Once more, Sinon felt her heart beating in anticipation. She'd confirmed it when she engaged the militia in the apartment block; this swelling emotion of tension and excitement.

Archery in ALO was an entirely different realm from a gun fight. You couldn't take targets at close range, or at least not proficiently. Sure, Sinon was unique in that she could force rapid shots in a very short period of time—but that was only because she had the agility and dexterity for it. ALO simply did not carry the weight of ranged combat that GGO otherwise did.

The reality of it was, Sinon was forcibly bending the archery system in ALO to resemble how she fought with guns. Be it with a sniper rifle or an automatic; and Sinon just so happened to be a very good shooter.

Which was why, even as she trained her gun on the back of the hooded figure in the neon-lit canteen, from the dark of her corridor, Sinon was still confident that she could take this fight. Even with the incompatibility of a sniper against a shotgunner… so long as she could dictate the terms on how she engaged the opposition, anyway.

'Not yet…'

Throom! Throom Throom!

"Keuk—!"

"Agh!"

"Hey—get to cover! Move! The tables won't stop bullets, move!"

The Stranger was no slouch. They were firing almost as soon as they could see something to shoot. Any exposed body part, any attempt to return fire on them, any mistake was immediately punished with a detritus-splintering blast of 12 gauge.

Throom!

The shotgun, a high-end semi-auto that Sinon recognized as the «Benelli M4 Super 90», fired regularly in 2-shot bursts of violence. Once, to blow off the body part with the misfortune to be exposed; a second, to finish the enemy off with a double tap when they'd crumple and fall out of cover.

—When they weren't simply killed outright the first time, at least. In a dark kind of way, it reminded Sinon somehow of the terrifying carnage when she'd blast a target apart with the .50 BMG.

The enemy were so close to the shots, that only Kirito's Photon Saber reaching out to poke them would've done more damage, compared to… whatever type of 12 gauge ammo this shooter was using to punch such oversized wounds in the targets.

Just as quickly as The Stranger would fire, the operator would be topping the tube off, pulling and loading shotgun shells 2 or 3 at a time from a belt pouch. Even as That Person dashed cover to cover, steadily creeping in on the enemy as they were kept off-balance and suppressed.

'Proficient, greatly so… but they're being bottlenecked by the loading gate. Not fast enough on the reload to do more than just keep up with the fire rate.'

A lull.

The Stranger tilted the gun onto its left side, briefly—a motion Sinon recognized immediately as something players did to check the chamber.

'They're empty.'

One of the enemy must've come to the same realization too; he popped up from his cover and attempted to shoot the cloaked assailant.

In a panic, however, his shot went high and missed. It impacted harmlessly into the ceiling; Sinon shrunk back from the wood splinters drifting down towards her face.

The Stranger's shot did not.

The operator thumbed out one of the shells on the ammo carrier slots attached to the receiver, dropped it directly into the chamber, hit the bolt release button—

—CLACK—

—and fired the shell immediately as soon as the chamber closed.

The motion was repeated, a little faster this time, and the target was finished off.

Sinon's grip tensed even as she kept her MP7 trained on the shooter's back. The scarf-wrapped sniper kept low, crouch-running between cover to conceal her movements, while she tried to maintain a close enough distance for what she wanted to attempt here.

'Calm yourself, Sinon.' She commanded herself. 'Calm. If you panic, you will make a mistake here and miss your chance. Treat this like a sniper ambush… just, at much closer range than you'd like.'

She loosened the white-knuckled grip around the handle of her MP7.

'And, finger off the trigger until I'm confident of a certain kill. With that skill level, I'm not sure I would be able to take this person down before they'd turn and shred me.

Wait to engage on my own terms.'

Distantly, quite a few of the dead bodies Sinon saw under the moody glow of the incandescent bulbs were slumped over their seats. Or sprawled out on the floor on their sides. Many didn't even have a weapon in-hand where they lay; the Stranger must've gotten them immediately out of an ambush.

'But the bar and private booths are all the way in the back…Did that person infiltrate first and burn the whole mag tube starting there, and work their way to the front?'

The Stranger had been in the middle of reloading; two more targets popped up behind cover.

"Oi—!" A yelp, as the stranger's off-hand quickly found its spot at the gear hanging from their belt.

Tink. —Something bounced off the floor.

'…!' Sinon's eyes widened.

Something that Sinon didn't expect to see: the operator engaged the first one not with a grenade or a shot, but a throwing knife; a thin, gray blur zipped through the air and planted itself squarely in the man's upper chest. He was finished off the normal way where he fell, the distinct [Dead] tag appearing over the body soon afterward while Sinon's gaze was still focused on the scene.

The shot transition to the second target was seamless, and struck true as another one fell to a grave wound. Same maneuver as before—no, almost.

There was the familiar loud sound of a shotgun discharge. But, then there was the other more familiar, dreaded noise. The remaining shots were miscounted, and in the heat of the moment, the third reload had been fumbled.

The distinct click of the hammer dropping on an empty chamber rang louder than any gunshot.

Wounded gravely though he was, his words were sputtered with a force only hatred could infuse them. "I got you now, you son of a bitch!"

"Oho, do ya?" The hooded girl—she knew it was a girl now by the voice—said as she held her empty gun aloft in her offhand, stretching her arms out to either side in presentation. "Then ya'd better not miss."

The NPC was wounded on his lower right hip, right below where his simple metal breast plate ended. He braced himself against a wooden support beam to keep himself standing. His arm trembled as he struggled visibly through the pain, slowly trying to lift his handgun level for a clean shot on the defenseless girl.

Just when he seemed about ready to fire…she yanked her hand backwards. The wrist cable attached to the «stun knife» she threw earlier dislodged itself from the dead man's body, and pulled the standing man off his feet as it snapped around his leg.

"Kugh—!"

He yelled as he slammed into a puddle of his own blood on the floor.

"Haa…"

—An audible sigh.

Sinon watched the cloaked girl slightly shake her head to herself, as if she was disappointed by what she saw. She sort of…casually sauntered over to the downed target, her boots making loud, hollow thumps against the wood floor as her heels hit the ground. For a moment, she seemed to be cradling the shotgun in the crooks of her arms to let her hands free—evidently more concerned with unhooking the throwing knife and replacing it in its sheath, than having any real sense of danger from her opponent.

She reached the incapacitated man, and dropped a shell into the chamber—

—CLACK—

—and leveled it.

"Ya idiots shouldn't have played this stupid damn 'bargaining chip' game with me."

If the look he gave her could kill, the girl in the cloak would've been dead.

She didn't wait for a proper response.

Throom!

—Tink!

The brass end of the shotgun hull rolled across the ground. The last shot fired in a fight that, as hectic as it was, only lasted a couple of minutes at most.

She stood there a moment, regarding the body.

"…Haaaa Ah…!" She sighed heavily. She gripped the empty shotgun with both hands and brought it over her head like a pull-up bar, groaning slightly as she stretched out the imaginary soreness in her virtual arms.

'Now.'

Tap tap tap TAP TAP TAP—!

Alarmed by the sudden noise, the girl started to whip her head around. But—.

"Do not turn around! Face forward! Do not turn! If I see you turn, I will shoot you right there!"

"Tch… And I thought I counted all of ya."

Shotguns, like bolt-action sniper rifles, were powerful tools within the ranges they were optimized for. Thankfully for Sinon, they suffered from the same drawbacks too—low ammo capacity, in this case. And she took full advantage of that.

The girl held her hands up…but then let one hand off the shotgun, and started to make a motion as if she intended to lay the weapon down.

"Stop. No you don't. I'm not letting you get a free hand to grab a knife or a grenade, I saw that performance earlier. You keep both hands on that gun above your head."

Sinon was deliberate about the distance she kept. Not too close that she was in striking range of a hand weapon, not too far that she'd miss if the girl wanted to dive out of the way. A hard, but well-earned lesson from ALO.

'Glad it's not a goddamn sword this time.'

"I know you haven't topped off that Benelli… And if you were thinking of chambering another shell, I guarantee you I'm a better shot than those third-rates you just squad-wiped. So stay still while I figure out what to do with you, understood?"

She saw the girl's shoulders move up and down in an apparent shrug.

'Okay…so now where do I go from here?'

Sinon scanned around the room one last time, but didn't expect to see something else that she could use. She was in a difficult situation; certain circumstances had forced her into making a hasty decision. But still, not much had changed: she was still in the middle of a tunnel, still in hostile territory, and still had very little in the way of support.

The only thing that changed with this, was now she was in a building with only two viable entrances to be shot from instead of many, and had a useless hostage who the people outside would be glad to shoot alongside her.

"Oya. You there, girl who's holding me up. Interested in negotiations?" The girl held hostage said so, with an air of casualness that didn't match her situation.

"Go on… Believe me, I have no interest in whatever the hell this...mess, is."

"Ohoo~. I presume as much, seein' how ya haven't just executed me like a petty rogue with a grudge and moved on yet. Which...must mean ya're looking for more than just a free kill and a clear path?"

"More like analyzing the situation and knowing I'm going to be judged an enemy along with you, even if I don't want to get involved. A lone armed girl walking off from the site of a bunch of dead bodies doesn't leave much room for the imagination, and I have no interest in doing a shootout by myself in a two-way tunnel with no decent hard cover."

"So ya lookin' for a guarantee."

"If that's what you want to call it." Sinon grimaced under her muffler. The sharp glower to her eyes was only enhanced. "Listen, I just want the exit, minimal time waste, and to finish the mission I have so I can get my reward and go to sleep."

"I see. Long day, is that it?"

"You could say that."

"I sympathize. ...Would ya mind, then? I'm not much help with my hands stuck in the air."

"Can I trust you, first of all."

"Ah. You're askin' me that?" The Stranger was actually taken slightly aback at this. She thought for a moment, and internally came to the conclusion anyone else would've—there was no trust here. Why would there be? But like Sinon, she also didn't want an unnecessary fight.

"Pull the knives off my waist. Both sides. That'll be ya guarantee I'm not goin' ta just shoot ya in the back."

Sinon hesitated at the strange request.

"C'mon! Hurry up! I've got more than enough headhunters after me who ain't gonna wait on us."

Finally, Sinon took the knives, unclipping them from the other girl's belt. She tossed them into the roll-up pouch she normally used for empty magazines.

"...Favorites of yours?"

"Gifts. And, yes."

"Fair... I have a friend who's like this about his blades."

"Oho~? Do tell."

"Different game, different conversation. The exit?"

"Er, right… Gimme a sec ta think."

Sinon looked to the cloaked girl with incredulity. "You don't have an escape route ready."

"Oi, I work a tight schedule! Normally I'd be gone by now. Wasn't expectin' an «add»." The girl said, trailing off at the end.

She pursed her lips in thought, nonetheless.

"Okay. Blue girl. Ya see that door behind us, past the bar counter? Has a wheel on it, looks like a ship's bulkhead. Get that open, 's our way out."

Sinon looked to where she pointed. She naturally spotted the bulkhead door…buried under a selection of desiccated bumper stickers and posters displaying the owner's poor taste. But it was there.

…!

There was a noisy din rising outside. For an area with the mood of a funeral parlor and the talkativeness of a graveyard, the audibly hostile clamor approaching was as obvious to them as a fire at night. Both girls glanced in the direction of the alert.

"And who are these new ones, now?" Sinon said.

"Idiots who need shooting." The Stranger replied sardonically.

Sinon ignored the remark, and Sky Eye came on the line then with a more thorough summary.

[Those are enforcers for the «Black Tower», a criminal organization that operates out of the «Communication Quarter». Normally if we had the option, I would tell you to avoid them.] The voice said with what Sinon was quickly coming to learn was the woman's usual cold, neutral tone.

As Sinon listened to Sky Eye, she started to see dark figures in the distance, giving form to the noises earlier. Only brief glimpses as they moved between the buildings and across roofs; either way, too close for either of the girls to still be out in the open.

Sinon patted the Stranger twice on the shoulder and gestured to the side as she dove for cover. The other girl soon followed suit, taking the opposite side of the doorway from her.

"And why didn't you warn me about them." Sinon said to the air, pointedly.

There was the faint sound of tapping off to her left side. A gray window floated into Sinon's vision. She only spared a glance long enough to confirm that it was a squad invite, which she accepted, and the sender's name: «Argo».

Sinon fixed her gaze forward in the next second.

[Because normally they ignore Contractors. As strange as that sounds, Contractors rarely interact with them nearly enough to be a factor in their eyes. An intentional effort would need to be made to antagonize them, and these ones were concealing their electronic signatures until now.]

Sinon glanced at the cloaked girl named Argo, having already filled in the blanks and confirming her suspicion that she was an intruder behind enemy lines, too. For her part Argo didn't look like an unaware greenhorn, either, despite her otherwise unaffected style of speech. She was calm now as if she was expecting this fight (which she probably did)—but also focused, steadily thumbing new rounds into her shotgun tube. An inexplicable smirk graced her features.

This alert calmness put Sinon a tiny bit more at ease that they were on the same side. For now.

She glanced at Sinon then with a look of confusion or curiosity, eyebrow raised. Sinon didn't know what she meant until the girl made a gesture of tapping her ear.

'Ah. She means the radio.' Sinon thought—only then realizing that radio signals don't normally work underground. 'She doesn't want to interrupt me.' She copied the ear tapping gesture and nodded to Argo, who nodded back and fixed her eyes forward.

Sinon similarly turned back to the direction of the incoming contact, and narrowed her eyes.

"Sky Eye, I hope you're not telling me next that they have optic camouflage."

After fighting Spriggans in ALO—not to mention the Death Gun incident—Sinon had become very weary about fighting cloaked enemies. It was the same loathsome problem that fighting on urban terrain presented her: being shot at from multiple angles from enemies she couldn't pinpoint. And she hated it.

"Hah!" Argo interrupted with a laugh. "Blue girl, I can guarantee ya they don't. If they had any of those left, I'd know about it."

'—any left.' Sinon noted the wording there. That and the cheeky attitude she displayed, Sinon could see why anyone would be angry enough to be pursuing her.

Still, Sinon couldn't get a good look at the enemy, peeking out over the lip of her cover—to judge their gear, count their numbers, ID them apart from civs—but she could tell from the texture when the light refracted off them (or more accurately, failed to) that their matte black uniforms weren't just normal cloth with a few armored plates attached. They had some kind of heavily armored outer layer on them.

"Then one of you two tell me what a standard assassination unit from the Black Tower would have. Because whatever they're running, it sure doesn't look like standard kit to me. I need to know if a PDW cartridge is going to be enough here."

Argo was the first to reply. "Light exosuits, basically armored HAZMATs. Ask ya friend on the radio for a longer explanation. I've worked over these guys with less, but I can tell ya right now: I wouldn't want ta take these guys in a real fight without at least a rifle-caliber carbine or a mid-range spec optical gun."

[She is correct. Consider those exosuits to be the equivalent of Class 3 plate armor with full body coverage, even the bodysuit underneath. 4.6mm will do much better damage than standard pistol calibers, but it would not be ideal.]

'Just my luck.' Sinon grimaced.

She thought about the Hecate, but swiftly decided against it. It'd take too long to set up, and was a bit bulky for the environment. But most of all—she just didn't trust the stranger she was stuck with to not shoot her in the back to try stealing it; knives for a chance at a light fifty caliber rifle would be a seductive proposition for most players.

Ignorant of this private deduction, Argo announced to the scarf-wrapped sniper. "Blue girl, I'll cover ya! Don't have a rifle on hand, but a hardened 12 gauge slug ought ta ring 'em like a bell!"

'Not like I have any other good choice here.' The sniper thought.

"Oh! And while ya at it—ask yer radioman if they can pull up the system spec info on those suits they're wearin' and have it sent to me? The purchase dates and serial numbers specifically, I need the info."

Sinon gave her an unreadable look at the request, gracefully still hidden under the muffler. She'd said some strange things already, but—'Why the hell do you need that,' Sinon almost said aloud.

Argo seemed shady, but she didn't give her the same impression that resale brokers did. Special edition avatar dealers, weapons collectors, limited event items, those sorts; strange, obsessive fellows.

[Do not concern yourself with asking, Contractor-san, I can hear what Argo said. Just respond in the affirmative, she will receive the data package when you leave the underground. Consider it her reward for a sub-mission.]

«Reward» seemed an odd word to Sinon for what amounted to banal text data. But…whatever. If it got things moving along.

Sinon shrugged to herself and just said "Sure" to the disheveled girl's attempt at brokering. She got up from her knee, but kept in a low crouch.

"And tell ya radio jockey we have a deal! We're helpin' each other out of this mess, after all, got it?"

"Sure!" Sinon repeated, again, slightly annoyed, to the insistent player. She hurried to the back.

Argo's golden eyes followed the girl's retreating form for the briefest of moments, then turned back to her work.

"Shit… I'm losing my touch. Twice today I'm pulling a random add into one of my problems." Argo murmured. "Now it's a fight and for once it's not the idiot in a black coat or the honor student with me."

Argo chamber-checked the Benelli, and then struck the back of the charging lever knob with her palm to ensure it was properly seated. Bracing against the side of the door frame, she was suddenly feeling glad that the immersion pod made her senses just that little bit sharper—as she trained her sights on a shack across the "street" and sent a thumb-sized slug straight through the sheet metal wall.

"Ya know what the great thing about fighting in this shitty goddamn tunnel is!?" Argo jeered, "It's that I can hear you bastards comin' a kilometer away!"

[—]

Glossary:

• Add: I think I've used this a few times already. An "add" is shorthand for "additional" or "add-on." It's normally used in MMORPGs to refer to a creature/mob that is "added" as an ally on the player's side, or conversely to the enemy's, especially during some kind of boss battle. (As far as I can tell, this is a much less common term compared to "pop" in the same circumstances. I was actually going to use "Third-Party" instead as a more accurate term to refer to Sinon entering mid-fight, but I am reluctant to use terminology that I cannot confirm—with confidence—that Japanese gamers also use. I am aware the term "add" is used in some translations of the SAO LN during the 1st floor dungeon Kobold raid.)

• Chamber check: Exactly as the name describes. This is a quick movement, and part of the manual of arms for all firearms. This can be anything from simply directly looking at the chamber to see if the gun has malfunctioned or run out of ammo, or physically pulling the chamber back slightly to check if there's a round loaded and properly seated—or not.

• Class 3/ Level III armor: The technically "correct" term is Level III, but I didn't want to cause possible confusion in terminology in an RPG-like setting by using "level" for two things. The US's NIJ lab established the classification to describe what each level of body armor is capable of defending against, in order of increasing ballistic threat. Level III specifically is capable of defeating most basic rifle caliber threats, and is the minimum armor level capable of doing so.

• Emergency reload: I do not explicitly use this term in-text, but I depict it. Also known as a "tactical reload"—an "emergency reload" is the fastest possible reload a shooter can execute, to get his weapon able to fire at an enemy in the shortest time possible. For magazine-fed firearms, this would be letting the magazine drop free to the ground without retaining it in a pouch, and loading a new magazine in. For manually-operated firearms such as pump-action shotguns and bolt-action rifles, this would be manually operating the action (i.e. pumping the slide, unlocking the bolt, etc), dropping a shell or cartridge directly into the open chamber, and then closing the action, without loading the rest of the ammunition. This type of reload is not ideal as it means the shooter has a higher likelihood of losing/damaging the dropped magazine, or having an otherwise incomplete reload.

(The John Wick 2 movie presents one example of this technique with a semi-auto shotgun.)

A/N:

And finally, the two stars of the show meet in GGO. I have been looking forward to being able to start having these two interact as their online personas.

Aside. Originally I was going to feature the full fight to its conclusion, but I wanted to keep the chapter length to general LN standards (by my estimate, it would have probably been double length all together). That, and I couldn't find a good way to do a transition leading towards the other half of the shootout.

Bit of trivia—

The exact shotgun Argo uses here is the Benelli M4 Super 90. It is a self-loading shotgun that uses a proprietary Auto-Regulating Gas-Operated system, which simplifies how mechanically complex the shotgun needs to be compared to competitors, as well as automatically adapting to fire different pressured/powered cartridges that might normally be underpowered or overpowered (within reason) in certain other shotgun platforms.

Yes—the acronym of the Super 90's mechanism does indeed literally spell "ARGO." I needed a close-range weapon for Argo considering her background and type of work, saw that in the description, and instantly decided that my search was over.