Early and Late

by Reki Kawahara

  For this one special occasion, we lifted our ban on Yui reading the map data, so she could offer us the fastest possible route through the floor. All of the puzzles with levels, gears, and foot switches were a breeze when you knew exactly what to do. If any impartial observer had been watching us, they’d assume we were doing a speed run.

  Even with two minor boss fights on the way, we reached the third-floor boss in just eighteen minutes. The creature was an extremely unpleasant giant, nearly twice the size of the Cyclops and Minotaurs, with dozens of centipede-like legs on its elongated lower half, but its physical resistance was nothing serious. In exchange, it had whopping attack power, and both Klein and I had our HP in the red several times as we kept pulling aggro. Knowing that if either of us died it was the end of our run, the nine minutes of battle were practically ulcer inducing.

  But with the help of Liz, Silica, Sinon, and Pina severing the giant’s legs one by one, I was able to use my Skill Connection to do a long combo on the immobilized boss to finish it off. As we headed toward the staircase in the back, ready to barrel onto the fourth floor and pound King Thrym back to Niflheim, one particular feature gave us pause.

  It was a cage against the wall, made from narrow icicles.

  Beyond the bars of ice that hung from ceiling to floor like stalactites was a humanoid figure. It was not giant-sized. As the person was crumpled on the ground, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to be about Asuna the undine’s height.

  The prisoner’s skin was as white as freshly fallen snow. The long, flowing hair was a deep golden-brown. The bust volume peeking out from the meager cloth covering her body was, not to be politically incorrect, on a class far above all five women present. Crude ice shackles bound her soft limbs as well.

  As we stopped still, stunned by this sight, the kidnapped woman lying facedown twitched, then raised her head, rattling blue chains.

  Like her hair, her eyes were also golden-brown. Assuming she was a player, her facial features were so finely chiseled that she was either astronomically lucky or astronomically rich enough to keep buying accounts until she got a face this beautiful. On top of that, there was a Scandinavian regality to her beauty that was quite rare for this game.

  The woman blinked, long lashes trembling, and said in a frail voice, “Please…free me…from this place…”

  The samurai lurched toward the ice cage, but I grabbed him by the back of his bandanna and pulled hard.

  “It’s a trap.”

  “That’s a trap.”

  “Totally a trap.”

  The latter two comments were from Sinon and Liz.

  Klein turned back around, his back arched. He scratched his head with a very doubtful look on his face.

  “Y-yeah…it’s a…trap. Um…I guess?” he mumbled reluctantly. I prompted Yui to explain, and the pixie instantly obliged.

  “She’s an NPC. She is connected to the same language-engine module as Urd. But there’s one difference. This person has an HP gauge enabled.”

  Normally, quest NPCs had no need for an HP gauge and couldn’t be harmed. The only exceptions were the targets of escort quests, or…

  “Absolute trap.”

  “Definitely a trap.”

  “I think it’s a trap,” offered Asuna, Silica, and Leafa in unison.

  Klein made a truly bizarre face with his eyebrows hanging, eyes bulging, and mouth puckered. I clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Of course, it might not be a trap, but we don’t have the leeway for some trial and error right now. We’ve got to get to Thrym as soon as we can.”

  “Y…yeah. Of course. Right. For sure.”

  Klein kept nodding rapidly and tore his gaze away from the cage of ice. But after the group took a few more steps toward the stairs in the back, the voice came again.

  “…Please…someone…”

  In all honesty, I wanted to help her, too. NPCs weren’t just moving objects automatically generated by the game system; they were residents of this world. If we were on a normal quest and we saved her, took her along, then at the climax of the quest story, she turned on us with a “Fwa-ha-ha, you fools!” then that would be part of the fun. But now was not the time to take on needless risks. Klein had to know that.

  One of our perfectly synchronized footsteps went sour, scraping on the icy floor.

  I turned to see the tall, skinny samurai standing still, his hands clenched, facing downward. A low murmur emerged from his unkempt mouth.

  “…It’s a trap. I know it’s a trap. But…even as a trap, even knowing it’s a trap…”

  He bolted upright, the liquid pooling in his eyes most definitely not an illusion.

  “Even then…I can’t just leave her here! Even if…we fail the quest…and Alne is ruined…saving her here is the right decision, according to my way of life—the samurai code!”

  He bolted around and stomped toward the cage of ice. As I watched him go, two conflicting emotions came to my mind.

  …What an idiot.

  And—

  You’re awesome, Klein!

  I would probably never know which of the two was stronger.

  Klein called out, “I’ll save you now!” to the imprisoned woman, who was propping herself up now. He grabbed the katana at his left side, and in the next moment, his quick-draw sword skill Tsujikaze erupted, severing the icicle bars in one horizontal swipe.

  Fortunately, the beautiful woman did not transform into an enormous monster and attack us the moment she was saved.

  With four more slices, Klein’s katana cut all of the ice shackles loose. The woman looked up and said weakly, “Thank you…fairy swordsman.”

  “Can you stand? Are you hurt?”

  He was fully absorbed in the role, kneeling down and offering his hand to her. Of course, we were in the middle of a VRMMO quest, so personal investment in the story was the point. I myself was in the middle of a desperate quest to help Queen Urd by stopping the plot of King Thrym of the giants, so I couldn’t act like Klein’s behavior was beyond the pale. He was within his rights. But still…

  “Yes…I’m fine,” the blond woman insisted, but she faltered as soon as she got to her feet.

  He put a chivalrous hand on her back to steady her and asked, “It’s a long way to the exit. Can you make it there alone, madam?”

  “…”

  The beautiful woman looked down, saying nothing.

  Put in simple terms, the Cardinal System’s automated conversational language engine module was an extremely complex version of a list of patterns: the player says A, the NPC responds B. With its advanced predictive and learning ability, the engine allowed any NPC calling upon it to have remarkably lifelike—but still artificial—conversations with players.

  A breakthrough version of the module that had also gained human emotion and nearly human-level intelligence was riding on my head at this very moment, in the person of Yui the pixie. But the automated-response NPCs were far from Yui’s level at present. It was still a night-and-day difference between them and the fixed-response NPCs who only repeated their written lines, but there were still times where they had trouble identifying player speech, which left the players to search for the “proper” question to elicit the answer they wanted.

  I suspected at first that the woman’s silence was one of these pauses, but to my surprise, before Klein could phrase his question a different way, she looked up and said, “I cannot simply escape from this castle right away. I snuck in here to steal back a relic of our people that King Thrym stole from us, but the third guardian spotted me and imprisoned me. I cannot return until I have the treasure. Will you please take me to Thrym’s chamber with you?”

  “Uh…um…hmm…”

  For some reason, the man who lived by the samurai code mumbled and murmured awkwardly. As we watched from several yards away, Asuna whispered to me, “Something about this doesn’t seem right…”

  “Yeah,” I responded.

  Meanwhile, Klein turned away from the woman an
d gave me a pathetic, pleading look.

  “Hey, Kiri, my man…”

  “…All right, fine, fine. I guess we’re stuck on this story route until the end. And we’re not a hundred percent sure it’s a trap, I suppose,” I said. Klein grinned and turned proudly back to the pretty woman.

  “You’ve got a deal, madam! Diversity makes for strange bedfellows! And now, to face Thrym and rip off his balls!”

  “Thank you, Sir Swordsman!” she said, squeezing his left arm. Meanwhile, as the party leader, I saw a window pop up asking if I wanted to include the NPC in the party.

  “Don’t get your sayings mixed up, or Yui will learn them by accident,” I grumbled, and hit the YES button. At the bottom of the list of HP/MP bars for the whole party on the left side of my vision, an eighth gauge appeared.

  The woman’s name was Freyja. The name struck me as familiar for some reason. Both of her numbers were significant, but it was the MP in particular that was astronomical. She had to be a mage type.

  If she stays with the party the whole while, that would be really helpful, I thought, glancing at the medallion hanging around Leafa’s neck. The many-faceted gemstone was covered with black over 90 percent of its surface. As we predicted before, that left us with maybe half an hour. I sucked in a deep breath to give a speech.

  “Based on the construction of the dungeon, we’ll probably be heading right into the final boss’s chamber once we’re down those stairs. He’s going to be tougher than the others, but we have no choice but to face him without any tricks. At first we’ll focus on defense, until we get a hang of the boss’s attack patterns, and I’ll give the signal to fight back. And be careful, because his attacks are bound to change when his gauge goes yellow, and then again in the red.”

  With a look at the rest of the group to make sure they were all on board, I raised my voice and called out, “Let’s blaze our way through this final battle!”

  “Yeah!”

  The third group cheer of this quest was joined in by Yui, Silica’s pet Pina, and our blond bombshell NPC, Freyja.

  The staircase downward widened partway through, giving way to pillars and decorative sculptures. The old Aincrad adage that the more complex the map data became, the closer you were to the boss chamber, still rang true.

  At the very end stood doors of thick ice, carved with two wolves. It was the royal chamber of the king of the frost giants, no doubt. Once we were sure there were no tricks or traps around, we approached, still feeling cautious.

  Once we got within fifteen feet of the doors, they automatically swung open. An even deeper chill and indescribable sense of pressure emanated. Asuna began to rebuff the party, and Freyja joined in, including a previously unknown buff that greatly boosted our HP.

  When the spot under our HP/MP gauges was lined with buff icons, we all made eye contact. With a nod of purpose, we rushed in together.

  The interior of the chamber was vast in both width and height. As before, the walls and floor were blue ice. Candleholders of ice featured eerie, rippling purple flames. A line of chandeliers hung from the distant ceiling. But the first thing to catch our eyes was the brilliant shine of countless lights reflecting along both walls.

  Gold. Coins, accessories, swords, armor, shields, sculptures, even furniture, every last piece of it made of gold, piled high in countless amounts. The rear of the chamber was shrouded in darkness, making it impossible to estimate the total amount of treasure present.

  “…How many yrd would all of this equal?” murmured Lisbeth, the only player present who actually ran a shop. As for me, all I could think was, Why didn’t I completely clear out my entire inventory for extra space first?!

  At the far right of our stunned group, Klein was driven by his samurai code (I assumed) to take a few uneasy steps toward the mountain of treasure. But before he got more than a few steps—

  “…Little bugs, flitting about.”

  A deep, floor-rumbling voice emerged from the darkness in the back of the chamber.

  “I can hear the buzzing of their obnoxious wings. I must crush them before they can get into trouble.”

  Thud. The floor shook. Thud, thud. As the vibrations came closer, I was almost afraid they were going to shatter the ice floor with their power.

  Eventually, a shadow emerged into the light’s range.

  “Giant” wasn’t enough to describe it. It was at least twice as tall as the humanoid Deviant Gods prowling the cave floor below, as well as the boss-level Deviant Gods here in the castle. The head was looming so far above us that I didn’t even want to guess its height. Even my strongest jump would be lucky to reach the knee of this monster.

  His skin was a dull blue, like lead. His arms and legs were covered in black and brown furs from some impossibly large animal. Around his waist was sheet-metal plated armor, each piece the size of a small boat. His torso was bare, but those rippling muscles looked strong enough to deflect any weapon.

  A long blue beard draped over his bulging chest. The head sitting atop it all was unclear, shrouded in shadow. But the gold of his crown and the freezing blue of his eyes shone brilliantly in the darkness.

  In the old Aincrad, a single floor was capped at just over three hundred feet high, and the boss chambers of each labyrinth tower weren’t very tall, so every boss monster had a fairly hard height limit. In other words, I couldn’t remember ever looking up this far to see an enemy. How could we fight this monster without being able to fly? The best we could do was prick his shins with our swords.

  Meanwhile, the gigantic giant—a redundant description, but the only applicable one—took a step forward and laughed, his voice like a gong.

  “Hah…hah…Insects of Alfheim, summoned here by Urd’s pleas. Little ones, if you tell me where she is, you may take all you can carry of my gold. What say you?”

  From his off-the-charts size, golden crown, and nature of his offer, there was no room to doubt that this was Thrym, king of the frost giants.

  As we faced off against the giant, a fellow AI like Urd and Freyja, it was Klein who responded first.

  “…Heh! A samurai would rather go hungry than give in to temptation! If you think I’d jump at a pitiful offer like that, you’ve got another think coming!”

  He drew his beloved katana boldly, while the rest of the group sighed behind his back. But as if on signal, the other six of us brandished our weapons.

  Although none of them were legendary weapons, they were all either unique-named ancient weapons or masterpieces crafted by Lisbeth herself, a master blacksmith. But the sight of them did not remove the grin from King Thrym’s whiskered mouth. Of course, to him we might as well have been carrying toothpicks.

  With a glare from his dark eyes far above, the king eventually settled upon the barehanded eighth member of our group.

  “…Oho. Is that you there, Freyja? Since you are out of your cage, I suspect you must have agreed to be my bride at last?” his cracked bell of a voice tolled.

  “B-bride?!” Klein yelped.

  “Indeed. This girl was brought into the palace to be my bride, but on the night before the ceremony, I caught her sniffing around my treasure. I placed her in an icy cell for punishment. Hah! Hah!”

  Things are getting a bit more complicated; I gotta figure this out…

  The blond beauty named Freyja claimed earlier that she had snuck into this castle to take back a treasure that he had stolen from her people. But thinking realistically, it would be nearly impossible to sneak into a floating palace with only one entrance. So she pretended she would be Thrym’s bride and passed right through the entrance, then snuck into the royal chamber at night in an attempt to steal the treasure. The guards then spotted her and chained her to that prison cell.

  If this was true, it lowered the chance that she would backstab us in the middle of the fight. But something still didn’t add up with the story. It was too complex and tricky for an optional sub-route. And which of the nine fairy races in Alfheim was her “people”? Wha
t was the stolen treasure?

  I noted that we should have asked these questions when we recruited her to join us, then remembered that we hadn’t had the time for that to start with. Meanwhile, at the front left of the group, Leafa pulled my sleeve and whispered, “Big Brother, I think I read about this in a book…The story of Thrym and Freyja…and a stolen treasure. Let’s see, how did it go…”

  But before Leafa could recall the details, Freyja herself stood up and shouted, “Who would ever be your wife?! Instead, I shall battle you with Sir Swordsman and his companions and take back what was stolen!”

  “Nwah-hah-hah. How bold you are. There is good reason your beauty and valor have reached all nine realms, Freyja. But it is the proudest flowers that are most tempting to pick…Once I have crushed these flies, I will enjoy showering you with the love you deserve, nwah-hah-hah-hah,” King Thrym intoned, stroking his beard with massive fingers. His threat was toeing the line of acceptable dialogue for an all-ages game, which made me wonder if the quest generator really came up with this scenario.

  While all the women present grimaced, Klein stood in front, waving his fist.

  “H-h-how dare you! You’ll never have her! The great Klein will ensure that you never lay a stinking finger on Freyja!!”

  “I hear the buzzing of little wings. Perhaps I shall flatten you as a pre-celebration to my conquest of all of Jotunheim…”

  The giant king took one rumbling step forward as a tremendously large HP gauge appeared in the upper right of my view. And it was a three-stack. It would take an incredible effort to grind that down.

  But the menacing floor bosses of New Aincrad didn’t even display HP bars, to break the spirit of those players who challenged them. At least here we could tell how quickly we were grinding him down.

  “Here he comes! Listen for Yui’s orders, and remember: dodge-only for this first part!” I shouted. Thrym lifted a fist like a giant boulder up to the ceiling—then brought it down swiftly, his skin wreathed in a storm of frost.

  The final battle (I hoped) of Castle Thrymheim was, as expected, a fiercer fight than I could ever remember.