point-blank range. The trench-coat man did not look at the second person as he became fragments. He slowly walked toward the last ambusher.
"Sorry. It's work."
The trench-coat man said it flatly and raised the Peacemaker toward him.
The roar sounded again.
Dyne's last member was executed by him. But immediately after firing, the man suddenly dropped forward and crawled. That ugly motion happened to save him from death. The empty ground behind and to his left exploded into a deep bullet crater.
After dropping low, the trench-coat man pushed himself up with one hand, broke into a fast run, vaulted over a piece of cover, and hid behind it.
Sinon held her sniping posture, but only she knew how unbelievable that miss had been.
After changing positions, she had locked onto him immediately. She had chosen a very close range for a sniper while advancing quickly, precisely because that should have made him ignore her. Even so, she had not fired too early. She had chosen the moment the trench-coat man fired to fire as well. A blind spot in his sight. A blind spot in his hearing. Almost no time to judge.
He should not have been able to dodge that shot.
How had he noticed...?
Sinon stared carefully at the cover where the trench-coat man had disappeared and aimed near it. The moment he showed even a little of himself, she would shoot.
But several seconds later, what she saw was only the muzzle of the Peacemaker.
The muzzle moved slowly, as if he were only roughly adjusting based on the direction of Sinon's earlier shot.
Then he fired twice.
It was meaningless.
The distance between Sinon and the trench-coat man was a full two hundred meters. Even if the Peacemaker had an exceptionally long range for a handgun, its tiny bullets would lose accuracy once the wind deflected them, even if the initial aim was good. On top of that, the Peacemaker's long-range damage falloff made it nothing worth fearing.
Sinon settled herself and decided it was a feint meant to disrupt her heart rate and lower her accuracy. He was probably waiting for a chance to escape.
Third shot.
Fourth shot.
The Peacemaker's six rounds were soon spent blindly. The muzzle withdrew, probably so he could reload, then came out again and fired according to the previous aim.
"What is he trying to do...?"
Sinon did not understand.
Click...
Her body suddenly froze.
Click, click.
On the floor of the place more than three stories above the ground where she stood, small bullet marks began appearing beside her.
How... how is that possible?!
In simple terms, GGO's accuracy tested the player's heartbeat rhythm. If a heart did not beat, like a dead person's, then the system's bullet circle would not fluctuate. In the truest sense, the bullet would go exactly where the gun was pointed.
But even if someone could consciously suppress their heartbeat while playing this game, they would still have to account for wind and humidity at long range. Revolver rounds in particular had almost no weight. After losing power from the shot, they drifted easily.
Which meant...
Was that trench-coat man first a dead man with no heartbeat, and also a brain with terrifying calculation ability?
Click, click.
The ejected casings were landing closer and closer to Sinon herself. Suppressing the shock in her chest, she rose at once to change positions. For a sniper, the moment her position was exposed, she had to change her attack angle, even if there was no real threat.
But she held herself back.
If she withdrew, nothing would restrain the trench-coat man's muzzle anymore. He would withdraw too. With his extraordinary Agility, catching up to Sinon would be easy. After watching the way he had toyed with Dyne's five-man squad, Sinon did not believe she, as a sniper, could face him head-on.
Besides, with this much long-range damage falloff, even if four Peacemaker shots struck her head in a row, she would not die.
So Sinon forced herself to calm down. She ignored the bullets landing around her, now closer and closer, and focused only on the enemy behind cover.
The attack stopped again for a moment. The trench-coat man began reloading for the third round. This time it took longer, a full eight seconds.
Sinon's breathing stopped before she knew it.
Suddenly, the man stood openly from behind cover. Facing her from eight hundred meters away, he calmly raised a revolver and began firing in rapid succession without hesitation.
He looked as if the earlier shots had allowed him to grasp her true position.
Sinon's head was pierced, and her HP began to drop sharply.
She had no time left to marvel at his terrifying skill. She aimed directly at his chest and pulled the trigger. The gun body shuddered.
At that same moment, she took a second headshot. Unfortunately for him, the distance was too great. He still needed two more hits to kill Sinon.
Her bullet was already flying toward the trench-coat man's heart.
Third shot.
Another headshot.
Sinon glared through the lens at the open, unguarded trench-coat man and his revolver.
He kept pulling the trigger for the fourth shot.
But before he could, a trace of pain twisted his calm face.
Tch.
The fourth revolver round struck three meters to Sinon's right. Considering that his first three shots had all been headshots, that shot had lost an enormous amount of accuracy.
Then there were no more gunshots, because Sinon's bullet had already punched through him. The massive damage swept away the pure AGI trench-coat man in an instant.
With one quarter of her HP remaining, Sinon watched the trench-coat man crystallize and burst apart. The randomly selected drop was the Peacemaker revolver in his hand.
Sinon stared blankly at the spot.
Three seconds later, she finally started breathing again.
If the fourth shot had hit, she would have died.
But the trench-coat man would have died too.
It was only his choice.
If he had not missed, Sinon would have died before him.
The enemy dying first equaled victory.
That had been the trench-coat man's judgment.
...What was he?
She slowly loosened her hand and stared out at the empty wasteland before her.