Chapter 24 – Sword Art Online (18)
Shino doesn’t know his father’s face.
It doesn’t mean that I have no memory of my father in the real world, but literally, I have never seen him as a person, even in pictures or videos.
It is said that Shino was not even two years old when her father passed away in a car accident.
Father and mother that day. The Shino family was driving along a one-lane road along a slope located on the border of a certain prefecture in Tohoku to spend the end of the year at their mother’s family. Due to the delayed departure from Tokyo, the start was already past 11:00.
The cause of the accident was concluded to be a truck that jumped out of the opposite lane without turning the curve properly through skid marks on the site.
The driver of the truck pierced the windshield and was thrown onto the road, nearly killing him.
The compact car, which was hit directly on the right side, crossed the guard rail and fell down the slope of the mountain, then came to a halt while being strung on two trees.
At that point, the father, who was driving, suffered serious injuries, but did not die instantly. The mother in the passenger seat was also injured only with a simple fracture of his left femur, and little Shino, who was securely seated in a child car seat in the back seat, was mostly fine. But he has no memory of that time.
The bad luck was that the road was rarely used even in that region, and traffic was completely cut off, especially since it was late at night. In addition, the mobile phone in the car was damaged due to the impact of the collision.
The next morning, it was already six hours later when a driver passing by saw the scene of the accident and reported it.
Meanwhile, Shino’s mother had no choice but to watch her father slowly dying from internal bleeding.
Then a part of her mother’s heart was slightly broken.
After her accident, her mother’s time was reversed to when she was a teenager, before she met her father. Her mother and Shino left their home in Tokyo and relied on her mother’s family, but her mother disposed of all her father’s belongings, especially photographs and videos, and refused to talk about her memories at all.
Her mother lived the life of a country girl who wanted only peace and quiet. How she perceived Shino was still unknown to her, 15 years after her accident. She may have thought of her like her sister, but luckily her mother still loved Shino deeply after her accident. She remembers reading her picture books and singing her lullabies every night.
So, her mother in Shino’s memory has always been like a fragile and vulnerable girl. She naturally, since she grew up, she came to think that she should behave herself wisely. That she must protect her mother,
When her grandparents went out, a hard-working salesman slumped on the porch, frightening her mother. She kicked her out by saying she would call the police if nine-year-old Shino didn’t go out instead of her mother.
To her Shino, the outside world has always been full of threats to her quiet life with her mother. She must keep, must keep. She always stared at it.
Shino, who was 11 years old and in the 5th grade of elementary school, did not play much outside.
Her routine was to come home straight from school and read books borrowed from her library. She had good grades, but had few friends. She was overly sensitive to outside interference, and there was a time when she beat a male student for an innocent prank of hiding her slippers, causing her nose to bleed.
One Saturday afternoon not long after entering the second semester.
Shino and her mother went out side by side to a small post office nearby. There were no guests other than the two of them.
While her mother went to the window to fill out the paperwork, Shino sat on her waiting bench and read a book she had brought from home, bobbing her legs. He couldn’t remember the title.
When I heard the door slam, I looked up and saw a man entering. He was a skinny, middle-aged man in gray, carrying a Boston bag in one hand.
The man stopped at the entrance and looked around the post office. She made eye contact with Shino for a moment. The color of her eyes was strange, she thought.
In the middle of the yellow whites, black pupils like deep holes were moving busily to and fro. Now that I think about it, it was an over-dilated pupil. It was later discovered that she had been given a stimulant injection just before her man showed up at the post office.
Shino didn’t even have time to wonder, her man quickly walked towards her window.
Her man suddenly grabbed the right arm of her mother who was doing some procedures at the «Deposit/Savings» window. She then gave a quick push with her left hand. Her mother collapsed without a sound, and she froze with her eyes wide open in shock.
Shino jumped up. She tried to protest loudly against the absurd violence inflicted on her beloved mother. That moment.
The man set her Boston bag down on her counter and she took out something black from inside.
I realized it was a handgun when I held the Sangai with my right hand and pointed it at the male clerk at the window.
‘Pistol? Toy… No, a real robber?!’
Numerous words crossed Shino’s consciousness.
“Put the money in this bag!”
Her man shouted in a cracked voice. Her cries broke out one after another.
“Put your hands on the desk! Don’t press the alarm button! You guys don’t move either!”
Moving the pistol left and right, he checked some of the employees inside.
Shino thought that she should run out of the post office and ask for help. But she couldn’t leave her mother lying on the floor.
Even while hesitating, the man was shouting again.
“Quickly put in the money!! Everything you have!! Do it quickly!!”
The male clerk at the teller stiffened his face and held out a bundle of papers five centimeters thick with his right hand.
The air in the room seemed to inflate for an instant. Both ears rang.
It took me a while to realize that it was to blame for the high plosives. A small metallic teeing sound followed, and something bounced off the wall and rolled down to Shino’s feet. It was a golden, thin metal cylinder.
When he looked up again, a male clerk across the counter had his eyes wide open and was clutching his chest with both hands. A red stain was looming on the white shirt under his tie. Just when he thought so, the employee leaned back with his chair and collapsed with the filing cabinet beside him.
“I told you not to press the button!!”
The man’s voice was ripping high, and her tone was unstable. He could see the right hand holding his gun trembled. A smell resembling her firecrackers stung her nose.
“Hey, you! Come here and put the money!”
On the side where the man pointed his pistol at her, two female employees stood firm.
“Aren’t you coming soon?!”
The man’s voice resonated sharply, but the female employees shook her neck thinly and did not move. He may have been trained for robbery, but the bullets actually fired didn’t stop any manuals.
The man kicked her under the counter several times in anger, then she raised her right hand, holding her pistol again, as if thinking of another shot. With a high scream, the female employees sat down.
But then the man turned her halfway around and looked back at her customer waiting area.
“If you don’t do it quickly, I will shoot again! I will shoot!!”
What her man was aiming with her pistol was Shino’s mother, who was staring into the air as she collapsed on the floor.
Her mother seemed to be unable to move under the weight of the events unfolding before her eyes. For a moment she thought Shino.
‘I have to protect my mother.’
Shino’s conviction and willpower, which she had always thought of since she was a child, moved Shino’s body.
Shino threw down her book and ran out, biting hard on the right hand of her man who was holding her gun. Her child’s sharp teeth easily dug into her man’s sinews.
“Aagh!”
Her man screamed in surprise and swung her right arm along with Shino. Shino’s body hit the side of the counter, and at that moment two of her baby teeth fell out, but she had no idea at the time. Because in front of her eyes, her jet-black pistol, which had slipped from her man’s hand, rolled. Shino unconsciously picked it up.
It was heavy.
The weight of metal that was transmitted heavily to her arms, the grip with vertical lines was drenched with the sweat of Sanya she was holding just a moment ago, and her man’s body heat made her feel like a living creature.
Even young Shino had that level of knowledge about what a tool was supposed to do.
You can use this to stop the scary guy. Guided by that thought, Shino raised her pistol as if imitating her, put her index fingers on the trigger, and headed towards her man.
A handgun could not have been properly aimed and fired by an eleven-year-old girl.
However, the moment she thought her gun was being taken away by her man’s grip on her wrist, Shino reflexively pulled the trigger.
Her violent impact passed from her hands through her elbows to her shoulders, but the recoil energy that had to turn her muzzle the wrong way was almost absorbed by the man’s hands. Again, the hot air burst out.
The man let go of her hand with a hiccup-like sound, and she took a few steps back slowly.
On her man’s stomach, on her patterned gray shirt, a dark red circle spread rapidly.
“AA AA AA!!”
As she screamed, the man cupped her belly with both of her hands. A stream of blood spurted out from the gap between her fingers, as if her thick veins had burst.
But the man did not fall. The stopping power itself is low because the water bore full metal jacket bullet used for hashing penetrates the human body as it is.
The man screamed at her and pointed her blood-soaked hands to Shino, who tried to grab them again. Blood spurted from her wounds also spilled onto Shino’s hands.
Her hands twitched and pulled the trigger again.
This time the pistol bounced violently, and a sharp pain ran through her elbow and both shoulders. Her body was thrown backwards, and her back slammed against the counter, choking her breath. The sound of the shot was barely audible anymore.
The second bullet hit the man below the right collarbone, went through it again, and hit the wall behind her. She stumbled and fell to her linoleum floor, slipping her feet in her own blood.
“Aaaaa!!”
But he still didn’t stop moving. He let out a roar of rage and put his hands on the floor to get back up.
Shino panicked. This time he was certain that if he didn’t stop her man he’d be sure to kill himself and her mother.
Ignoring the pain in his arms that were about to be ripped off, he took two steps forward. Shino aimed his gun at the middle of the man’s body, who was lying down and was trying to raise her upper body by about two centimeters.
And just as she was about to pull the trigger, she heard her voice behind her.
“Now stop.”
Swoop.
A warm hand took her hand and lowered it to the floor.
Then, the muzzle automatically points to the floor. Shino trembled and turned her head to see who was behind her.
He was a handsome boy.
A boy who looks better than anyone else even after searching her entire life.
Her boy was looking at her with her somehow sad face.
“Leave this to me and rest.”
“… Ah.”
Friendly voice.
At that, Shino felt her body, which had been stiff from her tension until now, loosen up.
A body that trembles like an aspen tree.
Her boy stroked her hair reassuringly, then looked in front of her. There was a robber who was glaring at her as if to kill her.
“After.”
The boy took a short breath and raised his wooden sword.
Then, it struck at the same speed as the light beam. The wooden sword broke the wrist of the robber who was reaching out as if he were alive, then turned around and hit the back of his neck.
“Turn it off…”
The eyes of the robber who was hit in the back of the neck are turned upside down.
Then, he passed out and fell to the ground, biting into crab foam.
“… Uh?”
Shino, who was watching the scene, opened her eyes wide.
Shino moved her face and turned her attention to her mother, who was lying on the floor a few meters away. And she is in the eyes of her mother, whom she loves more than anyone else in this world.
She clearly saw the light of her own distinct terror and fear.
Shino dropped her gaze to her own hand.
The two hands that were still tightly gripping the pistol grips were dotted with a sticky, dark red liquid.
Shino opened her mouth and then started screaming.
“Aaaaa…!!”
Shino stared at the Procyon SL she was holding with both hands while squeezing a faint scream from inside his throat. On the backs of her hands and between the fingers, you could see sticky, wet blood.
He didn’t disappear no matter how many times he blinked. He drips drips, drips, sticky droplets onto his feet. Suddenly, fluid overflowed from his eyes.
The boy who approached her… Her Seojun held her in her arms and patted her on the back.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
Shino didn’t know why the boy was apologizing.
However, curiously, his mind, which had been confused until just now, was not calm and relieved.
