GGO: Swordsman and Sniper

Hello! Me again!

Chapter 9.

Chapter 9: Death Gun

(1st person, Kirito, November 24th, 3:44pm)

I walked out of the cave and waited for the scan that would come in less then a minute, after that Sinon would come out and take her position in the conveniently placed tower and we would wait for the remaining players to show up.

The scan came and I turned on my map, it seemed that Yamekaze was maybe 5-10 minutes away depending on his speed.

Sterben was still hidden, unsurprisingly.

The dots representing me and Yamekaze on the map vanished and I closed the map.

I walked out into the open field and waited.

I heard Sinon walk out of the cave and move quickly in the direction of the tower.

I closed my eyes and focused on the tiniest sounds. Or his bloodlust.

After about 5 minutes later I could faintly hear footsteps in the distance.

The person was running so it probably wasn't Death Gun, so Sinon should have him covered.

He ran slightly off of my direction and stopped.

A moment after he stopped I heard the loud sound of Sinon's sniper rifle. Well that's that. That leaves just Death Gun, Sinon and I.

Focus.

Death Gun has a sniper rifle so I need to watch out for that, he probably won't bother stunning me because he can't kill me anyway so he'll be using live ammo.

He probably has some sort of weapon other then his handgun and sniper rifle if his handgun is reserved for 'killing' people, possibly even just a different handgun.

He has the ability to turn invisible with unknown limitations.

He is an SAO survivor so he knows how to fight with some form of sword.

He is a member of Laughing Coffin so he won't fight 'honorably'.

He has a mask which may serve a purpose other then just intimidation, possibly a gas mask. In that case he may have somme form of harmful gases weapons.

If there is poison in this game he will probably use it.

Just as I thought that I felt a surge of bloodlust to my right and leaned back.

Just as I did so a bullet whizzed past my face and severed a few strands of my hair.

I heard the bullet slam into the tower that Sinon was in but it didn't hit Sinon.

I turned towards the source of the bullet and saw a prediction line appear, it was aimed right at my forehead.

I activate both my swords and swing my right hand up to block the incoming rifle round.

It hits the sword and turns into a rather nice looking shower of sparks.

I run towards the source of the bullets, blocking the rounds as I went.

Then there was a pause in the fire and I heard the quiet sound of the silenced sniper rifle and the sound of Sinon's sniper rifle at the exact same time.

I could see that Death Gun's gun had been destroyed by Sinon's shot.

I closed the remaining distance in time to see Death Gun draw an estoc.

Okay, so this is a member of Laughing Coffin with an estoc, which Laughing Coffin members used estocs? I'll worry about that later.

"Hello, Kirito." he said in his demonic voice with steam puffing out of his mask.

"Hello." I answered calmly, readying my swords.

He too readied his sword and charged forward with speed nearing Asuna's, though not quite. Okay, one more thing about him, he is pretty fast.

I raised my sword and blocked his strike "This sword is made of starship metal, though this sword is the maximum size that a sword can be in this game." Death Gun said as we clashed before jumping back.

Taunting him I said "Surrender, you're finished."

"Zaskar is an American country, you won't be able to get my address from knowing my handle even if you are working with the government, and you can't remember my SAO name, can you?" Death Gun replied as I charged forward.

He parried my two sworded strike, barely, with his estoc and pushed back.

This caused me to wonder once again, why can a 'photon sword' be blocked/block a sword made of metal, or another photon sword. Being able to cut apart bullets makes sense, you're not reflection them, you are destroying them, oh whatever, it's video game logic.

"I think I have a pretty good memory, so I'll probably remember eventually." I replied.

Neither us talked as we exchanged blades, both of us losing HP. He was losing HP at a slightly faster rate, but the kind where one decent hit will make that advantage null.

"The old you would laugh at your skills." taunted Death Gun.

"Personally, I don't find that such a bad thing. I wonder though, have your skills with a sword stayed up to how they were in SAO?" I answered, knowing full well that during SAO I was better then I am now.

Death Gun momentarily slowed and I landed a decent hit on him, taking away about 10% of his total HP, or about 20% of his remaining HP.

But in doing so I over extended slightly and Death Gun landed a comparable hit on me, taking my HP down to a comparable level.

"You can't remember can you? You know why? Because I never told you. As I was dragged away I was going to tell you my name but you said 'I don't care about your name, as far as I'm concerned, I'll never see you again.'"

I remember that, after the raid on Laughing Coffin they dragged one of the high ranking players in Laughing Coffin past me and I did indeed say that.

But that also means that he may have just as well basically told me who he was, because with this much information there is bound to be someone who can remember his name.

"It's showtime" Death Gun said in english and charged forward at me.

That phrase was something Laughing Coffin's leader, PoH, said a lot but this person definitely isn't PoH, PoH used a large cleaver.

That means this is someone close to him.

I remember seeing some posters before the raid that had pictures of the Laughing Coffin higher-ups and their names, the top 3 specifically.

There was the leader, PoH, who always wore a hood, but his mouth could be seen underneath.

Then there were the two lieutenants, one was called Johnny Black and he always wore a sack on his head with wholes for eyes and mouth, his weapon of choice was a poison dagger so that's not it either.

And finally, there was Red-Eyed XaXa, who's real handle was XaXa, he wore a skull mask and somehow achieved glowing red eyes underneath it, perhaps a property of the mask, his weapon of choice was a rapier.

Of those 3 this was definitely XaXa, though he had an estoc not a rapier it was almost certainly him, same skull mask, same eyes, almost the same weapon.

I blocked his charge and pushed back, forcing him to retreat.

"XaXa, that's your name, Red-Eyed XaXa." I said.

He practically froze and I jumped forward with my right sword in front.

He retreated backwards and started to vanish "Not a chance!" I yelled as I lashed out with my left sword and landed a cut on his chest.

The moment my sword touched he became visible again and my right sword slashed though him at stomach level, cutting him clean in half.

His body landed on its side and he said in a fading voice "This isn't over..."

"Yes XaXa, it is." I said just as the glowing red eyes lost their glow and the 'dead' indicator appeared over him.

I let out a sigh of relief and turned off my swords, clipping them to my sides once more.

I turned round and saw Sinon running over, with a her sniper rifle in hand, though it was missing its scope. So that's what XaXa's bullet hit.

""We win."" Sinon and I said at the same time.

"Well what now? Is there a surrender button? Because I want to keep the ability to say that I've never died in a VR game." I said.

"I dunno, maybe there's a time limit and we can just wait and then it will declare a draw." Sinon answered.

I opened my menu and checked to see if there was a surrender button.

Seeing that there was I said "There is a surrender button so maybe if we both press it at the same time it'll be a draw. If we didn't particularly care about not dying we could do some 'romantic' and kill ourselves with a grenade or something but..."

"I don't mind, I don't really care which of us wins though so let's just both press the surrender button at the same time because I don't want to wait for hours just to see if there's a time limit." Sinon answered and opened her menu.

"3... 2... 1... Now." I said and pressed the button, seeing Sinon do the same.

We were surrounded by the teleport effects and both appeared at the spawn platform.

A message appeared in front of each of us and said a bunch of useless stuff and that there had been a draw so we both get to share first place.

We high-five each other and I say "Now time to leave this game forever after establishing ourselves as the best players."

Sinon nodded and we both logged out.

I opened my eyes and found myself back in the hospital room.

I took the Amusphere off my head and sat up, taking off all the electrodes from under my shirt.

Standing up a get used to the weight of a normal body and not the ridiculously high AGI body I had been playing with for the past couple hours.

"Well, now let's go get our paycheck." Shino said from next to me, earning a quiet laugh from the nurse.

"What? Why else would we be playing that smelly game? Seriously, those people pay to play that?" Shino defended, earning a slight laugh from me as well this time.

Shino pouted a bit and playfully punched my shoulder before saying "Well, let's get going."

"Right. Bye Aki-san." I said and waved to the nurse, Shino doing the same.

The nurse waved back and said "Bye!"

We left the hospital and once outside I took out my phone, dialing Kikuoka-san's number.

The phone rang for a moment and then he picked up "Hello Kirigaya-san." his voice said from the phone.

"Hello Kikuoka-san." I answered.

"We caught one of them in the trap you laid." he said.

I covered the mic and said to Shino "Looks like he did think that you actually lived there."

Shino just smiled slightly.

I uncovered the mic and spoke "There is at least one more, the one playing the game, and probably more unless the people they went after were specifically very close together. The one playing the game is an SAO survivor, his SAO handle was XaXa, you should be able to find him that way."

"Right, meet me tomorrow for your payment. Same place as last time." he said.

I could tell Shino heard what she said because of the annoyed sigh she gave upon hearing that we had to meet him there.

"At least the deserts there are good." I said.

"Obviously, but I feel so out of place there and I swear he tries to embarrass us as much as possible." Shino answered.

"True, but whatever, not like we have much choice." I said.

"Yeah..." Shino said with a sigh.

(Shino, November 25th, 4:27pm)

We walked into fancy restaurant again and thankfully this time annoying agent guy just waved us over this time.

We walked over and sat down at the table.

"Hello." he said, this time quietly enough to not attract attention, thankfully.

"Hello." Kazuto said.

"Hello." I said reluctantly.

The agent passed Kirito a piece of paper and looking over at it I saw it was a check.

"Giving us the check was obviously not what you called us here for since you could have just mailed it, so what do you want." I asked.

The next half hour was spent discussing the details of everything, and were rather boring, but to summarize, Johnny Black was the third Death Gun according to the confession of XaXa, also Sterben is a hospital term for when a patient dies and is German for die, apparently XaXa's father was a hospital owner so they were able to acquire the drug they used to stop the people's hearts and get emergency master keys for being able to sneak into people's houses.

The drug was a drug that relaxed the patients muscles which could kill in overdose called succinylcholine. I read it but I have not the slightest clue how to say it.

After that we head home, put on our Amuspheres—which we had gotten a while ago—and converted back to ALO.

"Ahh, so nice to be able to breathe!" Kirito said, exaggerating.

"Well at least we got paid, a lot." I said.

"Yeah, and we caught the murderer, which is a good thing on its own." Kirito said.

I nodded.

And that does it for this slightly longer chapter.

I had a raging head ache for most of the time I was writing this :(

Also please tell me, should I start a new 'story' for the Excalibur and Mother's Rosario arcs?

Also just counting the number of days and number of words I'm still somehow keeping an average of 3k words a day :)

Anyway, cya me oouuttiiyy!