The Lightning Flash

Chapter 17: Being Special Pt. 2

I wonder how Asuna's doing, before her first fight? I thought to myself, in the pitch-black room that I was going to spawn into my first match from.

After training with Asuna over the last couple of weeks, it was obvious that she had made significant progress towards her fear of blades. She even learned a few tricks that will help her during her battles that she earned through doing side quests. One of these tricks was called "Bullet Time" which caused time to slow down around the player, giving them the chance to dodge bullets when they were fired. The quest to obtain the skill was incredibly difficult and, rightfully, so. This ability was insane and unlike anything I had gotten to experience during my time in SAO or Aincrad Online. I could only imagine how helpful a similar skill would have been during my time with those games, especially SAO. There was no point in giving it too much thought, though, since I doubted the skill would ever be implemented into those games, regardless. I didn't know how many players had this skill, other than Asuna and I but I doubted it was too many due to how challenging the mission was. There was also, another skill that Asuna wanted me to teach her but, much to my dismay, I wasn't able to. She wanted to learn the "Awakening" skill that I had learned from my time in SAO. Even if I wanted to teach her such a powerful skill, there was no way to obtain it in Aincrad Online and the only place to learn the skill, the original SAO game, was a thing of the past. As sad as it was, not even I had the skill, anymore, to use. The last time I had used it, when I was fighting Sugou, only worked because the bastard made it so that all of my skills transferred from the base SAO game to his messed-up VR world. Funny enough, that was probably one of the biggest reasons for his downfall. Still though, I couldn't even imagine what would happen if Asuna actually found a way to learn that skill. Whether or not it would have the same effect on her, that it did on me, was up for debate. The best I could do was do the mission in GGO with her to get the "Bullet Time" skill. It was better than nothing but a far cry from the "Awakening" skill.

Even without that skill, I know you'll be able to win, Asuna, I said, internally, hoping that Asuna could somehow hear the message, from wherever she was. You're so strong, that you don't need to rely on overpowered abilities like that. The only reason that I was probably given such an ability...was because...I needed it...I wasn't strong enough without it.

Blue light began surrounding me, indicating that I was about to be spawned into my first match of the Bullet of Bullets tournament.

Here we go, I told myself, determined to win my first match.

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When I, initially, spawned into my first Bullet of Bullets match, the first thing I observed was that I was in some kind of strange ruins. I could tell that the location was somewhere in the wastelands, outside of the HUB city but I didn't recognize it. All of the fallen debris that was scattered around the area served as ideal spots to take cover in.

Call it a hunch but I feel like this fight might be a close-range one, I hypothesized, based on how small the ruins, themselves were. On top of that, it shouldn't take me long to find my opponent, either. In fact, due to how small these ruins are, I should be able to see him, without even moving from this spot.

Taking my own advice, I began looking around and just like I had thought, I was able to catch a glimpse of my opponent, who was at short distance from me.  I was close enough to him to see the type of weapons he was equipped with. Despite not knowing the exact name of the weapons, I could tell that he had two of them, one in each hand.

He's a dual wielder like me, huh? I questioned to myself. They don't look like the two pistols that I ended up picking, though. I wonder...