“……My word…!!”
The dark elf’s onyx eyes glowed with pale flames—or so it seemed to me. She stood up straight, grabbing the saber she’d left standing against the side of the sofa, and shouted, “If I were there, I would have lopped their heads from their shoulders! Kirito, Asuna, you must not return to your human towns! You must stay with me…”
“No, no, no, we’re fine,” I assured the furious elf, getting her to sit back down. I pointed at the weapons on the table again. “We managed to drive them off without suffering much dam…er, any wounds. But they’re very persistent, so there’s no question they’re still out to get us. The problem is the weapons they were using…Especially these, which are poisoned throwing needles. Can you tell us anything about this, Kizmel…?” I finished, all in a single breath, sliding one of the picks over to the knight.
“……”
Kizmel stood her saber against the sofa and lifted the pick high over her head, so that it caught the light from the window.
“…This isn’t steel. It was fashioned from the spike of some living thing,” she said.
Asuna leaned forward and tapped the other pick. She read the flavor text on its item properties out loud. “Kizmel, these human words say, THE SUNKEN ELF GENERAL N’LTZAHH FACED THE DREAD DRAGON SHMARGOR AND CUT OFF EVERY LAST ONE OF ITS SPINES, WHICH DRIPPED WITH DEADLY POISON…”
“N’ltzahh…Shmargor…?!” she repeated, rising again and initially hurling her hand with the pick away from her, before she regained her composure and placed the weapon on the table. She gave us both a look, then began to speak in an officious tone.
“…Shmargor is an evil dragon spoken of in elven legend. Long in the past, when the elves and humans and dwarves still lived on the earth, a wicked little snake snuck past the priestess and climbed the black Holy Tree to take a bite of the single fruit that grew at the tip of one of its branches. The snake gained eternal life, but it was cursed so that everything that entered its mouth turned to poison. Every time it ate, the snake suffered and died, only to come back to life through the fruit’s holy power. After several centuries, the snake had evolved into a massive, ugly poison dragon that attacked towns and villages. But the human hero Selm defeated it, and it fled to the land of ice far to the distant north…”
Kizmel’s rich voice faded out, prompting both me and Asuna to exhale. Her smooth and lyrical delivery was so pleasant to listen to, we wanted to ask her to tell us more, even though we knew she couldn’t.
“…Hmm, that’s kind of a sad story…I doubt the snake wanted to bite the Holy Tree’s fruit out of malice…” Asuna said, shaking her head.
Kizmel nodded deeply. “The fruit of the Holy Tree is said to give eternal life, and its sap provides invulnerable flesh. Many tragic tales revolve around such fruit. There is this story, for example: At the end of the Month of Holly, which humankind designates as December, there is a holy sage tasked with the duty of giving gifts to children. One year, he learned that the gift he was to give to a sickly little human girl was actually a piece of the Holy Tree’s fruit. Unable to stifle his curiosity, he opened the present box and found an unbearably gorgeous crystal. The sage desired this crystal, and of all the thousands of children, he only failed to deliver that one little girl’s gift. Without the protection of that crystal, the girl did not live to see the new year as she was meant to, and so the holy sage went mad, cursed to wander forever through a night that never ends…”
“…Do the other stories have similar endings?” Asuna asked.
Kizmel shrugged. “Most of them do. The gifts of the Holy Tree are not to be coveted.”
“And from what I remember, the Fallen Elves were banished because they tried to harvest the sap of the Holy Tree,” I interjected, which caused Asuna to gasp.
“Oh, right! The Fallen Elves were sent to the far north, too. So it would make sense that he encountered Shmargor up there…But wait, does that mean General N’ltzahh has been around since before Aincrad was created…?”
Kizmel frowned in silence while we talked, so I cautiously asked her, “Um, in fact…how many years ago did Aincrad come into being…?”
“…Actually, we royal knights do not know the details. As I believe Lord Yofilis told you, only Her Royal Majesty possesses all the legends surrounding the Great Separation and the six sacred keys. All we are told is that this floating castle was created long in the past.”
She paused for a moment there, brushing the clasp of her cloak before continuing, “However, I have heard that Her Majesty and the forest elf king are very long-lived. So perhaps the man who leads the Fallen is equally ancient. Not that he frightens me.”
That was a heartening attitude, but I didn’t want Kizmel to end up fighting General N’ltzahh. I had no doubt of her skill as a knight, but even remembering the sight of N’ltzahh up close left me short of breath. He would be worse than anything we’d faced so far, including the five floor bosses.
Though Kizmel couldn’t have known what I was thinking, she fixed me with a long look from her dark eyes and reached for the table again. This time, she picked up the black dagger that Number Two had dropped—the Dirk of Agony.
Unlike with the pick, Kizmel merely gave this a once-over, then stated, “Indeed. This is a Fallen weapon.”
“You can tell just by looking?” Asuna asked, wide-eyed.
The knight indicated the base of the thin blade. “Do you see the symbol carved faintly down here?”
“Huh?” I yelped. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t noticed it when I examined the weapon at the inn in Suribus, but sure enough, just above the hilt, there was a very fine carving that glinted orange in the sunlight. The design was of two folding lines that created a pattern of three diamonds, but I had no idea what it meant.
“What is this…?” Asuna wondered.
“It apparently represents ice and lightning,” Kizmel answered.
“Ohhh,” cooed two humans in unison.
The dark elves had a scimitar and horn, the forest elves had a shield and longsword, and the Fallen Elves had ice and lightning. In a different game, you’d figure the Fallen were masters of ice and lightning magic, but sadly—well, luckily, really—there was no magic in SAO.
Kizmel put the dagger back on the table and crossed her slender arms over her chest. “These are, indeed, weapons of the Fallen. The same mark was on the blades of those we fought on the third and fifth floors. But I seem to recall that the sigils I saw were not simple carvings, but cast silver.”
“Now that you mention it, I think that’s right…” Asuna agreed, but I couldn’t honestly remember. I found it hard to believe that an AI like Kizmel would be mistaken, so I moved on from there.
“You’re saying…this dagger is cheaper than the weapons of the Fallen we’ve fought to this point?”
“I would say so, but that is not all of it. I suspect these are weapons given to collaborators of other races…Meaning that those human vagabonds who attacked you did not steal that dagger from a slain Fallen, but they were given them for their assistance.”
“……”
Asuna and I had discussed that very possibility based on the flavor text of the Dirk of Agony this morning. I felt like Kizmel’s statement turned that vague suspicion into almost verifiable truth.
Morte and his buddy had found a quest route that involved collaborating with the Fallen Elves, rather than fighting against them. So we ought to assume there would be a way to regain those highly deadly poisoned picks. If we were going to keep fighting them, we needed a way to counteract level-2 paralyzing poison as soon as possible.
I drew in a breath to explain this, but I was beaten to the punch.
“Do not worry. As I told you earlier, as long as I am at your side, no vagabonds will threaten you,” Kizmel stated flatly. She patted Asuna’s knee lightly and stood up.
“Uh, K-Kizmel, we’re not…” I started to say, but she only sat back down to motion us to stand with her.
“Why don’t we
wash off the dust of your travel first? You must have taken on quite a bit of sand during your trip to this castle.”
Those words turned Asuna’s eyes into hearts—or more accurately, into the symbol for hot springs. Nobody would be able to stop her now.
I quickly stashed the weapons back in my inventory and hurried after the women.
When I visited Castle Galey in the beta, I took a tour of the building. A stint in the baths wasn’t on the tour, but I did remember the location of the facilities.
But Kizmel didn’t head to the second floor of the east wing, where I remembered it. She descended the stairs in the center of the west wing. I found this confusing—but not as much as when we continued descending even past the ground floor. Weren’t we going to the bath? Was there even a basement in the beta…? But the knight’s pace was utterly confident.
The stairs ended on the basement level, turning into a tiled-floor hallway lit by oddly colored lamps. As we walked, the chilly air gradually grew warmer and warmer.
Eventually, there was a large door on the right-hand wall. It wasn’t adorned with a hanging curtain with the word for bath on it, like in Japan, but the open doorway was exuding white steam, so it was definitely the right place. In the real world, a place that steamy underground would get as moldy as you could possibly imagine, but we didn’t have to worry about microorganisms or viruses in the virtual world—I hoped.
When Kizmel and Asuna passed through the door, I stopped and called out, “Okay, I’ll wait for you here.”
The knight swung around and beckoned to me, looking hurt. “Don’t be silly, Kirito. Come in with us.”
“Um…I’d feel bad if I forced you two to wear swimsuits like at Yofel Castle…Plus, on the one-in-a-million chance that those vagabonds attack again…”
Asuna looked exquisitely conflicted, trapped between her guilt at being the only one bathing and her desire to bathe properly in the buff, but Kizmel had no hesitation whatsoever.
“Do not worry about an attack,” she said. “This castle can only be entered through the gate to the south, and when it opens, the bells can be heard all throughout the castle. And you need not worry about the other matter.”
“Huh…?”
“Here, come and see.”
She grabbed my arm and yanked me through the doorway.
It was a kind of rest lounge, decorated all over with attractive, leafy plants and tables with rattan chairs on either side wall. There were also pitchers and glasses for water. There were no other dark elves here, probably because it was still early. There were also two rattan doors on the far wall that likely led to the bath. There was a circle on the left door and a square on the right.
“The bath in this castle is very large, so there are separate entrances for men and women. You will not need your ‘swemsoots’ here, Kirito and Asuna.”
“Oh…th-that makes sense…” I said, relieved. In that case, I wasn’t opposed to relaxing in a nice huge bath. I didn’t have anything against baths.
“We will see you later, then.” Kizmel grinned. She and Asuna vanished through the circle door, waving, so I pushed my way through the square entrance. As I expected, there was a changing room next. It seemed appropriate to the fantasy genre that in addition to wicker baskets for holding clothes, there were also armor hooks. But thanks to my art of Mystic Scribing, I could just hit the UNEQUIP ALL button to have my clothes spirited away into storage. After a quick check to make sure no one else was around, I removed the last piece, too.
Using the provided white towel for the minimal level of defense, I headed through the next door. The tiled hallway turned left, leading toward…
“Ooh…”
It was a fantastical enough sight to elicit a murmur from me. The space was a massive dome with a radius of probably thirty feet. The gently curved walls and ceiling were clearly carved straight from the bedrock, but that just accentuated the natural hot spring feel. There were niches in the walls at even intervals, containing lamps that provided soft light to the chamber.
Under the dome was milky liquid of an opal-white color, and something that looked like a thick vine hung directly from the middle of the ceiling all the way down to the water. This dome was probably located right beneath the open plaza on the surface, which would mean the vine was a root of the spirit tree.
I put the towel in my inventory and set foot on the first step of the bath, allowing the heat to fill me up to the top of my head. This time, it elicited a “Fwaaa…” from my mouth. It was too shallow to get my whole body in, though, so I headed toward the center, parting the lingering steam as I went.
Near the root, it was as deep as my waist, so I finally dunked down into the water.
Just then, the white steam in front of me gave way, revealing another figure at startling proximity. It was too deep for me to leap out of the way, so all I could do was stare.
In general, I was not a person with a lot of reliance on regulations, self-control, or personal rules—but even I had a few things I demanded of myself.
One was never to think If only I had (not) done this or that. It was important to understand the reason things happened to ensure I didn’t repeat my mistakes, but I considered worrying about Why did you say that, or If only I’d realized this, or If I’d just started my homework earlier to be nothing more than a waste of my limited mental resources over time.
But even I, in this one instant, couldn’t help but consider a whole cornucopia of possible actions that I’d failed to take:
If only I’d been satisfied with the edge of the bath. If only I’d realized why the huge bath was a dome. If only I’d more closely considered Kizmel’s description: There are separate entrances for men and women. If only…
If only I’d instantly closed my eyes, turned around, and claimed “I didn’t see anything!” maybe there would have been a different result.
But what I actually did was stare, dumbfounded, for about three whole seconds at the female player standing barely two feet away with all her equipment removed. My eyesight auto-aim kicked in, going first from the collarbone down to the pelvic bone submerged in the water, then back up, until I finally saw her face.
At this moment, there was only one other player in Castle Galey aside from me. So naturally, this person staring equally dumbfounded back at me was my partner of about a month, Miss Asuna the fencer.
Wow…after all that trouble, we’ve beaten five floor bosses in a month. At this rate, we could be on the tenth floor by mid-January, I thought, my mind grasping for anything other than the reality I was facing: Asuna’s neck, jaw, and then nose turning fiery red. When the color reached her hairline, she grunted “Nngh!” and raised her arm with a violent splash. Upon seeing her clenched fist, I thought, Well, I suppose I’ve earned this one, fair and squa—
No, no, no, wait!
I couldn’t accept that punch. This castle wasn’t under the anti-criminal code. If level-19 Asuna hit me with a full-power punch while I was unarmored, she would do damage to my HP, and that would change her cursor color to orange. Normally, when we were out of town, she carefully adjusted her jabs to play nice, but the gloves were literally off now.
“W-wait, no!” I yelled, but the God of Fury before me could hear no human words.
“Hnnngggg!” she roared, and before she could unleash her fists, I took the one option that would avoid her being designated a criminal player.
I toppled forward, not backward, and folded my arms around her body, then pushed her into the water, sending up a glorious plume of hot water. We sank nearly three feet into the cloudy bath.
I clutched the struggling girl, who continued trying to scream even under the water. I wanted to yell “You’re going to turn orange!” but the only sound that came out of my mouth was “Bwuh-bubbu-ba-beww-bowah-glurble-gurlurgle!”
Naturally, the Drowning icon showed up above our HP bars, and with the way the air was escaping our mouths, HP loss wasn’t far off. We couldn’t let ourselves die for such a pat
hetic reason, so I pulled us up enough for our heads to breach the surface, still holding Asuna. This would be my final chance to warn her about going orange…
Then a deluge of freezing-cold water poured onto us from above, literally cooling our heads. I froze in place, completely bewildered. It was Kizmel, who had no doubt come to the bath later due to the process of manual armor removal, looking down on us. “Well, well, aren’t we friendly?” she commented.
Naturally, she had not a single piece of equipment on, but by this point, I didn’t have any mental power left to reflect on it.
Later on, I was told that the spirit tree at Castle Galey was constantly sucking up the natural hot spring water through its roots to support its branches and leaves, occasionally becoming so quenched that it dripped like rain to form the pool at its base. The cold pool steadily seeped into the bedrock, and every hour or so, it poured into the underground spring like a waterfall.
It made a certain kind of sense—and also made no sense at all—but the point was, it saved us from a variety of potential troubles. Asuna’s class temporarily changed from Fencer to God of Fury, but when she remembered that we weren’t in a safe haven, she realized what my actions were meant to do. She cycled through five or six different facial expressions before she said, “I apologize for doing that” and went back to being human again.
I sank down to my shoulders and considered what to do now. The water itself was almost completely opaque, so if you stayed five feet apart, you couldn’t see the other person’s body whatsoever, but I didn’t have the willpower to sit back and enjoy my bath, even under those circumstances. It seemed that I should just equip the swimsuit Asuna made for me on the fourth floor, but for some reason, she was just soaking in a daze without doing the same, so I felt a bit hesitant to open my window.
In the end, I decided that simply finding a way to peel off and get out of there was best, and I was scooting off to the side when Kizmel, who was soaking on the other side of Asuna from me, started speaking.
“You know, about those throwing picks…I think I may know a way to counteract the poison that seeps from them.”
Sword Art Online Progressive 5 Page 17
