Sword Art Online - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.1

"This might be a game, but it's not something you play."
- Akihiko Kayaboa, Sword Art Online programmer

1

Thirst.

The sensation of thirst was so realistic, it was hard to believe it was just a simulation created by the AmuSphere. The tongue lost moisture, and the throat hurt with each breath. It made her wonder if her biological body, resting on her bed in the real world, was suffering from dehydration.

I wish I could log out and chug an entire glass of ice-cold water, she thought. But in this mysterious world, Unital Ring, her avatar would not vanish while she was away. Her thirst meter would stop, but if she logged off, drank water, and logged back in, the meter would still be depleted. And now that the grace period had ended, if she died once in UR, she could never log back in again. Potentially, she could lose her character and all of her items. That was the one thing she had to avoid.

And that was why Shino Asada, aka Sinon, was rushing desperately across the barren wasteland in search of water to quench her virtual thirst.

Running made the thirst meter deplete more quickly, but walking wouldn’t get her there any faster, either. She just had to trust that if she ran far enough, she’d find a source of water before her TP hit zero. The desert was very flat overall, but about half a mile ahead, there was a small boulder with what looked like plants growing along its silhouette. If there wasn’t water around there, she was out of ideas.

“Seriously…How could I let myself get stuck in this situation…?”

Her voice was hoarse in her parched throat. Sinon clicked her tongue, thinking about the mistakes in judgment that had led her here.

Six hours earlier, at 4:50 PM on Sunday, September 27th, 2026.

Sinon was logged in to the VRMMORPG Gun Gale Online (GGO), delving in a high-level dungeon and farming mechanical enemies for rare metal drops.

Since making an account for ALfheim Online (ALO), the home territory of her friends, she’d spent more time playing over there, but Sinon had no intention whatsoever of quitting GGO. The only weapon she’d ever used that was truly a part of her was the Hecate II, and she intended to win the next Bullet of Bullets tournament entirely on her own. Her solo metal farming was so that she could customize the Hecate and avoid the attention of her rivals in doing so.

The metal had only a 3 percent drop rate, and she was down to just one more to go when it happened:

The ground of the dungeon had rumbled beneath her feet, rainbow colors had filled her vision, and then she was teleported back to the surface.

She found herself in a town she’d never seen before. Weak sunlight coming through a thin cloud layer quietly illuminated a gray city. The road stretched in both directions without a soul in sight.

Sinon had traveled the world map of GGO from end to end, but she didn’t recognize this place. The buildings were constructed not of concrete but of old-fashioned stone, and the road was paved with cracked bricks rather than asphalt. More and more GGO players teleported in around her, all of whom looked around in bewilderment. She didn’t recognize a single one.

The situation was baffling, but Sinon did not appreciate being surrounded by unfamiliar men, so she stole away into a nearby building. Checking to make sure there were no residents inside, she hid in an upstairs room, clutching the Hecate to her chest as she listened to the voices outside.

About ten players gathered together and began to discuss what was happening in the hopes of finding an answer. Someone eventually noticed a fundamental change to the UI of the system menu, so they attempted to contact the development team but got no response.

That left logging out as the only option to collect more information. By now, there would be plenty of posts about this anomaly on GGO community sites and social media. Sinon really wanted to log out to learn more, but an ominous feeling kept her online.

Outside the building, the ten players were using their strange new menus to return to the real world. Once the outside area was silent again, Sinon leaned out the empty window to look at the road below, and gasped.

The ten avatars were still there, resting in the middle of the road on one knee. That was the standby pose, a familiar sight from GGO and ALO. In most VRMMOs, it was common practice to keep player avatars present in the world for several minutes after they logged off while outdoors to prevent them from being able to escape from monsters or other players by just turning off the game. If that rule still held true, it meant this city was considered “wilderness” rather than an actual city and offered no automatic protection. Then again, there were absolutely no civilians around, so you couldn’t even call it a city—more of a ruin, really.

And that meant…

Sinon was watching the scene with her breath trapped in her lungs when she heard a kind of skittering, scraping sound. She looked to the right and saw a number of long, thin shadows emerging into the waning sunlight from a side path. They were insectoid monsters, like a cross between a centipede and an earwig, except they were about two and a half feet long.

Based on the size, they didn’t seem to be that dangerous. But all the GGO players within their attention were offline at the moment. The gleaming assault rifles and laser guns on the players’ backs were impressive, but they were useless without an active finger to pull the trigger.

“Come on—log back in!” she hissed, gripping the windowsill, but the ten of them just knelt there, perfectly still. The centipedes were rapidly approaching, their many legs skittering across the paving stones. Sinon reached behind her on pure instinct, grasping for the backup MP7 she kept in a holster.

But she stopped short. The five centipedes visible weren’t necessarily the only ones nearby. Gunshots could potentially attract an entire swarm of them. She had a silencer on the MP7 for this very purpose, but she’d left it in item storage while she was farming for materials to maximize her carrying space. There was no time to dig through her menu so she could pull it out and snap it onto the muzzle.

While she sat there, paralyzed with indecision, the lead centipede crawled onto the back of one of the players and dug its huge jaws into his unprotected neck. Crimson damage effects spilled from the spot like spurting blood. The other centipedes quickly set upon the rest of the players.

Sinon assumed that, even as helpless as they were, the players could survive a few minutes of biting. The centipedes were obviously low-level monsters, and the men were outfitted with pretty fancy armor.

But just a matter of seconds later, the player who had been bitten first simply emitted blue particles and vanished. The other players died shortly after him. It happened all too quickly. Either the centipedes were much tougher than Sinon thought or…

Sinon opened the strange ring menu. Out of the eight icons there, she touched the human-shaped one, which she guessed was her status window. When she saw the values that appeared, she gasped.

Level-1. Maximum HP, just 200. Her stats had been reinitialized.

That wasn’t all. Below her white HP bar was a green MP bar, then a blue bar marked TP, and a yellow bar marked SP. MP was easy enough, but she had no idea what SP and TP were supposed to represent.

There was no point trying to figure that out now, though. She glanced out the window again—five players were gone. The other five still living were now in the centipedes’ sights. They were going to be wiped out before any of them returned.

“Ugh…!”

Sinon drew her MP7. She unfolded the foregrip, extended the stock, and switched the selector from safety to semi-auto. Pulling the cocking lever loaded the first bullet into the chamber, and she took aim at the lead centipede, resting her body against the windowsill. Her finger slid against the trigger and tensed just a little.

“Huh…?”

She was aghast. One of the two major systems that made GGO, well, GGO was nowhere to be seen: the bullet circle.

A bug? A system error? Or…? There was no time to wonder. Some monsters had the ability to nullify the bullet circle, forcing you to use your sights and aim the traditional way. She was shooting down from the second floor, but at this distance, there was no real concern about the trajectory being off.

Sinon aimed at the head of the centipede as it prepared to bite its new target, then double-tapped. Its reddish-black shell burst, shooting sticky green fluid outward. The second shot missed by a bit, but an HP bar with an unfamiliar shape over the centipede’s head rapidly dwindled to zero. The centipede screeched with its final breath, curled backward, and fell to the street, then…did not burst into blue shards and disappear. It was still there, but it was definitely dead.

She tried to aim for the next centipede and clicked her tongue. There were red cursors over the heads of the other four creatures. Her instincts told her they were focused on her now, and that was correct. They changed direction to approach her building. She told herself not to panic and took out a second centipede with another double-tap.

The remaining three immediately scurried straight up the stone wall. She switched the selector to full auto and leaned out the window to aim downward. The rhythm of the gunfire was pleasing, and a third centipede fell to the ground, ooze pouring from its carapace where the 4.6 mm bullets struck it.

The fourth met the same fate as the others, but the fifth reached the window. Sharp mandibles extended from its mouth toward her, and it swung its pincer bottom to point at her, too.

Sinon didn’t force her shot, kicking off the sill instead. She did a backflip as she flew and opened fire with the MP7 when she landed. It cracked the fifth centipede’s head as the insect tried to get inside the building. Its long, thin torso hung over the sill.

“Whew,” she exhaled, checking the remaining ammo in her magazine out of sheer habit.

A sudden, unfamiliar musical fanfare blared in her ears, and a blue ring rose from her feet up over her head. A window popped up in front of her.

Sinon’s level has risen to 2.

“Level-2…”

She couldn’t help but repeat it like a lament. In GGO three days ago, Sinon had just reached level-107. Once Zaskar, the dev team for GGO, realized the error, they would probably do a server rollback for everyone, but the game map and monsters were too polished for this to be some kind of glitch. It was like she’d been tossed out of GGO and pulled into a completely different game…

With her MP7 still at the ready, Sinon carefully walked toward the centipede’s body. She poked it with the muzzle a few times, but it did not move. After that, she took her hand off the foregrip and tapped the creature with a finger.

A properties window appeared with a shwam sound. It said: Red-bellied Centiwig Corpse, Material, Weight: 5.82.

The red-bellied part of the name made sense. The red coloring on its underside was brighter than on its back. And if it was classified as a material, that suggested something.

Sinon put the MP7 back in its holster and reached for the knife on her belt. But she touched nothing. She looked down at her right side and saw that the space where she kept her favorite survival knife was empty.

“…”

She glanced in confusion at the Hecate II resting against the wall. She had her main weapon and her side weapon, plus all her armor, so why would her knife be the one thing missing? Maybe it fell out when she did the backflip—not that such a thing should ever happen—but there was no sign of it around the room. She did, however, notice a cabinet against the wall.

On closer examination, the cabinet was unlike the metal cabinet style of the world of GGO. It was an old-fashioned wooden cabinet, more suited to the world of Alfheim, if anything. She opened the grimy old doors and found almost nothing inside except for some broken dishes, a bottle filled with an unidentifiable substance, and one small knife.

She picked up the knife. It was not meant for combat; at best, it was suited for peeling fruit, but the blade still had a little bit of an edge, at least. With the rusty knife in her hand, she went back to the centipede. After much hesitation, she jammed the knife into the gap between its segments.

There was a skin-crawling chugk sound and a vibration in her hand that made her want to hurl the knife away—but fortunately, one action was all it took for the centipede’s body to flash blue and vanish. A number of items fell on the spot it had occupied.

A message appeared reading Dismantling skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

She shrugged and minimized it. On the ground were a couple of reddish-black plates and what looked like two curved thorns. She scooped them up and tapped them, turning them into Inferior Centipede Carapace and Inferior Centipede Pincers. She didn’t know what they were for, but it couldn’t hurt to have them. Sinon opened her menu and tossed the carapace and pincers into her inventory. Then she stuck the knife into her belt, picked up the Hecate II, and left the room to head back down.

From the entrance of the building, she peered outside. She’d blasted the gun at full auto, but no new centipedes or other monsters seemed to be emerging.

The five players she’d saved were still in their standby poses. She used her knife to dismantle the four other centipede bodies and claim their materials.

“Can’t upgrade the Hecate with centipede shells, I assume,” Sinon muttered, sighing once again. However, she soon noticed that there were five dark bags resting on the ground where the player avatars had died earlier.

“…”

Feeling hesitant, she approached, sticking the knife back into her belt and touching one of the bags. It turned into a ring of light and disappeared. There was a new message for her now:

AK-47M acquired. Tactical Vest acquired.

“…”

Both were standard equipment in GGO. As she expected, the contents of the black bags belonged to the dead players. Of course, it was the centipedes that had killed the players, not Sinon, but looting a dead player wasn’t her style. She was opening her inventory to put the items back when she noticed something.

In basically every VRMMO, items left behind in the world would vanish after a certain amount of time. She wasn’t sure where the respawn point would be for those players, but once they realized their weapons had dropped, they’d be rushing back to reclaim them. If she wanted to be considerate, she should hold on to them until the players returned.

So she decided not to materialize the first items she’d looted, and she picked up the other four bags. She was worried about storage space, so she checked her window again, but her carrying capacity wasn’t even at 20 percent.

Struck with foreboding, she checked the contents and saw that all she was carrying were ten retrieved items and the materials from the centipedes. All of the items she had earned in GGO were gone.

“Unbelievable…”

She closed the window.

Her items would probably come back once the situation was resolved, but it was worrying that there was still no announcement from the dev team. She wanted to avoid losing her Hecate and MP7 if she died, so it seemed like she’d have to make her precious guns last until the rollback could begin—and then another thought made her suck in a breath through her teeth.

If everything in her inventory was gone, that meant her healthy stock of 12.7 mm ammo for the Hecate and 4.6 mm ammo for the MP7 was gone, too. The only things left were the seven shots in the Hecate’s magazine and the forty or so bullets between the MP7 and its magazine on her belt. Once she’d fired them all, the only weapon Sinon would have left would be the rusty kitchen knife she’d found in the cabinet of the abandoned home.

Strictly speaking, she also had the weapons and ammo dropped by the five dead players. But if she made off with them, she was nothing but a looter in name and fact.

Belatedly, she regretted using her guns on the centipedes at the full auto setting. Still, Sinon waited for the other five to log in again. The centipedes would be back eventually, so the six of them had to work together to survive. She pulled the MP7 from her holster again, then backed against the wall of the building and waited for three minutes.

At last, one of the players twitched, then bolted to his feet.

“Hey, everybody, let’s move! In the middle of the ruins is…,” he shouted but stopped when he noticed that only Sinon was present and listening. He looked around, then lowered his voice and said, “Hey, you, there were about five more people here before, right? You know where they went?”

“They died, unfortunately,” she said, shrugging.

Sinon was about to explain about the centipede attack when the player—who was dressed in gray digital camo and used an optical gun—took aim at her with the assault rifle on his shoulder.

“So you’re a PKer, huh?!”

“What?!” she shouted, a mixture of surprise and outrage. Then she realized that what she said could be interpreted as a bit of creative assassin role-playing. Plus, she had the MP7 in her hand, so she quickly lowered it and protested, “No, it wasn’t me—it was giant centipedes!”

“Oh yeah? And where are they?!”

“I took them out! I saved your lives!” Sinon objected. She wanted to open her window so she could take out the carapaces to prove it to him, but the man immediately pulled the trigger and left a burn mark on the wall just to the right of Sinon with a yellowish-green laser.

“Hey!!”

“Don’t move! Only the lowest of the low would prey on people while they’re logged out!”

“I’m not preying on anyone!” she hissed, trying to suppress her anger. But the man was in a rage and wouldn’t take his finger off the trigger. If she tried to move again, he would hit her for certain. Sinon was only level-1—well, level-2—so even a low-powered optical rifle could kill her instantly. If she died and dropped the Hecate, the man would assume it was rightfully his, won in battle.

Should she take the initiative and kill him first to protect her partner? But how?

A new voice broke the silent tension.

“Damn, this is crazy! It’s not just GGO,” shouted one of the other players as he got to his feet. When he noticed the man with the gun and Sinon, he exaggeratedly leaned backward in shock. “Wh-whoa, what are you doing, man?”

“Use your brain! This chick killed five of us while we were offline!”

“Yikes!”

The second man pulled a large-caliber revolver—probably a Ruger Blackhawk—from his holster. Sinon’s back was literally against the wall, and while she was searching for a way out, the other three awakened in quick order.

She’d completely lost the chance for initiative. It seemed the only thing she could do now was pray that one of these people would be calm and hear her out.

Then a familiar dry skittering hit her ears. She looked around briefly and saw two long antennae extending from a split off the road, to the left behind the men. The antennae just wavered there for a moment, then emerged farther, attached to a head with huge mandibles and a long body. The red-bellied centiwigs had respawned.

Because the guy with the optical gun was screaming his head off, the others didn’t realize the danger. She rolled her eyes yet again and muttered quietly, “Behind you.”

“What?! Did you say something?!” her assailant growled.

Again, she warned, “Behind you!”

“What, you think I’m gonna fall for the oldest trick in the book? Hurry up and drop your loot before I shoot—”

But a shriek—“Aaaiiieee!”—interrupted him.

“What the hell was that for? Would you shut up…?” the rifleman snapped, glancing over his shoulder, only to let out a yelp. “Gwah?!”

At last, he’d noticed the centipedes emerging onto the road. There were at least ten of them.

The five brigands backed away, guns aimed.

This is it…I have to escape now. The red-bellied centiwigs looked frightening, but two or three 4.6 mm bullets from the MP7 were all it took to kill them. The players’ gear was at least mid-rank, so if they shot like hell, it would take less than a minute for them to kill the bugs.

The instant she heard the first shot, Sinon bolted. She put the MP7 back into its holster and sprinted in the opposite direction of the gunfire. It was strange that she could run perfectly fine with the ultraheavy Hecate II on her back, despite being only level-2, but she wouldn’t know why unless she survived this situation.

In less than five seconds, she heard an angry shout among the gunfire.

“Ah! Hey, the chick ran away!”

“Dammit! Let’s finish them off and go after her!”

At that point, she was rooting for the centipedes to put up a better fight. This left her with maybe ten seconds to get away from the wide-open main street.

Right after he’d logged back in, the optical rifleman had said, Hey, everybody, let’s move! In the middle of the ruins is… The most straightforward interpretation of that statement would be In the middle of the ruins is a safe space. So she wanted to head that way, but it was difficult to go to a place with lots of players around if some of them assumed she was a PKer. So she should head for somewhere outside the ruined town.

Sinon recalled what she’d seen looking out the upstairs window. In her memory, the direction across from the window—meaning the left side of where she was running—featured a group of larger buildings. If that was the center of town, then the right-hand side was the way to leave.

The gunshots were wrapping up in the background. She had to get away from the main road before the men spotted her. Side street, side street…There. Five yards ahead.

Sinon tilted herself as far as she could go and made a ninety-degree turn down the side path as close as possible without slipping and tumbling. There was a narrow alley barely four feet wide between the buildings. If it was a dead end, she was screwed; she just had to have faith for now.

As she ran, stepping as lightly as possible, she saw three half-broken wooden boxes up ahead. She jumped behind them and crouched. In less than ten seconds, she could hear the stomping of heavy combat boots as well as irritated exclamations.

“Damn! Where’d that girl go?!”

“Maybe she snuck into one of the houses or down a side alley?”

“So we have to go searching them one by one? Man…”

“Don’t complain! She killed five of us!”

“Plus, that chick’s sni-ri was superrare. If it doesn’t get rolled back, we could sell it and split the winnings and still all come out superrich.”

…What the hell is a sni-ri? she wondered, then realized it was supposed to be an abbreviation of sniper rifle. They were right that the Hecate II was one of the rarest weapons in GGO, but if she lost it to scrubs who would call it something as stupid as a sni-ri and then sell it for cash, she’d never live that down.

If the men came down the alley in a line, she’d just have to shoot through all five of them with one of the Hecate’s 12.7 mm bullets. But doing that, even in self-defense, made her a true PKer. Plus, she had only seven bullets left, and she didn’t want to have to use them on this.

Don’t come down here! she begged.

It was as though they could hear her mind. The footsteps slowed at the entrance to the alley. She couldn’t see them, but she could sense their attention on the spot where she was hiding.

Sinon silently slipped the Hecate off her back and held it in both hands. Now she wished she’d left one more bullet in the chamber for good measure. She placed her right hand on the bolt handle. She’d wait for them to come down the alley as close as possible before loading the bullet, and then she had to shoot before they reacted to the sound.

One, two…three seconds later.

“Hey, someone check those busted crates…”

But she didn’t hear the rest because it was drowned out by the burst of a submachine gun. Live bullets burst through the wooden boxes, grazing Sinon’s hair and combat boots. Her instincts screamed at her to bolt from the hiding spot, but through sheer willpower, she kept her avatar still.

“Nothing there.”

“Don’t just start shooting like that, man!”

The first voice merely laughed. Five sets of footsteps moved away, but Sinon stayed in place for another thirty seconds before carefully rising. The wooden boxes were torn up after getting shot, and one more impact would have crumbled them to splinters.

You’re going to regret wasting those bullets, she warned them silently, then rushed down the other end of the alley.

Fortunately, the narrow path wasn’t a dead end, and it took her to another, larger street. Once upon a time, many people must have walked the stone-paved road that now hosted little more than wind and dust. What had turned this town into an empty ruin? The answer might lie in the center, but she wasn’t going there anytime soon.

Sinon headed for the outward edge of the town, realizing that at some point, she had stopped thinking of this place as a glitch or an unintended case of human error but as a proper VRMMO world with its own internal logic. She encountered the occasional centipede, spider, and scorpion-type monster, but she chose to conserve her limited ammo and ran away from them. At this point, she wished she could have switched her side weapon from the MP7 to a photon sword…but hindsight was twenty-twenty.

She was on the move for over twenty minutes, avoiding battle, when a tall stone wall came into view. It looked very much like a castle wall surrounding a city, but it was stacked with seamless blocks, with no way of climbing up them.

Sinon grabbed a pebble and flicked it upward with her thumb. When it landed on the ground, it bounced to the right, so she followed the wall in that direction.

In less than a minute, she arrived at a large gate. Praying that it wasn’t locked, she approached carefully, but she soon saw that her worries were unfounded. The heavy wooden double gate was standing on one side, but the other side had come out of the frame and fallen to the ground.

She stopped, wondering if leaving the town was really better than staying. But there was no way to know the right answer; the only thing she knew for sure was that she couldn’t approach the other GGO players who had been teleported here until she cleared up their misconception that she was a PKer.

What she needed now was a safe place where she could log out. If there were centipedes and scorpions and such all over town, the only possible shelter she’d find was outside.

With her mind made up for now, Sinon walked up to the gate, stepped through the empty frame, and made her way outside the city.

“……Whoa…”

Instantly, she found herself gasping at the view spread out before her.

The scale of the world map was, simply put, vast.

GGO’s familiar world was anything but cramped. On foot, walking across the wasteland surrounding the capital of SBC Glocken took over five hours. But this mysterious world wasn’t just vast—it was incredibly detailed. Every VR world naturally faded out as you gazed into the far distance, but the dried earth here just continued on and on toward the horizon until it met ranges of distant mountains that were still crystal clear to the eye. She hadn’t felt this much of a sense of scale since her dive into that true alternate reality, the Underworld.

Unconsciously, Sinon raised her hand and touched the side of her head. It wasn’t here now, but back in the real world, where she was lying on her bed, she was wearing the AmuSphere she’d been using for close to a year and a half. It wasn’t the latest and greatest piece of gear anymore. How was it creating such a vivid experience?

She needed to log out soon and find out what was happening. Sinon blinked, switching gears in her mind, and stared at the wilderness under the afternoon sun with renewed attention.

The terrain was about 70 percent dry, sandy ground and 30 percent faded plants, with the occasional cactus rising above it all. It reminded her of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, not that she’d ever been there, though.

There were monsters, too. Just from here, she could make out two giant scorpions and one giant lizard. It wasn’t going to be easy to look for safety while avoiding the predators’ reaction range. But then she finally remembered something. The Hecate’s precious bullets needed to be conserved, but there was more her gun could do than just shoot holes in things.

Sinon assumed a standing firing position with the Hecate and looked through its scope, turning the dial until its magnification was at 5×, the lowest it offered. Then she moved the gun slowly from left to right, searching for safe ground.

It seemed like being close to the ground wouldn’t help. She needed to find a high space where the scorpions and lizards couldn’t reach her, with cover she could hide behind.

But it was unlikely she’d find such a convenient spot here, so she’d settle for a raised area with a flat top…

“……Ah,” she grunted.

Sinon pulled away from the scope, then looked through it again, raising the magnification to 10×. She’d found a tall gray rocky pillar jutting from the desert floor. It was pointed on the top, but there was something like a cave near the base. If she could climb her way up there, it would be the perfect shelter. And the distance was reasonable, no more than half a mile at the most.

She lowered her gun, steeled herself for action, and stepped down off the fallen door. The soles of her boots hit dry dirt, slightly scraping the ground with every step. She wouldn’t be returning to this city for a while. She had to survive on her own until this strange situation sorted itself out.

At about thirty feet, she broke into a measured run. When she saw monsters ahead of her, she went well out of her way and kept an eye on the distant rocky point beyond the brush.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to contend with any scorpions or lizards up close before she reached her destination. Seen from the base, the rocky pillar was about fifty feet tall. The sides were nearly vertical. It seemed like only the centipedes from the town would be able to climb something like that—until she noticed the cracks and handholds on the rock surface. Sinon flexed her hands for a bit as she charted out a path up to the cave entrance. Once she had one, she grabbed the first handhold, jammed the toe of her boot into a crack, and pulled herself up.

In GGO—and probably in real life—a sniper’s success was largely defined by how much elevation they could gain, so free-climbing was a regular part of her work. The trick to rock climbing in a VRMMO was to do it fast, before the fatigue variable kicked in. She quickly got about fifteen feet up the surface.

Climbing skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

The sudden message, right in front of her eyes, caused her to miss the next hold she was aiming for. Her weight slid, but her left hand caught a small gap at the last moment, preventing her from falling. She clicked her tongue with annoyance and closed the window, then resumed climbing.

Thankfully, that single point of proficiency in the Climbing skill helped, because she was able to reach the cave entrance without further trouble. It was a dark hole about two feet around, and she had to be careful to slip inside without catching the Hecate on the sides. In the real world, a hole like this might end up too shallow to be of use, but in a game, the devs never put things like this in unless it was worth the trouble.

As she expected, the cave widened as it got deeper. That increased the chances it was a monster’s lair, so she slipped the MP7 out of its holster and turned on the small flashlight she had attached to a mount on her right side. Its white light cut through the darkness.

The cave was shaped like a cocoon, about four and a half feet tall and ten feet deep. There were no monsters here, nor any nest materials around her feet. Instead, there was a single wooden box with a reinforced metal frame along the back wall.

“……A treasure chest?” Sinon murmured, approaching in a crouch. She tapped the lid with the gun’s muzzle, and it made a hard, heavy sound. The chest didn’t look weathered or aged at all, in the sense of being left behind for years and years, so in her mind, that made it more likely that it was a treasure chest. She had to open it. As Sinon reached out with her left hand, she noticed a keyhole in the metal facing on the front.

She tried to lift the lid anyway, but it might as well have been glued in place. She exhaled and peered through the keyhole.

GGO’s treasure chests—or treasure boxes, as players called them in-game—were usually locked. There were electronic locks and physical locks, and sometimes the boxes could have both, meaning you needed both the Lock-Picking and Hacking skills. If it was just a physical lock, she could attempt shooting it with her gun, but the chances of success were low when you did that. More often than not, you just permanently broke the latch or destroyed the contents of the box.

Sinon looked back and forth from the MP7 to the keyhole but successfully resisted the allure of the gamble. If she wasted a valuable bullet and destroyed the chest, too, she’d feel like a total failure. She would have tried picking the lock, but all of her lock-picking tools were gone, along with the rest of her stuff. All she had were the belongings of the unfortunate men, a rusty knife, and some centipede mats.

“…”

However, a curious idea came to her. Sinon opened the ring menu and hesitantly found her way to the EQUIPMENT icon. From her very inadequate list, she selected Inferior Centipede Pincers and materialized one.

A reddish-black pincer six inches long appeared. The two sharp, curved spikes were connected at the base. If she held them in both hands, she could work them back and forth, but she couldn’t begin to guess what the pincers were meant to be crafted into. The only thing that mattered now, however, was that they were sharp.

Sinon stuck the pointed end of one of the spikes into the keyhole, then moved it around gently until there was a feeling of catching on something. It wasn’t as effective as a proper lockpick, but she supposed that if the chest was ranked low enough, this was a worthwhile substitute.

She dug the spike around, trying to move whatever it was caught on, and a new message appeared.

Lock-Picking skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

So it seemed there were a ton of various skills in this world. There was no way this situation could just be a system error at this point, but she had to focus on the lock and ignore the bigger questions.

“Grrr…stupid…thing…,” she hissed under her breath, tweaking the lock for a good three minutes. But when another message finally appeared telling her the Lock-Picking skill’s proficiency had risen to 2, there was a pleasant clicking sound. That was also the moment the durability of the centipede’s pincer ran out, and it crumbled in her hand.

Holding her breath, Sinon lifted the lid of the chest. It creaked ever so slightly and revealed a handful of coins, an aged leather bag, and one greenish rusted key.

She picked up a coin, the only silver of the bunch, and examined it closely. It was a circle about three-quarters of an inch across, and it was neither the credits of GGO nor the yrd of ALO. On one side was the number 100, and on the back was an image of two trees. She tapped it to bring up a properties window that said 100-el Silver Coin, Currency, Weight: 0.1.

“El…?”

She’d never heard of that currency. She shrugged and deposited the silver coin and the other copper coins into her inventory. Next, she took out the rusted key. There was an ornate openwork flower pattern on the handle, but she had no idea where this fancy key was supposed to go. She gave it a tap, too. Bronze Key, Tool, Weight: 0.72. No information of use.

Sinon tossed the key into her inventory next and saved the leather bag for last. It was tantalizingly heavy. Maybe it was full of gold coins, unlike the inside of the chest itself. Or perhaps there was a magical item inside. She widened the mouth of the bag and stuck her hand inside. Her fingers brushed against a couple of round items, so she pulled one out.

“…What is this?”

Resting in her palm was something like a metal ball bearing, small and shining. Its dark surface felt like iron or lead. It didn’t look valuable. She peered into the bag and saw that all the items were the same. Sinon was disappointed, but she tapped the metal ball anyway to see its properties.

Crude Musket Ball, Weapon/Bullet, Attack Power: 28.42 puncturing, Weight: 3.67.

“They’re just bullets…”

So the treasure chests that popped up in the middle of the wilderness could only be so good. Disappointed, she nearly tossed the iron ball aside before she stopped herself.

“…Musket ball?”

Was there a category for that kind of ammo in GGO?

From what Sinon knew, muskets were extremely primitive flintlock guns that were muzzle-loaded. They were long guns, but they weren’t rifles, because their barrels did not have rifling lines cut into the inside. They were only one step forward from matchlocks.

The setting of GGO was a once-advanced world that had fallen into ruin after a civilization-ending war, with all of the sophisticated metalworking knowledge lost. Humanity could just barely manufacture optical guns, which were mostly made of plastic, and live-ammo guns, which required metal stamping and machining, were completely beyond even the most capable NPC. The live-ammo guns could be salvaged only from the prewar ruins. Sinon’s Hecate II and MP7 were both items she’d looted from the dungeon beneath the capital city.

But the guns excavated from the ruins were from the early twentieth century at the oldest. She’d never heard of anyone pulling a seventeenth-century musket out of a dungeon. You’d have to pack in a new bullet and gunpowder after every shot, so even shooting at the weakest monster would be a big pain in the ass.

Meaning…

“There are muskets in this world…?” Sinon muttered, examining the iron ball again. Seconds later, she put it back into the bag, closed the bag tight, and put it into her inventory.

So I didn’t find any proper treasure, but at least I managed to open the chest itself, she told herself, leaning against a gently curved wall. It was six PM. There weren’t going to be any monsters here, she decided. Time to log out and figure out what was going on.

But before that, a break. She’d wait around for five minutes, or maybe just three, and be certain she was safe first. Once offline, she could replenish her fluids and eat something small…What do I have in the refrigerator, again? She still had some pork miso soup from last night. She could reheat that, then cook one of the millet dumplings her grandmother sent…

Sinon didn’t even realize her eyes were closed until she sank to the bottom of warm darkness.

She thought she heard an odd noise.

It was like the ringing of countless bells in the far distance, or of shards of glass gently falling and piling up. Something delicate and beautiful.

Her eyebrows worked themselves several times before her eyes finally opened. She was looking not at the white wallpaper of her room but at a rough stone surface. For an instant, she didn’t recognize where she was, until she realized she had fallen asleep in the virtual cave without logging off.

The time readout said it was 9:05 PM. She’d been asleep for three hours. That meant there was no automatic deconnecting system here that would log out players detected to have fallen asleep. Then again, maybe she was lucky; if the game had cut her off, she might have been comfortable enough in her real body in bed that she’d have slept eight hours instead.

In any case, the strange, continuous sound was drawing her attention toward the mouth of the little cave.

Her sleepiness dissipated in an instant.

There was a brilliant purple light shining into the cave from the outside, which should have been well past nightfall by now. It was not the light of sunset. It was cold and purple, an amethyst glow…and it was flickering irregularly.

Sinon grabbed the Hecate and crawled along the ground. When she reached the entrance, she went into a prone shooting position and looked carefully up into the sky.

It was definitely nighttime. But there were no stars or moon in the sky, just a multilayered curtain of light. An aurora…and the strange sound was coming from every bit of it.

Suddenly, the aurora flickered powerfully, and a voice emerged.

“The seeds bud, sprout stems and leaves, and join ends to form a circular gate. Visitors to this land, drained of hope, preserve your solitary life. Withstand myriad trials, survive untold dangers, and to the first to reach the land revealed by the heavenly light, all shall be given.”

The voice sounded like an innocent young girl’s but spoke with the wisdom of a sage. Sinon didn’t understand what it meant right away. The only phrases that remained in her head were “land revealed by the heavenly light” and “all shall be given.”

The heavenly light had to be referring to the aurora. She gazed into the night sky again, where the purple curtains of light were arranged in concentric circles. The center seemed to be north—no, northeast. She’d have to leave to get an accurate gauge on the direction.

Sinon steeled herself to go and started to get to her feet—but she couldn’t.

The rippling aurora in the sky simply vanished, like it had been turned off with a light switch. At the same time, she felt a terrible weight press upon her back. For an instant, she thought someone was actually pinning her down. But in fact, the weight was coming from the MP7, the sidearm she kept around her lower back. It had been as light as a kitten a second earlier, but now it was a lion resting on her spine.

“Urgh…”

She reached around her back, grabbed the grip of the MP7 where it stuck out of the holster, and managed to knock it loose and onto the ground. But the weight wasn’t gone. It seemed her combat suit—the Sniper’s Jacket, it was called—was over her Equip Weight limit.

With her right hand, she opened the ring menu and got to her equipment screen, then dragged the jacket from her mannequin to her item storage. Once the boots and muffler were off, too, she was finally light and agile again.

So this was likely what happened. In the four hours between her teleportation to this strange world at five o’clock and the mysterious announcement at nine o’clock, there was probably a grace period where she could move normally despite being encumbered. Once that period ended, Sinon’s Carry Weight limit matched her low level-2 status. She was no longer able to bear the weight of her rare MP7 and the Sniper’s Jacket.

Standing in her simple undergarments, Sinon looked down at the Hecate II on the floor.

She knew what would happen, but she tried to lift the barrel and stock anyway. Her gun was so immobile, it might as well have been bolted to the ground. It was an antimateriel sniper rifle, a member of the very heaviest class of weapons in GGO—although not as heavy as Behemoth’s prized minigun. So it was no surprise that she couldn’t pick it up, but it did mean she couldn’t haul her favorite gun around the wilderness with her. In fact, she didn’t even meet the equip requirements now, so she couldn’t get down on the ground and fire it from there.

The sniper knelt on the floor of the cave and gently traced the beautiful wood stock of the Hecate.

“…Just take a little rest for now,” she whispered, then tapped the gun to open a pop-up menu, and returned it to her inventory. The massive gun shone briefly, then vanished. She did the same to the MP7 with a sigh. When the virtual air filled her empty lungs, she was aware of her throat’s dryness.

On sheer autopilot, she reached for the little canteen on her belt, but her hand found nothing. Like the survival knife, her canteen was gone. She’d just have to wait it out until she could replenish her water somewhere. It probably wouldn’t be easy in this wilderness, but in VR, thirst was just an annoyance, not a life-and-death situation…

“Huh…?”

A nasty thought hit her. She looked to the upper left, and when she focused on the UI elements there, she gasped.

The blue TP bar was slowly decreasing. Below that, the yellow SP bar was also going down but at a slower rate than the TP bar. She intuitively knew that the bars going down had something to do with the thirst she was feeling.

T was probably short for thirst, she decided. It wasn’t hard to figure out what would happen when that bar went all the way down. She’d collapse and die and be teleported somewhere else, leaving all her items behind. She just had to hope that if her guns were in her inventory, they couldn’t be lost that way.

She stared at the blue bar again. It seemed to be falling at about 1 percent every minute. It would take a hundred minutes to deplete all the way, but she sensed that this rate would change with the environment and her physical state. It would definitely drop faster if she left the cave to search for water, expending energy.

But not doing anything wasn’t an option. After the aurora vanished, the sky it left behind was full of stars, with no sign of any rain in the next hundred minutes. If she didn’t find some water, she was going to die.

But there was one other problem. Sinon was dressed in nothing but underwear—top and bottom—plus a belt. The only weapon she could use was the rusty kitchen knife from the ruins. She couldn’t even beat a mouse with that, much less a giant centipede.

“…No other choice, I guess,” she muttered and opened her inventory.

It wasn’t to take out the Hecate or MP7. She scrolled through the short list and stopped when she reached the icons for five black bags.

On the right side of the icons were their names: Elcamino’s Items, Suttocos’s Items, Lian Lian’s Items, Mishoka’s Items, and Ichirou Masuoka’s Items. If she’d beaten those players herself, she’d think nothing of using their stuff, but when she had only picked them up to save their things for safekeeping, it felt disrespectful to do it.

Still, that hesitation meant nothing to the thirst that stabbed at her throat. She checked each bag in turn, looking for weapons or armor that a level-2 character could use. The other players she’d seen here from GGO were fairly experienced, so their loot more than likely had requirements too high for her. But maybe one of those five played an extreme AGI build…

Thankfully, the player named Suttocos matched Sinon’s hopes. In his bag was a weapon called a Bellatrix SL2 and Weasel Suit armor. She could equip them both and just barely stay below her Equip Weight limit.

After dropping the two icons onto her equipment mannequin, a long, thin laser gun appeared on the left side of her belt, and a yellowish-brown combat suit covered her body. The Bellatrix was an optical gun, which wasn’t her style, and the Weasel Suit had more exposure than she would have preferred, but it was better than running around in her underwear with a rusty knife. Her muffler could stay on because it weighed practically nothing.

In GGO, when you equipped a gun, the remaining ammo appeared in the lower right part of your vision. But this world had no such feature, so she had to pull out the laser gun and check the energy gauge it featured on its frame. It said there was 63 percent remaining. She didn’t know much about the gun, so she’d have to actually shoot it to find out how much energy it lost with each use.

Sinon put the laser gun in its holster and banished the ring menu. Her thirst abruptly became even more apparent, and she coughed. There was still time before the TP bar ran out, but the sensation was going to become unbearable before too long. It hurt to leave the shelter she’d found, but water was the top priority now.