Sword Art Online Progressive 5

by Reki Kawahara

  “There!” I shouted, but Asuna was already on the move. The wraith floated down from the ceiling as she approached.

  Asuna had learned the Annoying Wraith’s “path of least resistance” evasion methods from her previous experience and kept the rapier at her side, luring the enemy in as close as possible. The wraith’s arms, mostly bone, reached out to grab her again, and a lime-green light burst into being.

  The sword skill Folium was a rare slashing attack for the rapier category, but its trajectory was an unorthodox one. It curved upward from the left hip, then jutted into a sharp loop at its peak and ended at the lower right, much like a lowercase cursive l. The intention was to deflect the enemy’s attack before giving them a counter, but it wasn’t suited for hitting a specific point.

  Or so I thought.

  “Teyaa!” The Chivalric Rapier entered the wraith’s right side to perfectly pin the point I’d indicated—before doing a loop and exiting out the left flank. It must’ve broken the tiny weak point, because the third of its HP bar that remained drained all the way to the left edge. The Annoying Wraith let out a hideous wail and burst.

  My partner straightened up without a word and returned her sword to its sheath.

  I strolled up to her. “Yo, nice control. Did your Accuracy boost kick in just now? Or was that…?”

  “Pah-choo!” she answered by way of sneezing. She let go of the rapier and wrapped her body in her arms, her face pale. “I…I’m so cold.”

  “Yeah, you took a Chill effect…I think it wears off after five minutes, so you’ve just gotta…”

  “Pah-choo!”

  Her second sneeze drowned out the words tough it out. Even knowing it was essentially harmless, I couldn’t help but pity her paleness and shivering.

  At the very end of the beta, we started getting Purify Crystals that could instantly undo multiple debuffs, including this one, but here on the sixth floor, crystals were just starting to become droppable and were still very rare. The only other way to undo the effects would be the individual method for each one—antidote potions for poison, undoing a curse at the church, etc.

  Chill had its own special recovery method, of course. You could warm up by the fire, but lanterns and torches didn’t put off enough heat. On the other hand, there was that fireplace in the previous room—it occurred to me that it had been put there by design so you could undo the ghosts’ effects—but it would be a bit of a pain in the ass. No, a major pain in the ass.

  Instead, I opened my window to test out a convenient but somewhat embarrassing method. With both hands, I removed a thick blanket for camping and draped it over my back like a cape. To cover up the embarrassment of what I was about to do, I focused on thoughts like These long-haired cattle blankets sure are heavy, and I could really use a down-filled bedroll by now, and I bet that would be expensive. When I reached Asuna, who looked at me in surprise, I said, “Pardon me” and drew her closer so I could wrap us both up under the blanket.

  Instantly, her body froze like a rod between my arms, and right at my ear, her high-pitched, hoarse voice said, “Hey, wh-what are you…doi…? Pah-choo!”

  “This is the quickest way to undo the Chill effect. Just put up with it for another twenty seconds.”

  The icy chill from her body started seeping into me, making my nose itch. The chill was just a virtual skin sensation created by the NerveGear, and my real body would be in some hospital room with perfectly controlled temperature at the moment, but I couldn’t help but wonder if sneezing here was also prompting a sneeze out there…

  “L-listen, even if this is supposed to help undo the debuff, if someone sees us like this, they’re going to get the wrong fwuh…”

  Right at the moment that she trailed off with that odd sound, the chill trickling from her body into mine suddenly vanished. I’d experienced that before: When the Chill effect wore off, it left the body feeling pleasantly warm. It was like the feeling of taking off your clothes in a changing room in the winter, only to sink right into a tub full of delightfully hot water. I couldn’t blame her for letting out an odd moan.

  She stared at nothing, mind out of focus, until she snapped back to attention, eyes blinking rapidly, and ducked out of my arms.

  “Um, that wasn’t…It’s not…” she babbled, mouth working furiously, and then spun away from me. “W-well…I’m grateful to you for undoing the debuff. But next time, I’d appreciate an explanation first!”

  “I figured if I had to describe it first, it would be twice as embarrassing,” I said, putting the heavy blanket back into storage.

  To my surprise, Asuna said, “Why, that sounds like you’ve done it before.”

  “Huh?! W-well, I knew about it because I’d done it in the beta, of course…but let me be very clear that the other person was like Wolfgang from the Bro Squad but twice as hairy and super-macho, okay?”

  “…I don’t know if I wish I could’ve seen that or not,” the fencer said, a very strange and subtle smile on her lips. At least her mood had improved. She walked around the dining room, examining the table and the paintings on the wall, but found nothing.

  “Well, that made our battle against the ghosts meaningless.”

  “Hey, that’s just how quests go,” I bantered back, now that our usual mood had returned. We left the dining room and returned to the hallway.

  Between the kitchen, the study, and the bedroom, we defeated four more Annoying Wraiths but still had not found the key item. At last, we were at the final door. Asuna grabbed the doorknob, then side-eyed me.

  “Kirito, you didn’t know ahead of time that we weren’t going to find anything in the first five rooms, did you?”

  “I…I don’t know how I could have. Like I said, the item would pop in any of the six rooms at random in the beta. I’m…sure that’s what happened just now, too.”

  “You said that like an NPC,” Asuna accused, which was an odd thing to say. She opened the door, and a musty smell stung my nostrils.

  I recalled that the last door led to a storeroom. I followed Asuna inside, holding my lantern up. It was the smallest of the six rooms, full of wooden shelves lined with wooden boxes, pots, and various items of all sorts.

  “Ugh…do we have to open up all these things to search?”

  “I’d rather not do that, either,” I mumbled, passing through the maze of standing shelves to the back of the room. At the very end, there was a small writing desk along the wall, and sitting atop it, seemingly abandoned in a very meaningful way, was an object that dully reflected the glow of the lantern.

  It was a large key, sitting under ten years of dust.

  “Oh! That must be it!” Asuna exclaimed eagerly, trotting up to the desk. I tried to grab her shoulder, but my hand closed on nothing but empty air.

  “Asuna, your feet!” I shouted, right as a cracking sound went off under her foot. In the wavering light of the lantern, I saw an old, faded bone.

  Asuna froze in a very unnatural position, right as the boss encounter ghost of this haunted house quest emerged from the wall behind the desk.

  Unlike the previous wraiths, this Resentful Wraith was male. Once again, my English skill wasn’t quite up to the task of informing me what the word resentful meant.

  The tall, gaunt ghost wore a sweeping, tattered robe like the ancient Romans did, brandishing its freakishly long nails and opening its mouth wide enough that the jaw seemed dislocated so that it could scream, “Byoouuu!!”

  As I reached for the sword over my back, it occurred to me that the situation wasn’t great.

  The Resentful Wraith couldn’t take down our HP, of course, but it had a wide variety of debuffs, and if we suffered all of them at once, it would take quite some time to recover. That wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but I was also afraid of losing the progress we’d made against the wraiths in conquering Asuna’s fear of ghosts. I wanted to keep its attention focused on me, but with hardly four feet of space between the stone wall on the left and wooden shelves on the
right, there was barely room to swing my sword, much less switch spots with Asuna.

  “Asuna, regroup in the hallway!” I shouted, reaching out for her shoulder again. But before I made contact, I heard her voice, much firmer than I would have expected it to be:

  “Kirito, can I break the bones on the floor?!”

  “Oh…uh, I think those are just there to be spooky.”

  “Got it!” she shouted, taking a stance that scattered the bones below. She drew her rapier and thrust a series of five jabs with tip-blurring speed at the approaching Resentful Wraith. They were all aimed at the center of its chest, and while the first four did not have much effect, the fifth one did take a good 15 percent of its HP bar down. The elven blade had scratched the weak point, which must’ve been in the same place as the earlier enemies’.

  “Byaaaaa!!” the spirit shrieked with rage, rising up to the ceiling. It began a bewitching technique utilizing a figure-eight motion, but without the space of the dining room, its side-to-side movement was limited. Relieved, I realized that this would make it easier for the rapier to aim at the spots where it was floating, letting us take down its HP much faster…

  “I’m sick and tired of dealing with ghosts!”

  But then Asuna jumped up onto the writing desk, nearly kicking the crucial item away as she launched herself into the air. At the top of her jump, she activated the sword skill Shooting Star.

  The silver visual effect ran from the tip to the entire weapon—even the body of its wielder—creating an invisible propulsive force. With a twinkling sound effect, Asuna’s rapier shot toward the ceiling and caught the ghost square in the chest, gouging a huge hole in its transparent body.

  Ah, I see, I thought, impressed. A charging rapier sword skill can hit a pinpoint target with much wider coverage. The Resentful Wraith issued a hideous, fractal scream and vanished…and the Chivalric Rapier’s tip smashed into the ceiling, creating a purple burst of light.

  Midair activation of sword skills was a highly technical move that, in essence, allowed you to double jump, but it also had its downsides—if you jumped higher than you intended and suffered fall damage, or if you hit an obstacle and took collision damage. Since we were in town, there was no HP loss for hitting walls or the ceiling, but it struck me as poor form to stand by and watch my partner fall clumsily to the ground.

  Therefore, I took two steps forward, estimating where the rebound from hitting the wall of code would send Asuna, and held out my arms. I wasn’t entirely confident in my strength stat or my (nonexistent) Carrying skill proficiency, but I did succeed at catching her in a bridal-style hold. When I looked down at her face, I saw hazel-brown eyes blinking back at me.

  I thought she was just a bit stunned by the impact, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Her mouth opened and closed a few times before she finally squeaked, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I set her back on her feet. We both took a deep breath for some reason. It had been an experience, but the haunted house exploration quest was done for now.

  “You beat the boss, so you should get the key, Asuna,” I urged. The young woman started to approach the writing desk, but she stopped to look down at the bones she’d scattered just moments ago. She turned toward me.

  “…Hey, these bones aren’t Pithagrus’s, are they?”

  “Huh? Uh, no…they wouldn’t be. Remember, Cylon the disciple killed Pithagrus to become the lord of Stachion and buried his body in the yard behind the mansion.”

  “Then who do these bones belong to?”

  “Um…”

  I had to think about this. Because I’d already spoiled the ending, putting the order of the details and story twists together was getting rather complicated.

  “…Well, we skipped past that step, but remember how I told you about the proper order of looking up the code to the front-door lock?” I asked.

  “Oh, right…you’re supposed to go back to Stachion and then look at the painting in the lord’s chamber?”

  “That’s right. And you only know the painting is a hint when Cylon tries to hide it…which would tell you that Cylon knows the digits to that lock are hidden in the painting.”

  “Oh, I see…But does that really make sense? If he knows the number to unlock this house, why doesn’t Cylon come and investigate this place himself? And then he’d find this key. It’s the key to whatever place is hiding the golden cube, right?”

  I was impressed at the speed of Asuna’s understanding and her ability to extrapolate ahead of the information given.

  “That’s a good point. So the reason he couldn’t do that must be because Cylon knows the numbers but not where to use them. Remember? The only person who knew this was Pithagrus’s second house was the bartender he would visit—the last person we talked to in Stachion. Pithagrus kept this place a secret from everyone, including his apprentices and servants.”

  “…But why?”

  “You’ll know if you check the books in the study.”

  “Ewww.” She grimaced.

  In any fantasy RPG, books were a major presence among interior decoration elements. A house should have a bookshelf, and a bookshelf should have books, of course.

  But books are one of a game designer’s worst enemies. Unlike furniture or utensils, books are made important by their contents. And filling the vast number of in-game books with meaningful content is practically impossible. Therefore, most games either make it impossible to remove the books from the shelf, or they limit access to just a few books, with only a couple pages being viewable.

  But SAO, likely through some fixation of Akihiko Kayaba’s, bravely challenged this limitation. All the books in this world were fully functioning ones that could be taken from the shelf, and all the pages contained print. Generating all that content from scratch was apparently a bridge too far, as nearly all the books simply contained the text of classic books in the public domain as of 2024, in their original languages. So the vast majority of players could look at the books, but reading them was too difficult. I’d heard rumors that some Japanese books were floating around, too, but I’d never seen one.

  It was odd to think of books written in real-world languages being on the shelves of a world that contained elves and dwarves and such. But if you started down that road, you’d have to wonder why the NPCs were speaking Japanese, too.

  So this was why you could take a book and peruse its contents, but the thought of checking them made even Asuna groan.

  “…I feel like I’ve seen enough Cyrillic and Arabian script to last me a lifetime,” she grumbled.

  “Don’t feel bad. It’s all Greek to me…Sorry, sorry, just a joke,” I added when I saw the look she was giving me. “Most of the books in the study are what you’d expect, but a few mixed in are like manuals for puzzles. In other words, Pithagrus the puzzle king kept his secret books with the solutions to the previous lords’ puzzles and his own here in his secret home for safekeeping. It’s just that if we tried to read them, we wouldn’t make any sense of them.”

  “Ah, I see…Well, I hate to speak ill of the dead, but he sounds like a bit of a miser. Maybe if he’d allowed his apprentices to read these, rather than hogging them all to himself, he wouldn’t have wound up getting killed,” Asuna said, shaking her head sadly. Then she looked at the bones on the floor. “So…whose bones are these, then?”

  “Cylon’s henchman. Like us, he heard about the second home from the bar, and he got this far using the combination from Cylon to open the lock…but before he could return to report to his master, the wraiths got him.”

  “Wait, you mean the person who died here wasn’t the wraith we just fought…?”

  “If so, then there should have been bones in the other rooms where we found the Annoying Wraiths, right? It seems like once a house is left unattended to fall into ruin, ghosts just naturally swarm there.”

  “…If I ever buy a player home here, I’m cleaning it every single day. And you’re not allowed t
o leave it cluttered, either, Kirito.”

  “Yeah, yeah…” I muttered, but then I stopped in my tracks. Hmm? What sort of a situation is she envisioning in this scenario? She looked confused by the way I was pondering this, then reflected on what she’d just said, and her white skin instantly turned red.

  “No!!”

  “O…kay?” I said, startled by her sudden outburst. She grabbed my left shoulder.

  “It’s not that! It’s definitely not that!!”

  “O…kay.”

  I wasn’t sure what “that” was, but the point-blank lasers shooting from her eyes convinced me that I should indicate I understood. Asuna snorted, let go of my shoulder, and spun around to head to the desk. She snatched the key and returned in a huff.

  “This is the item, right?”

  On the left side of my vision, the quest log updated, so I told her, “Yep.”

  “And what door does this open?”

  “Dunno.”

  “You don’t know…?”

  “The only person who knows is the one who hid the golden cube and left the key on this desk.”

  “…So we have to find that person now…” she said, looking briefly crestfallen. But she quickly recovered, opening her game window and putting the key into her inventory. “Yikes, it’s after nine already. We’ll have to continue tomorrow.”

  “I agree. Or…I would, but…” I said, considering very carefully how much I ought to spoil. “Well…something’s going to happen in a bit that will surprise you, but it definitely won’t pose a danger to our lives…In other words, there’s no HP loss. So react calmly.”

  “H-huh? What do you mean…? What’s going to happen?”

  “Look, I wouldn’t want to ruin the best part of a movie for you, would I? Just think of it as a roller coaster and enjoy the ride.”

  “That does not make me anticipate a good time…” Asuna grumbled, looking around. There was no difference in the walls and shelves surrounding us. Eventually, she summoned her courage, closed her window, then grabbed my shoulders and spun me around.