Sword Art Online Progressive 5

by Reki Kawahara

  “Well, the reasoning behind that comes up at the end of the quest…but whatever. So Cylon got mad and beat Pithagrus to death, then mocked him up into a traveler who didn’t exist to hide his crime, right? He thought it all worked out in the end, but somehow the cube vanished from the murder scene—a cube with Cylon’s bloody fingerprints on it. On top of that, it’s the town treasure and the symbol of its lord—the very cube that formed the sizing basis of all the stone and wood cubes that make up the town. So Cylon’s idea is that the only way to purify the puzzle curse upon Stachion is to find the missing cube, clean off his prints, then place it at the grave of the traveler…who is secretly Pithagrus himself.”

  “……It just seems…very selfish. Or convenient. If he really wanted to undo the puzzle curse, he shouldn’t be bothering with the cube. He should admit that he killed Pithagrus and turn himself in to the police, right?”

  “Well, yeah. But there are no police in Aincrad.”

  Asuna murmured a soft “Oh yeah,” but her indignation still remained. She brought up the town guards, the dark elf fortress, even Blackiron Palace down in the Town of Beginnings on the first floor as a list of places he where he could turn himself in to a higher authority.

  “…Well?” she finished, looking at me.

  “Well…what?”

  “What do you think I mean? Who stole the golden cube? You’re not going to tell me it grew arms and legs of its own and ran away……Oh!”

  “‘Oh’…what?”

  “Is that actually what it is? You said the boss of this floor is like a giant Rubik’s Cube. Did the golden cube turn into some kind of monster form?”

  Now it was my turn to be stunned. As impressed as I was with the fencer’s imagination, I had to shake my head.

  “Sadly, that is not the case. Actually, maybe it’s not sad—if that boss cube were completely gold, you’d have no idea how to rotate it to solve the sides. But back to the point…we’ve already met the person who removed the cube.”

  “Whaaat?” She scowled, then let her eyes wander as she considered this. “So you’re saying…it’s one of the seven people we talked to in Stachion? The former butler, the maidservant, the gardener, the cook, the two apprentices, and the bartender he liked to visit…? And one of them has the cube now? Who is it?”

  “Let’s find that out on our own. We’re here to get the clues, after all,” I said with an evil grin.

  She pouted. “Fine, let’s get on with it. You know which room has the clue in it, right?”

  “Sadly, the place where the key item pops up is randomized.”

  “…So we’ll just have to start with the first room and go in order.”

  The swordswoman started walking down the entrance hall. As she went, I called out, “Oh, and a few of the rooms have ghosts, so don’t forget to prepare for battle.”

  “Sure, sure, whatever.”

  Step-step-step, pause.

  All of a sudden, she had teleported behind my back with her hands on my shoulders. An unyielding force pushed me on toward the first room.

  Fortunately, like in the beta, there was no dial lock on the inside doors. I pushed it open to a room that was actually darker than the hallway. Even with the lantern held up, the light didn’t reach all the corners of the room.

  “…Was there a ghost?” came a tiny voice behind my back. For the briefest of moments, my penchant for mischief kicked in, but I knew that playing pranks here would be the end of our partnership, so I gave her an honest answer.

  “Doesn’t seem like there’s one in this room.”

  “I don’t want seems! I want it on the record!”

  “Fine, fine. There are no ghosts in here.”

  At last, Asuna emerged from hiding behind my back, looking as smug and in control as ever as she inspected the room. “Ew…it’s in a terrible state…”

  I had to concur. It was probably a guest parlor originally, with a deluxe set of furniture in the middle of the moderate-sized room, and a huge fireplace on the far wall. But all the other furniture had collapsed after ten years of disuse, and the carpet was eaten through by insects.

  Asuna approached a side table that was still intact and ran a finger across its surface, which was piled high with dust. She made another face. “This was probably luxury furniture at one point. Not much use for it anymore…”

  “Well, you might be able to refurbish it if you take it to an NPC woodworker.”

  “Wait, you can do that? I thought you couldn’t move the objects in an NPC’s home.”

  “As a general rule. But in these safe-zone dungeons, there are a fair number of furniture pieces whose coordinates aren’t locked,” I explained, moving next to Asuna and grabbing the side table with both hands. When I pulled upward, the legs came right off the ground.

  “There, you see?”

  “You’re right…Hmm. But even if it got fixed up, I don’t think I’d want to use furniture that came from a place like this. For one thing, I have no idea when I might ever have a place of my own.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good point,” I said, lowering the table. But that vibration, as tiny as it was, managed to do in its remaining durability, and it crumbled pathetically into a pile of wood.

  “Ooooh, you busted it—you’re in trouble!” Asuna teased me, grinning wolfishly. She leaned onto the back of a nearby three-seat sofa, and instantly, the legs cracked off. It finished its act by splitting in two, through both the seat and the back portion.

  “Ooh, I’m gonna tell the teacher!” I taunted back, which I didn’t think I’d said even when I was actually in elementary school. Asuna snorted and grinded her left fist against my side. I couldn’t very well return that jab, and it left me helpless to do anything but grind my teeth in frustration.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything else here. Let’s go to the next one,” I said, pointing at the door.

  “Fine, if you say so…but what are we even looking for anyway?”

  “Something that would suggest the location of the golden cube.”

  “And what is that something…? Well, if it’s the key to this quest, I bet they’ll make sure it’s visible one way or another.”

  “Let’s hope so…” I said knowingly as I headed into the hallway. I checked the front door just in case, but it didn’t seem to have been opened while we were in the parlor. Asuna checked the same direction and seemed to notice something, however.

  “Hey…what happens if someone else solves the combination on the dials while we’re already in here?”

  “It’s not an instanced location. So they’d come right in here.”

  “…And what happens if that person finds the clue item before we do?”

  “I’d say that the item would be locked in place so you can’t move or destroy it, or it would be something you could find infinitely. But in the latter case, it would spawn at certain intervals. There are some that take thirty minutes or an hour to reappear. Some even last as long as a day before they come back…”

  “Then we’d better find it and get out of here. C’mon, next, next!”

  Asuna pushed me several steps down the hallway until we came to a new door.

  The room adjacent to the parlor was a large dining room. The massive dinner table and chairs were still intact, but the way that ten or so table settings with cutlery included were laid out on top was quite eerie. The wine bottles and candleholders were gray with dust, and the chandelier hanging from the ceiling supported many spiderwebs.

  For five seconds, Asuna cowered behind my back. Once she was certain there were no ghosts here, she emerged as if nothing had just happened.

  “Can you move the wine and utensils, too?” she asked.

  “Probably. You wanna take that back and drink it?”

  “No, thank you. On the other hand, the clue item doesn’t seem to be here, either,” she murmured. Asuna strode closer to the dining table.

  Just then, there was a whooshing, rustling sound like the kind we heard in the und
erground chapel on the fifth floor, and a pale light spilled out from beneath the table. Passing up through the filthy tablecloth were two astral monsters—based on the long, slim silhouettes and tattered white dresses, they seemed to be wraiths. There were other kinds in this category—specters, phantoms, spirits, apparitions—but I honestly had no idea what differentiated them all.

  While she didn’t scream the way she had on the floor below, Asuna leaped upward a foot or so and ran through the air—at least it seemed that way to me because she was moving so fast—and darted around behind my back again.

  “Th-there they are! Hurry! Do something!” she ordered. I drew my Sword of Eventide +3, but rather than immediately attacking, I kept the wraiths at bay with the tip.

  “Asuna, I think it’s for the best if you experience some battle against astral types right here.”

  “B-but…”

  “It’s all right. You might have forgotten, but we’re in town now. No matter how much they attack, you won’t lose a single pixel of HP.”

  That’s not the problem, she seemed to say with her resulting sigh. But Asuna had thoughts of her own on this, and she peered around my left shoulder. While she immediately shrank back first, she then sidled her entire body until she was at my side instead. With her lantern held high in her off-hand, she drew the Chivalric Rapier +7 and pointed it at the wraiths situated atop the table.

  I focused on the ghosts myself, bringing up the automatic cursor. Beneath the HP bar, it said ANNOYING WRAITH in English, and the cursor itself was a very faint pink color. That meant that even if we weren’t in town, they wouldn’t be tough foes.

  “…I don’t recall seeing any ‘Annoying’ Wraiths before,” Asuna said, her voice a bit hoarse.

  As calmly as I could, I asked her, “What’s anoing mean?”

  “You didn’t learn that in English class? It’s, like, irritating—or troublesome…”

  “Ahh. That would fit for a quest event like this. Like I said, we’re in town, so we won’t lose any HP. But aside from that, these are the same as any ordinary wraith, so hitting their limbs or the end of their dresses won’t do much damage, and if they hit you, they can debuff you.”

  “Wait…you never warned me about that!” Asuna shrieked, and the wraiths seemed to react to the sound. They spread their arms and descended with a wail: “Hyoooo!”

  Human-type astral monsters could be male, female, or indeterminate, but wraiths were mostly female, it seemed. However, they had no beauty whatsoever; the arms extending from their ragged dresses were thin as bones, and two-thirds of their faces were skeletal. Blue fires burned in the eye sockets of these ones, and they swung long hands with knife-sharp nails.

  I evaded the first attack and swiped at the torso. The deep cut produced a white substance like smoke, but it left little impact, and the wraith only lost a tenth of its health bar.

  But the creature screeched hideously and flew to the corner of the dining room. I kept my sword pointed in its direction and glanced over to check on Asuna.

  “Why, you! Fngh! Shwaaa!” the fencer was hissing, not to be outdone by the wraiths’ bizarre vocalizations. She executed thrust skills with incredible speed—their frequency so thick that even the ghost couldn’t get past her rapier. As the wraith flew around in a figure-eight pattern, she occasionally clipped an arm, but it didn’t do much HP damage.

  Astral types had insubstantial bodies, and regular weapons did not inflict effective damage on them. Other games would have flame or light spells that could wreak havoc on them, but because of the ancient Great Separation of Aincrad, true magic had been lost here. You just had to make do with physical attacks, one way or another.

  The most common method was to place a blessing buff on your weapon, but at the moment, that could only be done in large towns with a church, and it cost money. You could also use sword skills with a high anti-astral effect (most of which were mace or flail skills) or bring many illumination items (astral monsters’ natural resistance was lower in the light), but these were tough requirements for a group of just two sword users.

  Fortunately, both Asuna’s Chivalric Rapier and my Sword of Eventide had received elven upkeep, which gave them minor effectiveness against the undead—enough to be good on its own against weak event monsters like these. I thrust my lantern forward and closed the gap so I could take my target out. In this situation, a fighter who used a shield or a two-handed weapon would just have to put the light on the ground to fight, but having a free hand meant I could just hold the lantern. And to get even more into the fine details, not only did having a light equipped in battle help with attacking power, a torch was better because it didn’t count as irregular equipment—and it had extra power against an astral foe weak to fire—with the only drawback being that you had to be careful swinging it around indoors, lest you accidentally burn something that could be destroyed.

  Lit by the yellow light of the lantern, the Annoying Wraith let out a high-pitched wail and slid to the right to get away. But that was just what I wanted; when it got into range, I used the three-part skill Sharp Nail on it.

  The strongest sword skills I had at the moment were the four-parters Horizontal Square and Vertical Square, which unlocked at proficiency level 150, but they were too wide-ranging for an indoor environment like this. If push came to shove, I couldn’t bother myself about not destroying the walls or furniture, but since this was in an anti-crime code area, and there were plenty of unbreakable objects around, I didn’t want to have my sword bounce off an obstacle and lose my skill combo.

  Sharp Nail, however, was a nice, compact trio of strikes with the same high-angle path. My silver-glowing sword sank into the torso of the Annoying Wraith without catching on the wall or ceiling.

  The first and second hits took it down to about a third of its health, but the last one seemed unlikely to finish the job.

  Yet, the moment the third erupted, the tip of the Sword of Eventide actually veered away, as if drawn by a magnet. It sliced the wraith’s shoulder, passed expertly through the center of the chest, then emerged out the side. Unlike the first two slices, this one came with the sensation of something small and hard breaking.

  Counter to my expectations, the wraith’s HP bar sank into the red zone and did not stop until it reached zero. The three visual slicing marks hung in the air like some fierce beast’s claws, overlapped by the usual blue bursting effect of any dying monster.

  I stared at the blade of my second-generation sword, still in the pose with which I finished the swing.

  That magnetic sensation I’d gotten was undoubtedly the aiming-adjustment system that the Accuracy boost had given my weapon. I’d thought the effect only kicked in when you intentionally aimed at a weak point, but I had no idea that a wraith-type monster had a little solid nodule in its chest as a vital area, so that meant the Sword of Eventide had basically hit the Annoying Wraith right in that spot of its own volition.

  “…Is that true?” I asked it in a tiny voice. The sword didn’t reply, of course.

  What I did hear, instead, was my partner screaming.

  “Uniiiieee!”

  It was probably an expression of disgust and frustration. I turned to see, on the other side of the large dining room, the fencer utilizing a sword skill. It was the best move she had at the moment, Triangular.

  A clean hit from that skill, with the power of the Chivalric Rapier +7, would be enough to take out half my HP. It riddled the wraith with near-invisible speed. But the enemy rose right before the skill executed, meaning it only hit the trailing skirt portion. That ectoplasmic white smoke tattered in its wake, but it left the HP bar with 30 percent remaining.

  “Hoh-hoh-hooohhh…” the wraith cried—somewhere between a scream and a mocking laugh—and swung its long arms at Asuna as she waited to recover from the skill delay. It didn’t do any damage, but Asuna’s HP bar lit up with an icon of a pale hand. That was the Chillness debuff that lowered body temperatures uncomfortably.

  “Fy
ah!” Asuna raged, leaping back as soon as she could move again. Despite valiantly holding her sword aloft, her shivering was apparent. Chill did no actual damage, but it was a major annoyance, causing sneezes in battle and keeping you from dodging the enemy’s attack.

  I rushed up behind her and called out, “Asuna, want h…?”

  “No!” she snapped, refusing my aid. She was not entirely going to handle it on her own, however. “Just give me a hint or something! Its HP refuses to go down!”

  “Oh…yeah, rapier thrusts are just about the worst kind of attack to use against astrals…”

  The Annoying Wraith floating up near the ceiling couldn’t have understood what I was saying, but it chose a very appropriate moment to chuckle.

  “Asuna, have you mastered any of the slicing kind of sword skills?” I asked.

  My partner’s voice was hard—surely due to her struggle to control the cold and not because she was actually mad at me—as she replied, “When I reached proficiency one hundred fifty a while back, I learned to use one called Folium.”

  “Yeah, I guess that would work. Okay, next time the wraith approaches, use Folium right at the middle of its chest.”

  “Wh…which part is the middle?” she yelled back. I didn’t have any immediate answers. Against kobolds or reptoids, I’d tell her “Where the heart is”; all humanoids, including players, had hearts (critical points) located just to the left of the center of the chest. Yet, the little nodule I felt in the wraith’s chest had been directly in the middle. There was no other way to define it.

  “Um…”

  I put the sword behind my back and looked around, then picked up a dusty dessert knife off the dining table. It had almost no value as a weapon, and I didn’t have the Throwing Knives skill, so it wasn’t going to do any real damage, but…

  “Yah!”

  I tossed the knife, concentrating only on Accuracy, and it landed in the middle of the swaying wraith’s chest, right where the little nodule would be, doing just a single pixel of damage to its HP bar before falling to the floor. A red damage effect appeared for just a few scant seconds on the tattered white dress.