Sword Art Online Alternative "Gun Gale Online" Episode 04

Death Game (デスゲーム) is the fourth episode of the Sword Art Online Alternative "Gun Gale Online" anime adaptation, as well as the fourth episode of the 1st Squad Jam story. It aired on April 28, 2018.

Plot
Having dispatched four members of Narrow and made her retreat, LLENN learnt from M that the two remaining members had resigned, ending the battle in their victory. In order to regroup with her partner, LLENN was guided through a highly-complicated route by M via her earpiece. Thus, upon finally reaching her destination, LLENN expressed her surprise at M's navigational abilities. After explaining that this was the result of his good sense of geography since childhood, M displayed the map of the battlefield to see the results of the 14:50 scan. Having seen that only two other teams remained, one in the desert five kilometres away and another one closer but beyond a lake, M concluded that they would be unable to reach their enemies within ten minutes and decided to proceed along the waterfront until the next scan.

However, at 14:54, just two minutes after the two left their temporary safe house, M spotted a group of enemies, named MMTM, approaching them on hovercrafts via the lake. As the hovercrafts would be able to follow them on land, rendering their escape futile, LLENN proposed acting as a decoy to give M the chance to hide. However, while M praised the idea, he instead decided to deploy a highly-impenetrable shield, made from the armour plates of a space battleship, to safely counterattack with his sniper rifle. Having LLENN distract the enemy during their next attack, M began sniping them one-by-one, keeping his finger away from the trigger until the very moment he fired to ensure that his opponents would be unable to make use of the Bullet Line assistance system.

As such, M was able to kill five of the six members of MMTM without them being able to avoid his bullets. As M was unable to reach his final target, he threw a powerful type of plasma grenade into the water. Just as the hovercraft reached the spot where the grenade fell into the water, the explosion created a large wave that sent the survivor into the air. Upon the man landing on the ground, LLENN completed the job by shooting him at point-blank range under M's order.

Moments later, with LLENN having deduced how M was able to dispatch his enemies so easily, M notified LLENN that the next scan was about to begin. When LLENN expressed her astonishment that only an hour had passed since the tournament began, M was about to investigate the contents of a letter from his pocket, before deciding to focus on the scan first. Just as the slow scan reached the position of their team, LLENN and M noticed, to their shock, that their final enemy, SHINC, was merely six hundred metres away from them.

At that very moment, LLENN was sniped in her right flank. As LLENN barely survived the attack and was still disoriented after being flung into the air by the bullet, M immediately grabbed her body and carried her into a nearby hovercraft, using the vehicle to escape their enemy's firing range. Having temporarily gained distance from their opponents, M decided to travel to the south-western wasteland, as he doubted whether they would have enough fuel to reach the marshlands instead.

Once on shore again and having restocked on her ammunition and grenades from her inventory, LLENN remembered that M had planned to read a letter after the scan. Reminded about the message, M revealed that he had been told to read it at 15:00 and thus, while LLENN kept watch on their surroundings, he began inspecting the letter. To LLENN's surprise, however, upon finishing the letter, M aimed his pistol at LLENN, apologising for what he was about to do.

Reacting quickly, LLENN was able to avoid the bullet and move close enough to M to touch his gun. When M attempted to fire at LLENN again, he discovered that she had engaged the safety on his pistol, preventing it from firing. With her muzzle now aimed towards M at point-blank range, LLENN demanded to know why he had tried to dispose of her. After several moments of maintaining silence, M fell on his knees, desperately begging for his life with a tear-strained expression.

New Characters

 * Bold (MMTM)
 * David (MMTM)
 * Jake (MMTM)
 * Kenta (MMTM)
 * Lax (MMTM)
 * Summon (MMTM)

Teams

 * LM
 * Narrow
 * MMTM
 * SHINC

Locations

 * Gun Gale Online
 * Squad Jam tournament map
 * Residential area
 * Waterfront and lake area
 * Wasteland area

Adaptation Notes

 * Adapted from Gun Gale Online Volume 1, SECT.8 - SECT.11


 * The scene of LLENN following M's convoluted instructions to reach his position was omitted.
 * LLENN considering the possibility of M using drones or cheats to determine her position while guiding her through a convoluted route was omitted.
 * LLENN mentioning that her in-game name was based on her real name while hypothesising on the meaning of M's name was omitted.
 * The scene of LLENN proposing ideas for their next course of action after seeing the 14:50 scan, while M was lost in thought about his letter for several tens of seconds, was omitted.
 * In the novel, LLENN initially thought that the enemy hovercrafts were simple motorboats.
 * In the novel, only one of the hovercrafts approached LM within firing range as a scouting attack, while the others kept their distance for a couple of minutes.
 * Pitohui's lecture on covers and their usefulness was skipped.
 * A summary of MMTM's exploits until their battle with LM was omitted from the anime.
 * MMTM's remarks regarding M's shield and their reasoning for choosing to charge at LM were omitted.
 * LLENN's internal monologue, including her considerations whether to use her weapon as a shield, while distracting MMTM was omitted.
 * In the novel, when Jake's partner was shot, he did not die instantly. Instead, the blow caused him to suddenly turn the hovercraft's wheel, causing the vehicle capsize and the two men inside it to fall into the water. Jake's partner attempted to warn his team members that they would not see any Bullet Lines, but was unable to voice his sentence due to being in the water. The man died several moments later due to drowning, just as he deduced M's trick.
 * In the novel, when only two members of MMTM remained, they attempted to retreat. However, when only one survivor was left, he abandoned his attempt to escape.
 * The novel did not mention LLENN firing three separate volleys at the final member of MMTM.
 * Pitohui's lecture did not have any context in the novel. The battle against a group of robots was not mentioned there.
 * In Pitohui's example of LLENN using a P90 in the real world, Pitohui's reference to the Japanese Swords and Firearms Control Law, and her remark on LLENN being capable of preparing her gun for shooting were omitted. In her explanation of the workings of the Bullet Circle, a reference to Sword Skills was skipped.
 * The anime did not mention that Pitohui herself had tested the workings of the Bullet Circle with a sniper rifle when commenting about what would happen if the player pulled the trigger roughly, yet managed to get the Bullet Circle focused on the target.
 * A scene of Pitohui acting as a teacher and praising LLENN's initiative to ask questions, and then grading her question was omitted.
 * A detailed list of all the factors that snipers need to account for in the case of long-distance shooting was omitted.
 * In the novel, the hovercraft that M used to escape from SHINC still had the bodies of its previous users when LM embarked, thus M had to dispose of them first.
 * Rosa and Sophie were ordered to open fire with their machine guns when Tohma exhausted her ammunition and M was already on the hovercraft. In the anime, Rosa and Sophie were both waiting at the truck instead.
 * SHINC's perspective of their encounter with LM before their opponents escaped was skipped.
 * In the novel, Tanya was the only SHINC member to keep track of the satellite scan. Eva (Boss) was on the balcony along with Tohma, using binoculars to observe LM and oversee the actions of her team. She continued following LM with her binoculars until they disappeared into the distance with their hovercraft.
 * In the novel, Eva chose the wasteland as their next destination as she saw the route LM was taking and surmised that they would not have enough fuel to change course.

Errors

 * In the novel, it was said that MMTM's leader, unnamed in the books, had participated in the main third Bullet of Bullets tournament. However, in the anime, the leader was given the name "David", even though there was no such participant in the third Bullet of Bullets.
 * The anime shows Summon getting shot before David, yet David's hit points begin decreasing first.

Trivia

 * The song that LLENN hummed while travelling along the lake was "step step" by Kanzaki Elsa, a song whose melody was based on a Promenade from Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition.