Author's Note

7/31/2018: One More Guy, my beta is quickly turning into One More God to Worship. I'm supposed to be an atheist, but Guy is fucking converting me to Guyism. It's a little unsettling, honestly. :P

Shit, this happened. Normally I get chapters of this story edited, but… I was feeling really antisocial around the time I finished, so I just decided to edit it myself rather than going to someone else about it. Which I'm fully aware isn't as effective… but it helps get the obvious problems out of the way, at least.

So anyway, this chapter is a decent length, I guess. Not gonna lie, most of it was written when I was so damn tired I could barely keep my eyes open. Which is a little abnormal for me, because I usually write when I'm a fair bit less tired than that and then stop once that phase of drowsiness ends… so yeah, this is the equivalent of shit-faced drunk writing, I guess. Good thing I was fairly awake when I edited it…

I'll stop this note before it gets too long. Go ahead and start reading.

Gun Gale Online: The Swordswoman

Transcendent Bonds

Chapter Sixteen: The Man Who Should Have Died

With that, Kiriko exited the store, leaving the two players alone to contemplate her advice. Sinon clenched and unclenched her fists as her friend watched her expression go through a multitude of phases.

"I'm going to have to reconsider the way I play this game," she said, turning to the boy next to her. "Spiegel. I want you to teach me how to use guns."

"I tell you that you need to learn to use guns and you don't listen at all. Then, a few words from a stranger and you change your whole outlook…" he replied, shaking his head slowly at the irony. "Speaking of which, I wonder how my brother is doing. I haven't seen him since around the launch of the game. He's playing GGO somewhere, too."

They both left the shop soon after, their banter continuing the whole rest of the day.

Shortly after I helped those newbs out at the ore shop, I received a message from Argo. At first, I wondered what she could be contacting me for, but I read it without delay anyway. Knowing her, she wouldn't bother messaging me unless it was something important, personal or both. What I read would have made my blood run cold in real life.

"Come to the town right past the center maze at ten and head for the forest in the middle. Just last night, some made an attempt to kill Diavel's group as they were exploring one of the mountains. PKers keep hunting down clearers for their equipment and we must formulate a strategy before everything gets out of hand. Every other frontliner will be present, so make it a point to be there no matter what. You're the top beta tester and by far the strongest player currently, we need your input."

It was an issue I had more or less tried to ignore up until that point. It had been building up since the start of the game, much like a ticking time bomb slowly counting down, until it finally exploded. If they tried to kill Diavel, one of the current leaders of the frontlines, even though he was in a group… well, as a co-leader and prominent solo player myself, I would be a target, too.

What the hell was I thinking, joining up with my friends' legion under these circumstances? If PKers tried to go after me, they could easily change their targets to the Black Cats. And there was no guarantee I'd be able to protect all five of them in that scenario. Just by being with me, they were put at risk.

But I couldn't back out anymore, either. And if I just left them or kept myself at a distance, they'd made it clear they could get into dangerous situations on their own, so distancing myself wasn't an option if I wanted to keep them all strong and smart enough to survive.

It was a catch twenty-two. No matter what I did, they would be at risk. There was no clear solution to this problem…

For the moment, I decided to put this train of thought aside and just focus on getting to the meeting place. It would be a pretty lengthy trek, considering I was on a different zone and the teleporter on zone three was a long walk away from the meeting spot. I could always just use a teleport item to take me there directly, but considering how they only just started being sold in this zone, they were still quite expensive, and I didn't want to blow one on a situation where no one's lives depended on my speed.

With a great sigh, I started walking in the direction of zone two's teleporter, maintaining a fast pace to deter anyone from stopping me.

"So what do you hope to accomplish by doing this?" I couldn't help but ask this question of the four men surrounding me on all sides with their weapons trained on my head.

In the case of player on player attacks, headshots always resulted in a critical hit unless the target was wearing some sort of protection, like a helmet. But those types of equipment would more often than not severely restrict one's sense of vision, and therefore they were rarely used by players unless you were trying to run a tank build.

We were all standing in the middle of the forest right before the town where the meeting would be held. These four had suddenly walked out from behind the trees right in front of me and slowly surrounded me, preventing me from going any further. I allowed them to draw their guns and point them at me out of pity, I suppose.

These poor fools really had no idea what they were getting into. Ambushing me of all people when I was in this kind of terrible mood… that was just asking for me to fight back. They had no idea of the sheer difference between our strengths. They'd be incredibly lucky to get out of this with all their lives intact.

They didn't seem to understand this, however. The young boy right in front of me, whose wind-tossed blond hair reminded me a little of Ducker's mop of golden locks, gave me a condescending smile. "You can talk tough all you want, but it won't get you anywhere. If you haven't noticed, it's four on one. The odds are against you. Your fate has already been decided."

If that was supposed to scare me, it didn't work. I shook my head at the sheer ignorance that these fine individuals displayed. Judging from their crappy zone-two store bought equipment alone, they couldn't have had a collective level of more than twenty-four, maybe twenty-eight if I included the worth of their equipment in levels. They were more than a little under-leveled for zone three. But the thing is, their collective level would have to add up to at least twice mine before they'd pose a threat to me.

I was level eighteen. My equipment consisted of several rare drops, two heavily-upgraded weapons, and a few boss drops, each of which added about four or five levels' worth of power to my character. That put my level worth at well over forty in total.

Frankly speaking, they were about to get mauled. But I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and let them have the first strike. To see what they can do before making my own move.

I shrugged my shoulders. "Then shoot me. All four of you at once. Right through my head so you get critical hits. See what happens."

"Cocky little— prepare to die!"

The sound of four gunshots being fired at once reverberated throughout the forest. Two of them never made it to their target, having been blocked by my photonic shield, which got its battery life from my piss poor defense stat. The other two made contact with my head, two red flashes telling them that they landed critical hits.

Pain could still be felt in GGO, but it was reduced so that no amount of pain you felt in the virtual world could cause your body to react too drastically IRL. And beyond that, pain and recoil would also be reduced further if you were taking an attack from something or someone weaker than you, using the target and attacker's levels, attack and defense in the calculation.

And, well… both of those shots barely even tickled me. They didn't even make me feel a mild sting. And though I just took two gunshots, they didn't move me more than a centimeter. I tossed a quick look to my HP bar – still almost full. In fact, I had over ninety-five percent of my health remaining.

I grabbed my photon sword and unhooked it from my belt. I didn't even need my gun for this, so I let it rest in its holster as I nonchalantly flicked my blade's on switch and a beam of bluish white light erupted from the thin metal cylinder.

"The odds are against me, you said? And just who calculated those odds?"

As I said this, I took a single step forward, towards the blond – the one I would use as an example. They all shot at me again in response, and this time all four of them connected with my head, since my photonic shield was still on cooldown until the battery recharged. Even still, my HP barely even dented, still over ninety percent by a good margin.

TZZT!

Thud!

"My fate is already decided, you said? And who, pray tell, made that decision?" this time, I spoke from behind the blond, my blade positioned diagonally in front of my left leg.

I turned around and assessed the situation. It had worked out exactly as I planned – the blond's gun arm was on the ground, getting ready to shatter into polygons, his HP was in the red with a sliver left, the others were looking at me like I was the devil himself, and I knew all four of them had finally realized the situation they'd put themselves in.

To clarify what just happened, I utilized the power of a certain system that unlocked once my Agility stat passed the threshold of fifty. It had only just barely done that so far, so the effect wasn't as strong as it could be, but it was still enough for what I needed it for this time.

The system, known as the Burst System, was a functionality that allowed players to drastically increase the speed, power and control of an action or two. While you could actually spam it infinitely, it had a drawback of the cooldown increasing the more you used it at once, so it was best to use it for one or two actions at a time. To keep the cooldown at around one or two seconds.

I used it for two actions. The first was to approach the blond and cut off his arm in one fluid motion, and the second was to move past him so I was standing behind him, outside their little encirclement. And it all happened in the blink of an eye, so fast that nobody who wasn't using the Burst System themselves would even be able to follow the movements.

The gap in strength between a Burst System user and all those without it was like a gigantic chasm. This was why I didn't even entertain the notion of them being a mild threat – because even if they could deal a significant amount of damage to me, I'd still be able to outmaneuver them to such an extent that they wouldn't even have been able to hit me a second time.

"The only one allowed to decide my fate… is myself. And I will never make the decision to die," I told them, watching as the blond slowly turned around and stared at me with a contorted mix of anguish and horror evident on his features.

"Now get the hell out of my sight before I decide to pull out my gun. I guarantee you its damage is in a completely different league from my photon sword."

They had all shot me point blank, so their cursors were now orange. Which meant that, as per the game's sick form of justice, I wouldn't get any infractions for attacking or killing them. And considering they tried to kill me first, and I was already in a terrible mood, the fools were lucky I gave them the chance to leave at all.

They didn't need to be told twice. They started running away the moment I stopped talking, not looking back even once. But unfortunately, none of them got very far. Before they even put four meters of distance between us, two forms dropped down from the trees above them to block their path. One of whom I recognized immediately.

"Boss, please spare us! We were just caught by surprise, we can still—"

"I pride myself on being a man of my word, and so I'm upholding the promise I made to you when I gave you this mission," the same low, raspy voice I'd come to despise so much replied in a cold and calculating tone, coming from the one on the left. "Johnny, if you will."

"Slaughtering newbs is especially fun. They can resist or run all they want and it doesn't accomplish anything. That hopeless despair on their face right as their HP runs out is delicious."

The man standing beside PoH uttered this in a calm, collected tone as he pulled out a handgun – one I recognized as a rare drop from particularly tough enemies on the third zone, and probably the one I'd be using if I hadn't gotten my hands on the one from the secret spot in the zone one dungeon.

He wore a black hooded jacket with the hood pulled up over a matching-colored hockey mask, so I couldn't get a good look at his face, but I could already tell that this guy was amazingly dangerous. The powerful gun, the things he said, and the fact that his cursor was already orange clearly told me that he wasn't to be trifled with.

The four newbs hadn't stuck around to see this through to the end, choosing to run right past their apparent boss and this masked Johnny guy. He turned to face them and, with a relaxed posture, took aim at the one-armed blond first.

Bang!

"One down."

Bang! Bang! Bang!

As the sound of shattering glass rang through the forest, the masked, hooded man spoke again. "Mission complete. Give me something harder next time, boss. I want to have to work for my kills for once."

He killed them with no hesitation – hell, he seemed positively relaxed, almost to the extent that it appeared subdued. And even more terrifying than that, he had the power to kill each of them in a single hit, even the three with full HP. This guy… he was really strong, and completely unaffected by committing murder. That was the absolute most dangerous combination of power and personality.

"First you say it's fun, then you complain about it being too easy," the scarred 'boss' said with a smile and a shake of his head. "I'll try to whip up something more interesting for your next assignment, then."

"Why not send him over my way?" I asked, putting my free hand on my gun's handle. "I'd be the biggest challenge he'll ever face."

Because the moment I faced this guy in a fight, I'd make every attempt to ensure that I was the last challenge he ever faced. Allowing a guy like that to live would just breed more killing from him down the road. For the safety of the game's players, people like him had to be eliminated by someone as soon as possible.

"We're not here to pick a fight with you, despite how this meeting started out," PoH responded, crossing his hands out in front of him in a cancellation-type gesture. "I'm not dumb enough to challenge you without the Burst System. Even if it's two on one, we'd still get our asses handed to us or worse."

This guy was just full of surprises, wasn't he? He somehow knew about the Burst System even though I never told him about it. But the only others who should know about it at this stage in the game were fellow beta-testers like Diavel or Argo. He couldn't really be a beta-tester himself, could he…?

"Then you're here to have a talk with me?" I speculated, resting my free hand and letting my photon sword hang loosely at my side, its blade digging into the snow on the ground and melting it. "Weird. I'm pretty sure I made it clear how our encounters would go last time we met."

"You can't get the minimum infraction if you have to shoot two people, you know," he called my bluff with a disgusting smile. "So just hear me out, will you? I'm only here to open your eyes a little. Make you see a fraction of the truth, using that anomaly of a raid leader, Diavel, as an example."

"What about Diavel? Were you the one who orchestrated the attempt on his life?"

"Guilty as charged! But Kiriko, that's not what I meant by the truth," he told me, his horrid smile ever-present on his scarred face. I had to wonder at that point whether the scar was real or something he got tattooed on in GGO. It didn't distort a whole lot with his facial expression…

I sighed, narrowing my eyes a little. "Then explain yourself, since you love hearing your own voice so damn much."

"That bastard Diavel should have died in the checkpoint one boss raid," he told me, making me wonder just what the hell he was talking about. "Humor me for a second and picture how it would have played out if you'd started moving to save him just one second later."

"But I didn't, and he's still alive—"

"Just do it. Picture it," he told me, then frowned when I gave him a wary expression. "I promise we're not trying to distract you and take you by surprise. To prove it, we'll take our hands off our weapons and put them above our heads. Johnny, you too."

"I'll do it, but I'll need an explanation of what the hell you're doing once we leave," Johnny confirmed, putting his gun back in his jacket and raising his hands so they matched his leader's.

Since I didn't exactly have anything to lose, and even if they did attack me, I still had my photon sword and the Burst System ready, I decided to go ahead and humor him. I began imagining how it would have gone if, like PoH said, I had been one second later in rushing in to save the Raid's blue-haired leader.

I never could have prepared myself for what happened next. A stream of images, sounds and sensations filled my consciousness all at once, playing like a movie in my mind. Except that I was actually living out my character in that movie, rather than watching it from a screen. It was… it was like a memory, but complete with all of my senses intact.

In this first person movie, rather than immediately thinking to save Diavel and running between him and the boss's attack, I froze up like everybody else in the room for a second or two. By the time I forced myself out of it and started running towards him, I could already tell that I wouldn't make it in time.

The boss's skill combo caught the raid leader dead in the chest, the force sending him flying right into me. I caught him, jumped back and set him on the ground, grabbing a healing injection from my jacket pocket. But before I could stick it in his arm, he grabbed my wrist weakly, stopping me.

We had a brief conversation. He called me by name, told me that I had to defeat the boss, and then promptly shattered into polygons. He died in my arms.

At that point, the stream stopped, and my consciousness returned to normal. I gasped and put my free hand on my knees for support. That whole ordeal, whatever it was, had really worn me out. Not physically, but mentally – and in a world like GGO, that was just as debilitating if not more so.

What the hell was that?! Those felt just as real and vivid as actual memories, but… but that never even happened! What the hell is PoH trying to say here by showing me this—

"I take it you saw it then? How things originally played out?" PoH's voice cut off my thoughts. "You saw him die, didn't you? I can assure you that what you just saw was a real memory. At one point, you could even say it actually happened…"

"What… what was the point of making me see that, PoH? What do you gain from this?" Really, why did he even bother? It didn't seem to make any sense for him to just show me this for no reason.

And what the hell did he even mean? It was a real memory? At one point, it actually happened? But not anymore? That didn't make any sense at all!

"I'm just giving my greatest rival something to think about, that's all. Life's no fun when there's no puzzles or mysteries to solve, right?" he said, giving my a cryptic smile that really didn't fit his scarred, chiseled face. "Figure out what it means for yourself. Use that exceptional brain of yours!"

He turned around, apparently preparing to leave, and his subordinate did the same. "We'll be going now. Lots of stuff to do and not a lot of time. So I'll leave you with one more juicy little tidbit."

I didn't say anything this time, just deciding to allow him to speak. Since I knew he would whether I said anything or not, and I was still too shell-shocked from the vision of sorts to consider attacking him. He began talking again after a second of pause, his words lighting up a new fire of rage within me.

"In light of what should have been, my humble band of brothers' current number one target is the beta tester who should have died!" he said, his tone rising and falling in a highly theatrical manner as he grandly gestured to the sky with his hands. "You're welcome to try to stop us all you want, but the end result will be the same. He will die again."

With that, he teleported out, having apparently used an item to do so in the middle of his grand gesture. His lackey followed suit, and then just like that, I was alone again. I flipped my photon sword's power switch and the blade of light dispersed in a brilliant burst of bright blue color – this visual effect was the reason for its name, «Radiance Burst».

I hooked the metal handle back onto my belt, then sat down. This was… a lot to take in at once. And I couldn't make sense of half the new information anyway. But I knew one thing for certain. Diavel was PoH's target for PK. That alone was enough to warrant extreme caution, but beyond that…

That Johnny guy. The way he acted seemed… weird, somehow. Subdued, maybe? When he shot those four people, his posture seemed way too relaxed… almost as if he was deliberately avoiding showing his real fighting style because I was there. If that's the case, he's definitely one to watch out for.

As I sighed, I happened to glance at the clock in the corner of my vision. The time was 9:56. For some reason I couldn't describe, the knowledge of the time brought with it a sense of urgency… and then, after a few seconds of thinking, I remembered why.

The meeting started at ten. I had exactly four minutes to haul ass and get to the spot they described. And if I were to give my professional opinion of what exactly I thought was going to happen, it would be…

Damn it, I am definitely gonna be late!

By some miracle, I ended up sprinting at my top speed for three continuous minutes and getting to the meeting spot around fifty seconds before it was set to start. I walked over to Asuna, who gave me an odd look as I panted lightly. I could run really fast, but I didn't have a whole lot of stamina, so maintaining a decent pace was beyond difficult unless I wanted to make myself liable to pass out when I finally stopped.

Come to think of it, that was probably the only aspect of my bizarre real life physical condition that didn't transfer into my avatar when I looked into the «Hand Mirror» on day one. Though my Strength and Agility stats were both quite high even at level one, and my Dexterity was good enough that I didn't need to put any stat points into it, my Vitality stat – which affected defense and stamina – was positively tiny. I knew that one's real body's physical condition had an impact on what stats they would have more of early on, at least now that we were all stuck with our real bodies, but I had to wonder how the data got transferred into the virtual world in the first place.

Because honestly, my Strength and Agility stats were really high right off the bat, despite my barely having any visible muscle due to not exercising very much. How exactly did the game know that I had a unique muscular condition that greatly enhanced the strength, durability, density and reaction speed of all the muscles in my body? That wasn't the kind of thing that the «Nerve Gear» should be able to tell just by the calibration process.

I almost wondered if it learned through checking my memories… but I quickly dismissed the thought. That would be a huge invasion of privacy, and I didn't even know whether it was possible for a Full Dive unit to access the wearer's memory. But I had to admit, assuming it was even possible, it could serve to explain a lot of things, from the starting stat value determining process to the impressively accurate hidden luck stat.

As the clock in the corner of my vision struck ten and the gathered group of clearers began to move to another location, I couldn't help but let my thoughts wander back to the vision PoH had shown me, and what it all meant.

Author's Note

Yeah, so PoH knows a lot more than you thought he did, doesn't he? If you're wondering exactly how much of the time looping he is aware of… well, I don't want to spoil anything too major about that yet.

And as for the masked dude called Johnny. It was probably obvious to some degree, but he's Johnny Black from Laughing Coffin. Or at least, he's going to become known as Johnny Black… but in my interpretation, his avatar name is just Johnny, and the Black part comes from his apparel choices. I'm going to have a lot of fun turning him from a perpetually calm, cool, collected, unaffected, sociopathic guy into the dramatic and heavily theatrical murderer he is in his canon SAO appearances.

What you may have noticed was that Kiriko was taking the idea of killing other people very lightly in this chapter multiple times. With Johnny it sort of made sense in a way, considering what he did first and how he did it, but with the four dead newbs, well, it probably didn't seem as obvious why I wrote her to be so unopposed to killing them. This was majorly to show off a particularly merciless trait Kiriko has: the mentality of "If you try to punch me, I'll punch you right back and twice as hard."

She has that mentality for most of this story, to varying degrees, but it kinda disappears after she loses her memories, then never returns after she gets them back. I wouldn't say she grew up so much as she just lost touch with her original self.

But enough about that, I really need to finish a few of these fanfics instead of just talking about them. With that in mind, I'll be working on the original GGO SW next, since it's the closest to completion! And let's be honest, you're all positively thirsty for that upcoming hot spring chapter, right? Don't even try to deny it, pervs.

See you next time!