“Here.” I handed it over to Lind, who looked conflicted about this development. He stuck it into the lock and turned it left. The lock clicked heavily.
“So…what do I do with this n—” he started to ask, but the key rose out of his hand on its own and floated back into the wall niche. It tangled itself back up with the two chained pieces until the puzzle was back to its original position.
“……The heck was that?” asked Shivata.
“It’s kind of like magic, kind of like a curse. The lord here will explain it to you,” I told him, clapping Lind on the shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get this conversation going. I’m sure you’re busy, too.”
The Pegasus Hoof suite was, indeed, quite deluxe—in addition to a large living room, it had two separate bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. Asuna’s fixation kicked in briefly as she glanced toward the bathroom door, but given that she had just bathed at the dark elf camp, her bath meter was stable for the moment, and she passed by it without further inspection.
“…Why did you rent such an expensive spot?” I wondered, gazing out the large window at the town of Stachion below.
It wasn’t Lind, but it was Hafner who said, “It’s an issue of security. If someone just happens to wait outside the door with the Eavesdropping skill, it’s more likely that we’ll be out of their effective range if the room is extra-large, right?”
“Ah, I see…”
That at least confirmed for me how serious a matter the DKB considered this talk to be. There was a sofa set in the middle of the living area, but Shivata and Hafner decided to move it to the window on the south side out of an abundance of caution, getting it as far from the door as possible. I was going to suggest that they should just post guards outside the door, but then I realized they’d naturally have other members hiding out in the lobby below already.
The furniture set featured a sofa long enough to seat three, and two armchairs. I assumed Asuna and I would take the chairs, but Lind motioned us toward the sofa, so we followed his lead.
Lind and Hafner sat in the armchairs, and Shivata stood to the side. I wasn’t sure if they’d decided to have us sit down and then leave one of their own standing as psychological pressure, or if it was just a coincidence.
Abruptly, Hafner said, “Shivata and I explained what happened with the fifth-floor boss to Lind. Including the reason you wanted to get a jump start on the boss, and the reason we decided to participate.”
I blinked twice in surprise and said, rather foolishly, “Oh. You did?”
When Shivata and Hafner decided to join our impromptu raid party, they hadn’t said anything to Lind, their guild master, about it. I figured we’d either keep that a secret today or use that revelation as the starting point—but it seemed they’d already saved us the trouble.
At that point, we could probably just jump right into it, but Asuna, sitting to my right, shot Shivata a look. I followed her eyesight and saw that the short-haired swordsman was giving us some kind of very awkward signal with his eyes.
I squinted, trying to figure out what message he was trying to send, but Lind noticed my expression and swung around to his right to look at Shivata. Immediately, Asuna said, “Then you must know all about the guild flag already, Lind.”
With the mention of the item at the center of everything, Lind turned forward again. “Yes…but only the concept. And I’ll be honest—I’m still not sure whether to believe it or not. Before we negotiate, I’d like to see the item first.”
The use of the word negotiate rather than discuss was ominous, but it wasn’t enough of a reason to call things off at this stage.
“All right,” I said, opening my menu. But before I materialized the item, I decided to set up a safety measure.
First, I went to my equipment mannequin and dragged the icon for the Sword of Eventide +3 from my right-hand slot to my inventory. I’d removed my equipment before we walked into the building, so this action changed nothing about my appearance.
Next, I chose the Flag of Valor from the weapon category of my inventory and dropped it onto my mannequin. It was a two-handed weapon, so the spear icon appeared in both my right- and left-hand slots. Light glowed in my hands before sharpening into the long narrow weapon—er, flag.
When pulling weapons out of item storage, simply choosing to materialize it would pop the item into existence above the window. But if you were equipping it, the weapon appeared in one of two places.
If you had your weapon location selected ahead of time—for a polearm, it was on your back by default—it would appear directly in that spot. But if the setting was still in its initial state, or if you didn’t have enough physical space to fit it, the item would appear in your hands instead. Because I had my hands resting atop the window, Lind’s group wouldn’t be able to tell if I’d just brought the guild flag out as a simple item—or if I was equipping it.
The moment he caught sight of the ten-foot platinum longspear, Lind’s eyes bulged. The butt of the spear reached nearly to the window, while the tip crossed Asuna’s knees and jutted out over the end of the sofa. The top quarter of the pole was wrapped in a white cloth, and the string that held it in place was silver. Its stats as a weapon were frankly unimpressive, but the finely carved detail in the handle, the beautiful edging of the flag fabric—the overall informational “weight” of all that detailed data—made it clear this was a special item.
If I’d just taken the flag out in one single step, Lind could grab it and run out of the room. If he escaped for five minutes while Shivata and Hafner prevented me from utilizing the Materialize All Items command, ownership of the flag would transfer to him. But because I had equipped it first, my period of automatic ownership lasted for a full hour.
I gave the chances of them attempting such a stunt no more than 0.1 percent, but Lind merely tapped the pole to bring up the properties window, read it closely, sighed, and handed it back. He waited for me to put it back into my inventory, then leaned back in his seat and grumbled.
“Yes…I see…Seems like quite the balance-breaking item to have shown up on just the fifth floor…”
“I don’t know just how well it works without trying it, though,” I admitted.
The guild master shrugged. “The listed properties won’t be false. A hundred feet in diameter with four different buffs…Just from that alone, it’s almost too powerful to be real. I don’t blame Kibaou for trying to slip past the rest of us to get it—even if I find him obnoxious.”
He didn’t seem as angry as I imagined he might be. Asuna had the same impression.
“Did you already talk with the ALS?” she asked.
“No, we’ve said nothing. I had a toast with Kibaou at the party last night, but I wasn’t aware of the existence of this flag at the time,” Lind said, a self-deprecating curl present at the corner of his mouth. He looked to the side, where Hafner was scratching his head guiltily.
That would mean Lind had only heard the explanation in the last few hours. So perhaps the fact that he was so calm and cool about it was a sign that, like Kibaou, as long as the other guild didn’t have it, he was fine with the matter. I certainly prayed so.
“Well, now that you’ve seen it for yourself, I’m going to explain the conditions under which I would hand it over,” I continued. “Naturally, they’re the same conditions I gave the ALS. Situation one is if another guild flag drops somewhere. If it’s going to happen, I’m sure either the ALS or DKB will get it this time, so in this event, I would hand the flag to whichever guild did not get the drop, free of any charge. Situation two is if the ALS and DKB merge guilds. If that happens, I will hand over the flag unconditionally.”
When I’d suggested these to the ALS in the fifth-floor boss chamber, they’d yelled at me: That’ll never happen! and You gotta be joking! But Lind might’ve known about them already, because he barely batted an eye.
Instead, he asked me a very curious question. “Kirito, in the beta test, you failed to beat the tenth-floor
boss, correct?”
“Uh…yeah, that’s right. The labyrinth was this traditional Japanese-style place called the Castle of a Thousand Serpents. We only got partway through it.”
“And the guild flag did not drop from any more bosses to that point?”
“It didn’t…I believe.”
“Right,” Lind murmured. “So that would mean it’s highly likely that situation one cannot happen until at least the tenth floor…”
I nodded. If it dropped on the fifth floor, it seemed like the tenth would be a good bet, but there was no use making guarantees. At this point, I wished that we’d tried a bit harder in the beta and actually beaten the tenth-floor boss, but there was no whining about that now. Besides, the monsters in the Castle of a Thousand Serpents—especially the snake samurai Orochi Elite Guard and the snake ninja Kuchina Elite Assassin—were devastatingly powerful, and just the thought that if we kept going we’d be forced to fight them one day soon sent a chill down my back. I didn’t even want to imagine the floor boss who ruled over them.
Man, I could really go for a cup of hot green tea, I thought, waiting for him to continue. But Lind did not comment on the feasibility of the second option. He opened his window. I watched his hand movements out of an abundance of caution, but what he brought out was not a weapon but an extremely large leather sack.
He grabbed it off the top of the window and set it down on the low table. It made a heavy, metallic scraping sound.
“There’s three hundred thousand col in there,” Lind announced to our astonishment. “It’s the most the DKB can give you at this moment. Will you sell the guild flag to us at that price?”
Later—much, much later—Asuna would chuckle and say to me, “If you had immediately agreed to sell it, I would’ve grabbed the bag of money and chucked it through the window.”
But in that moment, I stared at the leather sack on the table, unable to respond. I wasn’t stunned by the sheer presence of 300,000 in col presented to me, and I wasn’t trapped between the options of selling or not selling. No, my mind was swept up in a sudden flash to the past.
It was about a month ago: the evening of December 2, 2022. I remembered the date because it was the day of the first boss-strategy meeting in the first-floor town of Tolbana, and it was the day I met Asuna for the very first time, deep in the labyrinth—though the memory that came to mind was unrelated to either of those events.
Through Argo the Rat, the information agent, someone made an offer to buy my Anneal Blade +6. The offer was for 29,800 col, which was upped to 39,800 a few hours later.
The Anneal Blade had two upgrade attempts left—meaning I’d gotten it to +6 without failing—which made it quite valuable at the time, but at most, it was worth thirty-five thousand. Suspicious, I doubled Argo’s silence fee from five hundred col to one thousand, and she revealed that her client was none other than Kibaou. I was even more skeptical after that, but it wasn’t until the middle of the first-floor boss battle that I realized Kibaou had been a go-between, too.
The man who was actually attempting to buy the Anneal Blade was Diavel the knight, leader of SAO’s first raid party. His idea was not to power himself up, but to power me down, allowing him to score the last attack bonus on the boss and cement his position as the leader of the game.
But Illfang the Kobold Lord’s attack pattern had changed completely since the beta, and as a former beta tester like me, Diavel fell into a trap set by his own past knowledge and expectations, and he perished.
Despite his outward distance, Kibaou had revered Diavel enough to take on the dirty work of buying someone else’s weapon for him in secret. Lind had been his faithful, dedicated party member. They both wanted to take over his position, but their significant discrepancies in ideals led them to start their own guilds, which were now the two biggest in the game.
The 300,000 col on the table now was ten times the sum that Diavel offered for my Anneal Blade. That had to be a coincidence; Lind wouldn’t have known about what Diavel was doing in secret. If I ever found myself sharing drinks with Kibaou, I’d have to ask him why he took on that request from Diavel, and what he thought about it…
I emerged from my brief reverie, looked Lind right in the face, and shook my head. “No…I wouldn’t sell this for even ten times that much. Besides, the ALS would string me up for doing it, and I mean that literally…Plus, let’s be real. You didn’t actually think I was going to say yes, did you?”
The guild leader shrugged and said simply, “Not really. But it’s important to put it out there. If you were actually willing to sell it, it would be worth it, and if you refuse, I get you on record as saying that you can’t be bought with cash.”
“Ah, I see what you mean. But if we’re talking a hundred times…maybe thirty million col could convince me to— Huk!”
I finished my sentence in some strange demihuman dialect thanks to Asuna reaching over with a smug expression and spearing me in the side with her hand. Lind did not react, but both Hafner and Shivata rolled their eyes.
I cleared my throat and got back to the subject at hand. “At any rate, may I conclude that the DKB accept and understand the terms for receiving the item now?”
“Yes…I shall have to acknowledge the current situation as the most reasonable compromise. I do not wish for the standoff between us and the ALS to get worse, either. But after having seen its stats for myself, it’s a terrible shame that we can’t use the guild flag in the next boss fight.”
“I agree. We’ll try to think of a way to put it to use, and I’m always looking out for ideas, so send me a message if you think of something.”
“Understood.”
At that, Lind and Hafner rose to their feet. I was going to watch them go, but then I remembered that it was the DKB who rented this room, so I got up in a hurry.
We filed out of the room in a line, and then Lind turned back toward me. “By the way…are the other inns outfitted with these obnoxious puzzles?”
“Your answer is half yes, half no,” I said, grinning. Lind looked skeptical. “I mean, it’s not just the inns. The NPC shops, the houses, the other locations…Aside from the front doors, every door to every room in this town has a puzzle on it. So have fun with that.”
I patted the stunned brush master on the shoulder and hurried down the stairs.
4
“…WELL, THAT WRAPPED UP A LOT QUICKER THAN I thought it would,” Asuna said once we were a fair distance away from the Pegasus Hoof. Something in her tone suggested disappointment.
“Are you saying you’d have preferred if we argued over it more…?”
“Of course not, you dummy.”
The fencer brandished a fist, then glanced around before continuing in a quieter voice, “I was expecting a more forward-thinking response. It’s not like a second flag is going to drop any day now, so the only way for us to make use of it on this floor is the second option, merging—it’s obvious to everyone. So I figured, if anyone’s going to make the first notions toward that end, it would be the DKB, rather than the ALS…”
“You did? Why do you say that?” I asked, sensing that both sides were more likely to say they’d prefer going to war than joining forces as a single group.
Asuna said, “The ALS is a group pursuing a set of ideals, and the DKB is a group pursuing practical ends. I’m sure there’d be some amount of reshuffling in the event of a merger, of course, but doesn’t it seem like the DKB members would complain about it less? It’s like they already know they’re the true model for tackling this game, and they have the confidence to go along with it…”
“Ahhh…Yeah, I see what you’re saying.” I looked up at the bottom of the seventh floor, hanging a hundred yards above us.
The Aincrad Liberation Squad was obviously named for the final goal of liberating all ten thousand—well, eight thousand now—players who were trapped in this floating castle. But it also felt like it contained another message: liberation from a status quo where just fifty or sixt
y elite players monopolized all of the game’s resources.
On the other hand, the name of the Dragon Knights Brigade, whoever had thought of it, didn’t seem to have much of a meaning. It was the typical kind of fanciful nomenclature you’d find in any online RPG. If changing the guild name was a sticking point in merging the two sides, Asuna was probably right that the DKB members would have less resistance to the idea.
That was why she’d been hoping that the DKB would display an amenability to the idea, giving us a pathway to a possible merger. But…
“The SAO system only allows for one guild leader,” I muttered. The footsteps next to me came to a stop. I slowed myself down and added, “Even if we could get merger negotiations on the table, neither Lind nor Kibaou would want to give up leadership in the end. Because both of them believe he’s the one carrying on in Diavel’s footsteps.”
“…In that case—!”
I was startled by her vehemence and looked over to my right. Asuna was standing there, her hands clenched into fists, staring down at the eight-inch tiles beneath her feet.
“…In that case, why do they leave all the truly dangerous jobs to you? They squabble over these pointless things like ideas and pride, and they always leave you to pay the tab for them. That’s not what a leader does.”
It was a statement very similar to what she said in the boss chamber yesterday. And I couldn’t give her a response that was any different.
“They’re not forcing it onto me. It’s because I stuck my neck where it didn’t belong that I have the guild flag now. And really, I’m more sorry that I dragged you into all of this…”
After I’d made that point yesterday, Asuna had cried.
But today, she did not. She looked up, her hazel-brown eyes strong and determined. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but solid to its core.
“You can’t be that flippant about this anymore. The man in the black poncho attacked you last night because you were preventing him from making the ALS and DKB fight, didn’t he? In fact, it’s more than that…I’m betting that he wanted to steal the guild flag from you, too. It’s the perfect tool for turning the frontline players against one another.”
Sword Art Online Progressive 5 Page 5
