Sword Art Online Progressive

by Miguel .

  Asuna grinned. “That’s right. You’re a boy, so you’d never stoop to demanding a ring from a girl.”

  “O-of course...Wait, are you saying that the reverse would be possible?” I grumbled. Asuna’s smile disappeared.

  “I wasn’t saying that! When did I ever beg you for a ring?”

  “I-I wasn’t referring to you specifically!”

  We stopped walking and glared daggers at each other. The elf knight looked on, concerned.

  “Kirito, Asuna. I hate to interrupt your chitchat, but–”

  Grrr.

  “–something is approaching. Based on the footsteps, it is neither elf, nor human, nor beast.”

  Grrrrr.

  “There are two of them, from the front and right. I will leave the one ahead to you.”

  Grrr...rr?

  Asuna and I stopped glaring at each other and looked in the direction of our travel. A shadow was flitting at high speed through the trees. It only came up to our waists, but it was very wide. Many thin legs skittered and scuttled, gliding it along the ground.

  Within a second, a cursor popped into view, partway between pink and red. The name beneath the HP bar read Thicket Spider.

  “Prepare for battle, Asuna!” I called, drawing my sword and bracing myself for the fight. Asuna already had her Wind Fleuret in hand. This quest was an opportunity to gather a few more materials to forge herself a new sword back at camp, meaning it was the last time to shine for the fine battle partner she’d fought with since the first floor.

  “Its only direct attack is a bite, but watch out for the thread it shoots from its ass–it’ll slow you down!”

  “Understood!” she shouted back, then briefly shot me a dirty look. I wondered what she was mad about this time, then realized my poor choice of words.

  “S-sorry! I shouldn’t have said ass! It’s not an ass, but more of a, um...”

  “Just stop staying that word!”

  Asuna neatly sidestepped the poisonous spider fangs that came lunging at us, then thrust a furious Linear into its giant eye.

  The venomous fangs and sticky thread were not to be trifled with, but the Thicket Spider was one of the easier insect-type monsters until this point. It didn’t fly or run away, and its hide was not protected by a hard shell. All of its attacks were simple and direct, so it was easy to time when to switch players for combos.

  Asuna knocked down about 40 percent of the spider’s HP with sword skills and regular attacks, then stepped back and glanced at me. I noticed her eye contact and prepared to join the fight. If this was in the open rather than the forest, Asuna could handle the spider all on her own, but the threads the spider shot from its rear would last for close to a minute, which gradually decreased the available space to fight as the battle wore on. It was always possible to move to a fresh location without webs, but there was the risk that you’d snag more mobs on the way–not to mention the treants that looked just like withered old trees.

  The Thicket Spider charged forward with a very spidery hiss–at least, as far as video game spiders went. Asuna released an Oblique, a low thrust skill. Its range was lower than Linear, but with the user’s weight behind it, the power was higher. Her sword

  knocked back with a flashy visual effect.

  “Switch!” I yelled, striking the large spider on its soft butt. It was only a normal swing, but I hit it right on the weak point of its thread-producing end, and it wheeled around with a painful screech. The cluster of eyes along the front of its head glared at me, poisonous jaw working furiously.

  The Thicket Spider was one of the smallest spiders of its type, but it still made for a menacing sight, several feet across from leg to leg. Anyone afraid of spiders would suffer a tremendous mental debuff, if I had to guess. I was used to spiders of all sizes from the shrine grounds near my childhood home–I’d even gotten stuck face-first in the web of a yellow spider once–so it wasn’t a big enough deal to affect me in combat, but I was surprised at how well the urbane, fastidious Asuna was handling the giant arachnid.

  I got so wrapped up in wonder at that last bit that I glanced away and met her waiting gaze for just a second. As though waiting for its moment, the spider struck. The eight gray, hairy legs tensed, and it bounded into the air. If its jumping attack succeeded in causing a Tumble status, I’d end up bitten several times by its poisonous fangs, so avoidance was the top priority.

  “Fwah...”

  Due to my late reaction, I knew I couldn’t step aside or counterattack with a heavy sword skill in time, so I fell onto my back, waited a split second, then kicked with all my might. The toe of my boot glowed yellow and swung in a semicircle through the air: Crescent Moon, a martial arts kicking skill. It was meant to be used from a standing position into a backflip, but as long as the motion was correct, you could pull it off while lying down.

  So the skill was convenient to throw while lying on my back, but there was a serious drawback: If I missed, I would be hit with both a Tumble status and movement delay. Fortunately, it was worth the frightening gamble, as my foot struck the airborne spider directly at the base of one of its legs. With a satisfying thud, the spider shot away, spinning through the air.

  The follow-through of the kick flipped me back onto my feet. I turned to see the spider upside down at the base of a nearby tree, its legs scrabbling against empty air. Nonwinged insect enemies were generally slow to recover from a tumble, so I calmly and carefully held my Anneal Blade at waist height. The dark blade took on a brilliant blue glow, and my body shot forward.

  “Ryaa!”

  I leaped, sword flashing. The blade swung horizontally from left to right, directly across the Thicket Spider’s bulging belly. As soon as it had passed, my wrists flipped over and reversed path from right to left to complete the Horizontal Arc, a flat two-part skill.

  Its weak spot hit deep from two directions, the poison spider flew through the air, spewing green liquid, and landed upside down again, legs curled inward this time. Its large body exploded into countless fragments.

  The attack left me leaning forward, sword held out to the left and ahead of me. I slowly stood up straight, swishing the blade left and right before returning it to the sheath on my back. When I turned around, Asuna was staring at me, so I instinctively raised my hand for a high five.

  She was not expecting that reaction in the slightest and looked awkward for a moment, but was kind enough not to leave me hanging. After the high five, she wasted no time in getting after me.

  “You were getting distracted during that battle, weren’t you?”

  “...Y-yes, ma’am.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  I stopped to consider my answer under her withering gaze, then recalled that I was surprised how well she handled the giant spider. However, whether to mention that out loud or not was another quandary.

  “Sloppiness against even weak foes will lead to disaster, Kirito,” came a voice from my right.

  Kizmel was standing to the side, arms crossed, having dispatched the other Thicket Spider well before Asuna and I finished. Like Asuna, her face was hard. It felt like I was being scolded by both a classmate and a teacher at once. I had to make an excuse for myself.

  “I-I wasn’t being sloppy, I was just thinking...”

  “And that’s what I’m asking you about.”

  “Uhh...Umm...” Nothing convenient was coming to mind, so I had no choice but to lay the truth bare. “I was just thinking that it’s surprising you don’t have any issues with the spiders and wasps and such...”

  “Huh?! Were you really wasting your time thinking about that nonsense?!”

  “Y-yes,” I admitted. Her shapely eyebrows went wide with displeasure for a moment, then she sighed.

  “Once they’re that big, the bugs are no different from wild animals. I can’t waste my time being afraid of how monsters look.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  She shook her head in exasperation, and Kizmel chuckled softly. I turned to
the dark elf in surprise and saw her looking down at the short fencer with warmth in her eyes.

  “That is very reassuring. My sister Tilnel did not shy away from corporeal monsters, either, whether insects or oozes...”

  She finished at no more than a whisper. Asuna and I both looked away politely. Asuna hadn’t seen Tilnel’s grave, but I’d secretly told her about Kizmel’s sister as we trudged through the forest.

  When she noticed our expressions, Kizmel apologized for bringing that up, then raised her hand to change the topic.

  “What is the meaning of that gesture you just did?” she asked, waving her hand forward. I thought this over–was it right to explain to Kizmel, an NPC of the world of SAO, the significance of a real-world high five? Before I could come to a conclusion, Asuna spoke up.

  “It’s a human gesture meant to congratulate one another for their effort.”

  She held up her own hand and slapped Kizmel’s much more thoroughly than she had bothered to with me, producing a satisfying smack. Kizmel looked down at her palm and squeezed it, as though savoring the sensation.

  “I see. We elves do not make it a practice to touch others often...but this is not unwelcome.”

  She held up her hand again and looked to me this time. I gave her a hearty high five, realizing it would just be awkward to hold back now. There was another crisp smack and an instant of warmth on my hand.

  A memory flooded back into my brain.

  The very first day of this game of death–it felt like ancient history at this point. But in fact, it was before everything turned deadly. I was thinking of the afternoon of Sunday, November 6, thirty-nine days before, when my very first friend in Aincrad, Klein, lazily hunted blue boars with me outside the Town of Beginnings on the first floor.

  Klein was struggling with the initiation of a sword skill, so I taught him the basics of the first motion, then slapped him five when he succeeded in killing his first boar. That was the last time I ever contacted him.

  As soon as Akihiko Kayaba’s cruel tutorial on the new rules of the game finished, I headed for the next village as soon as I could. I left Klein, a helpless newbie, back in the Town of Beginnings. I abandoned him.

  “...Kirito?”

  “What’s the matter, Kirito?”

  I came back to my senses with a start. My hand was still hanging up in the air, so I lowered it and said, “Er, n-nothing.”

  My awkward smile did nothing to remove their concerned looks, but Kizmel soon moved on.

  “I see. Let’s get going. If we follow the direction from which those spiders appeared, we should find the nest eventually.”

  “C-cool. So that means we’re heading...uh...”

  “This way,” Asuna said exasperatedly, pointing to the northwest. We set off again, and after about thirty steps, Asuna pulled level with me to whisper into my ear. “Hey, did Kizmel just say something about ‘corporeal’ monsters?”

  “Eh? Um, yeah.”

  “Which means there are monsters in this game without bodies?”

  “Huh? Yeah, like ghosts and stuff?” I asked in return. She blanched briefly at the word ghosts.

  “Like...like that.”

  “Hmm, I dunno...I didn’t see any in the beta. Besides, I don’t know how you defeat a monster without a body in a game where you can only use swords...”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was hoping for, but Asuna didn’t bother to elaborate. She slowed her pace to draw even with Kizmel. I continued my march in the direction of the spider nest.

  After another four battles with Thicket Spiders and their larger cousins, Copse Spiders, slightly adjusting our direction after each encounter, we eventually spotted a small hill rising ahead.

  Highlighted against the side of the moonlit hill was the gaping black mouth of a natural cave. I crouched in the shadow of the trees and saw about fourteen small spiders (still the size of real tarantulas) darting around the entrance. This was the spider nest we were after.

  “...Do we have to get rid of those little ones, too?” asked Asuna, looking at the nest in annoyance. I shrugged.

  “No, those are just critters.”

  “What? Do they jingle?”

  I turned upward to look at her in confusion. She spoke with the bossy tone of a teacher explaining to her students. “Didn’t you just say it was a ‘clitter’? Like clitter-clatter? Do they make lots of noise?”

  “Ummm...no. ‘Critters’ in an MMO are like background animals that aren’t monsters. You can’t interact with them; they’re just for show. Like butterflies or alley cats in town.”

  “You know what? I’m getting tired of asking about every single game term, so why don’t you just create a slang glossary for me?”

  “Ugh...”

  If she didn’t mind being ripped off, she could ask Argo for something like that. Kizmel chuckled from behind us and murmured, “Your words have not been unified yet, it seems. I suppose that is not a surprise, for there were nine nations of humankind when the Great Separation happened.”

  Asuna and I shared a look.

  The “Separation” was a term many used to refer to an incident that arose one month before. Many players suffered sudden disconnections and were stuck in limbo for around an hour before they rejoined the game. When it became clear that every player was going to be disconnected in such a way, I stopped my breakneck leveling for a bit and waited around in an inn room so that it didn’t catch me off guard. The mysterious phenomenon caused alarm and chaos at first, but the common assumption that emerged was that it was just our bodies being temporarily disconnected so they could be transferred to a proper hospital.

  But this Great Separation Kizmel spoke of must be something else. She was a resident of this world, not a player diving in through the NerveGear like me and Asuna. It must have something to do with the creation of Aincrad the floating castle...

  I instantly had a number of different questions to ask Kizmel on the subject, but she cut me off before I could open my mouth.

  “Come, let us investigate the hole. We will need more concrete information to bring to the commander about the spiders.”

  According to my increasingly unhelpful beta knowledge, the spider-vanquishing quest had two stages. Part one involved finding an article from one of the dark elf scouts within the nest and bringing it back to the base. In the second part, we had to return to the cave and fight the queen spider in the second level of the nest.

  So even though I knew this opening led right into the spider’s nest, that alone did not fulfill the quest requirements. We’d have to delve into the clammy cave twice.

  “...I don’t like these natural dungeons,” Asuna grumbled, stepping into a shallow puddle with her leather boots. I nodded in agreement.

  “If only it was a bit brighter in there...”

  The man-made dungeons, like the giant labyrinth towers, at least had oil lamps or luminescent stones on the walls to keep the interior lit. But this cave was almost pitch-black; the only source of light was very dim moss that gave off a faint glow in the dark. To counteract the darkness, Asuna and I carried torches in our off hands, but they did not cast very much light and would extinguish if dropped into water. Even worse, I normally fought with one hand free, so the difference made everything feel wrong in battle. Still, it was better than being a shield user who had to do without that valuable defense. And warriors with two-handed weapons would slap us for being spoiled–they had to find a dry spot on the ground to drop the torch before they could fight at all.

  Thankfully, in this situation, we had Kizmel with her special elven ability to see in the dark. Unlike the jumping spiders out in the forest, the ones in the nest were speedy fishing spiders, and Kizmel’s ability to warn us of their presence before they reached the torchlight radius gave us plenty of time to ready our blades.

  We searched each room on the first level of the cave slowly but steadily, occasionally finding chests with treasure, or valuable ores that c
ould 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.”