“What…? How would the information be getting out that fast? The only people who knew I had the guild flag at that point were the ones who took part in the boss fight with us, and the main members of the ALS…”
And that was when I put it together. The ALS didn’t just have Morte the ax wielder, whom I fought on the third floor. They very likely had other members of the black poncho’s PK gang infiltrating their ranks. Which meant the info about the guild flag was being passed right along to them.
The ALS was a bit behind the DKB in terms of member level and equipment stats, and they were trying to make up for it by swelling their ranks. Their practice of having a recruiting team that proactively brought in players who wanted to join the top group was admirable, but it also made the guild vulnerable to infiltration by those with ill intent.
It was occurring to me that it’d be smart to get both guilds’ leadership together so I could share info about the existence of this PK gang. I shifted gears from my initial denial. “Actually, you might be right about that. But that just makes it more important that I don’t foist the flag off on someone else. I already have a decent idea of how they’re doing this, and I’ve got some experience fighting players from the beta…”
Asuna sucked in a sharp breath but let it out after just a second, long and slow. Then she turned away—fingers brushing the silver rapier hanging at her left side. “And now that I’ve learned the basics of dueling from you, I have a duty to fight them as well.”
“What?! N-no, that wasn’t my point…”
“Well, I’ve decided!” she declared, letting go of the rapier and jabbing her finger at my chest. Like that, my temporary partner gave me my orders: “Listen up! You’re not going to rush off without a word to me again, the way you did when you went searching for Argo on the fourth floor! You must be within my sight for all twenty-four hours. Is that understood?!”
“Whehh?!”
It felt like she was treating me like a preschooler, but Asuna’s expression was anything but joking. I opened and shut my mouth a few times to no avail. At last, I protested, “B-but what about when we stay at an inn…?”
To my surprise, Asuna already had an answer for that. Before this point, she’d probably get all red in the face and physically attack me, but now she not only didn’t hesitate or stammer, she had an instant response.
“So we’ll rent a two-bedroom suite like the last one. If we split the cost, it shouldn’t end up being too bad.”
“………Ah, r-right…”
I didn’t really have any other option.
“Good!” Asuna said like a pleased schoolteacher. She turned on her heel and started walking loudly across the tiles. Within three steps, she stopped and turned back to me again. “Also…where are we going now?”
“Um…”
I looked around. We were on a small path to the east of the central street of Stachion that ran north and south from the teleport square. Although it was a backstreet, it was wide, with a strip of greenery on the right side of the path and a row of tiny shops on the left. Some were restaurants, as evidenced by the fragrant smells tickling my nose.
“……How about we get lunch first, then hit up the lord’s mansion?” I suggested.
Asuna agreed, smiling again at last. “Good idea. I’d like to eat something that seems appropriate for the New Year holiday.”
“That…might be tough…”
But on the inside, I was running through my memory, trying to remember if the menus of the restaurants here had anything that fit the season.
We had a lunch of meatloaf and shrimp fritters, which might be very generously interpreted as a Western-style take on Japanese osechi cuisine for New Year’s Day. Then we headed up the gentle staircase road north until we arrived at the mansion that overlooked the rest of Stachion.
Behind the mansion was the outer perimeter of Aincrad itself, so the pale blue expanse was very close at hand. If you turned 180 degrees at the large front gate, you saw the rectangular town before you, followed in the distance by the wilderness of the sixth floor.
“…When you see it all like this, you realize that six miles across really is a huge amount of space…” Asuna remarked. I was about to tell her that Aincrad was cone-shaped, and that each floor was about two hundred feet narrower than the one before, but then I realized it wasn’t really important enough to make a big deal over.
“Your typical open-world RPG’s map is around six to twelve miles long in each direction, so it’s like a bunch of them all stacked atop one another. According to the legend of the Great Separation that Kizmel mentioned, Aincrad was built out of pieces of land cut from the continent below. Makes you wonder how big that map must be…”
“…And in the forest elves’ legend, collecting the six keys and opening the Sanctuary will return Aincrad to the land,” Asuna said. It brought back all the details of the “Elf War” quest’s background.
“And the dark elves said that opening the Sanctuary will cause Aincrad to fall to ruin…right? We definitely want to avoid things getting ruined, but I’d also rather not have it all go back to the earth. What if this map was suddenly dozens or hundreds of times larger? It’s hard to stay motivated to keep going that way.”
“Wouldn’t you be able to skip having to do each and every labyrinth—and just jump straight ahead to the final boss’s dungeon?”
“Oh, good point…but there’s no way you could beat him…”
For an instant, I started to imagine the final boss waiting on the hundredth floor, as Akihiko Kayaba had said on the first day of our imprisonment. Then I shook my head to dispel the vision.
“C’mon, let’s go inside. We’ll get the quests from the lord and try to finish all the ones in town by the end of the day.”
Cylon, the lord of Stachion, was a small and skinny man who looked simply dreadful in his magnificent beard and flashy toga. He didn’t put on airs, however; he was quite welcoming to these strangers who showed up at his door. In fact, we had to wait awhile outside his chamber because there were three groups of players in line already, but that wasn’t his fault. They even served us tea.
Cylon’s appearance and background story were exactly the same as in the beta, but it was still worth paying attention for a refresher.
According to him, the abundance of puzzles all over the town was the result of a curse placed upon the previous lord.
His name was Pithagrus, and he was a man who loved numbers and puzzles. He bragged day and night that there was no puzzle he could not solve. One day, a traveler visiting his mansion produced an exceedingly complex numerical puzzle, and Pithagrus could not solve it. In his rage, he picked up a nearby golden cube and beat the traveler to death with it. The traveler’s last breath was a curse, and ever since then, Stachion was possessed by puzzles of all kinds…
“Pithagrus was driven mad by this, and he left Stachion forever, carrying only the bloodstained golden cube with him. It has been ten years already since then…I suspect he is no longer among the living,” Cylon said, sipping his tea dejectedly.
“As Pithagrus’s senior apprentice,” he continued, “I took on the responsibilities of his office and worked my hardest to undo the curse the murdered traveler enacted, but the puzzles only grow—a new one appears in the town every day. Nearly all the town’s interior doors and storage boxes are afflicted by puzzles already, and their front doors will not be long. By that point, it will no longer be possible for us to live here…Good swordsman, please find the golden cube that Pithagrus took from this mansion and bring it back. If the cube is placed on the traveler’s grave, and prayers are dedicated to his memory, the curse of the puzzles will surely be undone. Please, please save Stachion from this menace!”
Cylon bowed deeply, causing a golden ! to appear over his head. Asuna glanced at me and said, “Very well. We accept your request.”
It promptly turned into a ? at that point. Next came the time for questions, but since we knew other players were in line
to get their quests, we kept it to a minimum, then scurried out of the guest room. After that, we took a quick tour of the mansion, which was still very video game–like, thanks to its cubic construction. Lastly, we headed out into the backyard to say a quick prayer at the grave of the traveler who’d been killed by the previous lord.
“Ahhh…Going into mansions like that, I always want to just rifle through all the bookshelves and drawers and pots and stuff,” I said, stretching my back.
Asuna made an exaggerated show of pulling away in disgust. “Ew…Is that your fetish, Kirito…?”
“What?! F-first of all, it’s not a fetish, and second of all, it’s an RPG staple that you go around ransacking people’s houses for items! Although, in a lot of the Western ones, the guards will chase you if you do…”
For three seconds, Asuna greeted my protestation with an even more suspicious look. Then she burst into giggles. “Well, I suppose you’re not the type to go sneaking around and taking stuff. You’d rather dump out the owner’s entire inventory right in front of their face.”
“I—I don’t recall doing any such…”
Then I remembered when I had Asuna materialize all of her belongings on the second floor, and I suddenly had to clear my throat.
“…thing with malice. My point is, let’s get cracking on these quests. The “Curse of Stachion” is a really long quest series, so if we don’t do them quickly, we could get left behind at the boss battle. And on top of that, we’ve got more ‘Elf War’ quests on this floor.”
“I’m more interested in those, to be honest. Between all the murdered travelers and missing lords, the local story seems a bit dark.”
“As a general rule, RPG quests tend not to be fun and delightful affairs,” I commented. But the truth was that I wanted to see Kizmel again as soon as possible. On the other hand, the longer a quest series was, the better the experience bonus you received. High-risk, high-return experience gains were tough to pull off—the last thing anyone wanted was to die—so diligently checking off quests was still the quickest way to level up.
Asuna suddenly tossed her arms into the air and stretched like she was doing morning calisthenics. “Okay, let’s do this! Where are we going first?” she exclaimed.
“To an old man who was the butler to the old lord—to ask him questions,” I answered. Her excitement meter visibly plummeted.
“Ugh, that’s so boring…and we’re going to have to wait at the entrance again, aren’t we…?”
“Shall we buy some ring puzzles to play with while we wait?”
“No, thanks.”
The fencer shook her head sadly and trudged off. I trotted after her.
The former butler’s house was at the very southern end of Stachion, completely across town. If the northern half was the luxurious side with its ample greenery, the southern half was the more urban side, with small houses clustered around cramped alleys. Most of the buildings were made of wood—but eight-inch wooden blocks rather than boards and pillars—so they looked more like life-size block houses.
Fortunately, there were no other players at our destination, and we were done talking to the elderly NPC in just over ten minutes and on our way.
His story was the same as it had been in the beta. The former butler wasn’t present for the murder of the traveler; he heard the screams and rushed to the master’s chamber, only to see the ghastly body. The way he described it, the head was beaten to a pulp, and the humble traveling garb was covered in blood. In the beta, people had muttered, “This quest has to be rated R!”
The butler had no leads on the location of Pithagrus or the golden cube, but rather predictably, he did say that the maidservant at the time might know something. So we headed to the servant’s home next.
As we walked the narrow path, Asuna brought up a very reasonable question. “Say…don’t you know the final destination for this quest already, Kirito? Couldn’t we just skip all these steps and go right there?”
“Actually…you can’t. If you don’t go in order, things break down. Characters won’t talk to you, and events won’t happen. If we hadn’t talked to Cylon first, that old man back there probably wouldn’t have let us into his home.”
“…And how many more people do we need to talk to in town, by the way?”
“Six.”
She abruptly blurted, “Falyoon!”
“…What was that?”
“I was saying, ‘I much prefer the generic monster-killing quests to manhunt quests,’ in Elvish!”
“Nga-grunga.”
“…What was that?”
“‘I completely agree,’ in Orcish.”
And on and on, we chatted and joked as we made our way across Stachion to the home of the maidservant who’d happily married her way out of the job (they didn’t actually say that).
From there, we went to the former gardener, then cook, then first apprentice, then second apprentice, then favorite bartender, until at last we got the piece of information that Pithagrus owned a separate home in a neighboring town. That was the end of the questline in Stachion for the moment.
As we left the pub, the sky from the outer aperture was reddish-purple. It was five thirty in the afternoon by then, largely because at a number of these quest stops, the people had errands of their own to do.
Asuna stretched. She looked tired. “So after all that…we didn’t learn very much. Pithagrus was an eccentric, but everyone seems to admire him, and he didn’t have a wife or children. That was it, I think? And nobody knows who the murdered traveler was—or where they were from…”
“Well, that’s not so strange, now, is it? If you’re a traveler here, you don’t have a passport or social media accounts to follow.”
“But the teleporters weren’t active ten years ago, so if it’s a traveler, they came from somewhere on the sixth floor, right?” she wondered, looking up. “There are maybe three or four other villages here, so if we wanted to track them down, it should be possible to identify them, don’t you think…?” At that, she stared straight at me.
“Wh-what?”
“Hang on…you know the ending to this quest, don’t you? Where did Pithagrus go? Who was the traveler?”
“Um…you’re really gonna ask that question?”
Whether it was online multiplayer or not, a game’s story was a sensitive area when it came to spoilers. Some people didn’t care at all, and some people got furious over it. Survival was the utmost priority in SAO, of course, and Asuna didn’t seem the type to get hung up on spoilers, but I’d been careful to not reveal the outcome of quests before we got to them.
After a brief look of surprise, Asuna realized what I meant by that and let out a little giggle. “Ohhh, so you’ve been holding back for my sake! Well, it’s all right. I don’t get all worked up about this sort of quest.”
“Um…this sort of quest…? Then what sort of quest would you get upset about—over spoilers?”
“The heartwarming ones and the tear-jerking ones.”
“……”
Out of all the quests we’d done together, which ones would she classify as heartwarming and which as tear-jerking? And what category did the “Curse of Stachion” fall under? After a few seconds, I came to the conclusion that it was pointless to try to figure it out.
“…Um, so am I correct in thinking that you won’t get mad if I tell you the ending of this quest?”
“No worries. It’s totally one of the disappointing kinds, right?”
“……”
I hated to admit it, but she was right. After all the trouble I went through to finish it in the beta, I was left with such a bad aftertaste that I wanted a word with the scenario writer.
“Okay, then I’m going to spoil the hell out of it…There was never any traveler to begin with.”
“Huh?!” Asuna yelped. She came to a stop and turned toward me. “No traveler…? But the butler and the maidservant saw the body, right? And the gardener dug the hole for the grave in the backyard. So who
was it that got killed and buri…? Oh!”
She stopped herself in a moment of epiphany. I gave her a little round of applause.
“Bingo. That was the body of Pithagrus, the former lord. And the one who killed him was…”
“……Cylon?”
“Bingo again. Cylon was the first apprentice of Pithagrus the puzzle king, but when he announced that a different apprentice would take over as his true heir, he got furious and beat his master to death. To hide his crime, he pulverized the face until it was unrecognizable, then put on shabby clothes to transform himself into a made-up traveler…”
“I knew it! I knew it!” she shouted abruptly, hands on her hips with her face thrust forward. “I knew it was going to be a disappointing one! That’s why I don’t like this kind of quest! And what’s the ‘puzzle king’ supposed to mean anyway? What do you get by being the heir to the puzzle king?!”
“D-don’t yell at me. I didn’t write it…I don’t know what they get out of it, but there are quiz kings and medal kings and so on. Some people just really want to have that honor, I guess?”
“It doesn’t make sense…And for that matter, I don’t know what a medal king is supposed to be, either…”
“Sorry, forget I said it. At any rate, that’s the ending. But you get a ton of experience for it, so let’s just tough it out and beat the quest.”
“All right,” Asuna said, unconvinced. She looked up at the bottom of the floor above. The lid of rock and steel was turning deep purple, signaling that night would arrive within an hour. The next town over was a mile away, and there wouldn’t be many monsters along the road, so we could definitely get there before it was dark, but the problem was the next step after that. Pithagrus’s other home was an empty ruin now, and it would be full of astral-type monsters (i.e., ghosts) that we’d have to fight multiple times before we got the next clue. I decided to keep that part a secret, clapping the fencer lightly on the shoulder.
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