"Master! Master, Master, Masterrr!"

A shrill voice loud enough to drown out the sound of the sliding door boomed through the room, jolting me out of my slumber in bed.

And in flew in a girl, slight of frame and clad in a combat suit of white and purple. Her short, silver hair gave a grand swish as she halted in front of the bed, clenched her fists beside her hips, took in a deep breath, and—

"OH-MASTER! WE! HAVE! AN! EMERGENCY!"

Screamed at full blast.

The girl's name was Rei, and she wasn't a girl—she was an android. Her name was taken from her designation number A290-00, but myself and most of the other players called her by her model name: ArFA-Sys.

"What's wrong, ArFA-Sys?"

I asked guessing it was either some guerrilla event began somewhere without notification, or a new eatery opened in Glocken—but her answer betrayed expectations.

"There's a huge guy!"

"......"

I stayed sitting in bed and looked around the room that would be about 350 square feet in the real world—it was home to ArFA-Sys and myself, and as such, we were the only ones there. As I worried there might be a malfunction in her core program...I asked her again:

"This guy...who is he?"

"Well, ummm..."

ArFA-Sys opened and closed her mouth uncertainly several times before reaching out and grabbing my hand.

"Just come see!　Come with me, Master!"

As ArFA-Sys yanked on my hand, I answered, "Sure, fine," and got out of bed.

ArFA-Sys took hold of my hand and dragged me at a half jog across the room, through the sliding glass door, and out into the hallway. A short walk on the right-hand side led to an elevator hall. I assumed we would take it down to the first floor, but ArFA-Sys pushed the triangular button going up instead.

The elevator promptly arrived and the doors opened. We stepped inside, and ArFA-Sys touched the button on the upper-righthand side of the large touchscreen panel with the letter "R" on it. It was the button leading to the roof. I only remember pressing it a few times in my life. With a light acceleration, the elevator ascended.

The building was filled with hundreds of homes for players. In the real world, it would be like an apartment building over two hundred stories high. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and my eyes narrowed as the reddish sunlight and cool, dry breeze cut past us.

The roof contained neither a single tree nor bench to sit on. It was merely a wide open space beneath the sky. What's more, there were no handrails on the green. HP was always protected in town, so we were incapable of falling to our deaths, but my heart still felt like it was about to fly out of my mouth. The wild fields that surrounded Glocken was not the sort of scenery worth the risk of plunging to your death to admire, and the government house observation deck was taller than this building, besides.

Because of this, most people never came up to the roof—or at least that's what I thought.

"There's...a lot of people here."

I murmured, eyeing the dozens of players on the west side of the roof with their backs turned to us. ArFA-Sys nodded eagerly in reply.

"They all came here to see the huge guy!"

"Again, who exactly is this guy?"

"Let's go join them!"

She yanked on my hand again, and we lined ourselves up to the right of the row of players.

The map of this world—the VRMMO RPG Gun Gale Online—consisted of a central block, "SBC Glocken" and the five areas surrounding it. In the southwest region, "Sandy Island." In the southeast, "Phantom Wilderness." In the northeast, "The Forgotten Forest." True-north held a new addition in the most recent update: "White Frontier." And in the west, there was "The Old South."

The players stared in silence at The Old South. It was an intermediate-level map with an old ghost town in the middle of a big grassland. Why it was called "south" when it was positioned in Glocken's true west remained an eternal mystery, but from its founding one and a half years ago at the start of service, it had been explored corner to corner. To the players high enough in level to afford rooms in that apartment building, it wasn't even worth a glance anymore...

"......Uh, wait...what is that thing?"

ArFA-Sys answered my murmured question with a serious look on her face.

"It's the huge guy."

That was the third time I had heard her utter those words. I suppose, somewhere in the history of this game, a male avatar about three meters tall had appeared somewhere in town before.　And I had assumed this was what ArFA-Sys was talking about, but as I looked at the man then, I realized the word "huge" did not even begin to do him justice.

The ghost town that adorned the center of The Old South area was named Old South City. And deep inside, a massive silhouette of a man hovered like an apparition.

The silhouette shone like fire in the yellow tinge of the sun, and looked to be about three times the size of the tallest building in the ghost town. If the tallest building was around three hundred meters tall, that would make the top of his head sit at about a thousand meters high.

Given these proportions, it could be said the man had a slender body type, but he was so enormous that all suggestions of "elegance" in the word were lost. His entire body was covered in armor of a dull gold hue, on his head was a helmet of intricate design, and his long beard grew all the way down to his chest, swaying in the breeze. His feet were shadowed by the buildings of the ghost town, and his head was obscured partially by the thin clouds, but if nothing else, it was clear his gender was male.

"Yeah...that's definitely a huge guy."

"Yes, I told you so!" ArFA-Sys replied. For some reason, she looked oddly proud of herself.

So apparently there was no malfunction in ArFA-Sys's core program after all. Which begged the question, who was this man...this giant, rather.

We had encountered massive-scale enemies in GGO before. In the Lièvre Incident, a multi-limbed battle tank, the Behemoth MT-04, attacked Glocken...but that enemy was only about twenty meters tall. Compared to the golden giant before us, the Behemoth was a toy car. We had gotten ourselves roped into all sorts of unfair events and quests in the past, but I got the sense that this enemy's level of absurdity was one...two...no, ten times removed from any of that.

"Hey, ArFA-Sys...how long has this guy been standing there?"

ArFA-Sys tilted her head and answered my murmured question.

"The exact time is unknown, but a load exceeding the game system's full capacity was detected about nine minutes ago."

"Nine minutes... So was he just standing there the whole time?"

"Seems like it."

It was a male player standing to my left that answered my question. His mohawk was dyed bright red, and he wore what resembled swimming goggles on his face. He looked familiar to me...and in fact, it turned out he was on my friends list.

"Hello, Yamikaze."

"Hello from me, too!"

The man returned our greetings with a light nod before he continued.

"I've been watching that thing for the past five minutes or so, and it's shown no signs of moving. According to folks flying around the area, that thing is standing on the other side of the canyon in the true west of The Old South...meaning, he's standing outside the World Map."

"Wow...so people have already been up close to him."

"Yeah, like Dyne and Kakouton...all the curious players."

All the names Yamikaze listed were the infamous high-rankers in the Bullet of Bullets. Of course Yamikaze himself got second place in BoB and was a highly-skilled GGO veteran himself, but he never boasted about it.

"Aren't you going to investigate, Yamikaze?"

When ArFA-Sys asked him the question, Yamikaze gave a carefree shrug of the shoulders that clashed with his mohawk.

"If he's an event enemy, he's gotta have at least one or two billion hit points. I can always join in the fight after we've gathered more intel.

"Yeah...that's the smart thing to do."

I nodded in agreement. GGO always added new weapons with each major update, and if you enhanced your weapons to max, you could easily inflict over ten million HP in cumulative damage, even against an end-game tier boss enemy. If that giant was an event enemy like Yamikaze theorized, he would need to be powerful enough to withstand the attacks of several hundred players over the span of an hour. So his HP... would certainly be bigger than any of us could easily calculate. And since he was standing outside the World Map, we couldn't even get close to him that easily.

This meant our best course of action was to wait and see a bit longer...but just when I was thinking that to myself, a friend message notification appeared at the righthand side of my screen, and I reflexively tapped it.

"Come meet me at the City Dome!"

The message was marked urgent. And the sender was Kureha. She was an old friend of mine IRL, and she was the one who got me into GGO...so she was fundamentally out of my league.

"Uh...I've gotta go meet someone."

Excusing myself to Yamikaze, I opened the World Map so I could fast-travel.