Sword Art Online Progressive - Volume 01

by Reki Kawahara

  That last part was the secret at the heart of Nezha’s weapon-switching trick.

  He held the customer’s weapon in his left hand temporarily creating the condition in which it was “equipped” there. The ownership right was still with the client, but it was the same as the hand-over feature that made it possible to toss weapons to each other in the middle of battle. He could still use that weapon to activate sword skills...even Quick Change.

  Next, Nezha extended the pointer finger of the hand holding the weapon to touch the shortcut icon on his window, which was cleverly hidden beneath his tightly packed wares. At that instant, the client’s sword in his hand went into his storage, and a sword of the same type was automatically pulled out. Except this weapon was spent, guaranteed to break into pieces as soon as he attempted to upgrade it.

  The only outward signs of this elaborate trick were a momentary blink of the weapon and a faint swishing sound. Given that it happened at the exact same time that he tossed the upgrading materials into the forge with a bright flash and bang, you’d have to be watching for that precise action to even notice he was doing it.

  And if the customer realized he was switching weapons and tried to confront him about it, Nezha could simply employ the same trick just as quickly and get the client’s original weapon back. Plus, once he shattered the spent weapon on his anvil, there was no proof of anything.

  In other words, to prove Nezha’s upgrade fraud was happening, I either had to utilize the Materialize All Items command to spill all of my belongings onto the ground here, or use Quick Change myself, thus pulling the sword directly out of Nezha’s storage whether he liked it or not.

  It was following the latter choice that had taken me two days from the time I noticed the trick to actually attempting it myself. I had spent all of the previous day and today in the second-floor labyrinth fighting endless hordes of half-naked bull-men tauruses to get my One-Handed Sword skill to one hundred so that I could take the Quick Change mod earlier than planned.

  As a side benefit of this activity, I got some rare loot and mapped much farther into the twenty-level labyrinth. As usual, I offered the map data to Argo at no cost, and this generosity was apparently rankling both the Lind and Kibaou squads.

  They were upset because someone else was always one or two levels ahead of them in the tower, but they hadn’t realized yet that it was Kirito the evil beater. It was only a matter of time before they knew the truth. If there was one reassurance, it was that our relationship couldn’t possibly get any worse.

  At any rate, the two days of trouble were worth it, as I had finally uncovered and proven Nezha’s upgrade fraud trick. I looked down at the curled-up blacksmith and sighed in satisfaction.

  My goal was complete. It was not a quest, so there was no reward or bonus experience. On the contrary, it had cost me the 2,700 col for labor and ingredients, but all I really cared about was making sure that Nezha didn’t attempt this dangerous scheme anymore.

  The trick itself was brilliant, but if he kept filching valuable weapons from other players, someone was going to notice. Depending on who that person was, Nezha might find himself on the wrong end of an ugly lynch mob.

  The worst possible outcome was if all the players decided he ought to be executed and it became a precedent for how to deal with such crimes.

  I wasn’t of the mind that Nezha should be forgiven for his part in this. Rufiol and Shivata had lost their beloved swords...and even though it was returned in the end, Asuna cried at the loss of her Wind Fleuret. They deserved to see some kind of justice.

  But that punishment must not be the murder of another player. If that was allowed once, it would lead to pure anarchy–squabbles over hunting grounds and loot would be solved with violence rather than words. I’d taken on the scarlet letter of the beater to prevent the retail players from purging the former beta testers. That sacrifice couldn’t go to waste.

  My solution to this was to demand that Nezha either function as a proper, honest blacksmith from now on, or to give up his smithing hammer and become a warrior. Asuna and I had talked it over and decided on this choice. Once the source of their ill-gotten wealth dried up, the Legend Braves would sink back to a level appropriate to their skill.

  I stood there, lost in thought, sword dangling from my right hand, when the blacksmith spoke in a tiny voice.

  “...I suppose this isn’t something that a simple apology will atone for.”

  Nezha’s body and voice were scrunched up in such a compact form that it seemed as though he were trying to disappear entirely.

  “...It would be nice if I could return the swords I stole from all those people...but I can’t. Nearly all of them were turned into money. The only thing I can do now is...is this!”

  His voice reached a shriek by the end. He unsteadily got to his feet. The smithing hammer fell from his hand, and he took off running without a backward glance.

  But he didn’t get farther than a few feet. A new player descended upon his exit path, long hair gleaming in the streetlamps beneath a wool hood: Asuna the fencer.

  She’d jumped out the second-story window of an empty house and blocked his path, lecturing sternly. “You won’t solve anything by dying.”

  This time, Nezha recognized the face within the hood immediately. She was the female fencer whose Wind Fleuret he’d (temporarily) stolen three days earlier. His already-timid face crumpled even further. I was the very model of an imperceptive dunce, and even I feel the powerful guilt, despair, and abandon raging within him.

  Nezha turned his face down and away from Asuna, as though trying to escape her gaze. His voice was strained.

  “...I decided right from the start...that if someone discovered my fraud, I’d die in atonement.”

  “Suicide is a heavier crime than fraud in Aincrad. Stealing weapons might be a betrayal of your customer, but suicide is a betrayal of every player working to defeat this game.”

  Her eloquence was every bit as sharp and piercing as her Linear. Nezha trembled and tensed–and his face shot upward as though on a spring.

  “It’ll happen anyway! I’m such a slow, clumsy oaf, I’ll die eventually! Whether I get killed by monsters or kill myself, the only difference is whether it happens sooner or later!”

  I couldn’t stifle a small chuckle at those last words.

  Asuna glared daggers at me, Nezha’s teary face looked hurt among the desperation, so I put up both hands and tried to apologize.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just that it was the exact same thing this lady here said just a week ago...”

  “Huh...?”

  Nezha, wide-eyed and bewildered, looked at Asuna again. He took several breaths, then finally worked up the will to ask, “Um...are you...Asuna, from the front-line fights?”

  “Huh...?” Now it was Asuna’s turn to blink in surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Well, the fencer in the hooded cape is pretty well-known around here. You’re the only female player on the frontier...”

  “...Oh...I see...”

  She sounded very conflicted and shrank back beneath her hood. I took a few steps closer and offered some advice.

  “Sounds like your disguise is actually starting to identify you. Maybe you should try something else, before you get stuck with a nickname like Little Gray Riding Hood.”

  “Mind your own beeswax! I happen to like this hood! Besides, it’s nice and warm!”

  “Oh...I see.”

  I wisely chose not to ask her what would happen when the weather got warm again. Instead, I glanced at the stunned Nezha. I couldn’t overcome the urge to ask him a follow-up question.

  “So, erm...Do you know who I am...?”

  It wasn’t because I was interested in finding out how famous I was around the game. This was purely research to see how far the stories about “the first beater” had spread from that initial front-line squad.

  “Um, well...I-I’m afraid I don
’t...”

  My reaction was equal parts relief and shock. That conflict must have showed on my face, for Asuna patted me on the shoulder. “There, what have I always told you? Stop worrying about it so much.”

  “But...I really like that bandanna.”

  “Tell you what–I’ll give you your own nickname, How about the Ukrainian Samurai?”

  “Wh...why Ukrainian?”

  “That bandanna’s got blue and yellow stripes, just like the Ukrainian flag. I guess you could also be the Swedish Samurai, if you prefer.”

  “Sorry, can I choose neither?”

  Nezha listened to our back-and-forth in timid silence, then worked up the nerve to interject.

  “Um, pardon me...Is what you said true? Did Asuna really say she would die eventually...?”

  It was obviously a difficult thing for her to answer. I tried to smooth things over by answering for her in as light and breezy a tone as I could

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. It was wild, she just passed out right in front of me during a four-day camp-and-hunt expedition in the labyrinth. I couldn’t just leave her there, and I didn’t have the strength level yet to carry a player, so I had to take a sleeping bag and–”

  Shunk.

  Asuna slammed her heel down hard on my toes to shut me up. She composed herself and said quietly, “To be honesty that feeling hasn’t disappeared. We’re only on the second floor, and there are a hundred. There’s a constant conflict inside me between my desire to get that far, and resignation that I’ll probably fall along the way. But...”

  Her hazel eyes shone bright from the shade of her hood. While the brightness of that shine was no different from what I saw that first day in the labyrinth, it seemed to me that the nature of it had changed.

  “...But I’ve decided that I’m not fighting in order to die. Maybe I’m not quite optimistic enough to say that I’m doing it to live, to beat the game...but I’ve found one simple goal to strive toward. That’s what I’m fighting for.”

  “Oh...really? What’s your goal, to eat an entire cake of that Tremble Shortcake?” I asked earnestly.

  Asuna sighed for some reason and said, “Of course not.” She turned to Nezha again.

  “I’m sure you can find your own reason. It’s already inside of you. Something you ought to fight for. I mean, you left the Town of Beginnings on your own two feet, didn’t you?”

  Nezha looked down, but his eyes were not closed. He was staring at the leather boots on his feet. I realized that they were not non-functional shoes for wearing in town, but actual leather armor.

  “...It’s true. There was something,” he mumbled. Amid the resignation, it sounded like a tiny kernel of some kind, a burning ambition. But he shook his head several times, as if trying to extinguish the flame. “But it’s gone now. It was gone before I even got here. That happened the day I bought this NerveGear. When I...when I tried the first connection test, I got an FNC...”

  FNC. Full-Dive Nonconformity. The full-dive machine was an extremely delicate apparatus that sent signals back and forth to the brain with ultra-weak microwaves. It had to be finely tuned to work with each individual user.

  But of course, they were producing thousands and thousands of units for mass-market use, and they couldn’t spend ages of time on fine maintenance. The machine had an automatic calibration system that went through a long and tedious connection test on first use. Once that was done and it knew the player’s settings, you could dive in just by turning on the unit.

  But on very rare occasions, a person received a “nonconforming” response during that initial test. Perhaps one of the five senses wasn’t functioning properly, or there was a slight lag in the communication with the brain. In most cases it was merely a slight obstacle, but there were a few people who simply could not dive at all.

  If he was here in Aincrad, Nezha’s FNC couldn’t have been that serious–but he would have been luckier if it had prevented him from playing. He wouldn’t be trapped in this game of death.

  We packed up all the tools and items into the carpet and moved to an empty house near the plaza to continue hearing out Nezha’s story.

  “In my case, I have hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but there’s an issue with my sight...”

  As he spoke, Nezha reached out to the cup of tea Asuna left for him on the round table. But he did not immediately grab it一he reached his fingers closer, and only when his fingertip brushed the handle did he carefully lift it up. “It’s not that I’m entirely blind, but I have a binocular dysfunction. It’s hard for me to grasp distance. I can’t really tell how far my avatar’s hand is from the object.”

  For an instant, I thought this didn’t seem so bad...but I soon reconsidered.

  If SAO was an orthodox fantasy MMORPG, Nezha’s disability wouldn’t be such a big deal. There were classes that had autohitting long-range attacks–a mage, for example.

  But SAO didn’t even have archers, much less mages. Every player who fought in the game did so with a weapon in his hand. And whether sword, axe, or spear, the ability to judge distance, to tell exactly how far away the monster was, made all the difference in the world. The very cornerstone of combat here was understanding, on a physical level, how far your weapon could reach.

  Nezha took a sip of tea and carefully returned the cup to the saucer. He smiled hollowly.

  “Even hitting a stationary weapon on top of an anvil with my short little hammer is extremely difficult...”

  “So that was why you carried out the steps of the process so painstakingly.”

  “Yes, that’s why. Of course, I did also feel apologetic toward the swords I was breaking...but...” He looked back and forth at me and Asuna, smiling weakly. “It might not be right for me to say this, but...I’m impressed that you saw through my switching trick. But it wasn’t just today...you remotely retrieved Asuna’s Wind Fleuret plus four three days ago. So you must have known then...”

  “Oh, at that point it was just a suspicion. At the time I noticed, the hour limit to maintain ownership was nearly up, so I had to burst into Asuna’s bedroom and force her to use the Materialize All Items command, then–”

  I felt a piercing stare from the right and narrowly avoided spilling the beans on what her inventory contained.

  “–the Fleuret came back. That was when I knew you’d committed fraud...but it was two days ago that I figured out you were using Quick Change to pull it off. The key was in your name, Nezha...or should I say, Nataku.”

  Nezha (or Nataku) sucked in a sharp breath. His fists clenched and he even lifted up out of his seat for a moment. When he sat again, he looked straight down in shame.

  “...I had no idea you’d figured that out, too...”

  “Well, that required an information dealer to discover. I mean, even your friends in the Legend Braves were calling you Nezuo. It means they didn’t know either, did they? Why you’re named after Nataku.”

  “Just call me Nezha. I picked that spelling because I wanted people to call me that,” the blacksmith said. He nodded and began to explain. “Yes, you’re correct...”

  Nataku. Also known as Na-zha, or Prince Nata.

  He was a boy god in the Ming period fantasy novel, Fengshen Yanyu. He used a variety of magical weapons called paopei and flew through the sky on two wheels. He was every bit the legendary hero as Orlando or Beowulf.

  In the Western alphabet, the Chinese name was transliterated to “Nezha,” but only a true fanatic of Eastern mythology would recognize that as a reference to Nataku. It would be especially difficult here in Aincrad, without any Internet search engines.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of brain trust Argo had in her network of contacts. At any rate, when I saw the blacksmith’s true name at the end of her write-up on the Legend Braves, I finally had an epiphany.

  He did not join this game intending to be a crafter. He tried to be a fighter, but due to his circumstances, he was eventually forced to become a bla
cksmith.

  However, that meant that despite playing as a smith now, his weapon skills might already be above a certain level. Following that line of logic, I eventually hit upon the possibility that he was using the battle skill mod Quick Change to switch out weapons, and the rest was history.

  “The Legend Braves are a team we formed for a different Nerve-Gear action game, three months before SAO came out,” Nezha explained after another sip of tea. “It was a very simple game, where you used swords and axes to fight off monsters in a straight-line map, and tried to get the high score...but even that was difficult for me. Because I had no perspective, I’d swing when the monsters were too far away, and then they’d come in close and hit me. The team could never get into the top ranks because of me. It wasn’t like I knew Orlando and the others in real life, so I probably should have left the team or quit playing the game...but...”

  He clenched his fists again, his voice trembling. “...No one told me to leave the team, so I used that as an excuse to stick around. It wasn’t because I liked that game. It was because we decided that we’d all switch over to the very first VRMMO, Sword Art Online, when it came out in three months. I really, really wanted to try out SAO. But because of the FNC, I didn’t have the guts to start it up on my own. I was...weak. I figured, if I got to be in Orlando’s party in SAO, I might be able to grow stronger...even if I still couldn’t fight that well...”

  We could only sit in silence as we listened to his painful confession. It would be easy to say that I understood how he felt. The moment I saw the very first trailer for SAO, I swore to myself that I would play this game. Even if I’d had a worse FNC than Nezha, I’d have gone in headfirst, as long as I was able to dive.

  But I couldn’t say that aloud. I abandoned my very first friend back in the Town of Beginnings–someone seeking help, just like Nezha.

  However he interpreted my silence, the blacksmith smirked in self-deprecation and continued his tale.