With a familiar-sounding curse, Dyne swapped out the empty thirty-round magazine of his machine gun at top speed, but the ArmaLite in Pale Rider's right hand spat fire with a report like a growl from the belly.
At that range, there was no way to avoid every pellet from a shotgun. Hit effects flashed across Dyne's body, sending him drifting hard backward. To his credit, he still forced the new magazine in and tried to bring the gun back to his cheek, but before he could, the second blast rang out.
Pale Rider had closed the distance again. His next shot broke Dyne's stance even further. That was what made shotguns terrifying. Their damage was nothing to laugh at, and the force behind each round could keep an opponent trapped in a chain of hits with no room to answer.
Just fire from the hip. No need to press the SIG against your cheek.
Of course, Sinon's thought never reached Dyne, and by then it was too late anyway. Pale Rider kept closing in as he calmly reloaded the AR-17. Then, almost right in Dyne's face, he pulled the trigger a third time. The 12-gauge round burst apart, filling the air with shot and wiping out what little remained of Dyne's HP.
Dyne's avatar fell spread-eagle and stopped moving. Red 3D letters spelling Dead appeared above his body and slowly rotated. Dyne was now down in the arena. Since logging out during the tournament was forbidden to keep players from leaking information in the real world, that corpse would stay conscious, watching the broadcast screen and waiting helplessly for the finals to end.
"That pale-blue guy is strong..."
Sinon clicked off the safety on the Hecate II and said shortly, "But I'm going to kill him."
"Then keep waiting."
"Isn't it already over? We confirmed earlier that no one else was nearby."
"Did you confirm me beforehand?"
"..."
"Soon," Samuro said quietly.
After finishing Dyne with that brilliant rush, Pale Rider had already left the bridge and was moving north along the river. A small hit effect flashed on the right shoulder of his pale-blue camouflage uniform, and his thin body pitched left as if something had slammed into him.
"What...?"
Sinon's voice came out in confusion.
A sniper shot. Not hers. Someone else's. It had come from across the river, deep in the forest. From the direction Pale Rider fell, there was no mistake.
Even as surprise hit her, she threw all her focus into her hearing, trying to catch the direction and tone of the rifle report that had struck Pale Rider.
But no matter how hard she listened, she heard only the dry wind and the sound of running water.
"Did I miss it...?"
Samuro seemed to have thought the same thing, because he answered in a low voice. "No. There really wasn't any sound."
"The only things I can think of are an optical rifle with a very quiet firing sound, or a live-ammo gun fitted with a suppressor. But those are expensive consumables, and they hurt accuracy badly."
She looked through her scope again. Pale Rider lay on the ground and still had not stood up. Even so, it did not look as if he had been killed instantly. If he were dead, the same red Dead text that hovered over Dyne nearby should have appeared over him too.
He was still alive, so why was he neither running nor fighting back?
That was not the only question. Ten minutes earlier, Sinon had confirmed on the Satellite Scan map that there were no other players within one kilometer. In other words, the mystery sniper had shot Pale Rider from an enormous distance.
If so, the rifle had to be a fairly large-caliber weapon. But in GGO, the larger the gun, the less effective a suppressor became, while the penalties to accuracy and range grew worse. The fact that she had heard almost no gunshot at all made her want to know what had happened.
At that point, Sinon turned her face and asked, "Come to think of it, Samuro, where exactly did you appear from earlier? During the Satellite Scan ten minutes ago, there was no sign of you around this mountain."
"I hid during every scan. That satellite does not appear to have penetrating scan capability, so I timed it and hid in the river, under rocks, and places like that."
"Huh?"
"At the same time, I was searching for the three unfamiliar faces who appeared in this tournament besides me. The shotgun user was the first. But while I was tracking him, I made another useful discovery. The second new face seemed to be looking for him too. So I deliberately widened the distance. After every satellite scan, he was never near me either... which means he may also have a way to hide. Naturally, he could not see me on the map either."
Sinon could only answer Samuro's explanation with a small hum.
"Anyway, I have now learned that there is a way not to be caught by Satellite Scan. But Pale Rider, the guy you went this far to chase, may be strong, sure, but he doesn't seem like much. If one strong round scared him so badly he can't even stand, then no matter how you look at it..."
He could never win in the end. Sinon was about to say it, but Samuro cut her off again.
"Look closely at his avatar."
"Huh...?"
Sinon hurriedly increased the magnification on her scope. It was hard to tell under the afterglow of sunset, but faint blue arcs of electricity were definitely flickering over Pale Rider's pale-blue camouflage uniform. She had seen that effect several times before.
"An... electromagnetic stun round...?"
"Yes. Almost no one uses them in PvP. Each round is absurdly expensive. They're meant for parties hunting large mobs," Samuro added.
As they watched, the electric light binding Pale Rider gradually weakened. In another few dozen seconds, the effect would probably fade entirely. His HP should barely have dropped. Why would someone pull off such a difficult long-range shot just to do that? It made no sense.
A heavy thump shook the air. Sinon could not tell whether it had come from inside her own body or from beside her.
About two hundred meters north of the bushes where the two of them were hidden, a large iron bridge stretched east to west. On the west side of the bridge lay Dyne's avatar, the death judgment still rotating over his head. Pale Rider, who had been dropped by the electromagnetic round fired from the eastern forest, was lying five meters farther north and was now trying to stand.
Between the two of them, from the shadow of one of the iron bridge supports, a black figure slowly, very slowly, emerged.
At first glance, it was hard to believe the figure was a player. A strange halo seemed to surround the outline of the avatar. When Sinon looked more closely, she finally understood why. The gray cloak covering his entire body was torn into ragged strips, and when the wind blew, those strips fluttered irregularly like a swarm of small creatures.
"Since when was he there...?"
Sinon whispered without thinking. The man in the ragged cloak had to be the sniper who had attacked Pale Rider.
But when had he left the forest and reached the bridge? Even in a cloak with high concealment, if he moved onto an open bridge with nothing around him, she should have seen him. Had he sneaked there like Samuro had? No, he could not have Samuro's level of AGI. A large-caliber sniper loadout required a lot of STR, which would leave very little for AGI.
"And that person... somehow..."
"The Isaro Ruins. The final bridge area. We ran into an enemy there. How about it? Do you remember now?" Samuro prompted her slowly from beside her.
Sinon's eyes widened slightly, and the impression of the cloaked man in her scope began to sharpen.
But in the next instant, a shock right before her eyes blew all those feelings away.
The ragged-cloaked man stepped forward and revealed the main weapon in his right hand, which had been hidden beneath the cloak until now.
"Silent Assassin... the silent assassin."
She breathed the name like a groan.
It was a massive rifle, nearly as long as the Hecate II. Compared side by side, its barrel would be thinner, but the several heat vents across the receiver, the grip-integrated stock designed even around the thumb position, and the matte silver-black finish across the whole body gave it a coldness that made the skin prickle.
Most distinctive of all, though, was the long suppressor fixed to the muzzle. No, that rifle had been designed from the beginning on the assumption of absolute silence.
It was a gun made to snipe human beings. Its maximum range exceeded two thousand meters. A target struck by it would never see the shooter, and would not even hear the gunshot that brought death. That was why it had been given the nickname Silent Assassin.
Sinon had heard rumors that the terrifying rifle existed somewhere in GGO, but she had never seen one in person. For that matter, she had never heard of any active solo sniper besides herself. Yet that ragged-cloaked man had accurately hit Pale Rider from deep in the forest on the opposite bank. To control the bullet circle, which moved with the heartbeat, he had to have both the skill and the nerve for it.
Who was he?
"Looks like he spent a fair bit," Samuro said beside her, his voice edged with mockery.
Sinon did not understand what he meant. Reflexively, she looked at the watch on her left hand. 8:40 p.m. Five minutes until the third Satellite Scan activated. Under the circumstances, that was far too long.
In her scope, the ragged-cloaked man slung that expensive, lethal weapon over his right shoulder with lifeless calm and walked up beside Pale Rider, who was still lying on the ground.
Pale Rider had taken Dyne down almost unscathed. Now he could not even struggle, only silently watch the cloaked man approach. The contrast with his earlier performance was almost absurd.
"Why not finish him with a bullet? With that kind of shooting skill and a weapon like Silent Assassin, one shot would be enough. Why use an electromagnetic round, then get close? What kind of sniper is this?"
"He isn't a sniper," Samuro said darkly. "What comes next is what you should really watch."
Unable to guess the man's goal, and unsettled by the shadowed look in Samuro's eyes beside her, Sinon pressed her lips tight.
The ragged-cloaked man stopped in front of Pale Rider, left the slender long gun hanging from his shoulder, and slipped his right hand inside the cloak. What he drew out looked, no matter how she viewed it, like nothing more than a handgun. The sunset glare made the contrast too strong to identify the type of gun hidden in shadow, but from the silhouette alone she could tell it was an unmodified semiautomatic pistol.
A handgun round did not necessarily do less damage than a submachine gun round, but it could not fire full-auto while the trigger was held down. Unless it was an outlier like Blue Rose, a single hit would not remove the need for follow-up shots.
With an ordinary handgun, it would take time to fire enough rounds to drain an opponent's HP. Pale Rider, lying on the ground, was about to recover from paralysis. If he could move, he would undoubtedly blast the cloaked man with the shotgun in his right hand.
In that case, the one blown away and killed instantly would be the ragged-cloaked man.
But the back of that ghillie cloak, fluttering in the evening wind, showed no trace of panic or hesitation. With the muzzle aimed at Pale Rider on the ground, he drew his left hand out of the cloak. It held nothing. For some reason, the ragged-cloaked man touched the fingertips of his empty left hand to the forehead of his hood, then moved them to his chest, then his left shoulder, and finally his right shoulder.
It was the sign of the cross.
A farewell to the enemy he was about to kill? But he should not have had time for that. Was he confident he could dodge a shotgun blast at point-blank range? Or was he simply an optimist who had gotten lucky enough to obtain a rare gun?
Troubled by too many wrong details, Sinon pressed her lips together again. Then she heard a small murmur by her ear.
"You have the right to attack now."
It was Samuro's voice. That short sentence carried a grief she had never heard from him before.
"Huh? Which one?"
"The ragged-cloaked man, if you want to save someone."
There was something like force of will in that impossibly heavy voice. Sinon immediately placed her right index finger on the trigger. Normally, she would have snapped back with a complaint, but now she said nothing. She simply aligned the center of her crosshair with the ragged-cloaked man.
She read the wind direction and humidity from the dust effects around them, made a minute adjustment to the reticle, and put strength into her fingertip. The green bullet circle, precise to the last pixel, covered the man's entire body.
In theory, she should have waited quietly for their fight to end, then attacked the winner. If she attacked the ragged-cloaked man now, Pale Rider would recover from paralysis and immediately escape into the bushes on the left. She would not get a second chance to snipe him.
Even knowing that, Sinon did not loosen her finger. For some reason, she felt she had to attack that man. She stopped breathing, gathered an imaginary cold wind in her chest, and used that chill to steady her heartbeat.Thump... thump... The prediction circle expanded and contracted with her pulse, then shrank to a single point at the center of the enemy's back.
A roar.
A huge flower of flame, like a dragon's breath, burst from the large muzzle brake.
The target was only three hundred meters away. There was no way he could dodge. Sinon even saw the image in her mind: the avatar blown away with a large hole opened in its back.
But in the same instant Sinon pulled the trigger, the ragged-cloaked player fell backward with the weightless motion of a real ghost. The lethal round skimmed past his chest and flew off, punching an empty hole into the distant earth.
Sinon cried out, and in the next breath she knew, with awful certainty, that his face was turned toward her. The gaze shining from inside the tattered hood pierced through the scope and caught the surprise in her eyes. Then the mouth hidden in darkness unmistakably formed a sinister smile.
Almost unconsciously, a groan slipped from her lips.
"He... he knew from the beginning that we were hiding here..."
"...It seems he noticed me when I was following him earlier." It was rare to hear Samuro admit a mistake.
"No one can dodge like that unless they can see the bullet line. In other words, at some point he saw me, and the system recognized it..."
The only person who had ever dodged once without really seeing the bullet line was the unreasonable man beside her.
As she spoke, her right hand loaded the next round into the Hecate II almost automatically. She wanted to prepare another shot, but hesitation stopped her. Against an enemy with that kind of reaction speed, a single-shot attack with a visible prediction line had almost no chance of hitting. What if she bet everything on the four rounds left in the magazine and kept firing? No. She would only waste all her ammo, and she could risk letting him close the distance.
What should she do? What could she do?
As if he had seen that instant of hesitation, the ragged-cloaked man raised himself.
He aimed the semiautomatic pistol in his right hand at Pale Rider again and thumbed back the hammer.
"Shoot! Aim for his head!"
Samuro shouted hard beside her, drawing the Peacemaker from his hip without hesitation and leveling it at the cloaked man.
Sinon obeyed him without thinking and aimed directly at the cloaked man's upper body.
The Hecate II roared a second time. Alongside its massive vibration came the Peacemaker's sharp, precise report.
The instant the cloaked man heard the sound, he was already slipping backward. With the prediction line visible, he dodged the Hecate II's shot a second time. At the same time, he could see the path of the revolver round, which was neither light nor heavy. It was not as lethal as a sniper round, but if it hit, that man would likely pin him down with follow-up shots.
With a low, private sound of frustration, he had no choice but to retreat again and again.
One second. Two.
At that moment, the electromagnetic light binding Pale Rider finally lost its effect.
The body in pale-blue camouflage sprang up as if mechanisms had been installed throughout it. With a whoosh, he raised the AR-17 shotgun in his right hand fast enough to leave only an afterimage, and the muzzle drove into the ragged-cloaked man's chest. It was literally zero distance. From there, every pellet would hit the heart.
Unlike a semiautomatic pistol, that kind of attack could easily kill in one shot.
Sinon, Samuro, and probably every viewer watching the broadcast in the GGO world and outside it in the real world, all held their breath and stared.
The answering gunshots rang out at the same time.
But the shotgun did not hit the cloaked man. With astonishing reaction speed, the man reached out and nudged the muzzle aside while twisting his own body in the opposite direction, avoiding most of the damage.
At the same time, he struck the man before him in the chest with the plain handgun in his hand.
Their HP bars fell in completely different ways. The cloaked man took a terrifying amount of damage, nearly half his health, while Pale Rider lost only a small slice of his bar.
But then a tiny sound effect reached Sinon's ears. It was the sound of the AR-17 slipping from Pale Rider's right hand and landing in the reddish-brown sand at his feet.
Then Pale Rider's knees hit the ground like a doll whose joints had broken. Even then, the avatar did not stop. Slowly, slowly, it tipped to the right until it lay flat on the earth.
From Sinon's position, she could see only Pale Rider's mouth beneath the visor of his helmet. It was open wide, as if he were screaming without sound, or suffering because he could not breathe.
With motions completely unlike his earlier speed, he weakly raised his left hand and clutched the center of his chest.
The body wrapped in pale-blue camouflage was surrounded by an irregular halo that recalled static noise. Then it vanished.
The last remaining light formed small letters reading DISCONNECTION, then disappeared into the sunset.
"...What was that?"
It took several seconds before Sinon could force out the words.
The ragged-cloaked player had hit Pale Rider once with a handgun. By unlucky timing, a connection failure had occurred, and Pale Rider had been dropped from the game.
If she explained what she had just seen rationally, that would be the answer.
But could a connection failure happen at such a perfect moment? And the ragged-cloaked man, who had narrowly escaped a killing counterattack, looked less like someone saved by luck and more like someone who had predicted the disconnection in advance.
No. If anything, it was as if he had forced Pale Rider out of the game by his own will.
That was impossible. Inside a game, no one should be able to interfere with another player's connection. Was it some new script or hack? But a technique like that meant taking on the entire game company, maybe the whole VRMMO industry.
And yet the ragged-cloaked man showed not the slightest surprise at Pale Rider's disappearance. He calmly withdrew his left hand into the cloak. Then he raised the right hand holding the pistol and pointed it straight at a spot in the air: the virtual camera broadcasting the tournament.
The camera was configured as a faintly glowing object so players could tell where it was. In other words, that gesture was meant to boast to countless viewers. But for what? The fight against Pale Rider just now had only ended because the other player suffered a connection failure. It was a win by default, not a victory worth boasting about.
Or had that disappearance itself been caused by the ragged-cloaked man, giving him the win? In other words...
"Can he forcibly log other players out...?"
Sinon's voice came out thin.
Beside her, Samuro let out a long sigh.
"That idiot..."
He sounded almost regretful.
"What?"
"It isn't as gentle as logging someone out. It's a very stupid... method."
"Gentle? What part of that is gentle? That's awful. You could call it cheating. What are the operators even doing...?"
"Do you know the rumors about Death Gun?"
Samuro's ease had disappeared. In its place was a strict seriousness as he spoke to Sinon slowly.
"That man wasn't disconnected from the network. He was killed. Just now, Pale Rider... the player controlling Pale Rider, died in the real world."
"..."
What is he talking about?
Sinon was about to say that, but Samuro interrupted her again.
"That man... that man is Death Gun. The so-called DEATH GUN."
Sinon had heard that name before. As she drew that vague knowledge up from the depths of memory, she slowly opened her mouth.
"DEATH... GUN. Wasn't that the strange rumor...? In the street-side taverns and the plaza, he attacked XeXeeD, the winner of the last tournament, and Usujio Tarako, one of the high-ranking prizewinners. Then the two people he shot stopped logging in after that..."
"Yes..."
Samuro lowered his head and looked straight at Sinon's face. Deep in those black eyes, there was a will she had never seen before, and something else churning beneath it.
"Those two who disconnected are already corpses. He made that big a show of it, and he invited me too. There is no mistake."
"..."
Why do you know something like that? Who are you? And what is your relationship with that ragged-cloaked man?
After being told that Death Gun truly existed, Sinon felt suspicion toward Samuro before surprise. Countless questions piled up in her chest until even breathing became difficult.
No. She could not believe it so easily. Killing someone inside a game? That was too absurd... no, too contradictory. If people could really die in here, then this could no longer be called a game.