I caught both halves in my outstretched hands and took a bite of one. The milky-white flesh was crispy and pleasant, with a flavor somewhere between an apple, a pear, and a lychee.
Asuna breathed heavily with smoldering rage as she watched me chow down on the fruit. Eventually, she realized that most of the responsibility for the current situation was on her shoulders, and she kicked the ground timidly.
“…I’m sorry. Clearly, this wasn’t your fault.”
“Well, I could have said something when I noticed what was happening,” I answered, planning to stop there so that I still had some ammo to use against Asuna at a later time, but she still looked so uncomfortable that I had to offer a better olive branch. “I just followed you in the door, the same way I walked into Kizmel’s tent when we were staying there…But you paid for this room, so I should have checked with you first.”
“No, I’m the one who dragged you into this…I’m sorry for throwing the fruit at you.”
Asuna’s facial effects finally wore off, and she regained her normal expression. “You said that any party member can go freely in and out of an inn room, right?”
“Yep.”
“How does the cost work, then? Does it subtract the money equally from everyone?”
“That depends on the setting you enter when renting the room. Remember how there was an occupancy number on the window? If it’s set to one, you pay the whole cost, and if it’s multiple people, then the cost is split.”
“…”
The odd expression on her silent face told me that she was remembering it had been set to a room for two. In that case, my wallet had already suffered the loss of half the cost of a deluxe room, but that wasn’t anything I couldn’t make up.
“Don’t worry, if we split the party up, I’ll still be able to rent my own room…but only if I get back the cost of what I’ve already spent here.”
“…”
She didn’t respond to my half-joking suggestion, either. Eventually, she came to a conclusion of some kind.
“…We’re not spending the night here, just using it to rest until this evening’s meeting, right?”
“W-well, that was the plan. I want to be back at the dark elf camp by tonight…”
“…Okay, let’s leave it at that, then.”
“L-leave it at what?”
“Well, I only paid the price on the assumption that we’d be splitting it. It would be crazy to spend that amount on my own without even staying the night,” Asuna announced, then scanned the room for the beds on either side and pointed at the one on the east wall. “This one will be mine. And just so we’re absolutely clear, there’s a border right here that must be respected.”
She indicated a line straight down the middle of the room with her toe, then walked over to her sovereign territory and removed her Chivalric Rapier +5, breastplate, hooded cape, gloves, and boots. Loose and comfortable, she sat down on the bed and looked up at me.
“I’m going to take a little nap. You ought to get some rest yourself.”
“Uh, okay,” I said.
We needed to conserve money where we could, we needed to rest when we could, and we’d be spending the night in the same room—well, tent—anyway. This wasn’t the time to be succumbing to the Confusion status effect. Wait…SAO didn’t have a confusion effect.
At any rate, I moved to my territory and removed my Anneal Blade +8, coat, and other armor. When I sat down on the bed, I was facing directly at Asuna, which felt awkward, so I rolled back into a lying position. Appropriately for the price we paid, the pillows and mattress were soft and comfortable, and I felt sleep approaching quickly. I’d been up since two in the morning. After all we’d been through, I had earned a bit of a nap…
“About our earlier conversation,” Asuna said from across the room. My eyelids opened up about three-quarters of the way.
“Which was?” I prompted, looking up. Asuna was still sitting on the side of the bed, boots off and feet dangling. Her response took me by surprise.
“About the experience gain being better with one or two people than a whole party.”
“…What about it?”
I raised my head, then recalled that Asuna had been about to say something back at the staircase when I’d first mentioned it. But perhaps that was just my imagination.
“Just wondering, alone or with a partner, which is better?”
“Which…? Oh, meaning which gives you better experience points?”
The fencer nodded. I lowered my head back against the pillow again, blinked a few times to clear the sleep away, then thought my answer over.
“Hmm…It’s not as simple as one or the other. The reason you don’t gain as much with a full party is because it’s really hard not to have some strength go to waste. You can’t surround a small monster with six people and swing away wildly. If you break into two halves of three, it’s hard to time when to switch out. It’ll be different once we find a map with a whole bunch of extra-large mobs to fight all at once, though…And of course, the more people you have, the safer it is,” I prefaced, then actually answered her question.
“Soloing or playing with a partner are basically the same thing. With a two-man team, if you can hunt twice as fast as solo, your rate will be better. But that’s difficult to do. You need to be able to switch from one player’s sword skill directly into the other’s…”
At this point, I finally realized what Asuna was wondering about. I looked back at her and our eyes met directly, so I quickly glanced back at the ceiling and coughed to hide my embarrassment.
“W-well, that’s the ideal outcome, but it takes a lot of time to work together that smoothly. But at this point, safety is more important than efficiency, so in that sense, you’d want to have a partner rather than fight solo…”
“Kirito, if I’m ever more of a hindrance than a help, you’d better tell me,” she announced, clear and firm. I held my breath.
The fencer stared me down with a calm expression nothing like her fluster just minutes ago. She put her fists on her knees and continued, “Like I told you back in Tolbana, I left the Town of Beginnings so I could continue to be myself. But…maybe I’ve forgotten that feeling, bit by bit over time. We’ve been fighting side by side since meeting up in Urbus…but if that’s making things harder for you, or causing your leveling pace to drop, that’s not what I want to do.”
“…”
So she could be herself.
I didn’t know enough about how other people thought to truly understand those words. I didn’t even know how I was processing this insane game of death we’d been trapped inside. It frightened me, of course, and I wanted to be free of it. I didn’t want to die, and I felt hatred for Akihiko Kayaba for orchestrating it all.
As a result of this, I’d focused on nothing but making myself stronger since the day the game began. I prioritized efficiency, gathered information, tested out my ideal build, and gave up on everything else.
So the fact that I was now working with Asuna the fencer was the result of a decision—that doing so would improve my chances of survival. There was no other reason. There…shouldn’t have been.
“…You’re very strong,” I finally put into words. “You’re not holding me back in the slightest. In fact, with your new Chivalric Rapier, your damage per second is higher than mine. But it’s not just about DPS numbers. Your poise in battle, the execution of your sword skills—I’m in no position to claim you’re not good enough. On the contrary…if you decide to keep working with me, I’d be grateful.”
It felt silly to say these things while I was rudely lying on the bed, but Asuna only straightened her back, still and silent. I thought I detected her slender body trembling slightly.
Wait, what does that reaction mean?
But before I had more time to wonder, she said simply, “Oh. In that case, I guess I’ll stick around for a bit.”
“Um…cool. Glad to hear it.”
It felt like we ought to shake o
n it. I lifted my head off the pillow, but Asuna was already lying on the bed firmly in her own territory and rolling back toward the wall. With her back turned to me, she whispered, “Well, I’m going to take a nap until noon. Good night.”
“Um…okay. Sweet dreams.”
I lowered my head back down, wondering what her deal was. It felt like I ought to take this time to think things over, but the sandman was attacking again, and I only had enough willpower to set an alarm before closing my eyes and succumbing.
Across the surface of my mind, little thoughts rose like bubbles, then popped.
So much stuff happened in the span of this one day.
At this rate, we’re gonna be really busy with conquering the third floor.
I guess it’s not that bad knowing there’s someone there to watch your back…
At that point in time, I had no idea that just seven hours later, external factors beyond my control would threaten the dissolution of our team.
5
“WE ARE WELL AWARE THAT OUR REQUEST IS UNREASONABLE,” intoned the scimitar-wielding man, his long blue hair tied into a ponytail—Lind, now the first leader of the official DKB (Dragon Knights Brigade) guild.
“But I need you to understand this. Now that the top players in the game have been split into two camps, it is imperative that our two guilds eternally remain on good terms, working together in the pursuit of defeating the game.”
Compared to the late knight Diavel, who laid the foundation of the DKB, Lind’s expression and speech were stiff and awkward, but there was a certain stateliness to him, as befitting a man who had led his large group for ten whole days.
The spiky-haired Kibaou, leader of the ALS (Aincrad Liberation Squad), the other official guild, was also on the stage. But unlike Lind, he was silent, sitting cross-armed and cross-legged in a chair. Even after Lind’s speech, he sat, mouth twisted but shut tight.
Lind’s words were not meant for Kibaou. The scimitar warrior’s sharp gaze was not pointed at the DKB or ALS, but the true outcast of outcasts left over, the only beater who had publicly admitted to his participation in the beta test.
Me.
About five and a half hours earlier, our energy and motivation refilled after the nap in our lofty (in more ways than one) inn room, Asuna and I descended the long stairs—without racing this time—refilled on food and potions, and started all the single quests available in Zumfut before leaving town. Not to return to the dark elf camp, but to get down to the dirty business of earning experience.
Gaining experience in an RPG was practically a job, and each player had his or own way around it. Most could be categorized as quest first or hunt first. The former raced across the map, completing and turning in quests for bonus experience. The latter found camping spots with the best monster spawn rates, killing them over and over for points.
If anything, I was one of the hunt-first types, but I started changing my way of thinking after the second-floor boss battle. In the beta, the battle ended with Colonel Nato and General Baran, but the advent of King Asterios and his terrible lightning breath nearly brought our raid party to ruin. If Argo the Rat hadn’t cleared out all the local quests and noticed the possibility that a new boss had been added, then most likely Lind, Kibaou, Asuna, and I would all have died. Money, items, and experience weren’t the only things to be gained from a quest.
But of course, farming monsters over and over also gave you something other than just col and experience. It provided the player with actual skill—the experience of practice in battle. In this VRMMO, where combat was fought by moving the avatar like one’s real body, this kind of experience was just as important as the numerical kind, if not more so. Even if the attack speed number was the same in their menus, the initiation speed of an expert in a sword skill and one still new to it was, in fact, subtly different. Also crucial was the player’s ability to gauge distance and sense danger.
So it was that Asuna and I greedily planned to head out into the forest, stopping to battle at particularly effective spots as we worked on fulfilling the various hunting and gathering quests from town. In the five hours until sunset, we slew countless mobs, crushing them into polygonal dust. After turning in seven complete quests each, I had risen one level to 15, and Asuna had earned two to reach 14.
Tired and satisfied, we indulged in a toast at a tavern. At ten minutes until five o’clock, we headed off to the first strategy meeting of the third floor.
There was already a crowd of players crammed into the bowl-like assembly grounds between the three giant baobab trees. I saw the familiar, friendly face of Agil the ax warrior, so I greeted him and got an earful of jibes about how Asuna and I were still a party. I had just promised to give him the Vendor’s Carpet from Nezha, which was still at the inn down on the second floor, when the bells rang five o’clock. The support and tongue of Zumfut’s bells were carved directly out of the baobab trunks, and they had a soft, pleasantly woody sound to them. I sat down in the corner as the wistful melody of the approaching night played out, then applauded along with the group when Kibaou and Lind appeared on the speaking platform together.
Including the two on the platform, I counted forty-two participants at this meeting. There had been forty-seven (actually, forty-eight) at the second-floor boss battle the previous day, so we were down a full party. The six who hadn’t shown up were the Legend Braves.
The reason they’d made such a splash in the battle despite not meeting the average level of the raid group was the effect of their incredibly powerful gear. But they confessed that they’d raised the money for that gear through a scam and donated their equipment to the rest of the group. It would take them some time to regain the strength to join the frontline players, but with enough willpower, they would be back.
Meanwhile, Lind and Kibaou finished their brief introduction, and the real meeting began.
The first order of business was an official announcement that the blue and green teams, the largest groupings of players among the raid, were now real guilds. I was as impressed as everyone else. It took quite a number of errands, hunts, collections, and battle events to get the sigil necessary for the guild—though it was still far less work than it took to complete the elven war campaign quest. I seemed to recall that in the beta, it took twenty hours of play on average to complete the guild quest series. It had only been a day since we opened this floor, so Kibaou and Lind must have foregone food and sleep to finish it. Even Lind must have been surprised that the Liberation Squad had kept pace with the Dragon Knights, given their aversion to beta knowledge.
Next were the unveiling of the official names and acronyms of the guilds, their current member lineups, and a casting call for new faces. However, the only people in the group of forty-two who weren’t already affiliated with one of the two groups were Agil, his three friends, and Asuna and I.
I had no intention of joining either guild, of course, and Asuna said she wasn’t interested either, and I suspected the same went for Agil. When none of the six of us raised a hand, I expected that phase one of the meeting would be over.
But instead, Lind, leader of the DKB, made a most unexpected announcement.
“I would like the doors to my guild to be as wide open as they can be. Our only requirement at this time is that the player be at least level ten.”
Kibaou abruptly stood up next to him and shouted, “Level nine for us!”
A blue vein briefly pulsed on Lind’s forehead, but he regained his cool and continued the speech.
“Everyone participating in this meeting who hasn’t joined either guild should meet the requirements. So if you simply raise a hand, you will be gladly welcomed. However, there is one condition which applies only to certain people. This was decided after discussion between me and Kibaou.”
This time it was Kibaou’s turn to look cross but resigned. At this point, I was still looking around, curious as to who would need special conditions. So when Lind stared straight down at me, I nearly stumbled do
wn the stairs of the assembly grounds.
“Kirito,” he said, voice hard. Finally, I understood what was going on. He wanted to make it clear that I couldn’t join because I was a beater. This didn’t come as a surprise, and I wasn’t planning to join anyway.
“Yeah, I get it,” I started to say. But Lind’s gaze shifted to the left, and he called another name.
“…and Asuna.”
Asuna’s shoulders twitched, her face hidden beneath her hood. Even I couldn’t see her expression from my seat next to her.
Lind watched the two of us sit in silence, then cleared his throat before continuing, “Before you are approved to enter our guild, there is one more condition on top of the level requirement. One of you must enter the DKB, and one must enter the ALS.”
“…One each?” I repeated, not understanding his point. Asuna gave no reaction.
Lind cleared his throat again and explained quickly.
“As was made clear during yesterday’s boss battle, Kirito and Asuna are head and shoulders above anyone else in our general group. The two of you made off with the Last Attack bonuses of all three bosses in that fight, after all. I do not bring this up to criticize you, of course. But it does not benefit any of us to have the both of you join either guild. Our combined strengths are roughly equal for now, and you would cause a severe imbalance by joining either side.”
Kibaou’s forehead took on the bulging vein this time, probably because he took offense at the idea that their teams were equal for now. I listened to the explanation of the first guild leader in SAO without paying it much mind.
“We are well aware that our request is unreasonable. But I need you to understand this…”
My first thought was How serious are they being?
Lind and Kibaou’s demands boiled down to one thing: They wanted me and Asuna to join separate guilds, if we chose to at all. But the “if” conditional was a total nonstarter. I had zero intention of joining either group. Lind must have known that to begin with, and for Kibaou to welcome me into his guild would defy their cause of antagonism to all former beta testers.
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