Death Gun


 * This article is about a group and alias. You may be looking for the episode.

Death Gun (死銃) is a group created by Shinkawa Shouichi (XaXa) and Shinkawa Kyouji (Spiegel) to use an in-game avatar, named «Sterben», in Gun Gale Online (GGO) to imitate the ability to kill a player in real life from within a virtual world. Their goal was to make the players of GGO or, to a bigger extent, all VRMMO game players fear their alleged power. Death Gun wore a «Metamaterial Optical Camouflage mantle», a rare cloaking item. The avatar also wielded a «Type 54 "Black Star"» handgun as their in-game «Death Gun», as well as an «Accuracy International L115A3» sniper rifle, which was used to paralyze their victims from afar. All of the victims of Death Gun were gamers living alone in low security apartment buildings centered around the Tokyo area.

Background
After Shinkawa Shouichi (XaXa) returned from Sword Art Online, his younger brother Shinkawa Kyouji (Spiegel) suggested him to play Gun Gale Online. Shouichi was not enthusiastic at first, but it all changed when he purchased a Metamaterial Optical Camouflage mantle from the Real Money Trade system. Shouichi found it interesting to use the mantle to follow people from behind, but one day, a person he was following went to the Governor's Office to operate a game terminal. Shouichi decided to take out his binoculars to peek at the terminal, and discovered his target's real name and address, among other real life details. Shouichi memorised the information and wrote it down after logging out. Afterwards, he continued spying on the people in the Governor's Office and acquired the real names and addresses of sixteen players in total.

On a certain day in October, Shouichi's brother Kyouji told his brother about a problem with his GGO character's development, caused by misinformation spread by a player named XeXeeD. Shouichi remembered that XeXeeD was one of the players whose real life details he had acquired by spying. The two jokingly began discussing how they could use XeXeeD personal information and as they continued discussing, they formulated a plan for the Death Gun incident.

Plan
The Shinkawa brothers decided to steal a legal master key, as well as high pressure syringes of a muscle-relaxant, called succinylcholine, that could cause heart failure in extremely small quantities from their father's hospital. Then, Kyouji would operate Shouichi's avatar and, at a designated time, shoot the in-game avatar of their target with a Type 54 "Black Star". At the same time, Shouichi would use the key he obtained from the hospital to infiltrate the home of their target and inject the target with the drug at the designated time, causing the player to die shortly after being shot in-game by Kyouji and thus creating the illusion that a gun in-game had the power of killing people in real life. They chose seven targets, who all lived in Tokyo and had an old-model lock that would not leave any records of being opened, or there were spare keys near the door.

However, after the second murder, the brothers discovered that people did not take the Death Gun rumour seriously. Thus, they decided to modify their plan. They planned to kill three players: «Pale Rider», «Garrett» and «Sinon», during the third Bullet of Bullets tournament. However, there were problems with executing this plan. Firstly, during the tournament, the brothers would not be able to communicate, making it troublesome to shoot at the same time. This problem was solved by using MMO's Stream's broadcast of the tournament finals to synchronise their actions. Another problem was that they had to move between the homes of the targets to kill them. The brothers chose the trio closest to their home, but while Pale Rider and Garett lived close to each other, Shino's home was farther away. Kyouji insisted to be the one doing the killings in real life this time, but did not have a license to drive a motorcycle, thus Shouichi invited a third member, his partner from Laughing Coffin, Kanamoto Atsushi (Johnny Black), to help with the killing in the real world.

Known Members
The illustration of Sterben's avatar and gears from the "Design Works II" artbook.

Victims

 * XeXeeD
 * Usujio Tarako
 * Pale Rider
 * Garett