Sword Art Online Progressive - Volume 01

by Reki Kawahara

  There was no need to think. We had to retreat out of the chamber. We didn’t even know how this monster would attack...and the risks of fighting this taurus king were clearly far greater than that of the general.

  The problem was that Asterios had spawned in the center of the chamber, and the raid party was fighting in the back of the room. The group would need to charge through his attack range in order to reach the exit. Team H, fighting Colonel Nato, was the closest to the exit, and we could probably make it out safely now, if we broke for it...but if we did that, and teams A through G were wiped out by the king, our chances of beating this game of death disappeared along with them.

  How to evacuate a forty-seven-man raid party? The first step was eliminating our present foes as quickly as possible.

  Time seemed to spring back into motion once our path became clear, and I promptly raised my sword high and shouted, “All units, all-out attack!!”

  I tore my eyes away from Asterios atop his three-step stage, and fixed a gaze on the berserk Colonel Nato. I leapt as hard as I could, following the path of his hammer as he raised it behind him.

  As a speed-focused swordsman with no heavy metal armor, I could jump about six feet from a standing position. Nato was closer to seven or eight feet, but with the added reach of my sword, I could easily get to his head.

  My Slant skill hit the shining black horns directly. Nato’s attack motion stopped partway, and he reared back and roared. The tauruses of the second-floor labyrinth, excepting only a few (say, the Taurus Ironguard, which wore a heavy metal helm), were weak to blows to the horns. I hadn’t tried to strike their foreheads at any point until now because jumping attacks were inherently risky, and even a clean hit from a sword skill was no guarantee that the opponent would suffer a movement delay. But this situation called for desperate measures.

  At the exact moment I landed, Asuna and Agil’s team followed up with attacks of their own, knocking Nato’s HP into the red zone. His delay wore off, and the minotaur roared and began his motion for a numbing skill. In any other case, now was the time to pull back, but I pushed forward.

  “Raaah!”

  With a roar of my own, I unleashed my very best Horizontal. Even if I hit the beast’s weak point, I couldn’t stagger the creature on consecutive attacks, but it wasn’t the forehead I was aiming for–it was Nato’s giant hammer. The timing window was extremely short, but if I hit his sword skill with one of own just before he fired it off, it was possible to cancel the attacks out.

  There was a piercing clang that seemed to strike directly into the center of my brain, and my sword shot backward. Meanwhile, the hammer was pushed back overhead. Without missing their chance, my five companions proceeded to launch another wave of attacks. Only a few pixels of HP remained.

  Under normal circumstances, chaining sword skills together was impossible. But I knew from our hunting of the Windwasps the other day that you could get past that limitation if you used weapons of different categories. I curled up in midair and kicked out with my left foot. The resulting Crescent Moon, a vertical kick attack as I spun backward, caught Nato right on the forehead.

  The taurus hurtled backward and let out a high-pitched screech before freezing stiff, then exploding into a massive cloud of polygons. It must have been treated as a proper sub-boss, not just a typical mob, because I promptly saw a Last Attack bonus read-out. I didn’t have time for that, however; I spun around as I hit the ground.

  The first thing I saw across the room was a towering ebony back. King Asterios was on the move. Fortunately, he hadn’t targeted any of the five paralyzed along the east wall, but his destination was the thirty-six remaining fighters of the main party–who were still busy with General Baran.

  My worst fear was that the main force would fall into total panicked chaos and retreat if faced by a boss on either side. Fortunately, that was not happening. But very soon, his lumbering steps would take him within attack range of the raid. We had to defeat the general before then.

  “Let’s go, Kirito!” said Asuna, her voice tense. But I wasn’t sure if I should agree. It wasn’t that I was afraid for my own life–for some reason that I couldn’t explain, I was gripped with a sudden feeling that once I set foot into the battle ahead, I could not guarantee that she’d survive,

  I knew damn well just how good Asuna was. I wasn’t even sure if I could beat her in a one-on-one duel. But there was no denying my urge to force her to escape right there and then.

  After I had abandoned my first and only friend at the start of this game, and was nearly killed by a fellow beta tester just hours later, I had sworn to live as a solo player, relying on no one but myself. The week that we had just spent as a partnership-of-sorts was only a means to uncovering and stopping Nezha’s fraud. Nothing more.

  So why was I being ruled by this emotion...this sentimentality?

  Why was I so desperate to keep Asuna from dying? “Asuna, you need...”

  To run, I wanted to say–but I saw the powerful light in her hazel eyes. They told me that she knew full well what I was thinking. Her eyes were full of an emotion that was neither anger nor sadness but something even purer. Again, she said, “Let’s go.” There was enough strength in that voice that it bottled up the fear that had overtaken me.

  “...All right,” I said, and looked back at Agil’s party. The axe-warrior nodded at me, not frightened in the least.

  “We’ll swing around the right flank and defeat Baran first. If the king attacks before then, we’ve got to pull him away as best we can to help buy them time.”

  “Got it!” the others shouted. Bolstered by their courage, I leapt forward. By the time I reached full speed, my hesitation was gone.

  The monster’s reaction zone, also called its “aggro range” was invisible to the naked eye. But the more experience one built, the more it felt like a tangible thing. I followed my instinct and circled around the right side of the plodding King Asterios toward the main party.

  Baran’s HP bar was already down into the red zone. But as with Nato when he was nearly dead, Baran had gone into a berserk state and was using his Numbing Detonation at every possible chance, slowing the group’s attack progress.

  We had thirty seconds until the king started to attack, I gauged.

  I darted right between the wide-eyed Lind and Kibaou, directly in front General Baran, and leapt high into the air, aiming for his blazing orange horns. But the general was nearly twice the size of the colonel. Even my highest jump combined with my longest reach couldn’t make it all the way.

  “Rrraah!”

  At the apex of my jump, I took pains to hold my stance and just barely managed to throw off a sword skill. My Anneal Blade glowed green, and my body sped back into motion as though pushed by invisible hands: Sonic Leap, a one-handed sword charge skill.

  This desperate attack hit him right in the weak point, and the general’s body arched backward. This staggering was our final chance.

  Asuna and the other four didn’t need my order to know what to do. They raced in to land blows, then pulled back. The rest of the raid followed their lead, and General Baran was enveloped in flashing effects of every color.

  But once again, it wasn’t quite enough. There was still a pixel or two left on his HP bar.

  “Not again!” I cursed, clenching my left fist. Coming out of a major sword skill off-balance, my only option was a simple attack. I roared and swung forward with a Flash Blow, hitting him square in the chest. It was just enough damage to do the job, and that tiny little jab sent the massive body expanding...and exploding.

  I landed hard, ignoring the LA bonus readout entirely, and took a deep breath to command everyone to retreat back against the wall. There was no time to worry about whether I was overstepping my bounds or not.

  But my breath caught in my throat before I could speak.

  The onyx taurus king, who should have still been ten seconds away, was leaning backward, his massive chest bu
lging like a barrel. That looked like...

  A breath attack. Long range.

  And right in his path, back to him, her eyes fixed straight at me, was Asuna.

  If she didn’t move now, there would be no escape. I couldn’t waste time racing over to her. But that kind of logical reasoning went out the window.

  “Asuna, jump to your right!” I shouted as I dashed toward her. There were other players in the breath range, of course, but my tunnel vision was fixed on no one but the hooded fencer. She must have sensed the danger approaching from behind in my voice and expression. She leapt as I commanded, not bothering to turn around.

  As soon as her boots left the black paving stone, I reached her and slipped my left arm around her slender body, leaping in the same direction to add to our momentum. Even at full strength, the jump speed was unbearably slow. The arabesque pattern in the floor flowed past, glacial in pace...

  The right side of my vision went pure white.

  The dry shockwave that hit me was exactly a clap of thunder. Asterios the Taurus Kings breath attack was not poison or fire but lightning. And by the time we realized it, the both of us, and over twenty other players in the raid, were enveloped in its white blaze.

  There was no such thing as attack, healing, or support magic in Sword Art Online. But that didn’t mean that all traces of magic were absent from the game world. There was an infinite variety of magical items to be found that raised stats or provided buff effects, and the blessing of an NPC priest at a church in one of the bigger towns granted a player’s weapon a temporary holy effect.

  But those supernatural effects did not exist solely for our benefit. In fact, the majority were a detriment. For example, the many special attack skills employed by monsters: poison, fire, ice, and lightning breath.

  The most powerful breath attack in terms of damage was fire, but lightning was no joke. For one, it was instantaneous–it traveled the full length of its range in the instant it was unleashed.

  Worse, it had a very high chance of stunning its victims, with the worst-case scenario involving an even more dangerous debuff.

  Asuna and I took Asterios’s lightning breath to our legs, and we both lost close to 20 percent of our health in one go. A green border began to blink around the gauge, and a debuff icon of the same color appeared as well.

  Instantly, I felt my physical senses growing distant I couldn’t move my legs to land upright, even if I tried. Asuna and I slammed into the ground on our backs. This was no mere tumble effect–after all of my warnings, we were now paralyzed.

  “Asu...na,” I rasped. She was laid across my chest like an immobile plank. “Heal with...potion.”

  I tried desperately to move my stiff hand. There were two red HP potions and one green paralysis antidote in the belt pouch on my right side. Somehow, I felt around and grabbed the green one, popped the cork and held it up to my lips, even as the rumbling footsteps grew closer.

  Once I finished the minty liquid, I hesitantly looked up to see that the massive taurus king was barely ten yards away. His attack had hit several other players with paralysis, and over a dozen of them littered the ground between us and him.

  The other thirty players who escaped the lightning breath were making their way around the slowly moving boss, but they weren’t sure how to react. The reason why was clear: The raid’s leader and sub-leader, Lind and Kibaou, were both paralyzed, and the closest to the boss’s position. They were desperately trying to give orders, but a whisper was the best anyone suffering from paralysis could produce. None of the players outside Asterios’s attack range could hear them.

  But very close to my ears came the sound of a fragile, beautiful voice.

  “Why...did you come?”

  I looked back to see two very large hazel eyes right in front of my face. Asuna was collapsed directly on top of me, empty potion bottle clutched in her hand. She repeated herself. “Why...?”

  She was asking me why I’d run toward her when I realized the taurus’s breath attack was coming, rather than darting directly out of harm’s way. I wondered what the answer was myself, but it did not become apparent All I could say was “I don’t know.” And for reasons that were once again a mystery to me, she smiled gently, closed her eyes, and set her hooded head against my shoulder.

  I looked over Asuna’s back to see Asterios raising his massive hammer high overhead. The crushing implement, twice as large as even Baran’s, was aimed right at Lind and Kibaou.

  So this is it, I told myself.

  If our two leaders died, the rest of the raid party would flee out of the boss chamber, leaving behind the ten or so paralyzed, including me and Asuna, to die...But at some later point in time, they would be able to use the information gleaned from Asterios’s appearance and attacks to launch a second attempt The worst regret of all this was that I wasn’t able to save Asuna and her limitless potential. As I’d told her after the first-floor boss, she could have one day led an enormous guild and been a leader to the player population. Like a shooting star, endlessly lighting up the sky of this dark, hopeless game of death.

  I hallucinated a strange light, passing across the ceiling of the dim chamber.

  But even after opening my eyes wider, the shining arc did not disappear. It reached an apex and began to fall, heading right for the crown on Asterios’s brow as he was preparing to swing his hammer...

  It wasn’t until a high-pitched squeal of metal rang through the coliseum and Asterios lurched in pain that I realized the light wasn’t a trick of the eye.

  That was a long-range attack that shouldn’t have been possible at this point in SAO, a sword skill under the Throwing Knife category. But the thrown weapon didn’t simply fall to the ground after hitting the boss’s weak point; it spun around and flew back across the room, as though pulled by an invisible string.

  Asterios recovered from his delay and roared in anger, making a slow turn back to his attacker. That was the first actual hit on the boss, so it automatically drew the enemy’s attention.

  Suddenly, a powerful set of arms pulled me and Asuna off the floor. The mighty warrior, holding two people aloft without any help, spoke in a deep baritone.

  “Sorry about that! I actually got a little spooked!”

  Agil the axe-warrior carried us over to the eastern wall. His three companions were also busy moving paralyzed party members to a safer position. As if brought to their senses, the remainders of the blue and green teams raced over to the other immobilized fighters.

  I tried to crane my neck up so I could see as he ferried us under his arms like suitcases. As we moved, the southern side of the coliseum came into view behind the boss’s massive bulk.

  About thirty feet from the entrance, a small figure clutching a bizarre weapon was staring up at the looming giant with a resolute look on his face.

  “Isn’t that–?!” Agil cried in surprise as he dropped us on the floor against the wall. And it wasn’t just him–virtually everyone in the chamber was staring with shock at this new, forty-eighth player.

  Not because he had suddenly appeared just before the boss routed us, or because he used a strange and unfamiliar weapon. It was because we had all seen this man hammering away at an anvil in the eastern plaza of Taran just a few days ago. It was Nezha the blacksmith.

  He was dressed much differently now, of course. The brown leather apron was replaced by a bronze breastplate, gauntlets of the same material, and an open-faced helmet. But the image of a beardless dwarf that his short, stocky build and round, dour face created hadn’t been neutralized by this new look; if anything, his accentuated it.

  The entire raid was shocked that a blacksmith would be here, participating in the boss raid, with only two exceptions: Asuna and me, the ones who’d convinced him to change careers in the first place. I was surprised as well, of course, but only because I hadn’t expected him to be able to charge straight through the labyrinth alone, after just three days of training.


  But there were others here who would be shocked in a much different way from the rest of us. As soon as the thought occurred to me, a group rushed forward from the raid party in the center of the room. They came to a stop once they reached an angle that gave them a clear view of Nezha’s face around the side of the boss. It was team G...the Legend Braves.

  “Nez...”

  Orlando started to call the name of his missing partner, but he held back at the last instant. It seemed the Braves were still trying to hide the fact that Nezha was part of their guild.

  For an instant, Nezha looked back at his silent former companions with a pained look, but he composed himself and yelled, “I’ll draw the boss away! Get everyone back on their feet now, while you can!”

  Asterios’s walking speed–for the first of his many HP bars, at least–was quite slow. If Nezha used the hundred-yard hall effectively, he could probably continue to occupy the enemy’s attention all by himself. If he held out until all of the paralyzed had recovered, we might be able to evacuate the entire raid group safely...

  But no. It wouldn’t work. The boss moved slowly, yes, but he had that instantaneous lightning breath to make up for it. There was no way to dodge that onslaught on your very first encounter with it. And based on the moment of Nezha’s appearance, he probably hadn’t seen Asterios’s first attack.

  “Agil, warn him about...”

  The breath attack, I wanted to say, but I was already too late. Asterios stopped still and pulled his head back again, sucking in breath. His chest puffed up into a round ball, and little sparks crackled out of his nostrils. Nezha was standing still, looking up at the boss’s head.

  “Move...” I rasped.

  “Get out of the way!!” someone in the raid shouted. But Nezha nimbly leapt aside before the words were even out of his mouth. The next instant, a brilliant cone of white lightning shot from the boss’s gaping mouth. The breath attack reached nearly to the exit of the room, but Nezha was clear of its path by a good six feet.