We searched each room on the first level of the cave slowly but steadily, occasionally finding chests with treasure, or valuable ores that could be used to craft Asuna’s next weapon. Once we had nearly finished mapping out the entire floor, Asuna raised a belated question.
“Hey, is this dungeon one of those…instance things? Or is it…?”
“I believe the antonym of an instanced dungeon would be a public dungeon. This is the public kind,” I murmured quietly into Asuna’s ear, afraid that if Kizmel heard she would give us another lecture about the fractured language of humankind. “The reason I know it’s public is because there are other quests that use this dungeon aside from ours.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“Well, there’s a pet-finding quest at the next village past the forest, and another one from the main city of the…”
My mouth shut with a snap. Asuna’s orange-lit face looked at me curiously, and I tore away to look behind us.
The way we’d come was almost complete darkness, without a soul in sight…but did I just hear something? A faint, brief scrape of metal?
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“…How many hours have we been on the third floor, Asuna?”
“After all the sleep we got, I think it’s around fourteen hours.”
“Ugh…crap, that’s the exact timing.”
“Exact timing of what?”
I turned to look back again and whispered quickly, “This is the location of a major quest you can start from the main city. There are a few different patterns to the quest, so it’s not guaranteed, but a solid percentage of players doing that quest are going to be coming here for an item. Depending on the size of the party, it might take between ten to fifteen hours for them to get this far…”
Just then, I heard another faint clang of metal. Kizmel stopped dead still, a sign that it wasn’t just a trick of my ears. She watched and waited for a tense moment, face sharp, then turned to us.
“Kirito, Asuna—it would seem there are other visitors to this nest.”
“Yeah. It must be other pla…human warriors. We have reasons to avoid encountering them, Kizmel.”
“I do as well,” the elf knight grinned and pointed to a divot in the wall. “Let us hide there for a moment.”
“Huh? How can we hide with the light of the torches all around?” Asuna asked, wide-eyed. Kizmel smiled again.
“The people of the forest have their own ways of deception.”
She pushed our backs, guiding us to the three-foot-deep depression in the wall and up against the surface, then pressing herself against us to hide us from view. Her ample bosom, tight stomach, and smooth thighs were pressed directly against me, and I was afraid that the game’s harassment code would go off, but apparently that did not apply when it was an NPC initiating the contact. Kizmel, of course, had no idea what was running through my mind.
“Extinguish the torches,” she commanded. I did as she said and dropped my light into a puddle on the floor. Once we were shrouded in darkness, Kizmel stretched out her cape to cover all three of us.
Oddly enough, while the cape seemed to be woven solid from the outside, it was sheer and see-through from the inside. All I could see was blackness, of course, but there was just enough green glow from the moss across the way to tell that the cape wouldn’t block my sight.
That wasn’t the only surprise to me. Despite not using the Hiding skill, its familiar hide rate percentage readout appeared on the left side of my view. Even more shocking, the number was at 95 percent. Kizmel’s cape had a magic—er, charm—effect that activated the Hiding skill. Between this and the antidote ring, I was getting very jealous.
“You were saying earlier, Kirito?” Asuna asked at the lowest possible volume, interrupting my fit of envy. It took me a moment to remember what we’d been talking about.
“Oh, right. The people coming up from behind us are on that quest. It’s the guild creation quest, the one the other frontier players were desperate to get started.”
“…!”
Her eyes went wide in the darkness—she remembered. I was going to continue, but Kizmel gave us a warning first.
“Quiet. They’ll pass by soon.”
Asuna and I shut our mouths and swallowed hard.
Ten seconds later, we heard the rattling of armor on the move. I counted at least two heavily armored fighters, if not three. There were more footsteps, however; the party had to be five or six in total.
Finally, there came a rough shout, shockingly loud and careless in the midst of a dungeon.
“What the hell?! All the chests have been ransacked already!”
It was a very familiar voice, one that felt like I’d heard it just minutes ago. I had last seen him a whole fifteen hours ago, but something about the circumstances—the fact that I hadn’t even been to the town yet or that his booming voice was so memorable—made me think, Not you again! Asuna’s pale face grimaced in the darkness.
We held our breath for several seconds. The first player passed by us, so close we could reach out to touch him.
He wore thick scale armor with a chain coif that covered his entire head. It was too dark to make out the color of his tunic and pants, but they would be moss green, without a doubt. In his hands were a round shield and a rare one-handed ax. It was a crude weapon for the front line, but he nimbly spun it around in his fingers.
The next man to pass by also had a shield with his sword, and the third was unhelmeted. Instead, his hair was fashioned into large spikes that made his head look like a pointed mace. His eyes were sharp and his mouth was twisted in displeasure. He wore a steel breastplate and held a sword in one hand.
This man’s name was Kibaou, and I’d been running afoul of him since the boss fight of the first floor. As an avowed opponent of the former beta testers, he had plenty of reason to hate me, and if he saw me here in the dungeon, he’d no doubt have a foul word—or two, or three, or four—to say to me.
The instant he passed by, Kibaou’s beady eyes glanced at the hollow we were hiding in, and the hiding percentage dropped to 90. Fortunately, it did not drop enough to reveal us. Three more players followed him past, their raucous clanking growing fainter and fainter until it finally died out.
A few seconds later, Kizmel straightened up and returned her cape to its normal position. We heaved sighs of relief as we got to our feet. My partner looked worried.
“I felt more nervous than when we face monsters.”
“Yeah. It probably wouldn’t have turned into a battle if they’d seen us, though,” I answered. Asuna’s head waved, not quite a nod or a shake.
“Well, they might have demanded that we share what we found in the chests.”
“I dunno. I don’t think even he would go that far…I hope…”
Kizmel turned away from the direction the party had gone and asked, “Did you know some of those people?”
“Um, kind of…We’re not exactly on friendly terms, you might say…”
“Oh? I’d heard that the humans in this castle had maintained a healthy peace for years.”
“W-we wouldn’t come to blows, of course. And we help each other out when fighting big monsters…but we’re not friends.”
There was no way to explain the difference between former beta testers and retail players to Kizmel, so my explanation had to be simple, but she seemed to buy the story. She grinned weakly and said, “I see. Then it must be like the relationship between my Pagoda Knights Brigade and the royal Sandalwood Knights.”
What does she mean, Pagoda? I wondered. Asuna chattered in delight.
“Oh, that’s lovely! Your knight brigades are named after trees? Are there any others?”
“There’s the Trifoliate Knights Brigade, the heavy units. We are not on good terms with them, either.”
“Ahh…In that case, if I get to join any of them, I’ll go with the Pagoda Knights.”
Kizmel grimaced awkwardly. “I’m afraid that there is no historical preceden
t for humans being awarded the knight’s sword from the queen of Lyusula. But based on your accomplishments, you might be able to win an audience with her…”
“Really? Let’s keep it up, then!” Asuna beamed, nothing but optimism on her mind. I, however, had extra knowledge that caused me to avoid her gaze. In the beta, I’d followed this quest all the way up to the dark elf castle town on the ninth floor, but that was as far as I got. When the quest concluded, the gate to the castle remained steadfastly closed…
“Well, let’s get going!” Asuna bubbled, already an apprentice knight in her own mind, and slapped my back. I gave her a sullen affirmative and picked the two torches up off the ground, handing one to her. Dropping torches in water didn’t affect their ability to light again, as long as they had durability points left. We scraped them against the stone walls to get the flame started again, peered out of the hollow, and trained our ears on the direction the party of six had gone.
If Kibaou’s team was attempting the quest to establish their guild, they were heading for the second level of the cave. We’d already cleaned out all the spiders on the first level, so they could be at the stairs by now. The mobs down below would be tougher, but not enough to threaten a party of six.
I brought up my window and checked the map. We’d charted four-fifths of the first level, with only two spots left. One was probably the room with the stairs down, and the other was the room with the item we sought. We needed to head for the room away from the direction Kibaou was moving.
“Let’s go this way…” I started to say, then caught Kizmel staring at me. I wondered why. Was she confused by the menu screen? Or simply pretending not to see it?
“…It has been a long time since I saw that human charm.”
“Huh? Ch-charm?”
“Indeed. It is the art of Mystic Scribing, one of the few charms left to humankind after its magic was lost, is it not? The one that allows you to record knowledge, even physical items, within your mystic tome…”
Now that she mentioned it, a glowing purple screen that floated in midair at the wave of a hand was pretty much magic, no two ways around it. I nodded in agreement.
“Y-yes, that’s it. According to the map in my Mystic…Scribbly book, we haven’t checked this area yet…”
Behind Kizmel, Asuna tried to hold back a belly laugh at my pathetic answer.
We easily cleared out the spiders in one of the two remaining rooms, discovering a faint light blinking on the back wall. I sheathed my sword and approached to find a silver decoration carved in the shape of a leaf. At the base was a gleaming white gem like an opal.
I looked up and checked the fastener of Kizmel’s cape on her left shoulder. The design and coloring were exactly the same.
“…It is the insignia of the Pagoda Knights. It must have belonged to a scout who was investigating the cave. The owner cannot be alive anymore,” Kizmel remarked gloomily. I offered her the brooch, but she waved her head.
“You must take that to the commander, Kirito. We ought to return for our report.”
“…All right. I’ll hold on to it, then.”
I put the emblem in my pouch, and a message scrolled by on the left side of my view, announcing quest progress.
When I found this scout’s memento during the beta after a long, hard slog, the entire party cheered triumphantly. But I was in no mood for that this time. It occurred to me that from the moment we rescued Kizmel in the forest half a day before, my mental concepts of quests and NPCs were subtly and steadily shifting.
Mobs respawned at a much higher rate in dungeons, so the spiders around the entrance were probably back by now. I trained my ears for the sound of many legs, torch in one hand and sword in the other.
But in a few seconds, what I heard was not the skittering of monsters, but the shouts of men.
“Crap…It’s coming up the stairs!”
“Run, run! Back to the entrance!”
There was the crashing of metal armor and panicked footsteps. Then the screech of a very large monster, like dead wood creaking and cracking.
“No one said anythin’ about such a freakin’ huge spider! What the hell’s goin’ on?!” Kibaou bellowed. The irritation in his voice from earlier had been amplified into panic.
I turned to my two companions to confer.
“What should—”
“What should we do, Kirito?!”
“I will leave this decision in your hands!”
“—we…do…”
I never volunteered to be the party leader! I wailed internally, but it was too late for that. Now it was up to me to decide how to respond to this unexpected turn of events.
Ideally, we would hide, Kibaou’s group would succeed at escaping, and the giant spider would return to the second level of the cave once it lost its target. But the likelihood of all these things happening was low. The nimble fishing spiders would have repopped at the entrance by now, so Kibaou’s party wasn’t likely to get out into the forest safely. In a worst-case scenario, they might wind up trapped on both sides. The “freakin’ huge spider” had to be the queen spider, boss of the dungeon, so that would be a terrible situation.
The next best choice was for Kibaou’s group to stop running and face the queen. From what I recalled, it wouldn’t be too hard for a party of six around level 10 to defeat the spider without casualties. But that was assuming that all of them were calm and dealt with her special attacks properly. Kibaou’s Aincrad Liberation Squad were steadfast in their denial of all beta testers, so none of them would have any advance knowledge of this unfamiliar monster.
That thought process took me two seconds. I spent another half second looking over at Kizmel’s tense face.
Whether we got along with Kibaou or not, his party was an invaluable force in reaching our shared goal. We couldn’t ignore their plight, but I was also hesitant to butt in directly. There was no way to know how they—particularly Kibaou—would react when the battle was over and they noticed Kizmel.
They might not attack directly, but I felt a strong aversion to letting them see her. Lately, I’d been trying hard not to let terms like NPC or game be spoken in her presence.
“We’ll let them pass by and stop the spider as it chases. If we can get it into that big room over there, we should have enough space to fight,” I said quickly. Asuna and Kizmel both stared at me. There were different thoughts behind the hazel-brown and onyx-black pairs of eyes, but both women nodded in agreement before I needed to spend valuable seconds trying to figure out what they were.
“All right. You can lead the way.”
“If you have decided to fight, I will follow.”
Kizmel was one thing, but Asuna’s agreement took me a bit by surprise. There was no time to waste asking why, however; I had to consult my mental map of the dungeon and estimate Kibaou’s route.
“This way!”
I waved my torch and started running after the sound of footsteps.
Within just ten steps, the corridor intersected with a wide cross path. Kibaou’s group should come down that path from left to right, the queen spider on their heels. Once the players had passed, we’d grab her attention and pull her back to the room where the scout’s memento had been. The party would continue running all the way to the entrance, perhaps running across some minor spiders near the entrance, but otherwise convinced they’d outrun the queen.
We leaned back into another hollow in the wall, Asuna’s torch still lit but mine extinguished. I waited in the thicker darkness, timing when to charge. The ideal method of fishing mobs was through a taunt skill or throwing knives, but I didn’t have either at my disposal yet—my only option was to swing my sword into the intersection and catch the queen as she passed by. And because I’d need to back away immediately, I couldn’t use a sword skill with a movement delay after it.
I gripped my Anneal Blade and heard the shouts of the group again.
“It’s an intersection! Which way’s the exit?!”
“W
e just went through here! Straight, straight, straight!”
Six pairs of clanking footsteps approached. I flattened my back against the wall, watching the intersection with laser focus from five yards away.
Two seconds later, a gang of men raced across my field of vision. The man in the lead was still casually twirling his ax, but the others looked desperate. When running from a dangerous foe, the lightly armored types would always break away from the slower, heavier kind, but Kibaou’s leadership kept his team tightly packed.
Once the party had rushed past, I heard a roar like scraping sticks again. I couldn’t hear the sound of those thin legs, but the unique vibration of many spider legs hitting the ground traveled through my boots. Three seconds left, two…
Now!
I leaped forward silently, Anneal Blade raised for a compact swing. I wasn’t looking for huge damage, but I needed to generate enough hate to make the spider change targets. The moment I started my swing, a giant form crossed the left side of my vision. First there were round, glowing red eyes, then legs the size of tree trunks, and lastly a bulging body.
“…!!”
With a silent scream, I struck the giant spider’s flank. It was nothing more than a slightly charged normal swing, but it was enough for the point to pierce the dull purple exoskeleton and send green liquid shooting out.
“Kishashaa!!”
The spider bellowed in rage and stopped still as I pulled the sword out. I leaped back and raced for Asuna and Kizmel, not bothering to check if the spider was following.
When I looked over my shoulder, the queen spider had just finished a ninety-degree turn. My gaze met her many glowing eyes, and I noticed that the first of her two HP bars was slightly decreased. The name listed was NEPHILA REGINA. I knew that regina was Latin for “queen,” which made her Queen Nephila. In that light, the silver patterns on her gleaming purple body did lend her a regal air.
“Looks like you got her attention,” Asuna whispered, peeling away from the wall. The eight-legged queen crouched down, eyes flashing dangerously, as though displeased with the light of Asuna’s torch. Then—
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