At this moment, in the Jötunheimr field far below us, the players accepting the «Frost Giant Tribe» side’s quest and the hunting of the beast type evil-gods had gained momentum. The number of quest participants would only increase and not decrease. The remaining time was estimated to be around an hour. The battle with the last boss —— probably «King Þrym» himself —— should take about thirty minutes, we wouldn’t be able to move to the third and forth floor within thirty minutes.
If there were a little more time, we could explain the situation to the players on the field, asking for their assistance in revoking the ongoing quest, but at this moment we didn’t have enough time to go back to the ground. The other alternative was to message the fairy lord requesting reinforcements, but organizing a force in the capital city beyond the mountain range, moving it to the Aarun plateau, and reaching Jötunheimr from the dungeon stairs, by the time they did them the sun would have set.
In other words, with just seven people, we were in a hopeless situation. —— Or rather, factoring in the failure of «Queen Urth»‘side quest from the Cardinal’s automatic quest generator function, Þrymheimr castle would surface on Alfheim, and trigger the start of a large-scale campaign quest «Ragnarök». The fault was obviously the character who inherited its function from its creator.
Anyway——
“……In that case, I don’t care if it’s the king of the evil-gods or not, we will just «Smash» him for good!”
Lisbeth said that with a slap on my back, the rest of them altogether went “Oo!” in agreement. Where did they get that recklessness from? While thinking that, I strongly nodded.
“——Alright, everyone’s HP and MP have fully recovered right? Then let’s clean up the third floor quickly!”
The combined voice echoed once more, seven people then kicked the floor, and started running, aiming for the boss’ room on the lowest floor, which was visible through the ice.
Just as Yui said, the third floor was clearly narrower than the second floor. It was natural for the lower parts of an upside down pyramid, but this place was quite a narrow and also had a complicated passage. For a normal clearing, we would be confused by the gimmick of the paths, but we had, enshrined on my head, the Navigation Pixie-sama which could give the latest model of an intelligent car navigation system a run for its money.
Our trump card accessed the map data, and with her instructions, we could run through the winding passage at full speed. Even the gimmick puzzles using levers, gears, or stepping switches were cleared without any time used to solve them. If this affair were to be observed from the outside, there would be no mistake for them to think that we were doing a time attack for the fastest clearing.
We ran into the sub-boss twice, but we still reached the boss room of the third floor in only eighteen minutes. What awaited us there had twice the size of the Cyclops and Minotaur from the previous floors, both sides of its long lower body had ten pairs of centipede-like feet, it was clearly the creepy evil giant, but it didn’t have much physical resistance. Of course its attack power was through the roof, so the HP gauge belonging to Klein and me were in the red so many times after being targeted by it. This battle, which made my stomach sore later, when I thought that either of us dying would lead to a wipe, went on for nine minutes.
During that time; Lis, Silica, Sinon, and Pina tried their best to cut down the giant’s feet one by one, I then finished it off with the «Skill Connect» which included multiple sword skills once it was unable to move. With our high spirits, we rushed into the fourth floor to beat King Þrym and his Niflheimr. Once we stepped into the passage leading to the boss room, we stopped, as in front of our eyes —— a scene came into view.
It was a cage made of elongated icicles on the wall’s edge.
Behind the fence caused by the stalactite growing sharply from both the ground and the ceiling, was a single figure. It was not of a giant’s size. As it had collapsed on the ground, its accurate size was difficult to tell, but its body should be about the same height as the Undine Asuna’s.
The skin was as white as the powdery snow lying thick around. The long flowing hair was a deep brown gold. The volume of the chest covered by the clothing that could be seen from her sorry state, it would be best not to say this out loud, as it could easily overwhelm all of our girl members. Both her hands and feet were shackled in the rugged ice.
The unexpected scene caused us to halt and feel worried, then the captive girl’s shoulders made a sudden but subtle shake, as she lifted her face, with the blue chains ringing.
Her pupils were also of the same tea gold, like her hair. Her face, if it was a player avatar, would surely be because of overwhelming luck when it was created, or the account was bought with the large sum of money. However, her face was sublimed with the western European beauty, which was quite rare in this game.
Blinking once, her long eyelashes moved down then up, the girl said in a fine voice,
“Please…… Help me……out of here……”
The katana user was sucked aimlessly toward the ice cage, I grabbed and pulled the bandana tail which dangled from behind his head.
“It’s a trap.”
“Trap.”
“That’s a trap.”
The last two were Sinon’s and Lis’s words.
Klein straightened his back and turned around, as he made a subtle expression while scratching his head.
“O-Oh……it’s a trap. ……A trap, right?”
For the katana user on his death bed’s sake, I asked in a small voice, “Yui?”. The pixie on my head promptly replied,
“It’s an NPC. Just like Urth-san, there is connection to the language engine module. ——But, there is one difference. This person has the HP gauge enabled.”
Normally, the HP gauge of the quest giving NPCs would be disabled to prevent them from taking damage. The exceptions were, when the NPC was the escort quest’s objective, or the NPC was actually——
“A trap.”
“It’s a trap.”
“I think it’s a trap.”
Asuna, Silica, and Lyfa said at the same time.
His eyebrows made a 八 shape, his eyes widened, and his mouth was pursed; I patted Klein’s shoulder who was stiff in those complex expressions and quickly said,
“Of course it could be possible that it isn’t a trap, but now we don’t have time for trial and error. We need to reach Þrym’s place as early as possible, even if it is a second sooner.”
“O……Oo, hmm, well, that’s right, yeah.”
Klein nodded slightly and moved his glance from the ice cage.
When we ran until just a few steps before reaching the stairs, the voice came again from behind,
“……Please…… anybody…………”
——To be honest, I also had the urge to help her, as I didn’t think that NPCs were merely the system’s automatically generated moving objects, but dwellers living in this world. If this was in a normal quest progression, helping that girl, accompanying her, and as the story progressed until the end, hearing her laugh from behind, “Uhahahaha, you fool―“, would still be amusing. However, we were not in the situation to take that unnecessary risk now. Just for this fact Klein would certainly——
The sound of footsteps on the ice which was aligned nicely up to this moment had one which was no longer synchronized.
The tall and thin body of the katana user turned around, his hands clenched and head facing downwards. He said in a low voice from his stubbly bearded mouth,
“……It’s a trap. I understand it’s a trap. ————But, even it’s a trap. Even knowing it’s a trap……”
Then he suddenly lifted his face up, it might have been my imagination but I saw something thin and blur on his eyes.
“Still……no matter what, how could I leave this person behind! Even……even if it leads to the failure of the quest…… leads to Aarun’s destruction ……even with all those, I’d still help her here, this i
s, this is my way of life —— for a bushidō like me!”
He then ran noisily back to the ice cage, as we watched Klein’s back, there were two thoughts ran inside our minds —— namely ——
…………He’s an idiot.
and,
Klein-san’s so cool!
However, which thought had a higher count was a question which will never have an answer.
Iaido is Japanese martial art associated with the smooth, controlled movements of drawing the sword from its scabbard, striking or cutting an opponent, removing blood from the blade, and then replacing the sword in the scabbard.
Whirlwind
Klein shouted “I’ll help you right now!” at the captive woman who supported her upper body with her hands, while grabbing his beloved katana with his left hand. At the next moment, he unleashed the iai sword skill «Tsujikaze», which destroyed one side of the icicle cage.
The girl rescued from the ice cage suddenly turned into a giant monster and attacked us —— fortunately, there was no ungrateful wretch like that.
With four additional flashes from Klein’s katana, the chain restraining her hands and feet were cut off, and the beautiful girl lifted her face weakly and whispered,
“……Thank you, Fairy Swordsman-sama.”
“Can you stand? Any injuries?”
Squatting down and holding his right hand out, Klein was completely «immersed» in it. Well, during a quest in a VRMMO, being immersed in the story was the right practice. I was the same too, giving it my all in order to fulfill Queen Urth’s request to stop Giant King Þrym’s ambition, Klein just took one wrong step here. It was wrong, but, how to say it——
“Yes……, I’m fine.”
Nodding, the gold haired beauty stood up, but immediate stumbled lightly. Klein held his hand out like a gentleman to offer her support, then asked again,
means older sister, Klein uses it as if in this situation he is hitting on a girl.
“The exit is a bit far, could you go back alone, Nee-san?”
“…………”
To that question, the beautiful girl’s eyes looked downwards.
The «Automatic response/verbalize module engine» of the Cardinal System, to put it simply, was a system to answer ‘B’ if the player said ‘A’, but with extremely complex pattern lists. With the provisioning from advance prediction and learning functions, the NPC connected to the module could make a natural conversation with the player —— of course it was still artificial —— if observed carefully.
That module may have caused some breakthrough, but the automatic response NPC was still far from achieving the human-like «emotion» and unlimited «intelligence» of the little fairy Yui sitting on my head. While it was still a big difference from the fixed response NPC which replied with the same dialog no matter what was said, there were still many cases when the auto-response NPC was unable to understand player’s speech, forcing them to find the «correct question».
I thought this might be the case from the silence of the golden haired beauty, however, unexpectedly, she raised her face and said before Klein could ask a new question.
“……I cannot just flee from the castle like this. In order to reclaim the tribe’s treasure the Giant King Þrym had stole, I crept into this castle, but I was found and caught by the third gate guardian. I couldn’t leave without the treasure. If you would be so kind, would you please allow me to accompany you to Þrym’s room?”
“O……u……m……”
This time, Klein who held the «Man who lives bushidō life» banner was unable to find an immediate response and groaned awkwardly. Watching from several meters away, Asuna, who was next to me whispered quietly,
“Somehow, this is quite suspicious……”
“I think so too……”
I nodded in return, then Klein turned around from the girl, showed his sorry face to me and said,
“Oi, Kiri……”
“……Ah-well——, alright, alright. There’s no choice but to go along until the end. It isn’t 100% sure this is a trap anyway.”
With my answer like that, Klein grinned and declared in high spirits to the beautiful girl.
“Alright, let’s go nee-san! We’re sharing the same destiny, let’s kick Þrym’s butt together!”
“Thank you very much, swordsman-sama!”
At the same time the golden haired beauty clung to Klein’s left arm, as the party leader, a dialog window appeared in my vision asking for the permission to let the NPC join.
“Let’s hope Yui won’t say anything odd―”
While mumbling, I pressed the ‘Yes’ button on the window. On the upper left of my vision, below the mini HP/MP gauge of the party members, an eighth gauge appeared.
The beautiful girl’s name was [Freyja]. It was a name I wasn’t sure I had heard before. Her HP and MP were really high, especially her MP, which had a quite surprising number. She was probably a mage type.
Like this, if she stayed as our companion until the end, she could really be great help, and while I thought so, I glanced at the medallion on Lyfa’s neck. The clean cut jewel seemed to be more than ninety percent in darkness now. The remaining time should be around thirty minutes, I inhaled deeply before speaking,
“From the dungeon structure, after descending those stairs it will probably be the boss’ room. The boss is certainly stronger than those we faced so far, we’ll just have to fight with our all. At the start, focus on defense while observing its attack patterns, and counter attack when there’s a chance. Be careful when the boss’ gauge changes to yellow or red as it might change its attack patterns.”
Looking at the nodding party members, I exclaimed in a strengthened tone,
“——Last battle, fly ahead with full throttle!”
“Oo―!”
With the third shout since the start of the quest; Yui on my head, Pina on Silica’s shoulder, and the golden haired beautiful NPC Freyja also raised their voices in chorus.
The width of the descending stairs increased as we went down, and the decorative objects on the surrounding pillars and statues became more gorgeous at the same time. The «approaching boss room and resulting map data would be larger» tradition from Aincrad was also present here.
Standing at the end of the path were two wolves carved into the massive ice gate. So this was the throne room of King Þrym. Even though we made sure there were no gimmicks in the surroundings, we still approached the gate cautiously.
The gate began opening to both sides automatically once we were about five meters away. The cold air, along with a difficult to explain pressure, came from within. Asuna began re-applying supporting magics, and with Freyja help, the maximum HP amount of all members were increased by an unknown buff.
Everyone made eye contact after confirming the numbers of buff icons below our HP/MP gauges. Then, we nodded and rushed in at once.
The interior was an extraordinarily huge space in both horizontal and vertical directions. The wall and floor were blue ice, like the rest of the dungeon. The purple fire swayed eerily on the ice candles. High up on the ceiling were chandeliers of the same color, lined up. But what grabbed our attention was the dazzling reflection from the left and right wall lined along the interior.
Gold. Gold coins and ornaments, swords, armors, shields, sculptures and furniture, all kinds of golden objects were piled up to a scale where it was impossible to count. As the insides of the room sank into darkness, the full extent of the treasure was entirely unfathomable.
“…………How much Yurudo are all these worth……?”
Inside the room; Lisbeth, the only person who managed a player shop here murmured in a trance. But what was inside my mind was “With this much, your storage would surely explode!”, of course I didn’t say that to her.
On the right side of the party now standing still, would Klein still able to uphold his bushidō way of life? He walked aimlessly a few steps toward the treasure mountain. And, increased his s
peed as he approached the treasure——
“……A small bug is flying.”
The low frequency mutter could be heard from the dark open space deep within the room, causing the floor to tremble.
“I hear an annoying buzz. Where is it? I’ll crush the bad bug.”
Boom, the floor trembled. Boom, boom, the trembles approached, it sounded as if it were so heavy that it might break the ice floor.
Once it reached the lighting range, a human shape appeared.
Giant —— wouldn’t be a suitable word. The humanoid evil-god was huge even compared to the bosses we fought in this castle so far. Its height must be at least fifteen meters. Even if I jumped with full force, I wouldn’t be able to reach the knee of those giant tree trunk sized legs.
Its skin color was dull blue, like lead. Dark brown fur coiled around its arms and legs, and I wondered what kind of large animal the fur came from. A single part of the plate armor on its waist had the size of a small boat. While the upper part of the body was bare, the prosperous muscle looked as if it was able to repel any weapons directed at it.
Its muscular chest had its blue beard hung over it. Its head above it sank into a silhouette and we could only see its outline. However, the gold crown on its forehead and the blue and bleak blinking eyes below shone brightly in the dark.
In the old Aincrad, the system limit of the floor height was a hundred meters, the boss room inside the labyrinth zone was also under the same rule, it was unavoidable for all boss monsters to had vertical size in moderation. So up until now, I had no experience in fighting with an enemy which I had to look up to. As I couldn’t fly, how could I fight like this? The best I could do was cutting no higher than its shins.
While I was thinking about various things, the giant giant —— the double expressions are necessary to describe its size —— took another step closer, and laughed like a gong being hit,
“Hu, hu…… the Alfheim bugs? Creeping into this place under Urth’s seduction? How about this, you small fry. Just tell me where that woman is hiding, and you can take the gold in this room with you, hmm?”
Sword Art Online - Volume 8 - Early and Late Page 20
