Author's Note

Hey, this chapter is longer than the other two before it! Cool, my length actually increased! Normally it gets worse before getting better… so this was a welcome surprise. Especially considering all of this chapter is just one long scene. Even without the author notes, this thing topped 3500 words! That's 3-400 words longer than both of the first two chapters with author notes! I'm getting way too excited about this, aren't I?

Contrary to the last chapter, this one was primarily edited by ForteDragon. But Konetsu did pop in to do a little editing while we were working on it (make your threesome jokes while you can), so they're both getting a thanks note here. Thanks a bunch you two, I really appreciate the help! It looks about three times better now that it's been edited!

Anyway, about this chapter. It's basically just a collection of setups for future events. But it's also my attempt at making Sinon's trauma and how she copes with it more realistic than in canon (for those of you who don't know, the lack of realism in Sinon's trauma in canon is why I dislike Phantom Bullet and to a lesser extent Sinon herself).

You don't really need to be briefed on anything else. Go ahead and start reading.


Airsoft Guns, Bamboo Blades and Unyielding Love

Chapter Three: Speed Blitzed


"Sorry if I was a bother to you," she said, giving a sort of rueful smile before turning around. "Looks like I gotta go now and help unpack. See you around."

With that, she left, walking back along the dirt path at an even, measured pace. The bespectacled girl kept watching her until she disappeared from view. She had to wonder what the girl read that caused such a complete tone shift.

A bother, she said?

That girl, Kimiko, was a lot of things. But so far, at the very least, a bother wasn't one of them. If anything, her most unsettling feature - her complete lack of any verbal filter - actually made her more tolerable than the girls in Shino's class.

If they ever met again and had time to talk in private, the short-haired girl decided she'd ask her what made her call herself that.


By the time Shino finished with her homework, it was only half an hour before she needed to go to bed. She still had enough time to do some light gaming, but nothing too intensive. She did, after all, have school the next morning. If she stayed up too late, she might sleep in and break her thus far perfect on-time attendance record.

So rather than log onto the main RPG that she normally played with Alice, the owner of the eyeglass store, she went onto another one that the brown-haired woman didn't play. If she went on their usual game, she'd get sucked into going on some two-hour long raid and totally stay up past her bedtime.

The game she selected was one known primarily for its drastic stat based player performance changes, and as such, its amazing PvP. In this RPG, she had an archer character with a pure Dexterity build – there wasn't a single enemy she'd ever faced that she couldn't reliably hit with her bow. Locally, she was pretty well-known as one of the best in the local PvP circuit, though she hadn't ever saw fit to test her skills outside of her home town's area.

After she got to the load screen, she selected the multiplayer option. Then, presented with both co-op and PvP as her options, she chose the latter. She then joined the default room that would show up for people in her local area, and her character appeared on the lobby map. She moved the avatar up to the left counter, the NPC of which allowed you to challenge the people who put their names on the list from the one on the right.

She saw the same names as usual for this time of night… except for the one at the bottom. That last one, she'd never seen before – and the name sounded kind of similar to the one she'd just been told earlier that day.

"Kiriko, huh?" Shino muttered to herself. "Definitely sounds like a combination of Kirigaya and Kimiko. Well, only one way to find out for sure…"

One of this game's unique features was that the player could record their own win and loss messages for PvP if they so wished. There were, of course, also a list of preset voices and lines to choose from if one wanted to retain their anonymity, but most people who played this game with multiplayer recorded their own to serve as signatures of sorts. If this new player had done that, then Shino would be able to tell if they were really the same person or not after they finished a match.

The bespectacled girl selected the name from the list and then chose 'duel' from the command window that popped up. For a few seconds, she waited with bated breath for this player to respond, and then, after a short three seconds, they accepted. As the one who put their name on the list, this Kiriko person would also be choosing their arena.

The one displayed on the screen was… interesting, to say the least. It was a large, moderately windy grass field-type map, and it had never been one that Shino particularly liked. Wind in this game affected one's movement speed as well as the speed and range of the dash command, which also included the skills that incorporated such movements. So in very windy locations, one could be up to twice as mobile if they had the wind at their backs, or half as much if it was directly against them.

This was one of the windiest PvP maps, but it still capped out at either buffing mobility by fifty percent or lowering it by twenty-five, so as not to be too game-breaking for those with unlucky positioning. However, the biggest annoyance of this map had to be the specific buff spots scattered throughout the place. The little levitating spheres of white light would buff the agility of the first to touch them by fifty percent per spot. Which would mean pretty huge increases in skill casting speed, not to mention action and movement speed.

And though some of the buff spots spawned at random locations, there were a few constants, with one being right in between where the players would spawn. Which would of course be a very bad idea to let her opponent have if Shino wanted to get an early advantage. She ran an almost pure Dexterity bow and arrow build, so she didn't have a whole lot of speed to begin with. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the direction of the wind would likely decide the result of the battle if she were to fight here.

The bespectacled girl realized at that exact moment that she had kept the other player waiting for at least twenty seconds while she thought. They couldn't start the duel until she confirmed the field choice. Blushing bright pink in embarrassment that she was glad her opponent couldn't see, she hurriedly accepted before they decided to abandon the duel. After a few seconds on a loading screen, they spawned on their map of choice.

Right from the very beginning, as the buzzer counted down from ten seconds, Shino realized this duel wasn't going to play out well for her. The wind was blowing exactly opposite her turquoise-haired avatar, which would make her as slow as possible and her black-haired opponent as fast as possible.

Not to mention her opponent was running a dual swords build. While the bespectacled girl would have an advantage at a good range, the moment that kind of build got too close, she could be hit by some logic-defyingly long and powerful combos. Dual weapon builds could often pull out some absolutely unbelievable original skills, too.

The duel ended in three seconds.

Right at the buzzer, the dual swords girl activated some sort of sword skill without even moving closer, the blades lighting up faintly. Shino immediately responded by pressing the buttons to activate a stun arrow skill to interrupt her foe's action. But before she even finished pressing the last button, the black-haired avatar had closed the distance between them and delivered a diagonal slash with her blue-glowing right blade. Her left followed up in a mirror of the initial hit that created a vice-like combo.

This two-hit skill, which didn't appear to be one of the game's default combos, had already taken out a fourth of the turquoise-haired avatar's HP in a single second. The activation speed of her skill was absolutely off the charts – it was almost instantaneous! To make things worse, when her attack closed the distance, the dual blades monster apparently took the buff spot in between them, making her even faster.

Shino immediately tried to back out and create some distance by dashing, hoping the bonus from the wind direction would get her to safety, but her opponent activated yet another skill as she tried to move away. Once again, the time between charge and combo start was just about instant – if anything, it was even faster. This new skill opened with a lunging thrust from the right that caught the archer dead in the stomach while she was stuck defenseless in the dash animation, unable to block.

It then followed with a horizontal slash from the left blade. Next, several diagonal strikes, until the hit count reached an incredible ten hits. By the end of the combo, which once again seemed to be one of this player's self-made skills, the bespectacled girl's avatar had completely run out of HP.

She lost before she could do anything to fight back. She had been totally speed blitzed in a way she didn't even realize was possible.

The screen turned white for a moment, and when it came back, the screen was split between a close up of each avatar. This would be where each player's win/loss phrase would be spoken. Because this person won without taking damage, the phrase that would play, if she selected one for it, would be her 'perfect win' phrase. But the loser's phrase would come first, and since Shino lost without dealing any damage, her 'overwhelming defeat' phrase would play.

"How careless…" it was one of the default phrases and voices, but it described the situation well. She shouldn't have accepted a duel in this arena, where the speed difference could quickly become too much to overcome.

"Ha-ha, you underestimated me!"

This voice… yup, it was definitely the girl she met in the eyeglass store and the park. It had the slight drop in quality of a recorded message, but it sounded just like her, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Which meant that Shino just got utterly destroyed by a weirdo with a glasses fetish. Talk about getting your pride hurt… that wasn't even a match, it was a completely one-sided slaughter! How could she call herself a top local player after getting defeated so easily, and by such an odd girl at that?

Could she even say she still had any pride after that beat-down? It kind of got slashed down to smithereens along with her turquoise-haired archer avatar…

As they returned to the lobby, half of her wanted to just go to bed and forget about this painful experience, and half of her wanted to acknowledge that she knew the girl who destroyed her, even if it really sucked.

However, the decision was quickly made for her. A notification popped up on her screen, not one from the game, but rather from the console. It told her she had a new message, and after a look at the name displayed, it did, in fact, happen to be the same name she just lost against. She pressed the button to view her messages so she could see it, then began to read.

"Hey there! Sorry, I kind of didn't hold back much. But you know, if you blocked instead of trying to dash out, you would have lasted longer since I wouldn't have been able to activate my second skill effectively!"

Not only did she effortlessly win, but she decided to lecture her, too? It was almost infuriatingly insulting, even if she most likely didn't intend any ill will. Shino gritted her teeth and typed up a response, trying to keep her emotions in check as much as possible.

"But unless I switched to a different weapon, I would have just been delaying the inevitable. And I didn't have another weapon equipped, anyway."

Really, she didn't have any other options. Normally, she didn't need any other weapons, either… nobody had ever come at her that fast before. She could usually interrupt other players to stop their first action and then maintain control of the battle from that distance until she won. This experience was so far outside the norm that it was almost as if she was suddenly playing a different game.

The resulting reply only added insult to injury.

"Yeah, about that… you run a pure DEX build, right? Your equipment suggests that, at least. You should really consider equipping a dagger for close range battles. Your DEX will add to your crit rate and you'll get more OS slots. I'm not personally acquainted with that style, since the only archer I regularly duel runs an AGI build and consequently has a rapier as her other weapon, but I'm pretty sure a bow/dagger build would be a good combo."

Just the day before, Shino was one of the best in the area with a near perfect win record in the dueling circuit. Then, this girl shows up, beats her in record time, and then promptly starts telling her how to play the game better… it really couldn't get much worse.

To clarify about something the other girl mentioned, OS stood for 'Original Skill'. It was the collective term for the skill combos one could create in 'skill record mode' by chaining together actions within a time limit determined by one's equipped weapon and stat scaling choices. Once a skill was recorded, each action would be sped and powered up to match the speed and damage of the default skill combos.

Both of the skills Kiriko used to beat her were OS combos, though the bespectacled girl had to admit she'd never seen one ten hits long before in her life. The first one she used, though, was a bit more straight forward – she probably chained a dash into two diagonal strikes made by tilting the joystick while hitting the attack button to create it.

Normally, a player would have three OS slots per weapon type. So that meant if, for example, Shino had a bow and a dagger equipped, she would be able to record up to three OS skills per weapon. But in the case of wielding two of the same type of one-handed weapon – like Kiriko's dual swords build – the player would get six OS slots like normal, but they would all be for the same weapon combination. This, of course, gave such players the ability to equip a full arsenal of original combos, since the maximum number of attack skills one could equip was exactly six.

Which meant that the bespectacled girl had likely only seen a third of the unique cards in her opponent's hand. Talk about a crushing defeat. She typed out a reply, sighing in resignation as she hit send.

"It's kind of pride crushing to get so completely shown up by the new girl in town… but thanks for the free info, I guess."

It didn't even take five seconds before she got a response. Granted, it was a kind of short one, but the speed kind of forced it to be like that, Shino supposed. For the amount she said, it was still pretty quick.

"Huh? I don't think I ever said I was new here…"

The short-haired girl expected this – from the moment she baited the conversation by adding in the 'new girl in town' bit, she had been trying to get it to flow this direction. Luckily, this girl was at least perceptive enough to figure it out right away. That is, to figure out that under normal circumstances, she shouldn't have known that for certain based on what had been revealed so far. She made quick work of responding.

"Well, your username is a combination of the first and last names I just got told by a new girl moving in. Who also happens to have the same voice as you do in your victory message. It was pretty easy to connect the dots from there."

This time, the reply came in a little under three seconds. "Oh, you're the cute glasses girl I met!"

If this were an anime, Shino would have had both a blush and an anger vein popping on her forehead right about then. She got called cute again, which was embarrassing and confusing, but on top of that, she got called a 'glasses girl'… by a girl with an apparent fetish for the aforementioned eyewear. Not exactly the direction she wanted this conversation to go.

"If you're planning to keep calling me that, you may as well just call me by my in-game name." came her response to this minor offense.

"Sinon-san, then?"

"We're talking over PSN, you don't have to bother with honorifics."

"Okay… Sinon. (*\\\*')"

The hell was she doing getting embarrassed by just that after unabashedly saying so damn many things that were far more embarrassing?! This girl just didn't make sense sometimes…! Why choose something as simple as calling someone by a name without honorifics to get flustered over?

Shino felt so exhausted right then. She just wanted to abort the conversation and go to sleep. She typed out one final thing before she left.

"I don't know whether you start school tomorrow or what, but I need to go to bed so I can be on time. I'm signing off now. See you later, Kiriko."

"Bye!"

After reading the parting word, the bespectacled girl stood up from her couch, walked over and turned off her TV. She had her most recent PlayStation model situated on a shelf that had levels made of metal grates which gave plenty of breathing room, so she could leave her console on indefinitely without having to worry about it overheating. Since she didn't really want to go back into her game so she could save it, she decided to just leave the system on for the night.

After she set her controller down and plugged it in to allow it to charge, she walked from her living room to her kitchen and grabbed a glass from the cupboard on the right. She then took it to the sink and filled it with a single gulp's worth of water – she was about to go to bed, so she'd regret it if she drank too much.

Shino set the glass down for the moment, then grabbed two pill bottles from where she left them on the counter. Not many people knew, and she didn't like to admit it, but she relied on a few medications in order to be able to function normally. One was a pill that helped her sleep soundly through the night; if she didn't take it, she'd have night terrors (think really bad nightmares except about five times as debilitating) every night and lose sleep over it, which led to huge decreases in performance in school. This med was, unfortunately, also why she couldn't drink a lot before going to bed – it made her sleep so soundly that if she drank too much, she'd end up having to wash her clothes and sheets when she got up, to put it plainly. That was never fun, and it just created more work for her.

The other pill she took was some anti-anxiety medication that she couldn't pronounce the name of. She kept a bottle of this in her school bag, just in case. Originally, she just took it when she had panic attacks, but more recently, her psychiatrist decided to put her on it more regularly to help ease her everyday anxiety as well.

If she hadn't been under the effects of that pill when that free-spirited girl called her cute, it would have done a hell of a lot more than just leave her out of sorts for a while. She would have been a total wreck, to say the least possible in order to preserve some of her dignity.

She absolutely hated relying on pills to solve her problems. But at the same time, she couldn't imagine how much worse her life would be without them. So she had no intention of stopping use of them anytime soon. Going off of them would be a far bigger risk to her health than just continuing to take them.

She opened each pill bottle and got a single capsule out from each one. Holding them in one hand, she grabbed her glass with the other and drained it, but kept the water in her mouth. After that, she popped both pills into her mouth and swallowed. They went down with no resistance.

Having finished with her business in the kitchen, Shino set the glass in the sink and went back to her bedroom at a leisurely pace, stopping every once in a while to check and make sure that all the lights in the house were out. After arriving in her room, she went right up to her bed and crawled under the covers – she had already gotten dressed in her black cotton pajamas between finishing her homework and starting to game. Before laying her head down on her pillow, she took her glasses off and set them on her nightstand, then turned off her bedside lamp.

Right before drifting off, she grabbed her phone from its charging spot on her nightstand and made sure her school alarm was set. Not a minute after setting it back down, she was out like a light, exhausted from her unusually eventful day.


Author's Note

So yeah, I made Sinon take pills to cope. Honestly, one of my biggest gripes about how stupidly written her trauma/anxiety was in the anime was the fact that we never saw her actually attempt to fix it in a realistic way. If people making finger guns at you is enough to make you have panic attacks, you need some serious help, either through medications, therapy, or both. So I'm going to include that, since it adds a dose of realism to her trauma (which by the way, is different – I made up my own event for Sinon's traumatic past, I'm not using the bank shootout thing from canon in this fic. Just so you guys don't automatically assume that I'm going that route with my already-stated total AU).

And, surprise, surprise, one of the pills she takes has a side effect! Yes, I did have to include that side effect of the sleep pill (which she can obviously avoid by just not drinking too much before bedtime, how nice for her to have such a manageable one). Again, I'm trying for realism here. Having people take pills and never making them deal with any unintended or undesirable effects is just bad, unrealistic writing. I came up with that one because for certain sleep aids I can confirm that they are at least said to do stuff like that (can't confirm whether they actually do because I've been lucky to not have any of the related side effects outside of sleep hangovers). And trust me, when you have whatever sleep disorder I do (they still haven't come up with an accurate diagnosis yet and it started years ago), you get put on a lot of different sleep aids. I have tons of experience in that field.

Well, I'm about done for now, I suppose. Next chapter is going to be their school morning, possibly going through to lunch. I dunno, it depends on how long I end up making the opening scene. Either way, prepare for Kiriko to begin (and possibly finish) the quest to learn Sinon's real life name!

See you next time!