Sword Art Online Progressive 5

by Reki Kawahara

  “To go from orange back to green, you need to complete something called an ‘Alignment Recovery’ quest. I don’t know exactly how it works, but if your cursor turns orange, you’ll occasionally come across NPC travelers or wanderers in the wilderness, and they’ll give you a kind of trial quest…I think,” I murmured, not entirely sure of my memory on the matter.

  Asuna pondered this. “Is that something you can do in a night?”

  “Apparently the difficulty and length of the quest changes depending on your crime. Stealing something cheap from an NPC might not need a very long quest, but if you attacked or killed someone, that would be much more serious. And if you commit the same crime again, the second time, the quest is harder than the first, and the third time is harder than the second. I seem to recall people saying that if you PKed about five players in the beta, it was essentially impossible to be restored to green again.”

  After all that, I realized I hadn’t actually solved Asuna’s concern, so I added, “I don’t know how much it would take to repair the dagger guy’s alignment, to be honest…Plus, he attacked the big man, but he didn’t kill him…”

  “Yes…and another problem is that only half of the ALS is here…”

  “I kind of doubt they’d take us seriously if we explained the truth, too…”

  We were interrupted from our hushed conversation by a loud, booming voice coming from the dungeon entrance.

  “Hey, if you wanna tag along, yer welcome! But if you join the raid, you gotta follow our commands!”

  It was a voice I’d never mistake for anyone other than the leader of the ALS with the morning-star hair spikes, Kibaou. I flashed him an okay sign, and he snorted and turned back to the entrance. Among his three parties were some familiar faces: Okotan the halberdier and Liten the full-plate girl who had helped us with the last boss fight. They made little motions to catch our attention, and Asuna and I bowed back.

  Clearly, it had been decided that the ALS would take the lead on this dungeon, as DKB’s Lind, Shivata, and Hafner led their parties behind the other guild without a word of complaint, and the Bro Squad, with their two extras, brought up the rear in similar fashion.

  Kibaou confirmed that all parties were in order and boomed, “Let’s get through this place an’ eat lunch at the next town!”

  The ALS members cheered heartily—the rest of us at half the volume—and the forty-two-man group of conquerors headed into the dungeon that split the mountain range.

  In less than twenty minutes, we were infighting.

  The dungeon itself was very simple, made up of large rooms and the hallways that connected them. We cleared out the ten Living Statue monsters that appeared in the first chamber without much trouble.

  The problem arose when we reached the puzzle lock on the door at the back of the room.

  It looked like a sliding puzzle—in Japan, these are often called daughter-in-the-box puzzles—with blocks in large, medium, and small sizes that could be slid around. To beat the puzzle, you had to maneuver the large block placed at the very top of the puzzle all the way to the exit at the bottom. But while in the beta test there was one large block, four vertical blocks, one horizontal block, and four small blocks—a fairly easy orthodox example—the puzzle on the door now was longer—with eight small blocks in total.

  Naturally, it was Kibaou who confidently made the first attempt. But after five minutes, and at least three hundred moves, he was nowhere nearer to solving it, and Lind, who was getting tired of waiting, suggested he give up and let someone else try. Kibaou yelled at him to stay out of it, and eventually the DKB and ALS had taken sides across the room in a glaring contest.

  “Well…this certainly looks familiar.” Asuna sighed in exasperation as she leaned against a distant wall. “Say, isn’t there a simple and reliable way to solve that, like with the fifteen puzzle?”

  “Unfortunately, there isn’t…I remember that the shortest solution to the original version was eighty-one moves, but this one has four extra blocks on it. I don’t think I’d be able to step in and do it smoothly.”

  As we spoke, Kibaou was busy clattering the metal blocks as he slid them back and forth. But he was merely finding himself back in the same spots he’d been in minutes earlier, and he was getting no closer to a solution.

  “By the way, Kirito, the puzzles in Stachion were some curse from the lord of the town, right? We didn’t do that quest, so I don’t know the fine details,” said Agil, joining our conversation.

  I looked up at his craggy face and nodded. “Someone died at the lord’s manor, and now the place is cursed.”

  “Then why are there puzzles in this dungeon that’s miles away from the town? There wasn’t a single one in Suribus.”

  “…That’s a good point.”

  I’d always known the sixth floor as the one with puzzles, so I never thought further about it, but now that he mentioned it, if the curse didn’t even extend to Suribus, it didn’t make much sense that it was afflicting this dungeon farther away. In fact, the puzzles spread to the south area across the lake and to the labyrinth tower as well, and I didn’t recall anything in the beta that rationalized this.

  Well…it’s all just a setting someone made up, I concluded lamely, and I was gauging if I should say it aloud when someone’s voice interrupted me.

  “Hey, you just reset it to the beginning!” Lind bellowed, drawing our attention.

  Indeed, on the massive sliding puzzle that opened the stone door, the large block that was meant to escape from the bottom of the puzzle was back to its starting position at the top. As he fiddled with the long vertical blocks below it, Kibaou grunted, “When you get stuck, you start over! It’s common sense!”

  “You just admitted you got stuck! So let someone else have a go!”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Yes, you did!”

  Exasperated with their bickering, Asuna commented, “Sometimes I get the feeling that they’re actually best friends.”

  “You might be right about that…”

  “Oh, just go over there and solve the puzzle for them already, Kirito.”

  “L…listen, there’s a whole extra row added to what was there before. I can’t beat it with the moves I remem…”

  But then I came to a realization: Yes, there was an extra row of blocks, but the difference was just four new single-size blocks at the bottom that were the most maneuverable type, so in fact, they could largely be ignored. All you had to do was get the large block down to the spot where it was originally supposed to go and then slip two of the small blocks around the sides of it, creating a path to the exit.

  “Um…”

  Asuna was grinning.

  “…Well, I guess I’ll give it a try.”

  Agil smirked.

  Leaving the pair behind, I crossed the large chamber to the locked door. Kibaou and Lind both noticed my footsteps and turned to me, ready to object, but I held up my hands to cut them off.

  “Listen, there’s no trick to this puzzle other than memorizing the moves. I’ll do this one, and if you can remember how I do it, then you should be able to do it in a snap if you come across the same thing.”

  The two clamped their mouths shut, then shared a quick glance. Lind nodded, while Kibaou turned his back on me.

  “Well, if you say so, then I’m willin’ ta let you try.”

  “Then if you’ll pardon me…”

  I approached the puzzle that Kibaou had just reset and started working on it, relying on memory. I’d said there was no trick to it other than memorization, but in general, the quickest method was to gather the long vertical blocks on either the left or right side, then eventually get them to take up the top rows. Thankfully, I managed to inch the largest block downward without getting stuck, until it was at the original exit position. As I theorized, once the block was there, it only took a few moves to adjust the new blocks out of the way and slide that large block to the bottom spot.

  “Ooooh,” the crowd
of players murmured, as the massive door sank into the floor, offering us passage into the hall beyond.

  “Let’s get movin’!” Kibaou said triumphantly, leading his guildmates through.

  Part of my showing off was on Asuna’s request, but there was another purpose for it, too. As the ALS passed, I casually began strolling with them until I could approach a mustachioed dandy in their back row.

  “Hiya,” I whispered to Okotan, the captain of the ALS’s recruitment team. He glanced at me and murmured, “Nice work.”

  “Thanks. Listen…I hate to ask this out of the blue,” I began, prompting a curious look from him, “but of the members originally slated to participate in this dungeon, did anyone drop out abruptly just beforehand?”

  But the truth was that I was already expecting to hear a certain name as Okotan’s answer.

  The man who gave me the nickname of Beater after beating the first-floor boss, the man who tried to have Nezha crucified for his part in the weapon-upgrading scandal, the man who claimed Asuna and I were trying to monopolize the “Elf War” questline on the third floor, the man who stayed away on the fourth floor but accused me of trying to get the guild flag for myself at the fifth-floor boss, the man with the catchphrase “I know the truth”—the man named Joe. I’d found myself suspicious of him on a few separate occasions, and when he wasn’t among the ALS members in this dungeon, my suspicions grew deeper.

  The only things Joe shared in common with Black Hood Number Two were that they both used daggers and were about the same height. Number Two had his hood pulled low last night and also when I spotted him in the catacombs—and Joe always wore a leather mask that hid his face, so neither of them actually showed off his features. Their high-pitched voices were similar, too, but masks could change that, so it wasn’t a reliable detail.

  But on the fifth floor, Kibaou had said to Joe that the information he’d brought about the guild flag was accurate. That meant that at the very least, Joe had access to beta information, which could have come from Morte, who was a tester. The ALS had a few other dagger users, and much like Morte, there was no guarantee that Number Two wasn’t switching his primary weapon while he was working with the ALS—but if Okotan mentioned Joe’s name, my suspicion would turn almost to conviction.

  “Well…” Okotan started, seemingly without any suspicion and with his eyes darting up to the left, where the list of his raid members would be. He shook his head. “No, nobody changed their plans. Everyone who signed up at yesterday’s meeting is present here.”

  “Oh…I see,” I said, without any visible reaction. On the inside, however, I was taken aback.

  Morte and his pal must’ve known, in planning last night’s attack, that they would become orange players because of it. Even if their plan was to complete an “Alignment Recovery” quest overnight to get back to green, Number Two had lost his special Dirk of Agony in the act of saving Morte. If he hadn’t thrown it to distract me, I would have smashed the smoke bomb away with my sword in the instant before it exploded.

  Losing the powerful weapon he’d received from the Fallen Elf would be a major blow to his battle power, and such a loss might affect his ability to complete the recovery quest before morning. I had assumed that if Number Two was Joe, he would come up with some excuse for why he suddenly couldn’t take part in today’s activity—but it turned out that Joe was never scheduled to be here.

  I needed to get as much information as I could while I had the opportunity. “Um, what time of day did you have that meeting, exactly?” I asked.

  “It was after dinner, so probably around eight thirty in the evening,” Okotan said. At last, he seemed to find something suspicious about my questioning. “Why would you want to know something like that?”

  “Er…well…Late last night, we saw someone who looked like they were in the ALS fighting out in the woods, and they were struggling. I was just concerned, that’s all…”

  I knew it was a weak explanation, but in fact, I wasn’t really lying—I just wasn’t going to reveal that his opponents were me and Asuna.

  Okotan took this at face value, however; in fact, he even bowed a bit. “Oh, I see. Thank you for your concern. I didn’t hear anything about any members being in trouble last night, so I don’t believe there was a problem.”

  “Oh, good,” I replied, pondering this.

  If the meeting was at eight thirty, it would’ve been after nine when they finished. The attack on us happened after nine; if our second attacker was, in fact, Joe, he couldn’t have been at the meeting.

  I wanted to know if Joe was there or not, but asking as much would be fishy at this point. And even if Joe wasn’t at the meeting, that merely increased my suspicion without giving me any hard evidence.

  If only I could figure out the reason why Joe wouldn’t be taking part in this dungeon run today, when he’d been in every single boss fight thus far…

  “Yo, the next room’s up ahead! All members prepare fer combat!” Kibaou shouted from the head of the line. His ALS followers brandished their weapons. I decided there wasn’t much point trying to talk further and thanked Okotan before I drifted back.

  Once the DKB had filed past and I was in the rear again, Asuna zeroed in on me. “What were you talking with Okotan about?”

  “I was asking if any of their members backed out from this at the last minute.”

  Asuna instantly understood where I’d been going with that. She leaned closer. “And…?”

  “Sadly, he said there weren’t any.”

  “……Oh…I guess it wasn’t going to be that easy to catch him by the tail…”

  “Yeah. At this rate, we should keep our wits about us all throughout the day.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I leaned over. “The truth is that it’s not actually too hard to cover up the reason you went orange. He could have said he used an area attack that accidentally hit an NPC—and gotten his guildmates to help him do the ‘Alignment Recovery’ quest. The reason he didn’t is probably because he considered the possibility that the attack last night wouldn’t work. He could trick his guildmates, but if you or I survived and learned that someone in the ALS turned up orange, we could confirm that he was our PKer…And if they’re savvy enough to plan that carefully, they could have decided that we’d let our guard down, thinking they won’t attack again the next day, making us easier targets this time.”

  “…When you put it that way, it seems likely. So assuming that we’ll be watching our backs more carefully from now on,” Asuna contemplated, leaning in very close with an angry glare, “I’d like a correction to your quote just now about ‘if you or I survived.’”

  “Wha…?”

  “Why would you think that if one of us was killed, the other one would run away? Say it again, but correctly: ‘if you and I.’”

  “O-okay…”

  I wasn’t planning to abandon Asuna and run away, of course, but I did think it possible that I might need to use myself as a shield to help her get away…and if I dared to suggest it out loud, I’d get more than an angry glare in return. So I agreed with her and started to correct myself—when I heard a crude whistle from behind us.

  “Things are getting steamy over here!”

  “They’re melting the North Pole!” taunted Lowbacca and Naijan of the Bro Squad. Almost instantaneously, Asuna and I were no longer touching shoulders and leaning our heads in, but keeping a healthy distance.

  I couldn’t help but think, I didn’t taunt Shivata and Liten that way, because I told myself that being in ninth grade meant I was too old for that!

  We managed to get through four of the large rooms—each of the door puzzles being the same type, in increasingly complex arrangements, but we got through them all despite Kibaou and Lind’s bickering—until the final chamber greeted us with a huge, vine-plant boss. It rapidly grew pods that hurled explosive peas at us, until Agil and Lowbacca charged in with their battle-axes to cut it free from the roots, at last.


  I didn’t get the Last Attack bonus, as I was busy dodging the explosives, but according to Agil, all he got for it was a huge bunch of peas. With great sympathy, I suggested that maybe they’d be sweet if boiled. Once out of the dungeon, we split off from the rest of the frontliners.

  The ALS, DKB, and Bro Squad headed over the western horizon toward the faint silhouette of the next town, but Asuna and I had another destination in mind: The dark elf fortress on the sixth floor was located in this northwest slice of the map.

  “…I don’t think there’s much use in complaining about the map design of Aincrad at this point,” Asuna said after a few minutes of walking off the path through the wilderness, “but when there’s only a single line of mountains between us and the first area, it really shouldn’t be this different.”

  “No arguments from me,” I replied.

  The northeast area that contained Stachion and Suribus was mostly thick forest, like the third floor, but adjacent to it on the map, the northwest area was burnt-red desert, just like a western movie. There was no verdant plant life on this rolling terrain, just weathered rocks and the oddly shaped cactus here and there. When a particularly strong breeze started, it kicked up sand into little whirlwinds that impeded your vision.

  Hunger and thirst couldn’t kill you in Aincrad, but in the real world, you’d never set foot in a place like this without more than a few bottles of water. Our destination was near the aperture directly north, after a hike of about two and a half miles. And there was no path to take, so we had to avoid dried riverbeds and rocky outcroppings along the way, while battling the many monsters that appeared.

  Fortunately, my partner failed to find the giant scorpions, giant centipedes, and giant camel spiders to be quite as icky as the astral monsters, despite the fact that most girls would absolutely hate them. And just when my inventory was getting close to full with unappetizing ingredient items like scorpion tails and camel spider jaws, I finally hit the milestone of level 20.

  “Yahoo!”

  The moment the level-up light surrounded me, I raised my right fist and leaped into the air in celebration. Asuna, who had reached level 19 not that long ago, backed away a foot.