So…how was I supposed to explain to the dark elf this very particular quirk of mine, based on preference rather than rational gain? If I insisted on Sharpness, that might solve the matter, but it seemed like there was a 1—no, a 10-percent chance that this particular NPC would say “Then I won’t do it.” Instead, I just glanced back and forth between the sword and his face.
Finally, Asuna broke the stalemate with a perfect, simple solution.
“Why isn’t Sharpness the best choice?” she asked.
The blacksmith nodded. “Of all of Lyusula’s great blades, this one is especially sharp—and thus fragile. To preserve and protect the blade, it is best to dispatch the enemy with as few strikes as possible. That means Accuracy would be best, followed by Durability.”
“Ah, I see…So the Accuracy is to make fighting more efficient,” Asuna said, echoing my own reaction.
The sword’s Durability wasn’t bad at all according to its specs, but ever since I’d started using it, I noticed that it seemed to deplete on the quick side in battle. The Sword of Eventide was better at slicing away at uncovered or undefended spots than at smashing through layers of armor, presumably. If one focused on hitting weak points from the very start, then the effect of the system assistance kicking in might not be that disorienting, after all.
It hadn’t eliminated all of my misgivings, but if this was a sword forged by a dark elf, it was probably best to accept a dark elf blacksmith’s advice about it. “Okay…I understand. Then let’s upgrade its Accuracy, please,” I said.
“Very well,” the blacksmith replied, and the window popped up once more. I reset the items and values, hit the OK button again, and grabbed the bag of materials that appeared.
The blacksmith took the items and tossed them into the furnace that seemed to be made of wood. The materials melted instantly, and the orange flames began to glow blue. He stuck the Sword of Eventide in, and it promptly took on a blue glow of its own.
Then he transferred the sword to the anvil—I couldn’t tell why he chose the specific timing of it—and began to smack it with his hammer. With just ten strikes, quick enough that I didn’t have time to get nervous, the sword promptly flashed brighter.
“It is done,” he said, thrusting the sword toward me.
“Um,” I said without taking it, “I’d like another round of Accuracy, actually, followed by Durability.”
Even maximizing the amount of materials you could put into the process, upgrading couldn’t get higher than a 95-percent chance of success, but the blacksmith easily cranked out three perfect attempts. It was my nature to want to keep the streak going, but that was sadly the end of my stock of mats. I still had three moo-moo planks (the cow-branded metal pieces) that could boost your chances to maximum in one go, but I was saving them for when it was really necessary.
Instead, Asuna decided to get up to +7 on her Chivalric Rapier—the scary part was that she still had eight attempts left—and then we thanked the blacksmith, who gave us a disinterested snort and returned to his business. I was curious about why he called Viscount Yofilis by the name Leyshren, but we didn’t have time, so that would have to wait for another day.
We also stopped at the leatherworker and the seamstress for some upgrades to our armor—both of these were women and at least five times friendlier than the smith. When this was done, Asuna and I moved to the outdoor training grounds at the western end of the encampment. It was now 10:40, so even accounting for travel, we had a full hour to practice.
There was no way I could teach her every little trick and lesson I’d picked up over my time with the game, and that was likely to backfire with Asuna anyway. Teaching her more about the essentials, about the mind-set that one needed, was far more likely to help her make use of her own creativity and proactive capabilities.
The problem was that giving a lecture on mental outlook was much harder than talking about technique. And it was all the more difficult when the teacher was just a dumb kid like me with no experience teaching.
I came to a stop at the entrance to the empty training grounds, glanced at Asuna, who was standing at a thirty-degree angle from me, and came up completely short on how to start even the first sentence. All I could think about was the way Asuna had said I don’t want to do this when we tried practicing dueling on the fourth floor.
“Soooo……ummmm……”
I hemmed and hawed, trying to find an entry point to the topic.
Suddenly, Asuna giggled and said, “Listen, Kirito.”
“Y…yes?”
“I went into the bath with Argo when we were in the town of Shiyaya on the fifth floor.”
“Y…yes?”
It sounded familiar to me, I just couldn’t wrap my head around why she was bringing it up now. I looked at her suspiciously. “R-right, I seem to recall that. You and Argo were having a little girl-on-girl chat in the…”
“We were doing no such thing!” she said, pouting briefly. Then she grinned. “No, Argo and I had a duel there.”
“……Wha—? In the…bath?”
“In the bath.”
“……With…no gear?”
“With swimsui…Wait, that’s not the point!”
She jabbed me in the gut with her first two fingers pressed together. Belatedly, I recalled that we weren’t in a town safe zone—but to my relief, she didn’t do anything worse than that.
“…But when I say duel, all we did was smack each other with the bundles of fragrant herbs they put in the bathtub. Argo asked me…if I was afraid of dueling.”
“…A-and what did you say…?”
“I was honest. I told her I was scared, but thinking on it, Argo uses all of her points for agility, so she’s got even less HP than me. Yet, in the duel, she fought hard with just a bundle of plants and didn’t seem nervous at all. She heads into the latest dungeon without an ounce of hesitation…So in return, I asked her, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’”
“……A-a-and she said…?”
“‘’Fraid I can’t tell ya that for free,’” Asuna said, a remarkable imitation of Argo the Rat’s speaking style, and headed for the other end of the grounds.
I called out after her. “Um, c-could you explain what that story is supposed to mean?”
The fencer turned back, her long hair swishing, and gave me a devilish grin. “What do you suppose it means?”
How the hell should I know?! I shouted inwardly. Chances were, Asuna was trying to say that she was all right now. So I just had to teach her as much as I could in the short time we had. Once she got over her fear of fighting another human player, there was nothing left to hold back Asuna’s potential and the sharp point of her +7 Chivalric Rapier.
I glanced up at the forest surrounding the camp and whispered a warning to the man in the black poncho and his friends, wherever in Aincrad they were now.
“Next time I’m gonna get you.”
“Huh? Did you say something?” Asuna shouted.
“Nothing!” I shouted back, hurrying over the short grass toward my partner.
3
WHEN WE RETURNED TO STACHION, THE TELEPORT square was jammed with players. The majority looked like tourists from the first floor, but there were also a surprising number of “catchers-up” loaded with fairly decent gear.
This second group had gotten off to a start a month or two later than the present-day advancement group and weren’t a high enough level to hang in the frontier zones, but shopping in town was perfectly safe. And since it was RPG custom that the further a town was in the game, the better its equipment, every new destination was a chance to buy into a better round of gear—if you could afford it.
In that sense, Kibaou’s Aincrad Liberation Squad and their stated aims of sharing money, items, and information as widely as possible weren’t wrong. If the frontline groups used their earnings to help outfit the people catching up, they’d be able to gain XP more safely—and reach the frontier much quicker.
But the actual method of distribut
ion was rather tricky. It wasn’t as if the advancement group was drowning in money, so you’d only want to distribute money to those players who were truly serious about reaching the front line. But in order to identify them from the rest, you’d need to do some time-consuming background checks and skill tests. Even the large ALS didn’t have the man power to bother with something that involved, and if they did, acting like heavy-handed police or military might only inspire mistrust instead.
When I beat everyone to the punch by defeating the fifth-floor boss and looting the guild flag first, Kibaou quietly thanked me. He must’ve understood that we were forced to do this to prevent the coalition of frontline groups from fracturing. He might have a foul mouth, but he wasn’t a bad person. It was why he was so dedicated to the noble cause of redistributing resources to give everyone a fair shot.
On the other hand, Lind of the Dragon Knights Brigade was the polar opposite—a man who proposed concentrating resources instead. He wanted to create a band of heroes who would accumulate all the money and gear and experience, shining bright at the forefront of the game. The idea was that this would inspire the lower players to work even harder in the hopes of joining his team—a choice of ideals that seemed at odds with reality.
But one thing was certain: If the unique guild flag item was going to work better in either the ALS or DKB, it would clearly be the latter. And Asuna and I needed to explain the flag’s crazy effects to Lind’s guild, as well as the requirements for us to actually give it up.
“…Just five more minutes now…Have they settled on a place?” Asuna asked after she emerged from the teleporter. I checked my instant messages.
“It says we’re meeting at an inn called the Pegasus Hoof. It’s that one over there,” I said, using my memory from the beta to point at a white building on the north side of the square. It was much bigger than the Fifteen Numbers, where we were staying.
Stachion was arranged like a gentle series of steps, with the northern side being higher and the southern sinking lower. I used the word steps rather than hill because the ground was made up of those eight-inch cube tiles, so there was no natural slope to be found. It wasn’t as simple as just uniform steps lined up across the entire town, but if you traveled north and south enough, you would undoubtedly find yourself going up and down stairs.
As we walked toward the inn, Asuna looked up at the north side and asked, “So…who lives in the biggest building up at the north end?”
“That’s the lord’s mansion. He’s, uh, a guy named Cylon, with a beard. He gives you a bunch of quests, so we’ll be there a few times. It gets real tiring climbing all those stairs, though…There’s just something mentally draining about stairs, as opposed to an ordinary hill.”
Asuna didn’t comment on any of that. She frowned and murmured, “Cylon…Where have I heard that name before…?”
“Wasn’t that the bad guy from The Lord of the Rings?”
“That was Sauron, dummy…Well, whatever. How many minutes to go?”
“Um…one minute, twenty-two seconds.”
“They’re going to be so conceited if we’re late. Let’s run!”
The fencer tore off down the tiles for our destination, and I had to rush to keep up. We passed through the large door of the Pegasus Hoof at seven seconds before twelve thirty, but the blue-haired man seated on the sofa in the lobby promptly and loudly said, “You’re late. It’s common practice to arrive for any meeting five minutes before the agreed-upon time.”
If we were going to get sniped at one way or the other, I wished we’d come five minutes late. Instead, I had no choice but to wave at Lind, leader of the Dragon Knights Brigade guild, and his officers Shivata and Hafner. “Yo. You guys eat already?”
As young as they might have looked, they were at least in their late teens, so as a middle schooler, I ought to have asked, “Did you gentlemen already enjoy your lunchtime?” But this was Aincrad, the land of outlaws. On top of that, people seemed to think I was two, three, maybe even four or five years older than I really was, so the only thing all that extra verbiage would do was clog up my online connection with voice data.
Lind didn’t seem bothered by my attitude. It was more the content of the message he took offense to, a furrow running through his brow.
“We have been waiting here for fifteen minutes already. Where would we find that kind of time?”
It seemed to me like that was plenty of time, but I decided to keep it friendly and suggested, “Then why don’t we talk over a meal? You’re just going to head right back out for more adventuring in the afternoon, aren’t you?”
This was a profound bit of strategizing by my standards, hoping that Lind’s attitude might soften over some good food, but the blue-haired guild master shook his head. “No, I don’t want any chance that we’ll be overheard…We’re going to talk in a room that my guild has reserved for the purpose.”
“…Got it,” I said after a pause. If Lind was renting the room, no one else might be able to unlock the door, but it would still open from the inside, and we were within the town, so they couldn’t do anything to hold us there by force. I didn’t think the leader of a powerful guild would stoop to such a thing, but the guild flag had all the magical allure of the One Ring, so I had to be careful.
Lind rose from his seat and took Shivata and Hafner—whom I secretly nicknamed the track athlete and soccer player, respectively—toward a staircase at the back of the lobby. If anything, Lind seemed like a member of the calligraphy club, although that might’ve just been because the back of his ponytail looked like the tip of a brush to me.
As I followed the trio, I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering over some truly pointless subjects. Maybe, if I really need to write something on parchment, and I have ink but no quill pen, I could dip that tail into the ink and…
They led us to the Pegasus Hoof’s third-floor suite. It seemed like a sure sign that they were a big, wealthy guild…except one thing stuck out to me.
“Hey, guys, did you go into this room ahead of time?” I asked, right before we reached the door.
Lind turned around and answered peevishly, “No, we just rented the room at the desk.”
“I see…so you haven’t tried this puzzle yet.” I pointed at a very complicated, messy metal object placed in an alcove next to the door.
“What’s that?” Hafner wondered, raising a thick eyebrow. But Asuna seemed to have recognized what the object was.
“Where did the DKB stay last night?” she asked them.
“Well, we were having fun as a group at the year-end party…and we ended up passing out at the room in Karluin where we were celebrating. We didn’t come up to the sixth floor until this morning.”
“I see.”
Asuna shot me a glance. Apparently, explaining the situation was my job, so I cleared my throat.
“Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed that this town—in fact, this entire floor—is covered in puzzles…and so are the inns. Pretty much every inn requires you to solve some kind of puzzle before you can open your room door. The type varies depending on the establishment, and the Pegasus Hoof specializes in cast metal puzzles…which are like big, heavy disentanglement puzzles. The cheapest rooms are fairly simple horseshoe puzzles, but the more expensive the inn, the trickier they get…”
“…………”
The track, soccer, and calligraphy club members stared at the metal object in the wall niche. After they traded a series of looks that suggested No, you go first, Shivata gave up and reached for it.
The puzzle was three tightly interlocked U-shaped parts with little protrusions like deer antlers on them. Two of the parts were chained to the wall, and the third had the door key stuck to it. It would not come loose unless it slid off at just the right position and angle. It must’ve taken quite a lot of precision and data to re-create such a complex puzzle with 3-D models.
Shivata rattled the puzzle for about thirty seconds before he threw up his hands and backed away. Hafner
didn’t even last for twenty. Lind was third, positively glowing with an aura that said For the glory of the guild!
Observing from a distance of six feet, Asuna whispered to me, “I guess the name Pegasus Hoof was a hint as to these horseshoe puzzles.”
“The fifteen puzzles at our inn were a lot better, huh?”
“Once you figure out the trick, maybe…”
Lind’s valiant attempt at the puzzle continued while we chatted, but he, too, came to a stop after about a minute of trying.
“…It is not coming off. Something must be stuck.”
“Now, now, Lin, it wouldn’t be a true puzzle if there’s no solution.”
“Then you do it, Haf.”
“Listen, I’m not good at these things…”
A part of me wanted to keep observing this very rare glimpse at the DKB members acting casually, but the conversation we were supposed to have would be tricky enough as it was, so this was my cue to step in and help.
“Pardon me,” I said, barging in with a little hand chop and taking the tangled metal puzzle. It was four months ago that I’d been tackling this town’s puzzles in the beta, but the muscle memory for these cast-metal puzzles was still there…I hoped.
At the time, if you fell asleep in an inn bed, the NerveGear automatically logged you out of the dive, so that when you woke up, you were in your real-world room again. The sleep log-out was a popular trick among beta testers because it allowed you to avoid the usual intoxication of emerging from a full dive, but I didn’t get to try it more than a few times before the test was over.
In the meantime, I kept my hands moving, slowly getting past one protrusion after another, until the part with the key on it came loose.
Sword Art Online Progressive 5 Page 4
