Keeping her sight trained on the crossroads a kilometer away, Sinon caught the enormous shadow that came racing out from the shade of the mountain on the left.
Reflexively, she made a tiny adjustment to Hecate II's aim.
The wind was blowing from the left at two and a half kilometers per hour. Humidity, five percent. She shifted just above the center of the faintly gleaming reticle, and the instant the prediction circle began to contract, she pulled the trigger without hesitation.
A thunderous boom rang out.
Through the scope, the .50-caliber round burst from the barrel, dragging a blur of air with it as it crossed the sky. The bullet, spinning counterclockwise, traced a spiral path and struck the upper half of the shadow.
"...Oh?"
Sinon let out a low sound and pulled Hecate II's bolt handle. The empty casing sprang free, and the next round was chambered.
The black shadow shattered by the heavy impact had not been her opponent, Stinger. It was an ordinary rock about a meter in diameter.
In the next instant, a larger silhouette came wheeling out from the same place the rock had flown from, rolling up dust as it charged straight toward her.
It was a four-wheeled armored vehicle. An HMMWV.
This kind of vehicle item did not belong to any player. It was placed at a fixed point on the map, and whoever reached it first could drive it. The body should have been brand-new, but there was a small dent in the front. Which meant the rock from earlier had been launched by the vehicle ramming it on purpose.
Stinger, sitting in the driver's seat, obviously knew that Sinon's main weapon, Hecate II, was a bolt-action rifle that could not fire continuously. He also knew the crossroads he had to pass through were already covered by her scope.
So his plan had been to use the HMMWV to knock a rock into the crossroads, make Sinon fire at it, and then cross before she could get off her second shot.
The logic was sound.
In fact, by the time Sinon pulled the bolt, the vehicle had already reached the center of the crossroads. Even if she fired again, she would only get one shot, and she had no time to aim carefully.
But by taking away the sniper's greatest weapon, the first shot with no Bullet Line, Stinger had also given her something extremely valuable.
That information was the path carved by the first bullet, still vivid in her mind.
As long as she adjusted without panicking, the second shot would fly along the same trajectory. If she used that, she could make a shot far more precise than the first.
Sinon made a slight adjustment to the rifle, then calmly pulled the trigger.
The cannon-like report rang out again.
The fired bullet seemed to vanish into the small side window of the HMMWV, punching cleanly through the thick bulletproof glass without slowing down.
A moment later, the vehicle carved a wide arc, climbed over a rock by the roadside, and then swung sideways. Its front slammed into the mountain wall, and red-black flames burst from the engine.
"...If you had gotten out and run, you might have been able to dodge the shot with the Bullet Line."
As she murmured that, Sinon loaded the third round.
Her right eye stayed against the scope. The crossing point of the dotted reticle aimed straight at the HMMWV burning in the flames.
Several seconds passed, but Stinger did not appear. He had probably died instantly in the driver's seat.
Even so, she kept her shooting posture.
Only when the victory notification appeared in the dusk-colored sky did Sinon leave the bushes where she had been hiding and stand up.
Match time: nineteen minutes and fifteen seconds.
Semifinal cleared.
With that, she had earned her ticket to tomorrow's BoB final tournament, exactly as planned. But Sinon did not strike a victory pose. She did not even smile.
Her mind had already moved on to the final match of Block F, which was about to begin.
Samuro would undoubtedly clear his own semifinal in less time than she had.
If he could block even high-speed full-auto weapons, that was practically the same as cutting off most players' arms.
So Sinon stayed where she was, holding Hecate II in her arms, waiting motionless for the instant she would be transferred to the next battlefield.
A few seconds later, she did not return to the waiting room.
Instead, she was sent directly to the preparation space for the final match. The opponent name displayed in the window on the floating hexagonal screen was exactly what she had expected.
Samuro.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw an elevated bridge stretching out in a straight line, and at the far end of it, a sunset as red as blood.
A harsh wind moved through the place, as if it had only just survived a fierce battle, stirring the fine aqua hair along her forehead. Sinon drew in a long breath and steadied herself.
The Intercontinental Highway map was, like the earlier ones, a square one kilometer on each side. But because there was no way to jump down from the hundred-meter-wide road running east to west through the center, the actual battlefield was just this long, simple elevated highway.
Countless wrecked vehicles covered it. There were even helicopter remains. Cracked concrete and exposed rebar rose and fell everywhere, making the obstacles extremely complicated.
After confirming the map information, Sinon searched behind her as fast as she could. Once she confirmed that Samuro was approaching from more than five hundred meters away on the opposite side, she immediately broke into a run.
There was a chance. On a straight map like this, with him in front of her, his only option was to come toward her and expose himself to her scope.
Or rather, ever since the preliminaries started, he had been exposing himself to everyone's guns.
But if his opponent was Hecate II, with the power she was so proud of...
That thin katana of his probably could not block these extremely heavy rounds one after another.
She set the muzzle in front of a floor-to-ceiling window in the building and dropped into a prone position.
Sinon drew another long breath, calming her whole body. With the experience she had built up over time, she controlled her breathing and heartbeat and watched the hit zone in her scope swell and shrink.
It was just like back then.
She was going to hunt him from far away.
And he had to think about how to slip past her sniper fire, close the distance, and end her.
Only, the first time they had crossed paths, he had not shown this distorted, defiant hunger to seize victory by the throat.
If this version of him fought the earlier, courteous version, the Samuro here would probably kill that polite man with ease in a matter of seconds.
But she could win.
Definitely.
Sinon carved that belief into her heart.
She did not really understand why she wanted to win so badly.
It was not because his arrogance, the way he looked down on everyone, had provoked her.
What the girl had seen in his eyes was a pure, starving will to fight.
He was complete, the version of herself she had always dreamed of becoming.
No fear. No reverence. Just the mad, shadowlike swing of a weapon, cutting down everything in front of him.
Someone like that could endure one betrayal, ten betrayals, a hundred betrayals, and still keep standing.
The finger she kept on the trigger trembled.
Maybe that was what she had been searching for all this time: real strength.
Sinon's focused pupils narrowed slightly.
Against the deep red of the sunset, that shadow appeared before her eyes. His coat hem and loose hair began to sway. His slender body stepped slowly over the obstacles, the blade hanging at his side.
He still did not run, not even knowing that Sinon was a sniper with Hecate II.
She barely thought at all. Her concentration had already been pushed to its limit, and the crosshair in her scope overlapped with Samuro's head. Then she pulled the trigger.
There was no Bullet Line; by the time he heard the shot, it would be too late to react. From that direction, even the bright muzzle flash from her barrel was blocked from view. It was a killing blow with no warning at all.
Hecate II roared through the building. The tall front windows went white, then shattered all at once, and the bullet tore straight through the crimson glow of the sunset.
Samuro suddenly raised the long blade in his hand, but unlike before, he did not swing to cut the bullet down. He held it sideways, as if to block it.
Hecate II's round struck the smooth, mirrorlike face of the blade with perfect accuracy, and a violent metallic impact rang out.
The force of the bullet threw Satoru's upper body backward. He stumbled back a step or two before barely regaining his balance.
Only then did the long, heavy-caliber bullet, which had looked as if it was about to drive into the surface of the blade, finally lose all its force and drop weakly to the ground.
Satoru narrowed his eyes at the blade, forged from the steel plating of a spaceship in the highest-level Ruins area and already scarred.
"...Hmph."
He gave a low, unreadable snort and raised his head again.
The gold in his eyes was beginning to spill outward, and after the first shot, he could now see a new crimson Bullet Line forming at the center of his forehead.
The second roar came, and even in the slowed world, the sniper bullet was still impossibly fast.
Gradually, the bloody sunlight, the broken bridge deck, the rusted vehicles, and the rising gunsmoke all began to lose their color, returning to the plainest black and white.
When heaven and earth had been stripped of their original light in his vision, the spinning bullet tearing through the air was once again brought to a sudden halt.
For the first time, he sprinted, drawing fully on his enormous AGI.
The hem hanging near his waist was blown straight back by speed born from absolute stillness, as if he had spread wings. He cut across the battlefield in a straight line, so fast that he seemed to become a shadow under the setting sun.
With an avatar built almost entirely around AGI, his burst speed came close to a vehicle at full throttle. Even the explosions caused by bullets punching through wrecked cars behind him could not keep up.
This was how someone with a Fluctlight was meant to move: if he could see every attack, then he only had to abandon defense and pour every resource into movement.
Satoru gave a savage grin. Like a phantom, he slipped through the obstacles on the battlefield and charged straight toward the building where Sinon lay in wait.
Sinon immediately picked up Hecate II from where it was braced on the ground. It was hard to believe her perfect shot had been blocked like that, but she was not discouraged; she was already calculating her chances.
That blade could not fully block her Hecate II. Three more times, no, maybe two, and it would probably shatter from durability loss.
Before fighting her, it had already cut down more than a hundred bullets. That was his disadvantage right now.
At two hundred meters, he might be able to dodge her sniper fire with his powerful reaction speed and AGI.
Then what about one hundred meters? What about fifty?
Sinon hugged her beloved rifle and moved. With her Strength value, carrying Hecate II while sprinting was difficult but still possible, so she rushed straight for the stairwell, aiming for the highest point: the rooftop.
A man with a blade was racing toward her, while a girl was hurrying to the roof of a building with no escape route left.
The scene looked a lot like the helpless resistance of a fragile heroine in a horror movie. But as Sinon clenched her teeth and climbed the stairs, she could not suppress the hot tremor in her heart.
She reached the rooftop entrance at full speed and casually shot the door off.
The girl burst onto the rooftop, rolled, and dropped flat to the ground, raising her muzzle toward the rooftop's only entrance with the shortest movement possible.
The violent movement made her gasp by reflex. But she forced her breathing down, scolding herself with the thought that this was only virtual, that an avatar did not get tired.
She pressed her lips together, cut off her breath, and stared through the scope.
Or rather, at this distance, she did not even need the scope. Sinon and Hecate II were less than ten meters from the rooftop entrance.
Ten meters. A shot close to the game's theoretical peak in bullet speed, probably near the speed of sound. If he could react at ten meters, if he could block that or dodge it... then he should go ahead and try.
She did not doubt for a second that he would walk into a trap designed purely to lure the enemy in for the kill. The way he was acting made it obvious: whatever was ahead of him, he would charge straight at it.
...
Satoru sprinted forward.
Before his eyes, the black-and-white world looked ancient, almost like scenery from another era. Yet it was impossibly clear—clear enough for him to follow individual grains of dust drifting through the air.
This was not because of the game's high performance.
Ever since The Seed Kayaba left behind had been released, the VRMMOs common on the market had inherited SAO's functions. One example was this "Focusing" technique. Only when a player deliberately focused on a point would the modeling detail and processing power allocated to that point increase, making it more refined and realistic.
In other words, the system kindly handed players the information they wanted to observe seriously.
But around Satoru, the ceiling, the stairwell, the shattered windows, and the glass scattered across the floor were all being rendered with extreme precision.
In an extremely short span of time, he had thrown his focus everywhere. The system returned every detail of his surroundings to him.
He was accelerating, and the system seemed to accelerate with him.
Amazing. Every corner of his vision remained perfectly clear; before these eyes, the vast virtual world had nowhere left to hide.
His thoughts were clearer than ever. In this black-and-white world, he felt as if he could go anywhere.
The freedom of letting himself soar was intoxicating.
Satoru no longer cared about the cost to his lifespan, because this was simply too addictive.
As Rinko had said, this was like experiencing the hatching process of The Seed.
Curiosity burned around him like a raging flame.
If I keep accelerating, what else will I be able to see? If nothing can escape my perception, could these eyes find her directly? And if they could... then what did it matter if his life burned away in the process?
That conviction pulsing inside him was like the forbidden fruit that tempted the serpent, giving off a sinful fragrance.
The gold in Satoru's eyes shone even brighter as faint black curves began to surface within it, the radiant color quietly turning dark.
He burst onto the rooftop.
It took only an instant to realize that Sinon had already set up her rifle. It was her only remaining chance to win.
Satoru licked his lips. So what? Bathed in the light of the Fluctlight, he felt utterly unstoppable.
He burst out laughing.
The black-and-white world before his eyes, already stripped of color, was stripped of even its white filling next. Only a dim black curtain remained. Objects and scenery were outlined by simple white lines.
The vast virtual world had been reduced from its original color draft to a black-and-white sketch, and then to the simplest line art against a black background.
Not a trace of emotion remained, but he knew with absolute certainty that he had reached a higher level.
...
The heavy footsteps sounded like a warning bell, announcing that Sinon's enemy was approaching.
She clenched her jaw without realizing it, and the moment the footsteps stopped right behind the door, the instant her eyes caught the shadow of that figure, the finger resting on the trigger pressed down with all her strength.
Without hesitation, Hecate II unleashed its long-range killing shot like the roar of a thunder beast.
Clang.
She had only just pulled the trigger, and her finger had not even left it yet.
Sinon forgot to breathe, her eyes wide.
All she could see was Samuro wearing a cruel smile, the blade knocked from his hand by the tremendous force of impact. But that also meant the blade had taken the blow for its master.
Samuro had already raised Blue Rose in his right hand.
Defeat was inevitable. There was no room left to maneuver, and though it was only a virtual loss, the man before her looked genuinely prepared to kill her.
Sinon stepped back.
"Cough, cough, cough!"
What she heard next was not a gunshot, but a cough.
Samuro's body froze in midair for reasons she could not understand.
After trembling for a few seconds, his entire body broke apart into digital fragments and was deleted.
Sinon stared ahead in silence, needing several seconds to process what had happened.
"Dis...connected?"
The system automatically declared Sinon the winner.
But she still could not understand it.
...
Curled up on the floor, the man ripped off his new-model helmet and slammed his fist into the ground in rage.
"Why did you block me?!"
"Why did you stop me?!"
"I could have gone farther! Faster! So fast I would reach a level where no one else exists!"
"I lost? How could I possibly have lost?!"
He gasped for breath like a prisoner trying to break out of his cell, venting all the negative emotion born from that interrupted journey.
He could not see himself. If he could, he would have noticed that his eyes were already bloodshot.