“None of the items we could earn for finishing the quest had any special effect against the floor boss. Since Kibaou said the items you earned from the elf quest were necessary to avoid big trouble against the boss…then you could say that his information was a lie…”
“Right…But if someone claimed that the hint about poison antidotes was that reward, it’s a lot harder to write it off entirely,” Asuna responded almost immediately, her quick wit in keeping with her agility-first build. “All you can do now is just explain the truth exactly as it happened at the meeting tonight. If we watch Morte’s reaction closely, maybe he’ll give something away. At any rate, let’s eat and take a break before we go. I hope they let us use Kizmel’s tent.”
“…G-good point.”
Even if it was available to use, now that the owner was away on the fourth floor, it would just be the two of us sleeping under the same canopy. I chose not to bring that up and trotted after Asuna to the dining tent.
Thankfully, when Asuna did notice that the two of us would be sharing a tent alone, there was no fruit for her to throw, so I got a faceful of soft cushion instead.
Five in the evening.
The second strategy meeting was about to begin in the meeting grounds of Zumfut.
Lind’s DKB and Kibaou’s ALS had finished mapping the labyrinth tower up to the boss chamber on the top floor. The DKB had just barely beaten them to the door, so for the second floor in a row, the MC of the strategy meeting and the leader of the raid would be Lind.
What threw Asuna and me for a loop was Morte’s absence from the meeting grounds. Perhaps he had changed his entire gear setup—in the safety of town, he could feel free to put on weapons whose skills he didn’t have—taken off his coif, and slipped among the crowd in a form I didn’t recognize, but Asuna said that as far as she could tell, both guilds had the same lineup as the second-floor boss battle.
The meeting began with the schedule of tomorrow morning’s battle, then moved into actual strategy. Argo had already released her strategy guide on the boss, and based upon that beta test information, we split up the parties into separate roles.
Once the questions and answers were out of the way, Lind asked me to speak. Naturally, he wanted a report on the campaign quest rewards. I stood up and started off with a basic quest outline. When I reached the part about the Fallen Elves, the crowd started to stir. Some of them wanted more details about that, but I chose to keep it brief, knowing that Argo would soon be releasing the second volume of her Elf War guide.
“First things first: Nothing in the items themselves had any unique relation to the floor boss. However, after we received our loot, the elf commander gave us one piece of advice about the boss.”
The entire crowd was silent, not wanting to miss this information.
“Umm…He said, bring plenty of antidote pots, because the boss uses poison attacks…That’s it.”
Now the silence turned awkward. It was such an obvious, basic piece of advice—who wouldn’t bring a stock of antidotes to a major fight? I cleared my throat and added a piece of information for the sake of the commander’s honor.
“Just so you know, the boss in the beta test didn’t have a crazy poison attack. Since that might be the thing that was altered in this fight, it’s probably a good idea to bring as many potions as you can. I’ll leave it up to Lind and Kibaou to decide if this info counts as a ‘quest reward crucial to defeating the boss’ or not.”
I sat back down, and the meeting grounds erupted into chatter. Some thought it was a letdown that there were no secret weapons against the boss, while others claimed that this knowledge was far more useful than an item. Foremost among the latter opinion was Joe from the ALS, who screeched that if we all tried the campaign now, we might learn something even more important.
Once again, Kibaou shut him up with a single command, and when the group had quieted down, Lind rounded up the discussion with his ever-solidifying leadership.
“We will visit every item shop tonight, even on the lower floors, and procure more than enough potions for tomorrow. As planned, we will begin our operation at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Meet at the north gate of Zumfut. We will then travel to Dessel, the closest town to the labyrinth. After a short break, we will enter the tower. If all goes according to plan, we will defeat the floor boss by two in the afternoon.”
He paused and surveyed the forty-some members gathered from left to right, then raised a bracing call. “Tomorrow night, we will celebrate in the main town of the fourth floor! C’mon, everyone…Let’s win this fight!”
During the last meeting, I’d watched Lind deliver a speech on stage and thought, You’ve got a long way to go to replace Diavel.
But even if he did not become Diavel himself, Lind had a role to play that was his and his alone. Something much more crucial than mine, as I kept running from the truly important things. A role that someone had to take on, if we were actually going to reach that far-off hundredth floor.
Meanwhile, some were trying to fulfill roles that no one ought to touch. Morte was attempting to get the DKB and ALS to clash. The man in the black poncho had lured the Legend Braves into swindling other players. Whatever their intentions were, they surely would not stop now. I had to continue playing my role so that I could deal with their future machinations. Even the outcast of the front-runners could help in his own way.
I joined the others in raising my right hand toward the flat expanse of rock and steel a hundred yards above, and clutched my newfound determination deep within my chest.
At 1:12 PM the next day—Wednesday, December 21, 2022—Nerius the Evil Treant, boss of the third floor of Aincrad, was defeated by a forty-two-man raid built from seven parties.
The large tree monster liberally used a wide-area poison skill that hadn’t been there in the beta, but our stock of antidotes did not run dry. As I expected, Asuna’s Chivalric Rapier easily outclassed any other weapon present in damage, and the rest of the group was left in awe.
The battle took fifty-three minutes. As on the second floor, there were no fatalities.
Morte the ax warrior was not among the raid.
10
“…I WAS REALLY TRYING TO GET IT,” ASUNA SULKED as we climbed the spiral staircase to the fourth floor.
“Huh? Get what?” I asked. She pouted even harder.
“The Last Attack bonus, obviously.”
“Ah…r-right…”
“Your sword skill and mine hit at the exact same moment at the end. They were both two-part combos, and my rapier has more attack power than your sword, doesn’t it?”
“Y-yes…”
“So how did you wind up with it? Logic states I should have gotten the LA.”
“Um, well…I’m guessing that maybe my attack hit just a teensy-tiny bit faster than yours maybe?”
“No! It was simultaneous!!”
She turned her head away in a huff and sped faster up the stairs. I hurried after her and tried to change the subject.
“Besides, remember when we were talking on the last staircase? I was mentioning how combat in SAO is like an, um…what was the word again?”
“A concerto!” she snapped, not bothering to turn around.
I pointed at her cape. “Yeah, that! The concerto is the thing where one instrument plays the lead, while the rest form the backing orchestra. I assumed that it was a reference to one versus many in combat, but maybe I was wrong…”
“…Oh?” Asuna replied, slowing down so she could look sidelong at me. “What does it mean, then?”
“Umm…well, you’re always alone, even when you’re in a party or raid…but when you’re in trouble, there are people around you to help you out…”
“…That’s about the last thing I’d expect you to come up with,” she said honestly. I had to agree. I must have still been a bit loopy from the adrenaline of my first boss fight in a week.
Asuna glanced exasperatedly at me, let out a brief sigh, and smiled.
“In that case, the lead player in the third-floor concerto wasn’t you or me.”
“…Huh? Who was it?”
“Kizmel, of course.”
I had to agree. In nearly every battle during the ten quests of the campaign, Kizmel’s overwhelming strength was the primary factor. She supported our endeavors at every turn. The concerto of the third floor, played on the stage of that deep, deep forest, undoubtedly featured the dark elf knight as its star.
“…We’ll see her again, won’t we?” Asuna mumbled. I had no answer at first. A chalk-colored door appeared ahead in the distance.
The DKB and ALS were still down in the boss chamber, conducting a dice-rolling tournament to see who would receive which piece of loot. Once again, it was our job to be the first to open the door to the next floor and to send Argo a message notifying her of the boss’s defeat.
With thoughts of the next floor in my mind, untrod upon by the foot of any player, but somewhere containing our dear friend, I said…
“We will. I’m sure of it.”
AFTERWORD
Hello, this is Reki Kawahara. Thanks for reading Sword Art Online Progressive 2.
Since we’re safely under way by now, I think it’s time to admit that this insane concept of following the conquest of Aincrad from the very first floor onward did not actually begin in this exact form.
As viewers of the SAO anime series from July to December 2012 know, the anime reordered the events of Aincrad into a more cohesive timeline. But in my original novel, the early parts of Aincrad were basically skipped over entirely. It starts with the first day of the game in December 2022, then jumps ahead six months to April 2023, when Kirito meets the Moonlit Black Cats.
This would be so much of a gap between the first and second episode, it was suggested that I write a plot that at least covers the conquering of the first floor. So I ended up producing a novella from Kirito and Asuna’s first meeting to the boss. I fondly (?) remember the pale look on the producers’ faces when I brought back twice the pages they needed, but at any rate, that was the genesis of “Aria of a Starless Night” from the first volume.
In essence, that was the end of my job, but once I finished “Aria,” I was still left wondering what had happened to Kirito and Asuna after that. As I wrote in the last volume’s afterword, I just wanted to see what our two heroes (and Argo, and Agil, and Kibaou) would do on the second floor. Of course, if I started on that, it would cause all kinds of contradictions with the main series, and I wasn’t sure what to do for a while.
But it’s the author’s nature not to be able to stop once he’s found something to write…so I scrawled the “Rondo of a Fragile Blade” in a dazed trance, and it too ended up far longer than I expected. Soon I learned that I’d be able to put out both “Aria” and “Rondo” in a single book, in October 2012. So in many ways, the Progressive series was the product of some unplanned circumstances. There’s no other way I would have found the determination to write about all hundred floors of Aincrad from the start—no matter how much that desire might have existed within me.
Of course, now that I’ve started, there’s no turning back to the Town of Beginnings! So at long last, here is the third-floor story, “Concerto of Black and White.” As I announced last volume, this story’s theme was campaign quests, but I’m sad to admit that I became so focused on Kizmel the NPC that the latter part of the quest had to be very quickly wrapped up.
While writing it, I was struck by how strange MMORPG quests really are. In a single-player RPG, at least your character is born into that universe and goes on an adventure, so challenging these various quests makes a kind of sense. But the player-characters in MMOs always have a bit of a stranger-in-a-strange-land vibe to them. They seem to take on more of the player’s personality…I do get that feeling from actual MMOs, but in SAO, this fictional VRMMO, the characters are the players. Kirito and Asuna are visitors from the “foreign” realm of the real world and can tackle the quests of Aincrad as such. I wrote “Concerto” while pondering what they would feel and think. As a natural consequence of that, I had to write a little bit about how Aincrad itself came to be, and I’ll reveal more of that backstory as we go along. After all, that campaign still has a long way to go.
The story of the fourth floor will probably come next year, but I still intend to follow Kirito and the gang all the way to the hundredth floor, so I hope you tag along. The next volume of SAO proper is the fourteenth, which starts with the result of Kirito’s duel with the Integrity Knight Eugeo. Hope you check it out!
Once again, I must extend super-thanks to my illustrator abec for providing super-cool, super-exciting illustrations despite her super-tough schedule, Mr. Kurusu for turning my nonsense scribbles into that super-beautiful map, and as usual, my beleaguered editors, Mr. Miki and Mr. Tsuchiya. And to all of you readers, for picking up my thirtieth published book, a truly heartfelt thanks!! I’ll see you again next year!!
Reki Kawahara—October 2013
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Sword Art Online Progressive 2 Page 24