Subtilizer, Stealer of Souls, June–July 2026

The sniper had pale-blue hair.

Her delicate, girlish body fit surprisingly well with the mammoth 50-caliber

rifle she used.

She was prone, in firing position, and had her back turned, hiding her face.

But she was proud and beautiful and dangerous, surely no different from a lynx.

Her concentration was tremendous. She watched the path below with

absolute stillness, her right eye pressed to the scope and index finger on the

trigger. It was worth watching for longer than this, but time was limited.

Something came out of a hiding spot and across the floor of the abandoned

building. Pebbles, twigs, and scraps of metal littered the ground and had to be

avoided carefully to ensure the approach was silent—or else she would hear.

Suddenly, her shoulders twitched.

She must have sensed something that was neither sound nor vibration. Her

instincts were impeccable but, sadly, too late.

A right hand reached out, wrapping around her slender neck, while the left

pressed on the back of her head. With quiet but undeniable intent, the

strangling began.

The Army Combative skill kicked in, and the visual representation of the girl's

health, her HP bar, began to drop rapidly. The sniper struggled, but in the

VRMMO Gun Gale Online, unless the victim had a clear advantage in the

Strength stat, it was nearly impossible to break out of a rear naked choke

barehanded. In that sense, it was just like the real world.

Of the twenty-nine contestants in the Bullet of Bullets event, the blue-haired

sniper was the most desirable target to fight…no, to hunt. She had been

expected to snipe from the upper half of this five-story building.

The problem was that both the fourth and fifth story had a clear shot at the

main street of the map. The choice had to be made quickly: Which floor to wait

on?

Common sense said the fourth because it would be quicker to stop there and

get into firing position. But upon seeing the library on that floor, intuition and

logic both said otherwise. Intuition said the sniper was probably still young

enough to be a student. Logic said that a student would want to avoid shooting

in a library, which might be mentally associated with everyday life.

That suspicion was correct. The blue-haired sniper spent the extra thirty

seconds or so to climb another floor higher, and she appeared in the fifth-floor

storeroom.

And now, like a butterfly that wandered into a spider's web, her fragile life

was soon to vanish.

Oh, but if only this was not some calculation of binary data in a virtual setting,

but the taking of a real life and soul.

If only it was not her avatar struggling against the chokehold, but her true

flesh-and-blood body. How sweet the moment would be when it arrived.

In the upper-right corner, the sniper's HP bar went under 5 percent. But she

still struggled desperately to break free.

Though her defeat was certain, she neither wasted energy trying to shout nor

went limp in submission. Her refusal to give up on escaping was even rather

touching to her foe.

And into her ear from behind, as tenderly as a lover's embrace, came a

whisper.

"Your soul will be so sweet."

1

His eyelids rose slowly.

He'd fallen asleep at some point. The new Italian sofa he'd imported last

week was a bit too comfortable. Without getting up from the smooth leather

surface, he glanced at the smartwatch on his left wrist.

2:12 AM.

He got up, stretched, and walked to the southern-facing wall. It was entirely

made of smartglass, and its currently transparent surface afforded him a gaze of

the waterfront from his executive room on the forty-third floor.

The port gleamed softly with the reflected light of the downtown skyscrapers.

A number of large ships were stationed along the expansive harbor. But their

angular, forceful silhouettes were not those of luxury cruise ships. They were

battleships of the Third Fleet of the United States Navy under Pacific Command.

For many years, San Diego, the second-largest city in the state of California,

had been a military town. It had stationed over twenty-five thousand military

personnel and their families at a massive naval base that served as the city's

primary economic engine.

But in recent years, new industries had rapidly taken hold—high-tech sectors

such as information, communications, and biotechnology.

Some companies straddled the boundary between military and tech. Most of

them were private military contractors, or PMCs, that accepted contracts from

the military and other large companies for protection, training, and even direct

combat on the ground.

The chief tactical officer (CTO) of Glowgen Defense Systems, Gabriel Miller,

gazed down upon the darkened port next to downtown San Diego and smiled

without even realizing it.

He was still excited from the dream he'd had during his brief nap. It was a

dream of the full-dive VR game event he'd participated in just a few days ago

from this very executive suite.

Gabriel hardly ever dreamed, but when he did, it always replayed some scene

from his past in minute detail. He could still feel the pleasant sensation of the

blue-haired sniper struggling against his grip. Almost as though it were real and

not a dream…

But it wasn't real. That battle happened in the virtual world, not the real one.

Full-dive technology was a revolutionary invention, and its creator, Akihiko

Kayaba, was worthy of respect. If he were still alive, Gabriel would have spent

millions to recruit him. Even though he was the most infamous criminal of the

century—in fact, especially because of that.

But the experience offered by the AmuSphere, as close as it came to providing

truth, only made the fact that it wasn't real that much more unfulfilling. Like

salt water—never truly quenching his thirst, no matter how much he drank.

As Glowgen's youngest officer and major shareholder, Gabriel led a life

without any unfulfilled physical wants. Yet, his gnawing mental needs could

never be satisfied with money.

"…Your soul will be so sweet…"

He repeated the words from his dream.

In fact, he wished he could have said those words in Japanese, which he'd

been studying for the past three years. But because his player account was

tagged as an American one, he didn't want to give away any unnecessary details

or make himself more memorable. They'd have a chance to speak more

intimately someday. And he had many questions.

The little smile playing across his lips went away, and Gabriel used one of the

touch sensors at various spots on the glass to lower the translucency of the

surface. It turned into a darkened mirror instead, reflecting his image.

His blond hair was loosely pulled back, and his eyes were a piercing blue. On

his six-foot-one frame, he wore a white dress shirt and dark-gray slacks. His

shoes were custom-made cordovan leather. His image was almost

embarrassingly white and white-collar, but Gabriel thought nothing of his

personal appearance, instead favoring the essence held within. The flesh was

nothing more than a shell that enveloped the soul, after all.

Soul.

Just about every religion contained the concept of the human soul.

Christianity, of course, held that the soul was sent to either Heaven or Hell

depending on your actions in life. But Gabriel's belief in and fixation upon the

soul had nothing to do with being Protestant or Catholic.

He knew it. He had seen and experienced it for himself.

He'd witnessed an indescribably beautiful collection of light particles leaving

the forehead of a girl whose life was fading away as he held her in his arms.

Gabriel Miller was born in Pacific Palisades, a suburb of Los Angeles, in March

of 1998.

He was an only child and grew up with every material and emotional

expression of love from his wealthy parents. They lived in a huge mansion that

provided him with many places to play, but young Gabriel's favorite place of all

was his father's private collection room.

His father was the owner and manager of Glowgen Securities, the precursor

to Glowgen Defense Systems, and he was an avid collector of insects. He had

countless glass cases arranged in the large collection room packed with the little

things. When Gabriel had time, he hid in there, magnifying glass in hand, gazing

at the colorful bugs as he sat on the sofa in the center of the room,

daydreaming.

Sitting in that tall, dim room all by himself, surrounded by thousands upon

thousands of silent, unmoving insects, young Gabriel sometimes experienced

the strangest sensation.

Until a certain moment, all those insects had once been alive. They'd been on

the plains of Africa or in the deserts of the Middle East or the jungles of South

America, contentedly building their nests and foraging for food.

And then, a collector came along and caught them, treated them with lethal

chemicals, sold them through a series of transactions, until at last they wound

up lined in tidy little rows in the Miller household. This was not just a room for

displaying a large insect collection. It was a massive mausoleum housing

thousands and thousands of defiled corpses…

Gabriel would close his eyes and imagine what would happen if all the insects

around him suddenly came back to life.

Six legs, scrabbling in the air for freedom, feelers and wings vibrating and

twitching. Skitter-skitter, skitter-skitter—individually faint but multiplied times

infinity—a wave of scraping and scratching noises that engulfed and bowled

him over.

Skitter-skitter, skitter-skitter.

His eyes flew open. He thought he saw one green beetle's leg twitching in a

corner of a case directly across from him. He leaped up from the sofa and

rushed eagerly to examine the case, but the insect was just a lifeless display

sample again.

The emerald-green shell, which gleamed like metal; the legs with sharp little

spikes; the compound eyes with their lattice of incredibly tiny photoreceptors.

What kind of power had once operated these precise little machines?

His father told him that insects did not have a brain, like humans did. "So how

do they think?" he asked. His father showed him a video.

It depicted praying mantises mating. The smaller male held down the much

larger, rounded female from behind and pressed the end of its abdomen

against hers. The female did not move for a while, until abruptly, without any

warning, she grabbed the male's upper half with her forearms and began the

unforgettable display of devouring his head. To Gabriel's shock, the male even

continued mating, only disengaging once its entire head was gone. Then, when

the female released her grasp, she fled the scene.

But despite having no head anymore, the male mantis crawled across the

grass, climbed branches, and nimbly continued its escape. Gabriel's father

pointed this out and said, "The entire nervous system of insects like the mantis

is kind of like their brain. Losing their heads is only the loss of sensory organs.

They can still live for a while."

For several days after seeing that video, Gabriel wondered where a praying

mantis's soul was. If they could live on even after their heads had been eaten,

then losing all their legs probably wouldn't stop them, either. Was it in the

abdomen? The thorax? But the insects would still wriggle and writhe, whether

you crushed their soft stomachs or pierced them with a pin.

If no part of their body caused instant death when destroyed, then praying

mantises' souls must be spread throughout their entire being. This was eight-or

nine-year-old Gabriel's conclusion, after he had undertaken numerous

experiments on bugs he caught around his home.

Insects ran on a mysterious power that operated their machine-like bodies—a

soul that stubbornly clung to its vessel even as parts of it were destroyed. But at

a certain moment, it would give up and leave that body behind.

Gabriel eagerly wanted to witness that soul leaving for himself, perhaps even

catch it. But no matter how hard he stared through the magnifying glass, no

matter how careful his experiments, he never caught or even saw any thing

leaving an insect's body. He spent long hours and expended immeasurable

enthusiasm in his secret lab deep in the woods behind his house, but he never

found the slightest bit of success for his trouble.

Even young Gabriel had an instinctual feeling that his parents would not

welcome this interest of his. So after the incident with the mantis video, he

never asked his father about it again, and he never told anyone about his

experiments. But the more he hid it, the deeper his obsession became.

Around that time, Gabriel had a very close friend his age.

Alicia Clingerman was the daughter of the corporate board member who lived

next door to Gabriel's family. The children went to the same elementary school,

and their families got to know each other. She was shy and quiet and preferred

staying inside and reading or watching videos, rather than going out and playing

in the mud.

Gabriel, of course, kept his experiments a secret from her and never once

spoke about insects or souls. But he never stopped thinking about them. When

he gazed at Alicia's face, smiling angelically as she read her stories, Gabriel

pondered where exactly her soul was.

Insects and humans are different. Humans cannot live without a head. So the

human soul must be in the head, he thought. In the brain.

But Gabriel already knew, from browsing the Internet on his father's

computer, that brain damage did not necessarily lead to loss of life. There were

construction workers who survived despite being pierced from chin to crown

with a steel pipe. Some doctors had succeeded in rehabilitating patients with

mental illnesses by removing a part of their brain.

So it has to be a specific part of the brain, Gabriel thought as he stared at

Alicia's forehead, which was framed by wispy golden locks. Somewhere past her

smooth skin, hard skull, and soft brain matter, her soul was hidden.

In his youthful naïveté, Gabriel assumed he would end up married to Alicia.

Perhaps one day, he'd actually get to see her soul for himself. Given how

angelic she was, it was certain to be the most indescribably beautiful thing.

Gabriel's wish would come true much sooner than he realized, but only half of

it.

In September 2008, a major bank collapse triggered a worldwide financial

crisis.

The resulting recession engulfed Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, too. Several

of the mansions around them were sold, and the number of luxury cars on the

street visibly dwindled.

Glowgen Securities's cautious business model paid off, and they were able to

keep the damage to a minimum, but the Clingermans' real estate investment

company suffered huge losses. By the following April, the family had lost all its

assets, including the mansion, and was going to move to Kansas City in the

Midwest to rely on some farm-owning relatives.

Gabriel was sad. He was wise for a ten-year-old boy and understood that

there was no way he could actually help Alicia. He could easily imagine the

hardships that awaited her in the future.

All his privileges—a large home kept safe by perfect security systems, every

meal prepared by experienced cooks, schools full of other rich white children—

would become things of the past for Alicia, replaced by poverty and hard labor.

Worst of all, Alicia's pure soul, which was supposed to be his one day, would

now be tarnished by someone else, some stranger—and that was the hardest

thing of all for Gabriel to bear.

So he decided to kill her.

On Alicia's last day of school, after she said her good-byes, Gabriel invited her

to go into the woods behind their houses when they got off the school bus. He

guided her there along his secret route, skillfully evading all the security

cameras along the roads and fences, ensuring that no one saw them, walking

over fallen leaves to hide their tracks, until they reached his secret laboratory,

which was hidden in an especially dense area of shrubs.

When Gabriel put his arms around her fragile body, she returned his embrace,

having no idea of the countless insects that had perished in this space. The girl

sobbed and hiccuped, telling him she didn't want to go anywhere, that she

wanted to stay there in that city with Gabe forever.

In his mind, he silently reassured her that he'd make that come true. He put

his hand into his pocket and pulled out the tool he'd prepared: his father's fourinch steel needle with a wooden handle, used for killing insects.

He stuck the sharp end into Alicia's left ear, pressed his other hand against

her right, then rammed the implement all the way in to its base.

Alicia blinked in wonder, not realizing what had just happened, and then her

body abruptly went into violent spasms. A few seconds later, her blue eyes lost

their focus.

And then, Gabriel saw it happen.

Something luminescent, like a tiny gleaming cloud, emerged from Alicia's

forehead. It floated gently toward him, right between his eyes, and passed

without sensation directly into his head.

The soft sunlight of the spring afternoon around them vanished. Instead,

powerful beams of light shot down through the branches of the trees directly

overhead. There was even the faint sound of bells.

Gabriel's eyes welled up with tears of unfettered joy. He was viewing Alicia's

soul…and not only that, he understood that he was seeing what her soul was

seeing.

The tiny glowing cloud, over a few seconds that seemed like an eternity,

passed through Gabriel's head and rose, higher and higher, guided by the light

of Heaven, until it disappeared. The spring sunlight and the chirping of the birds

returned.

As he sat there, cradling Alicia's lifeless and soulless body in his arms, Gabriel

wondered whether what he'd just experienced was true or merely a

hallucination brought about by his extreme excitement. But whichever the

answer, he knew that for the rest of his life, he would be seeking that

experience again.

He took Alicia's body to an oak tree he'd found with a deep, gaping pit

beneath its roots and tossed her body down into it. Then he examined himself

very carefully, plucked two long golden hairs from his body, and dropped them

into the hole, too. After carefully washing the needle, he returned it to his

father's tool kit.

The local police never succeeded in finding any clues to Alicia Clingerman's

disappearance, and the case went cold.

Twenty-eight-year-old Gabriel Miller awoke from this brief but deep reverie.

He pulled away from the reflective-mirror glass and headed to his work desk on

the western wall of the room. The instant he sat in the Norwegian reclining

chair, a phone icon began to blink on the thirty-inch display panel embedded

into the desk's glass surface.

He tapped the icon, which brought up the face of his secretary, who began to

speak.

"I apologize for disturbing you, Mr. Miller. Mr. Ferguson, the company COO,

would like to have dinner with you tomorrow. Shall I make the arrangements?"

"Tell him my schedule's full," Gabriel immediately replied. His usually

implacable secretary looked a bit startled by this. The chief operating officer

was the vice president of the company, the number two man at Glowgen DS.

Gabriel was just one of ten executives, and he wasn't important enough to turn

down an invitation—under typical circumstances.

But the secretary's expression faded in a second, and she said, "I understand.

I will let him know."

The call ended. Gabriel sank back into his chair and crossed his legs.

He had an idea of what Ferguson wanted. He was going to try to convince

Gabriel not to participate in a particular exercise that was on the schedule. But

secretly, the COO's intention was the exact opposite. The wily old badger was

hoping he would venture into danger and wind up on the KIA list. After all,

Gabriel was the son of the previous CEO and was the company's biggest

shareholder.

For his part, Gabriel understood how stupid it was for a corporate executive

to take part in a live-combat scenario with actual gunfire being traded. Even if

he had combat experience of his own, the CTO's job was to draw up overall

tactical plans from the safety of the company office. There was zero need to

expose himself to the danger of the battlefield.

But for the sake of his top-secret master plan, he couldn't sit back and miss

out. This was a strategy that directly linked to the life goal Gabriel had had since

the day he saw Alicia's soul leave her body.

The client in this case was not their primary partner, the Department of

Defense. Instead, it was the National Security Agency, a department they'd

never dealt with.

When two NSA agents visited this very office last month, they succeeded on

multiple fronts in stunning Gabriel, who did not experience normal emotions as

others did.

For one thing, the operation would be extralegal, completely off the books.

This made sense, as the plan was to send Glowgen's combat team on a naval

submarine and attack a ship belonging to an allied nation, Japan. And if

casualties resulted on the other side because of combat, so be it.

The point of the operation was to steal technology.

When he heard the details, Gabriel was so stunned—or perhaps elated—that

he gasped. Fortunately, the agents didn't notice.

It was called Soul Translation technology. A stunning machine, developed by a

tiny arm of the Japan Self-Defense Force named Rath, that could scan and read

the human soul.

As a devout seeker of the soul, Gabriel had been keenly fascinated by the fulldive tech coming out of Japan. It was what drove him to play against Japanese

players in Gun Gale Online and study the Japanese language. He even spent

tens of thousands of dollars to get his hands on one of those hellish devices that

were supposed to have been destroyed: the NerveGear. But not so he could

wear it, of course.

After the controversy over that deadly game, Gabriel expected that

continuing development in full dive would taper off. But no, they'd continued

clandestine research, and now they were on the verge of unlocking the secrets

of the soul.

To Gabriel, this NSA offer was as good as fate.

For one thing, Glowgen DS was big but still just a PMC. There was no way they

could spurn an offer from the NSA, which was more powerful than the CIA at

this point. They convened a quick board meeting and chose to accept the

contract by a margin of two votes. To maintain the secrecy of the mission, they

chose operatives with dirty pasts and expertise in wet work whom they could

lean on for the combat team.

And Gabriel nominated himself to be CO.

Naturally, they would hide Gabriel's role as company executive from the

combat team. They were the types of people who, if they found out his identity,

would take him hostage and demand ransom from the company instead.

And Gabriel had to undertake this risk in order to go.

The NSA agents told him that not only had Rath's STL tech succeeded at

reading the human soul, they could even make clones of it. Once the artificial

intelligence code-named A.L.I.C.E. was complete, its soul would be loaded onto

Japanese drones that would overturn the balance of military power in East Asia.

He didn't care about war in Asia—or anywhere in the world, for that matter.

But the moment he heard the name Alice, Gabriel's mind was made up.

She would be his.

He would do whatever it took to get the soul contained in that tiny medium

called a lightcube.

"Alice…Alicia…," he murmured, leaning back into his chair. That faint smile

had returned to his lips.

When Gabriel's grandfather founded Glowgen, he intended it to mean

"generating glow." He thought of it as the glow of prosperity and happiness, but

to Gabriel, his heir, it conjured only the image of that golden glow emerging

from Alicia's forehead as she died.

What generated that glow? The soul, obviously.

It was all fate at work.

A week later, Gabriel and eleven squad members flew to Guam, then took a

nuclear submarine from the local naval base into Japan's territorial waters.

Right before the operation began, they switched to a tiny ASDS submarine that

ferried them to their assault on the Ocean Turtle, a massive marine research

craft.

He didn't know whether they'd take the vessel bloodlessly or whether one

side—or both—would suffer losses. But Gabriel was certain that Alice and the

STL tech would be his. He could give the NSA some random lightcube and a

copy of their research.

Soon…very soon. He'd done his experiments on a number of people since

Alicia, and he never got any closer to the true nature of the soul—but it would

be in his grasp before long.

He would get to see that beautiful cloud of light once again.

"…Your soul…will be so sweet…"

This time, as he closed his eyes, Gabriel said the phrase in perfect Japanese.

2

Captain Dario Ziliani, commanding officer of the Seawolf-class nuclear

submarine Jimmy Carter, was a true submariner, who rose through the ranks

from cleaning out torpedo tubes to his current position. His first sub was a

Barbel-class diesel, an extremely cramped vehicle, the meager interior of which

was largely occupied by oil stench and clangor.

Compared to that, the Seawolf class, the most expensive submarine ever

developed, was more like a Rolls-Royce. Since being named captain in 2020,

Ziliani had given his sub and crew all the care he could provide. The harsh

training paid off, and now the high-tensile body, S6W reactor, and crew of 140

were unified into a single organism fast enough to swim freely in any sea,

provided it had the depth.

In a way, the Jimmy Carter was like Ziliani's baby. Sadly, he would soon be

phased out of active service, forced to choose between working on land or early

retirement, but he knew that if his recommendation, XO Guthrie, was put in

charge next, she would be in good hands.

But then, like some dark cloud over his impending change in life, Captain

Ziliani got a strange and ominous order just ten days ago.

Jimmy Carter was designed to support special-operations missions, and it had

systems that worked with Navy SEAL forces. One of them was the presence of a

miniature submarine on the aft deck.

On several occasions, she'd sailed deep into foreign waters with SEALs on

board. But these missions were always to support peace for the United States

and the world at large, and the men who rode on those missions shared the

same sense of duty as Ziliani and his crew.

But the men who'd boarded in Guam two days ago…

Ziliani went back to meet with them once, and he nearly ordered his officers

to launch them out of the tubes. A dozen-plus men lounging around in disarray,

blasting music from headphones, playing poker for keeps, littering beer cans

around the place. They were not regimented sailors. They could barely pass for

proper military.

Only one of them, their tall commander, who apologized for the mess,

seemed to have any sense of decorum at all. But his stunningly blue eyes…

When Ziliani took his outstretched hand and gave him a hard stare, he felt a

sensation he hadn't had in many years.

It was from his childhood, long before he enlisted in the navy. He'd been

swimming at the beach in his hometown of Miami when a great white shark

swam directly past him. He didn't get attacked, fortunately, but he did look into

the shark's eyes as it swam by. They were like bottomless pits that absorbed all

the light that touched them.

And in this man's eyes was that same dark void…

"Captain, I've got something on the bow sonar!" said one of the techs, pulling

Ziliani out of the memory. "It's a nuclear turbine. Identifying now…Match.

That's the megafloat, sir. Distance to target: fifteen miles."

He snapped back to attention. He was in the command center and needed to

give orders.

"Maintain depth. Speed one-five knots."

The helm repeated his order, and then there was a brief sensation of

deceleration.

"Do we know where the Aegis defense ship is located?"

"Gas turbine–engine signal at forty-three miles southwest of target…Match.

JMSDF Nagato."

Ziliani stared at the two dots on the large display screen. The Aegis ship would

be armed, but the megafloat was just a research facility, as he understood it.

And their orders were to send that band of armed ruffians for infiltration. To a

Japanese ship—an allied nation. It didn't seem like the kind of operation the

president or DoD would approve.

Then he remembered what the black suits who'd brought him the orders

straight from the Pentagon had said.

Japan is undertaking research on that megafloat that will put them at war

with America again. The best way to maintain peaceful relations is to bury that

research in the darkness, where it belongs.

Ziliani wasn't young enough to take them at face value. But he was also old

enough to know that he didn't have any option other than to follow orders.

"Are our guests ready?" he murmured to his executive officer, who was

standing nearby.

"On standby in the ASDS."

"Good…Maintain speed, depth to one hundred feet!"

Compressed air cleared the ballast tanks of seawater, lifting the considerable

hull of the Jimmy Carter toward the surface. Slowly but surely, their distance to

the dots on the sonar shrank.

Would Japanese scientists die? Most likely. And he wasn't going to forget his

part in this operation until the day he died.

"Distance to target: five miles!"

Ziliani steeled himself and cast aside his misgivings. "Disengage ASDS!" he

commanded. He felt a minor vibration—a sign that the cargo on the aft deck

had been released.

"Disengaged…ASDS is autonomous."

The little submarine containing a pack of wild dogs and one shark picked up

speed, charging toward the belly of the giant turtle floating on the sea.