Author's Note

This chapter was originally already six-thousand words long and gaining. Since I realized I could do quicker releases this way, I decided to split it into two parts. I had a lot of trouble coming up with a name for this chapter, since the original name was in regards to what happens after it ends and the next one starts.

I think this chapter will throw you for a real curve ball. None of my reviewers picked up on my hinting, nor did any of them even come close to predicting the outcome I had planned from basically the start.

Since I want to see reactions quicker, I'll stop the author's note here. Go ahead and read up so I can see how many of you I shocked.


Gun Gale Online: The Swordswoman

Chapter Twenty-Four: Unpredictable Outcomes


"I don't know about you, but I forgive people as long as they don't repeat the same mistakes again and again," I told her, standing up before saying some more. "As far as I'm concerned, it's already resolved. We can be friends again as soon as you're ready for that."

I turned around, preparing to go back to the forest. I had deliberately specified that she and I would be friends once things went back to normal. I had decided to give Argo a chance, after all, and that meant that unless she and I broke it off, I wouldn't be starting romance with anyone else.

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go grind some more. See you at raid time."

With that, I left Sinon and made for the forest, full to the brim with a confidence I hadn't felt in months.


By the time I returned to the wooden pier after beating all the mobs a second time and re-equipping my boss drop blade, Sinon had already left. It occurred to me that she may have only come early to talk to me, which I had to admit I was grateful for. I sat down on the shore again, exactly where I had sat when I snuck up on my blue-haired ex-partner.

My new skill's proficiency had gotten to three-hundred-sixty-four by the end of the last mob. The climb to three-hundred-fifty was rather quick, but the last fourteen points took over seventy percent of the center island's monsters to defeat. By that time, around five-forty to be specific, I didn't have enough time to go back to zone twenty and grind more, so I decided to head back to the spot I told Asuna I'd be.

The sun had set shortly after my talk with Sinon, and it had been an hour or so since then, leaving the sky and the caldera waters dark. The whole world seemed to be tinged with the dark blue hue of night. It wasn't quite as breathtaking as when the sun reflected off the crater lake's surface, but instead had a peaceful, mysterious, somewhat mystic feel to it. I decided I really didn't mind this exchange of vibes, all things considered.

I had some time to kill before they arrived at around six-fifteen, so I allowed myself to get lost in thought without trying to snap out of it every time I noticed. I thought about a lot of things all across the subject board, from my new skill, to whether Sinon would ever completely move past her prior hatred of me, to whether my soon-to-be relationship with Argo would work out. I spent a lot more time focusing on that last one than any of the others, though.

It's actually kind of hard to picture Argo as a lover, actually. It's not that she's unattractive, but… when I first met her, we were both cross-playing as guys. I didn't even consider this sort of thing back then…

It was true – back in the beta period where we became acquainted with one another, Argo played as a male just as I did. We became friends rather fast, but at the time, I really didn't imagine or desire anything deeper forming between us.

When I first met her in the official release and we discovered the truth about each other, that really didn't change. Without anything to hide, we grew much closer than before, with the info broker often taking a sort of motherly role and guiding me through some of the toughest times of my life.

And at some point along the way… she fell in love with me.

I couldn't fathom when or how it happened. It simply didn't make sense to me that she would love me. Not because we were both girls – denying it based on that would be like denying both my feelings for Sachi and hers for me before she died. It was more… that I always seemed to be causing trouble for her or doing things that made her worry. Looking at it from that standpoint, and recalling all the times I did something that nearly got me killed, I seemed like a very unhealthy choice for her to fall in love with.

But I guess love isn't something you can really choose to feel, is it? I can only hope that I'll be able to reciprocate her feelings in time…

I really didn't love her yet, even though I really wanted to. If I could make myself love her back immediately, I'd do it, even if I had to pay a hefty price of some sort for it. After all the pain I caused her, she deserved to be happy, and if that meant me loving her, then that's what it meant.

I wasn't naïve. I knew that being on love with someone also meant desiring them on a physical level. I realized that if we were to become a couple, that would include things like us holding hands, hugging, kissing, and… sex.

What would that even be like…? I know how it goes with a man and a woman, but between two girls…

I couldn't even imagine it. It was too far outside my experiences. For one thing, I had never done it at all, whether with a guy or with a girl. Not that other people didn't want to do it with me. Both in real life and in the game, I had received so many confessions and requests to become an item that I gave up on keeping count long ago. And I knew that the vast majority of them came from impure intentions filled with lust. I turned every single one down without even slight consideration, regardless of the apparent motives.

Well, almost all of them, anyway.

There were only three confessions I didn't shoot down throughout all my life so far. The first was Sachi's, back in real life. Yeah, I avoided answering her until shortly after we met up in GGO, and even then, I didn't give a clear yes, but it certainly wasn't a rejection. The second was Sinon's, which, looking back on it, I was glad didn't work out. If we had become a couple before she found out my real identity, I would have almost certainly been killed in my sleep once she did realize the truth.

The third, of course, was Argo's. But in everything aside from chronological order, it seemed to be the middle child. Not the youngest/most attention-worthy or the oldest/best, simply in the middle. Sinon's confession made me debate over my answer more, Sachi's affected me more deeply and for longer. Argo's wasn't the best or worst in any significant way.

I knew it was bad to compare confessions like that. They were all unique, after all, so ranking them was both impractical and sort of an insult to the ones confessing. But I also knew that I could never stop myself from thinking about something if my mind really wanted to focus on it. And this was one of those things that just demanded my mental spotlight.

Sometimes I hate my mind and the things it thinks about…

Just after I let out a great sigh, I noticed something out of the ordinary in the corner of my vision. I turned my head to the right, and out in the distance, I saw what looked like a large motorized boat – at least five times the size of the little rowboat I used to get to the island. I had never seen it before, but the context and the time, six-thirteen PM, made it easy enough to deduce its identity as the ferry carrying the raid members.

As it neared the dock, I took a deep breath and got up to go meet them there. This was it – my first contact with the lead group as myself since they ostracized me and put a bounty on my head. Five out of ten were people I didn't bear any ill will towards: Agil, Klein, Heathcliff, Asuna, and Sinon. I could interact with them just fine.

But three out of ten were members of the legion that most actively despised and tried to prosecute me, with one of them being the very person who started that hellish stage of my life that was only just ending. It wouldn't get in the way of my ability to cooperate with them in a battle situation, but… well, I had no obligation to pretend to like them, either. They made four months of my life full of despair and even more self-hatred than would have been normal for me. I had every right to hate the very virtual air they breathed.

But they're not even worth getting worked up over. The real issue here is…

The last guy was the one I had to be most concerned about, though. Not from a social interaction or teamwork stance, though. It was just… something about him seemed familiar, even though I'd never seen him before. Not that I'd be able to tell if I had met him, considering the motorcycle helmet he wore. The familiarity wasn't bad on its own. It was who he resembled that unnerved me and put me on edge.

By the time I arrived at the pier, the ferry had almost docked. Not because it got there quickly; I was just walking super slow to accommodate the long thought process. I walked onto the wooden dock at a faster pace, however, and by the time I got within two meters of the landing point, all of the raid members had disembarked.

No turning back now…

The silence was palpable. That seemed to be happening often as of late. For a moment my imagination ran wild and pictured Lind trying to come at me with handcuffs, but I quickly shook off the scenario – mentally of course, since literally shaking my head right then would be super weird. Just before I tried to break the quiet with a greeting, a single person stepped forward.

That person was Asuna. She moved from her spot beside Heathcliff until she stood right in front of me, then without any prior warning, enveloped me in a fierce embrace. Finding myself once again with a face-full of her breasts, I put one arm around her before pulling my head back to speak.

"Uh, hi to you too," I said, trying to make it clear to our audience that I was just as taken aback by this gesture as they were.

In response, she released me and stepped back, seemingly content with a single public display of affection. She then put a simply unfair pout on her face before saying, "I missed you, idiot."

In a split second, I surveyed the rest of the group for reactions. Heathcliff was as stoic as always, Agil gave me an annoyingly knowing smirk (what the hell kind of ideas was he getting there, damn it?!), and Klein whistled like the teasing best friend he was deciding to be right then.

The three members of the «Dragon Alliance» were all averting their eyes awkwardly, which gave me a fair amount of twisted satisfaction that I'd never admit. The unknown guy in the biker helmet just stood there, about as visually unaffected as wearing something that concealed your face could make you.

Out of all of them, Sinon's reaction stood out the most. When I first looked her way, her eyes were wide with shock, eyes wide as saucers, as if the scene completely took her by surprise. When she noticed me looking back at her, she averted her gaze to the ground, and I read a hint of… something in her eyes.

Is it sadness? No, that's not quite it… but not much else I can think of would fit in this context…

In order to force myself out of my thoughts, I decided it was time to talk business. "I've been grinding here for a while, so all the mobs have been cleared for the moment. I went and took a look at the field boss, and it's a big iron-colored metal humanoid with what look like giant gun-blades for arms and had three HP bars. I didn't engage it, so I don't know its attack patterns."

"Knowing its weapons and armor type in advance is already of great benefit," Heathcliff replied, nodding his head towards me. "Well done. We should be able to predict its patterns based on that information."

It was so unbelievably simple. Nobody accused me of anything or tried to revenge kill me like they would have mere weeks prior. And all that I had to do to get praise, rather than anything negative, was make a minor scouting contribution. For a very long time, I didn't know if an event like this would ever come again. But now that I stared it down, I could only wish I had tried to get my name cleared sooner.

"All right then, let's get this show on the road!" Agil called, holding his fist high in the air. "The sooner we take out this field boss, the sooner we can clear the checkpoint. Time to stop with the talking and start with the action!"

At his call, we all began to head for the center of the island without any further delay.


Just before we entered the field boss's map, we stopped for a quick strategy session. Heathcliff himself was the one to do most of the talking, dividing each of us into roles based on his prediction of the enemy's attack patterns.

"The field boss will likely be primarily a close quarters fighter, with ranged special attacks," he said, looking us all over as he explained. "Since it has two blades and is controlled by a high-level AI, it will be able to strike twice at the same time. This means we will need two people to draw aggro and defend against the blade's attacks, whether by tanking damage or by blocking them, while the others focus on draining its HP."

He pointed first to himself, then to the high-defense member of the «Dragon Alliance», Shivata. "Shivata and myself will handle the defense. Asuna, Agil, Klein, our volunteer and Kiriko will focus on attacking. Lind and Yamata, you watch the flow of battle and notify us if anything out of the ordinary happens so we can quickly adapt, and if anyone's health goes into the yellow, switch roles with them until they recover. Sinon, since sniper rifles have an inherently high stun chance on hit and a guaranteed knockback, you will take the role of forcing it out of any powerful combos it tries to execute. I trust everyone finds this setup acceptable?"

Everyone nodded to signal an affirmative. Even the members of the «Dragon Alliance», whose primary focus in battle was to try as hard as they could to get the last attack, did not dare speak up about their seeming dissatisfaction with only having one of their players make contact with the boss under normal circumstances.

"Good. Let's get started, then."

With that, he turned to face the entrance to the center map, walking forward and through it. The rest of us followed suit a second later, save for Sinon, who stayed back in order to enter after us so she didn't have even a slight chance of getting noticed by her target. Soon enough, we were all staring down the iron-colored field boss.

The first two to walk into its aggro radius were, as per the plan, Heathcliff and Shivata. The enemy before us promptly raised its sword arms, which had hung loosely at its sides before, up over its head in a gigantic X pattern. It then swung both of them out in a huge and impractical cross slash, the blades hitting each other and generating sparks that flew out in all directions.

At that moment, I finally got a look at its name. To say the least, it really didn't fill me with a lot of confidence in my equipment setup. One of my weapons could very well be useless, or at least, severely nerfed. Its name?

«Pyronullic Knight»

My gun's effect, «Exploding Shot», was fire elemental. Field boss names in GGO were pretty straight forward, so 'Pyronullic' probably meant that fire damage and fire elemental effects would be nullified. Which meant my gun's effect and its burn DoT, which I had come to rely on quite a bit (it was how I beat the Christmas boss, among many others), would not work on it.

To clarify, though Vice's boss drop, the «Shadow Gloves», did in fact make my attacks ignore type resistances, they did not bypass elemental negation. Type resistances referred to the type of damage the weapon did – for example, metal swords and knives had slash type damage, the majority of bullets had pierce type damage, light-based weapons had photonic damage, and big weapons without edges had blunt damage. The defender's resistance to the attacker's damage type was factored in at the end of the game's damage formula.

However, elemental damage and negation was something completely different, something that got factored in before type resistance. If an enemy had an elemental negation, any weapons with matching pure elemental damage would get their final damage automatically set to zero. Likewise, any weapons with a matching elemental effect would have said effect nullified.

Long story short, my gun was a regular handgun to this enemy. My «Ghastly Remains» photon sword, however… now that could do some real damage if I got in close enough to use it.

"Everyone, get into formation!" Heathcliff shouted, snapping me out of my thoughts. He and Shivata continued to advance on the field boss, and it neared them just as fast.

Shivata's main form of defense was a giant bulletproof shield, like what police officers occasionally used in the west, but made of a material that could block blades just as easily as bullets. He held it out in front of him calmly, looking very confident in his tank role.

Heathcliff, on the other hand, had no such shield. He didn't seem to have anything of the sort, in fact – in his right hand he held a semi-auto handgun, and in his left, nothing at all. But his empty hand soon reached for a metal cylinder on his belt and unhooked it – wait a minute…

Is that a photon sword? He uses one, too?

But something was off. He was holding the deactivated photon sword upside down. And not really in reverse grip, either – he was holding it so that when it activated, the blade's endpoint would be perpendicular with the ground. What could he do with it in that position…?

When he flipped the switch to activate it, my questions were answered. The red-outlined blade extended from the cylinder in a way I'd never seen before. Rather than looking just as cylindrical as the tube, it actually looked like a very, very wide sword. So wide, in fact, that it could be used just as easily to block attacks—

Oh… now it makes more sense.

However he got it to be like that, it was pretty clear that his photon sword was intended to be used as a shield. The condensed light even formed a guard around both the blade's handle and his hand – making it the perfect non-passive defense option.

Just as our two tanks got within range of the enemy, it made a strike at each of them simultaneously. The left sword clanged off of the side of Shivata's big shield, which had already been in the right place to block. The right sword, however, came down on Heathcliff in an overhead strike, trying to cut straight through the middle of his head.

BZZT!

With a speed I'd only ever seen in one source before, Heathcliff's photon sword moved and fended off the attack with only a fraction of a second to spare. The field boss's giant iron blade bounced off of the red blade's flat, and before it could recover from the recoil, that same beam of red light plunged into its chest before returning to the same spot it had been in before the enemy's attack.

Its three-stage HP bar's first section depleted by a fraction large enough to be easily noticeable, even from my distance. Heathcliff didn't just have impregnable defense – he had strong attack power, too. But I was much more concerned with one other factor; namely, the incredible speed at which he could both block and strike.

That speed is unreal… it's just as fast as when I block bullets!

In the few seconds following their successful defense, a torrent of bullets and blasts of light rained down on the field boss from all directions. The attacking force had spread out while I was absorbed in my own thoughts, and now they could each attack without hitting anyone on the team in the process. Even Sinon, who had initially stayed back in the prior area, had just entered the map and was already heading off into the forest surrounding the clearing to take her position.

Guess I should join in, too.

That was the point where the battle really began for me. But at that time, I had no idea what was in store for us. We were in way over our heads here, and we were about to find out exactly how badly we screwed up.


Throughout the entire first section of its HP bar, everything went more or less according to plan. Heathcliff and Shivata performed their roles as tanks admirably, with the former often going an extra mile and getting a good counterattack in before deferring to the attack force.

But right after the first bar dissipated into nothingness due to being fully depleted, everything went straight to hell.

Not because of the field boss, though – it was still performing just as predictably as ever. The problem wasn't even loosely related to it, at least not at the start. No, this problem was much worse, much more deadly, and infinitely more unexpected.

It all happened so fast. One moment Shivata was just about to defend against one of the giant iron enemy's blades, and the next, he dropped to the ground, about thirteen red marks on his back indicating he'd been shot. His HP bar, which had dipped straight into the red, was flashing yellow around the edges, a little lightning mark on its left side.

"What the he—"

Those were his last words. Right in the middle of the word "hell", the field boss's giant iron blade tore into his back, depleting the rest of his HP. The impact stopped him midsentence, and he didn't get a chance to finish the word before he shattered into polygonal fragments the next moment.

That was it. He was dead. He had been shot, paralyzed and left a sitting duck for the field boss to finish him off. The rest of us all froze in shocked horror.

I whipped my head around to where both Lind and Yamata were right away. They should have been on the lookout – they should have seen this coming and warned us. But as I found out by looking, Lind was on the ground, HP in the yellow, paralyzed like his subordinate had just been. His mouth seemed to be moving, but I couldn't hear anything, so he must not have had the strength for an audible voice. As for Yamata… he wasn't even there. His complete absence made it obvious what had happened.

"We're being attacked, guys!" I shouted, trying to break the remaining raid members out of their stupor. "Be on your guard!"

"Do you really think that will help?" a smooth, low, raspy voice said from directly behind me. The sound of it – and the recognition of who it was – drove a shiver down my spine. "We've got the entire battleground surrounded. It's seven against forty, baby, not even counting the field boss."

I swung my photon sword's black blade out behind me, but it caught nothing but air – he evaded at the last second. I used my own momentum to pivot until I faced the second most terrifying person I'd ever met in GGO.

He wore a black poncho over his matching bulletproof vest, the hood of which covered most of his face. But one defining feature was not hidden by the hood: a jagged scar that ran down the right side of his tan, chiseled face. He was the only person in the game who had ever given me nightmares. The leader of the biggest, most famous PK legion in the game, «Laughing Coffin».

PoH.


Author's Note

So, how many of you totally didn't see a PK ambush coming? Because if the reviews are any indicator, none of you foresaw this as even a remote possibility. I'm so pleased with myself right now… I totally threw a curve ball here.

So, as far as plot twists go, was this a good one? I mean, I totally broke my normal code and killed off two people who had names already. And they were people who both existed and had prominent guild roles in canon SAO… but since they weren't even supporting characters, they were expendable. That's been my mindset from the beginning, honestly. If the character doesn't have/no longer has an important role in the story, then can and very well may be killed off.

So anyway, I'm about done here. As usual, please leave a non-retarded review with a unique message.

See you soon!