A year has passed since the SAO incident. Kirito receives a strange request from Seijiro Kikuoka of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Virtual Division. He has been researching a strange phenomenon, Death Gun, that suddenly occurred in the VRMMO Gun Gale Online (GGO). If a player is shot by the avatar who has the black gun, they will die in real life as well. Kirito is unable to reject the the request to log into GGO, despite his doubt about the physical impact that the virtual world can have on reality.
