Sword Art Online Progressive 5

by Reki Kawahara

  “Let’s get dinner in the next town, and then we can continue the quest. If we can finish it up by the end of tomorrow, we should be able to get to the dark elf fortress the day after.”

  Asuna’s face lit up, and she gave me an energetic “Great!”

  Suribus, the second town on the sixth floor, was a beautiful place with a southern European air and absolutely no little eight-inch blocks.

  A large river running through its middle was spanned by numerous bridges—a sight that was reminiscent of Rovia, the main town of the fourth floor—though, regrettably, this river had not a single gondola in it. Still, the view of orange lights reflecting off the dark surface of the water had a kind of ethereal beauty you could only find in a virtual world. We had to stop on the bridge leading into the town for a moment to drink it all in.

  “…This town doesn’t have any cursed puzzles in it, right?” Asuna said right off the bat.

  “Nope,” I confirmed. “If you want some to go, they sell ’em in the gift shops.”

  “I don’t,” she stated firmly. “More importantly, let’s get something to eat. What’s good in Suribus?”

  “Hmm, let me think…”

  In the beta, I just ran through the quests and didn’t spend much time here, and upon further reflection, there weren’t many opportunities to eat in Aincrad back then. If I had time, I wanted to spend it leveling up, and if I got full in the virtual world, my mom and sister would yell at me. I tried to dig through what dim memories I had of the place to little effect.

  “It’s a wrap bake.”

  I spun around in alarm at the sound of a voice right behind us, covering Asuna to protect her.

  Leaning against the stone railing was not, however, the man in the black poncho who’d tried to kill me the other day; it was a small woman in a sand-brown cape. The top half of her face was hidden behind straw-yellow curls, but there was no mistaking the three whisker markings on either cheek.

  This was the best and only source of information in Aincrad, Argo the Rat. She looked stunned for a second, then pouted. “What’s this? What’d I do to earn this kind of reaction from you, Kii-boy? That hurts.”

  “S-sorry…I’m kind of on edge right now. It’s Sneak Attack Caution Week, let’s call it…”

  Asuna popped out from behind my back. “Good evening, Argo! I didn’t see you in Stachion—of course, you must’ve been over here already.”

  “Evenin’, A-chan.” Argo waved at her and pushed herself off the railing to walk closer. “Well, I’d like ta get my first strategy guide out by tomorrow, but it looks like most of the front-runners are already moving from the main town here to Suribus.”

  “Oh, they are? But why—?” I started to ask before the reason occurred to me. “Oh…It’s because the puzzles are a pain in the ass…isn’t it?”

  “Hee-hee-hee! Bingo. And the monsters aren’t too tough around these parts…so while I hate ta be the bearer of bad news, just about all the rooms in Suribus are booked. Only the expensive suites are available.”

  Asuna and I glanced at each other. We’d been planning to stay in a suite with two bedrooms tonight anyway, so the single rooms being taken wasn’t a problem. But given Argo’s rather menacing motto of “selling any info that can be sold,” this free tip was a bit—no, make that very—suspicious.

  “Ohhh, I s-see. But I’m sure that if we look, we can find an open room or two,” I replied. Argo’s eyebrow twitched, but she said nothing more on the matter.

  “Welp…based on what you were sayin’ earlier, I’m guessin’ you two are about to eat dinner?”

  “Yes, we were just deciding what to have,” Asuna said. “Argo, you said this town was famous for its wrap bakes? Do you have a recommended restaurant?”

  “I just made my way over here from Stachion earlier today, actually. Only had a chance to try out one place, but it was mighty tasty.”

  “Then let’s go to that one!” Asuna insisted. Argo had no choice but to grimace and go along with it. If it was me, she’d have demanded a price for that intel, but now that Asuna had identified her as a good friend, the Rat seemed unable to inflict her usual business practices.

  Argo took us to a place on the third floor of a building along the river that ran through Suribus. It was kind of a hidden, hole-in-the-wall type establishment. The first and second floor were just homes, and there was no sign, so you weren’t likely to find it unless you knew about it already.

  The stairs were narrow enough you could barely go two ways on them, and the door at the end was faded and marked with knots, but the interior of the place was quite clean. There was a counter and two tables for four, so we took one of them.

  I was imagining that the famous “wrap bake” would be something like gyoza dumplings, but what came out was essentially a round meat pie about eight inches across. Meat, tomato-flavored veggies, and plenty of cheese were all wrapped in a hot crispy crust. It wasn’t bad. In fact, it was great.

  In a blink, I’d reduced the circle pie to a semicircle. I took a long drink of cold herbal tea, then asked the info dealer, “Are all the wrap bakes in this town the same tomato-and-cheese flavor?”

  “Nope. If it’s like it was in the beta, each place will serve a different kind. Since it’s a riverside town, most of ’em were fish.”

  “Fish pie…? Seems weird to me…” I murmured.

  But Asuna had a huge grin on her face. “Just like the famous herring and pumpkin pie, I suppose.”

  “F-famous…?”

  I craned my head back the other way, wondering if there was such a staple dish in Aincrad, and saw that Argo was smirking as well. “A-chan, if you’re going to make a reference a game addict is going to understand, it has to be from a game.”

  “I suppose you’re right…”

  “You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you in your future…”

  “No kidding…I m-mean, not that I’ve decided this partnership is lasting forever!”

  “Nee-hee-hee-hee!”

  In the moment, I had the feeling that although it was hard to tell what exactly they were talking about, it was probably better that I didn’t know, so I returned my attention to the half-finished meat pie.

  Now that I thought of it, this might have been the first time I’d ever tasted a truly orthodox tomato flavor in Aincrad. Food in this world tended to be light on flavoring but heavy on spice. It was good once you got used to it, but most restaurants had one little thing—or sometimes a big thing—that felt unsatisfying afterward.

  This pleasantly overdone tomato flavor, however, was almost reminiscent of junk food to me. I’d have loved to try it heaped on top of soft-boiled spaghetti rather than in a neat little pie…but I still finished every last bite of the meal anyway.

  “Ahhhh…Nice work, Argo. You know the best places to go.”

  “Don’t I? Now, I’m not sayin’ ya owe me for the tip, but…”

  She looked around the room, ensuring there were no other players present, then whispered, “The big thing…How’d it all turn out?”

  Given that we were alone, it seemed like she could have just said the name of the item in question. But it was an important enough topic that I couldn’t get touchy about it.

  I leaned over the table and whispered, quiet enough that no Eavesdropping skill could pick it up through the door, “We gave the DKB the same conditions we did to the ALS. They did accept our terms, but…”

  “But?”

  “They also tried to buy it off us for three hundred thousand col.”

  Argo blinked once, very slowly. Her painted-on whiskers twitched. “Heh-heh. So that’s their tactic. Well, in that case…”

  “…He really is takin’ over for Diavel,” she left unsaid, downing the rest of her herb tea. Asuna looked at us for answers, but I whispered “I’ll explain later” before getting us back to the topic at hand.

  “At any rate, it looks like I’ll be holding on to it for the time being. The only problem is: That means we can’t use it f
or this upcoming boss fight…so they were on the same page in hoping to find a shortcut to it.”

  “A shortcut, huh…?” Argo folded her arms and murmured to herself. Then she grinned again. “Remember what the chakram guy who helped you with the fifth-floor boss said? If you started up a guild, all the Legend Braves would join ya. In fact, if ya made A-chan the leader instead of yerself, I bet you’d have a whole crowd o’ folks lookin’ to join. How about that?”

  “Wh…what?”

  Just this morning, Asuna had said she didn’t want to be the subleader of a guild. She shook her head back and forth so violently that the ends of her long hair smacked me in the face.

  “Y-you’ve got to be joking! It’s annoying enough for me to watch after him. I want nothing to do with any guild master job!”

  “A-annoying…?”

  I wasn’t expecting that her answer was going to throw me under the bus. Argo just chuckled to herself.

  We said good-bye to the info dealer outside the meat-pie place and headed right for Pithagrus’s other home on the edge of town.

  The river running through Suribus was flowing from a waterfall that emerged directly from one of the massive pillars at the outer aperture of Aincrad, and it continued through to the lake in the center of the floor. The town was built in a narrow strip along both banks of the river, with countless bridges crossing back and forth. Some of those bridges actually had full buildings on top of them, with roofs and everything. One of these “bridge houses” was our quest destination.

  We started this day training in the dark elf camp on the third floor, then talked with the DKB, followed by running all over town doing quests, leaving town and fighting our first monsters in the evening, and now reaching Suribus for dinner. Naturally, Asuna was looking a bit fatigued, but as soon as she saw the bridge where we were heading, her eyes lit up.

  “Ooh, it’s lovely! Just like the Ponte Vecchio!”

  The name sounded familiar to me, so I consulted my memories of the real world—in danger of being entirely overwritten by that of this fantasy realm—and asked, “Erm, are you talking about…the bridge in that, er…famous Tokyo theme park…?”

  Asuna blinked twice, then smiled. “Ah, right. They copied it there, too, didn’t they? In the water park, not the land one. But the original Ponte Vecchio is a bridge in Florence, Italy, spanning the Arno River. The real one’s much bigger than this one, of course, but it’s just as beautiful…”

  She looked up at the bridge house again, enchanted, while I fell into my thoughts. This was now the second time (ever since the fourth floor) my temporary partner had mentioned the name of a city in Italy. At this point, it was probably a good bet that she’d actually been there herself—not just read about it. That on its own wasn’t important, but it did fit a pattern, combined with her looks, communication skills, lack of gaming knowledge, and richness of other knowledge, that suggested Asuna had an extremely fulfilling and “normal” life in the real world. So how did she wind up logging into SAO on the very first day, when only ten thousand copies had been shipped (and nine thousand turned on), getting herself stuck in here…?

  “C’mon, let’s get going! I bet the river is gorgeous from up there!”

  She patted me on the back, and I returned to my senses.

  “Oh, y-yeah, I bet…”

  From the outside, Pithagrus’s second mansion was pretty, but it was a total wreck on the inside. It was also full of ghost-type monsters, which Asuna described as “not my forte”—which probably meant she was completely terrified of them. But before I could explain any of that, the fencer had marched off for the building, and the only thing I could do was chase after her.

  As we traveled along the river toward the bridge, three players were descending the stone stairs that led up to the house over the water. On instinct, we stopped behind the trees lining the road and listened to them speak.

  “…No way that door opens…”

  “Waste of time. Forget this whole thing. Three digits is bad enough, but six is impossible!”

  “Yeah, I just feel like there’s gotta be something good in there…”

  The grumbling trio passed by our position and left. From the tree next to mine, Asuna gave me a sidelong glance.

  “…Is there another puzzle door?”

  “…Yes.”

  “…You said they were only in the main town.”

  “N-no, it’s just the one here…I think,” I added, stepping back into the street.

  The bridge that Asuna compared to Ponte Vecchio was about eighty feet long and twenty feet wide. The first story was just a normal bridge, but the side railings were dotted with pillars that formed countless arches supporting the living space on the second story. After having spent so much time in Stachion with its uniform, blocky look, the structure here was, indeed, elegant and attractive.

  At the edge of the railing were especially large supports—the main pillars, as they called them—the sort that often featured a plaque with the bridge’s name on it. One had a short staircase attached to it that led up to Pithagrus’s house over the bridge itself. As I approached the old door, I couldn’t help but reflect that games taught you to want to head up little paths like this.

  On the surface of the stout wooden door was a six-part metal dial. It was a familiar locking device, where each wheel could turn through all the digits from zero to nine.

  Asuna reached it first and tried it out, the dials clicking as she moved the numbers. She turned to me. “None of the quests so far had anyone tell us the key for a numerical lock, did they…? Are we supposed to solve this on our own?”

  “You might guess a three-digit code, but six makes it just about impossible. It can be anything from zero to nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine, so that’s a hundred thousand possibilities…”

  “You mean a million.”

  “Huh? Oh…y-yeah, duh. A million possibilities. So even if you just ran through each and every one, it would take you several days. But, spoiler alert, you can find the correct combination in Cylon’s office.”

  “What? Where was it written?”

  “In the landscape painting on the wall,” I said.

  Asuna’s cheeks promptly puffed up. “Hey, you could have said something. If I’d known there would be a hint there, I would have looked closer and spotted it.”

  “No, I very much doubt that. The way it works is that you’re supposed to come here and think, ‘I don’t know the numbers!’ Then you go back to Stachion to ask Cylon, who won’t tell you, but he makes an odd show of trying to hide the painting. So then he kicks you out and you have to wait for him to leave before you can go back in to search the painting. It’s a huge pain…”

  “…You’re right, I’d rather not go through all that,” Asuna admitted. Then her brows knitted again. “But…how does that make sense? I mean, Cylon’s the—”

  I had a feeling she would blurt this out at some point, so I glanced over my shoulder and cut her off. “We can talk inside. I don’t want anyone to see us opening the door.”

  “Fine, fine, whatever you say. So…what’s the correct combination?”

  “Let’s see…”

  I started to answer according to my recollection from the beta, but my spine ran cold. If they had changed the combination between then and the release of the game, I was about to look extremely stupid. Hesitantly, I uttered the six digits.

  “…Six, two, eight, four, nine, six.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  She quickly spun the little dials into place. With a very clear click! the lock was undone. I stepped forward, relieved, but Asuna just stared at the dials without turning the doorknob.

  “What’s up? If you don’t open it soon enough, the lock will engage again.”

  “Oh…y-yeah. I was just thinking, the numbers seemed familiar somehow. Maybe I really did spot them in the painting without realizing it,” she said vaguely as she opened the door. It was pitch-black inside, and a draft of c
hilly, damp air swept outward. The fencer fell back on her heels a bit, sensing something foreboding, but I grabbed her shoulders from behind and kept her moving forward.

  Once we were inside, the door shut behind us on its own. There was a scraping sound, which was just the number dials from the lock shuffling themselves again, but I felt Asuna’s shoulders jump under my fingers.

  “…Um, it’s dark in here.”

  “Yeah, it’s night.”

  “…How are we going to search the place like this? Should we wait until the morning and come back?”

  “No, we’re fine.”

  I opened up my window and materialized an item that I always had on the first page of my inventory.

  “Laaanterrrn,” I said in a spooky voice, hoping this would lighten up the mood. All I got was a cold stare over Asuna’s shoulder. I cleared my throat awkwardly and lit the device, filling the area with orange light.

  As one might expect from a home belonging to the lord of Stachion, the entrance hall was quite spacious. Because it was built on top of a bridge, it was inevitably a bit elongated and narrow in shape, but the hallway that ran down the left wall was plenty wide enough not to feel cramped.

  On the other hand, there were bundles of cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, and broken utensils and torn pieces of paper were all over the floor. It very much had the appearance of an abandoned house. The look on Asuna’s face said this wasn’t what she signed up for.

  She turned to me. “So…back to what I was saying.”

  “What was that…? Oh, about Cylon?”

  “Yes. Does what he’s doing make any sense? If he’s the one who killed Pithagrus and buried the body in traveler’s garb in the backyard, why is he asking us to investigate the incident for him?”

  “Nuh-uh. Cylon didn’t ask us to investigate the killing of the traveler. He asked us to look for the golden cube that was used in the murder.”

  “Oh, right…” The small furrow between her eyebrows eased for a moment, then returned. “No, but that still doesn’t make sense. Cylon was the one who beat Pithagrus to death with the golden cube, right? So wouldn’t Cylon have hidden the weapon?”