The moment her eyes met his dark-colored eyes, she felt small fireworks exploding in her head.
From between her grinding teeth, Asuna—Yuuki Asuna, forced out a low, hoarse voice.
"Unnecessary…effort."
After being imprisoned in this world, Asuna had asked herself hundreds and thousands of times.
Why, at that time, did she touch a new game machine that was not even hers? Why did she place it on her head, lie down on the mesh recliner, and issue the start command?
The dream VR interface and cursed killing machine, «Nerve Gear», and the game disc of the prison of an immeasurable number of souls, «Sword Art Online», hadn’t been purchased by Asuna, but by her older brother Kouichirou. However, even for her brother, things like MMORPGs or anything with the name of 'game' had been unrelated to his life since his youth. Born as the first son to the president of the huge electronics-manufacturing company «Recto», he had grown up while receiving all the education and training needed for him to become his father’s successor, and at the same time being excluded from everything unnecessary to that.
Why that brother of hers would be interested in Nerve Gear…no, in SAO, was something that she did not, even now, understand.
Ironically however, Kouichiro would not be able to play the first game he bought in his life. On the first day of game's official service, he was sent on a business trip overseas. On the day before his departure, when facing her from his seat at the dining table, he had complained about it jokingly, but she sensed that he genuinely had regrets about it.
Though not as extreme as Kouichiro, the only experience of game playing that Asuna, a third-year middle school student, had previously had up until now were free games on her cell phone once in a while. She knew about the existence of net games, but with high school entrance exams closing in, she had no reason or motivation to be interested in them—or that was how it should have been.
That’s why even she couldn’t explain why, on that day one month ago, on the afternoon of November 6, 2022, she had visited her brother's vacant room, taken the fully set-up Nerve Gear from the top of his desk, placed it on her head, and said «Link Start».
From just one action, everything changed on that day…no, it could be said to have ended.
In the beginning, Asuna had locked herself within an inn room in the Starting City to wait for the incident to end, but after two weeks passed with no word from the real world, she gave up hope on being saved from outside. Also, having learned that the number of player deaths had already reached over one thousand at that time and yet in spite of that even the first dungeon had not been broken through, she realized that waiting inside for the game to be cleared was useless.
The only remaining choice was therefore «What kind of death?».
Staying in the only safe city for months, no, years like this could be one way. However, no one can be sure that the rule of «Monsters cannot enter cities» will continue forever.
Instead of continuing to huddle in a small dark room while fearing for the future, it's better to go outside. Use all her ability to learn, train, and fight. If she ended up dying after using all her strength, at the very least she would not need to lament whims of the past and regret a lost future.
Run. Charge forward. Then disappear. Like a fleeting shooting star burning up upon entering the atmosphere.
Holding onto that single thought, Asuna had left the inn, and stepped out into the wilderness of the MMORPG world, of which she didn't know a single piece of terminology. She chose her own weapon, and relying on the one skill she learned, reached the bottom of the dungeon that no one had been to before.
Then today, Friday, December 2, at 4 AM. Asuna had fainted due to, most likely, a natural neural reflex from the fatigue of continuously fighting, and her path should have come to an end. In the Starting City's «Black Iron Palace», near the left side on the «Monument of Life», the name 'Asuna', run through by a horizontal line, should have been neatly inscribed, and everything would have ended—is how it should have been. And yet.
"Unnecessary……"
Asuna again squeezed out that single word again. The dark haired, single-handed sword user crouching four meters away from her lowered his night-colored eyes. Her first impression of him was that he was a little older than she was, but that unexpectedly naïve gesture made her furrow her brow slightly.
However, a few seconds later, the man's mouth formed a cynical smile that overwrote her previous impression.
"I didn't save you."
A low quiet murmur. It sounded youthful, but something in it camouflaged his age this time, too.
"……Then, why didn't you leave me there?"
"What I saved, was the map data you have. If you secluded yourself near the front lines for as long as four days, you should have mapped a considerable amount of unexplored areas. It would be a bit wasteful if it disappeared along with you."
With this logic and pragmatism pushed onto her, she took a deep breath.
'The importance of life' and 'How everyone should team up and work together'; up to now, when people in the city had told her such things she had immediately cut them down—with words only, of course—and she thought of doing that now, but couldn't come up with any reasonable responses.
"……Then, just take it."
With a low mutter, she opened her main window. Navigating through the tabs with a hand motion that she had finally gotten accustomed to recently, she accessed her map data and copied it all to a parchment item. She turned it into an object and took it out as a small scroll, and then tossed it near the man's feet.
"With this, you've achieved your objective, right? Then, I will be going."
Pushing on the grass with her hand, she stood up but wobbled slightly. Judging from the window's time display, she calculated that she had slept for seven hours since she fell, but it seemed that she had not fully recovered from her exhaustion yet. However, she still had three spare rapiers left. She had decided earlier that she would not leave the tower until the last rapier had only half its durability.
She had many unanswered questions. Through what kind of means had the grey-coated one-handed sword user moved her from the depths of the dungeon to the forest clearing?
Even accepting that he had moved her, why had he especially gone to the trouble of moving her outside, instead of a safe area in the dungeon?
Even so, she didn't think it was something that she needed to turn around and ask. Therefore, in order to return to the dungeon that towered darkly from above the tree grove to the left, Asuna tried to take a step forward. —But, just before she could.
"Wait, Fencer-san."
"……"
Asuna ignored it and took a few steps forward, but the speech that followed after made her feet stop.
"You, too, are basically working hard to clear the game right? Not just to die in the dungeon. Then, wouldn't it be better if you show your face at the «meeting»?"
". .Meeting?"
After she murmured that with her back still turned, the swordsman's voice reached her in an altered tone over the gentle breeze within the forest.
"This afternoon, in the town of «Tolbana» that is the closest to the dungeon, the first «First Floor Boss strategy conference» is supposed to be held."
3
Since the floating castle Aincrad had a tapering structure, of course the first floor on the lowest level was the widest. The first floor was almost perfectly circular, with a diameter of 10
kilometers, and an area of about 80 square kilometers. To use a reference for comparison, Kawagoe City in Saitama prefecture has an area of 110 square kilometers, and a population of over 300,000 people.
For its huge size, the first floor actually held a lot of geographic variety.
On the southern edge was the «Starting City», surrounded by a rampart that drew a semi-circle around it with a diameter of 1
kilometer. In the grasslands surrounding the city, mainly boar-and wolf-type a
nimals were prevalent with worm-, beetle-, and wasp-type insect monsters also inhabiting the area.
Northwest of the grassland was a deep wide forest, and towards the northeast there was a lake region. After passing through either of the two there were mountains, valleys, and ruins that contained monsters waiting to ambush passing players, and on the far northern-most edge of the floor, there stood a 300-meter wide, 100-meter tall squat tower—the First Floor Dungeon.
In many places on the first floor, there existed many small-and medium-sized towns and villages other than the Starting City, but the largest of them—though even then, it was only about 200
meters from edge to edge—was the town situated in the valley closest to the dungeon: «Tolbana».
The first time players arrived at this town lined with huge windmills was three weeks after the official service of SAO began.
At that point, the total number of deaths had actually reached 1800.
The mysterious female fencer and I set out together—that is, while maintaining a certain distance between ourselves, we left the forest and arrived at Tolbana's north gate.
The purple letters [INNER AREA] flowed into my view, showing I had entered a safe town area. At that moment, I felt a heavy fatigue on my shoulders, and I involuntarily let out a sigh.
If I was so exhausted just from heading out from this town early this morning, I thought that the rapier user walking behind me must surely feel worse. But when I turned around, her feet covered by knee-high boots did not seem to waver.
I didn’t think it was at all possible for one to completely recover from the exhaustion of three continuous days of hunting with just a few hours of sleep, so she must be straining herself as always. I had thought about telling her that she should at least relax her body and mind (although in the virtual world, those two are essentially the same) when returned to town, but the atmosphere between us didn’t seem to allow idle talk like that at all.
Instead, I turned toward the rapier user, and spoke very business-like words.
"The meeting is supposed to take place in the town center, at 4 PM
in the afternoon."
"……"
The face hidden by the cloth hood moved slightly up and down.
However, her feet did not stop, and the slender body passed by in front of me.
The breeze that blew in the valley town caused her cape to flutter behind her. I opened my mouth slightly, but unable to find anything more to say, I closed it wordlessly. Thinking about it, I, who had been solo playing hard for three weeks, was not qualified to seek interaction with others. Up until now, I had only been spending every day protecting my own life, after all…
"A strange girl."
Suddenly hearing that murmured behind me, I turned my gaze away from the back of the rapier user and looked around once again.
"…I thought she would soon die, but she did not. No matter how you look at it, she is a net game beginner, but her skill is fearsome.
What kind of person is she?"
The high-pitched voice continued, ending its sentences with a special nasal inflection.
The speaker was a truly nimble-looking player that was more than a head shorter than me, who by no means had a large build in the first place. Her armor, like mine, consisted of full-body cloth and leather. Her weapons were a small claw strapped on her left waist and throwing nails on her right waist. These were not weapons regularly used by those who reach the front lines, but this person's greatest weapon was something else.
"Do you know something about that fencer?"
I reflexively inquired, but knowing what the opponent's reply would be, I grimaced. The claw user did not betray my expectations, as she held up five fingers and said.
"I'll sell it cheap. 500 col."
Her grinning face had one big distinct feature. On both her cheeks were three distinct animal-like whiskers drawn on with a makeup item. Matched with her curly auburn hair, her appearance was reminiscent of a certain rodent.
One time in the past, I asked why she used such markings.
However, I only received the angry outburst of 'Don't ever ask the reason why a girl puts on makeup' reply, immediately followed by, the statement 'I will tell you for 100,000 col', so I had no choice but to hurriedly back down.
Someday, when I find an ultra-rare item, I really will pay that 100,000 col—as this secret vow continued to stick in my mind, I sourly replied.
"I feel awkward about buying a girl's information, so I will refrain from doing it."
"Nihihi, you have a good heart."
The person who said these words that were at the limit of shamelessness and laughed was most likely, Aincrad's first informant: the one known as «Argo the Rat».
'—If you chat with «Rat» for five minutes, you'll end up paying for 100 col worth of stories without knowing it. Be careful.'
That was a warning by someone. However, the actual Argo had said that she had not once sold information of doubtful authenticity for money. She said that she would only treat it as «merchandise» after she determined that a story had value, made sure to pay an appropriate information fee to the source of the story, and also collected as much of her own evidence as possible.
Thinking about it, if a false story was sold even once, then the reliability of the informant would drop, so the business of information gathering possessed a different kind of danger and anxiety compared to gathering material items in dungeons and selling to NPCs in towns.
Although it was a kind of a sexist question, 'Why would a female player choose this kind of job'…is something I inevitably thought whenever I saw Argo’s face. But even if I inquired, the most she would say would be another '100,000 col' as an answer, so instead I asked another question after giving a cough.
"So? Today once again, you aren't here for normal business talk, but as a proxy negotiator as usual?"
Then, Argo grimaced this time, and after quickly glanced left and right on the street, she pushed my back with her fingertips and made us move toward a nearby alleyway.
The «Boss strategy conference» was still two hours away, so there were not many players here yet, but it seemed like this was a conversation that she didn’t want to be heard by others just in case. The reason was—because it had to do with her reputation as an informant, most likely.
Argo stopped when we were deep inside a small alley, and then leaned her back against a house (inhabited only by NPCs, of course) and nodded again.
"Well, yeah. It’s been raised to 29,800 col."
"The offer has reached 29.8k col now, huh."
I smiled wryly, then shrugged my shoulders.
"…Sorry, but no matter how much col is offered, my answer remains the same. I don't want to sell it."
"I also already told the client that the last time."
Argo's main business is as an informant, but by using her very high AGI (Agility) stats for movement, she also maintains a side business as a «Messenger». Normally it was just delivering oral messages or short messages on a scroll, but the person who had been contacting me through her over the past week seemed to be a slightly complicated…or rather, troublesome client.
He (or she) wanted to buy my one-handed longsword, «Anneal Blade +6 (3S3D)».
The weapon enhancement system in SAO was simple compared to those of recent MMORPGs. There were five kinds of enhancement parameters: «Sharpness», «Quickness», «Accuracy», «Heaviness», and «Durability». You could try to perform an ability enhancement on a weapon for one of those categories by commissioning a NPC
or a player smith to do so.
The factors of requiring material items that are exclusively used for raising weapon parameters and also having a fixed probability of failure were similar to other MMORPG titles.
Whenever the enhancement of any of the parameters succeeded, the item's name in the equipment window would have a +1 or +2
appended to it. However, that number's «breakdown» could only be seen when the weapon
was directly tapped and its properties window was opened. During player-to-player sales of weapons, saying an item had 'Accuracy +1, Heaviness +2…' and such quickly became tedious, so instead, it had become custom to use a shorter abbreviation: for example, a +4 item with a breakdown of Accuracy +1, Heaviness +2 and Durability +1, would be denoted by the phrase «1A2H1D».
In other words, my «Anneal Blade +6 (3S3D)» was enhanced by Sharpness +3 and Durability +3. Having an item of this quality on the first floor actually required a lot of patience and luck. Because of the situation within Aincrad, not many players have trained smithing skills which have no direct relation to the rate of survival, and although the NPC blacksmiths do have a truly appropriate dwarfish appearance, their level of skill is very unreliable.
Considering that my weapon «Anneal Blade» was also the reward from a quest that required a lot of hardship to clear, the current specs of this sword could be said to make it almost the most coveted item on the first floor. —However, that being said, it's still only a «Beginner's equipment», after all. I could only enhance it a few more times at most, so around the 3rd or 4th floor, I would have to upgrade to my next sword and re-forge it from the beginning again.
For the above reasons, I wasn’t able to guess the motives of Argo's client, who wanted this sword so much he would pay the undoubtedly large amount of 29.8k col at the present time. If this was a normal face-to-face transaction, I could ask for the reason directly, but that doesn't work when I don't even know the client's name.
"……The hush money the person paid was 1000 col, right?"
At my inquiry, Argo calmly nodded and said, "That's right. Are you willing to raise?"
"Hmm…1k huh…hm——m!"
Hush money was the amount of col that Mr. X, who wanted to buy my sword, paid Argo to keep his name hidden from me. If I decided to pay 1100 col, Argo would instant message her client to inform them of that, and ask if they would like to counter it raising to 1200 col. If YES was the reply, then this time I would be forced to choose whether to pay 1300 col or not.
Sword Art Online Progressive - Volume 01 Page 2
