The axman’s slim-fitting, dark gray scale armor was wetly semi-reflective, suggesting that it was made not of metal, but some monster-hide material. It looked easy to move in and quiet, ideal for PKing, but its ability to deflect piercing and thrusting attacks was no different from my long coat’s.
So the Sword of Eventide, rather than stopping as it would against some thick metal plate, sliced through the gaps between scales and sank deeper and deeper…
Kadaaamm!! I’d used this skill more times than I could count, and even I’d never heard it produce that kind of blast. It vibrated through my palm hard enough to shake my very skull. The lighting effect the impact produced was two or three times brighter than usual, making my vision go hazy and blue.
Sound, light, feedback. This was a true critical hit. And a weak-point crit, too.
When the flash subsided, over half my sword was embedded in Morte’s chest.
The HP bar in the middle of the orange cursor floating over the axman’s head began to dwindle. It seemed to move slower than usual, perhaps because I was in a state of heightened alert, but it showed no signs of stopping. From a nearly full position, it dropped to 70, then 60, then 50 percent and lower, into the yellow warning zone.
I was certain it would stop soon, but the yellow line continued narrowing at the same steady pace. It was down to 40 percent, then 35…and 30. Now into the red warning zone, the bar headed ever closer to the left end of the gauge.
When he’d challenged me to the half-finish duel on the third floor, Morte softened me down to just over half my HP so he could destroy the remainder in one final blow—a duel PK. But ultimately, that fight ended with both HP bars at just over 50 percent.
25…23…it kept going. Was it possible to completely eradicate all of a high-level player’s HP in a single blow, even with a true crit against a weak point? Glowing red light spilled from where the elven sword stuck into Morte’s chest, pulsing like blood. Through the palm of my right hand, I felt a trembling like a heartbeat. Neither I nor Morte budged an inch.
A number of times in the past, I’d suffered so much damage at once that I couldn’t even breathe, much less move, while my HP bar dropped. That was hard enough in the beta, but now the consequences of death were permanent. If it didn’t stop, then Morte…the guy lying on some bed somewhere in Japan…would be put to death by his NerveGear.
Without realizing it, I glanced from his red HP bar to the face under his chain coif. The red light pouring from his heart cast a faint glow on the upper half of his face, which was consistently sunken in shadow otherwise.
My first glance at the PKer showed me an ordinary young man, maybe a few years older than me but still a teenager. His gaping eyes stared at the space over my right shoulder…at the HP bar of mine that only he could see. He wore no true expression, but his lips, which were normally curled into a sneer, now parted slightly, as if mouthing disbelief.
My mouth was open, too, and I wanted to ask him, even if just through the movement of my lips, why he would ever choose to PK in a world like this one…
…when a voice in an extremely grating, high-pitched register pierced my eardrums from behind.
“Mamoru! Pull the sword ouuuut!!”
In an instant, I finally understood.
Morte’s HP hadn’t dropped this far just from the combined critical hit. He was suffering continuous piercing damage. With my sword still stuck in him, his HP continued to bleed out of him.
When he realized this, too, Morte let out an uncharacteristic, panicked wail. He dropped the Harsh Hatchet and grabbed the Sword of Eventide’s blade with his right hand.
If I clutched the handle of the sword with both hands and pushed it toward the hilt, I could kill him in less than five seconds.
And I probably ought to. He tried to use the paralysis event to kill Asuna and me. If he survived this, he would probably try something similar again. I didn’t want to die, and I especially didn’t want Asuna to die. She was going to grow into a far greater warrior than me, lead the game’s population to victory, and save thousands of lives.
Nothing was more important than Asuna’s life.
So it was utterly crucial that I took this step now, to
“Aaaah! Aaaaaaah!!”
There was a scream behind me—a sound not even human. Footsteps rushed toward me.
On instinct, I put my left hand on Morte’s chest and pulled the Sword of Eventide free. Red particles scattered from the blade as I swung it, right as Black Hood Number Two leaped at me with his dagger drawn.
Asuna was in pursuit behind him, but the man’s foot speed was formidable, and she wouldn’t reach him in time. I stepped to the right and held up my sword, preparing to meet the dagger even as I kept an eye on Morte, in case he decided to throw his third pick with his one good hand.
But Morte stayed down and immobile, and Black Hood Number Two engaged in some unexpected strategy. He hurled his dagger at me without so much as pausing to aim it.
A single swing of my sword knocked the spinning dagger aside. Then Number Two threw something with his other hand.
It wasn’t a weapon, but a small sphere slightly over an inch in size. I’d just seen the same object less than thirty hours earlier, so I ran toward Asuna and shouted, “Stop! It’s a smoke bomb!”
There was a soft, deep boomf! behind me. I turned back as I reached her and saw a curtain of smoke darker than night rising to cover the PKers.
Even still, I could see the dagger man grabbing Morte’s right hand and helping him up. Then thick smoke covered their silhouettes, and I heard only faint footsteps racing toward the forest to the north and out of earshot. The two orange cursors blinked out at the same time.
I already knew the smoke screen didn’t confer any system debuffs. So if I chased after them, there was a high possibility I could take them both out for good—or at least the gravely wounded Morte.
But my feet felt so heavy that my knees sank into the grass, and Asuna made no move after them, either.
The cold night breeze swished through the trees, finally dispersing the green poison gas and the fresh, dark smoke screen. When the air had cleared, Asuna dropped her Chivalric Rapier into the sheath at her side and muttered, “What did he mean, ‘Mamoru’? If he hadn’t said that, I wouldn’t have hesitated about chasing them.”
While Morte had been suffering that continuous damage, Black Hood Number Two had called him Mamoru. It was either a nickname between comrades, or…I had to stop myself from continuing that thought—and put my sword back where I normally kept it.
“I was almost there, but I wasn’t able to go through with killing him. When I drew my sword, I was so certain I would never let him do the same thing again…”
“…I wonder if they’ll come back,” Asuna murmured.
I thought it over for a bit. “They probably will. And they’ll have some new kind of PK scheme that we could never see coming…”
After I said that, I realized there was something else I should’ve said right away. I turned to Asuna, looked into her curious eyes for a third of a second, then looked away and bowed my head to her.
“I’m sorry, Asuna. I knew the abduction event was going to take us out of town in a paralyzed state, so I should’ve realized this could happen…and because I wasn’t thinking straight, I exposed you to danger. I’m really, truly sorry.”
Upon further reflection, I’d earned Asuna’s anger on numerous occasions since our partnership began on the first floor. I couldn’t even recall the exact number of times she’d thrown a pillow or jabbed me in the side on this floor alone.
But this mistake was on a different level. If I hadn’t given her my careless guarantee, backed by beta experience, that it was “absolutely safe”—or if I’d just told her exactly what would happen in the event—Asuna’s perspective without prior influence might have noticed the danger of PKing it harbored.
The peril we just survived was clearly a situation that came about because I was a beater. An
d I couldn’t guarantee that it would be the last time.
“…I feel like I probably don’t have the right to continue being your par…” I started to say until something soft brushed the sides of my lowered head.
I realized they were Asuna’s hands. She pulled me upward, forcing me to stand straight. The young woman glared right at my face, not removing her grip.
“I’m going to tell you one thing I really, truly hate.”
“Y…yes?”
“It’s when two people know what each other are thinking, but they decide to continue using vague, imprecise words to keep everything at a distance and play oblique mind games. Yes, softening things is valuable sometimes, but the really important things ought to be said cleanly and clearly…don’t you agree?”
“Um…Wh-what are we talking about…?”
I understood the point Asuna was making, I just didn’t know how it connected to the present situation. But with her holding my head tight in both hands, I couldn’t even put a finger to my cheek to ponder this.
“My question is,” Asuna said, sucking in a deep breath, “are you saying you want to break up our partnership?”
With no escape from this direct fastball of a question, I had little choice but to answer honestly. “If it’s a matter of wanting to or not wanting to…I don’t want us to split up.”
“Okay. Well, neither do I…so that should be our conclusion. Right?”
“………”
She is such a stud, I thought bizarrely. Asuna ruffled her hands wildly over my head before letting go.
“Now that that’s settled, there are plenty of things we need to talk over…What do you think we should do first?”
“Um…ummmmm…”
I sucked in a lungful of the cold, refreshing, midwinter air that shrouded the forest to reset my mind and glanced around us.
We’d moved farther than I thought during the battle. The packed dirt path was about twenty-five feet to the south of us. The riderless carriage and horse were still on the road. It seemed like we should do something about that, but I had no idea what. Plenty of glittering objects littered the ground around the carriage, too. Thousand-col gold coins, hundred-col silvers, and a wide variety of items. All had belonged to Lord Cylon of Stachion before Morte killed him.
“…How about we figure out what to do later but grab the stuff Cylon dropped fir…” I started to say, before I realized something.
There was one item we needed to grab right away. I tore my gaze away from the carriage and back to the grass. “Asuna, find the ax and dagger they dropped!” I shouted.
Then I ran a few yards and leaned into the thick undergrowth. It was around here, I was certain. I needed the spot where I’d cut off Morte’s left arm; he’d had the poisoned pick in that hand when it happened. And the moment his severed hand vanished, the pick had…
“…Aha!”
I reached into the grass and carefully hefted a black piece of metal stuck into the ground. It was a little less than four inches long—and three-tenths of an inch at the thickest point—with six sides that curved gently, prompting me to think of a type of drill bit. From the middle to the needle-like point at the end, an oily liquid seemed to be oozing from the inside of the spiral grooves.
I was curious to check its item properties, but the ownership and equipment status of this pick were still with Morte, and I had to do whatever it took to steal it from him. If they got to a safe location and used the Materialize All Items command, the pick would instantly vanish. And in fact, Morte might not even need to bother with such a thing.
“I got them, Kirito,” said Asuna, trotting over with an ax in her right hand and a dagger in her left. I consulted my mental list of the various monsters one could encounter in the fields of the sixth floor.
I knew there was one. One of those detestable creatures with the same habits as the ratmen lurking in the catacombs of the fifth floor. It was called…
“…Asuna, go and look in the surrounding forest to see if there’s a monster called a Muriqui Snatcher.”
“Moo-reekee…? That’s a weird name. How do you spell it?”
“Uh, it’s tricky…M-u-r-i-q-u-i, I think.”
“Hmm…”
Even Asuna, whose knowledge sometimes seemed encyclopedic, didn’t recognize that word. It occurred to me that I should’ve looked it up in the two months between the end of the beta test and the launch of the game. I scanned the woods on the north side of the path but didn’t see any shapes that looked like the monster in question.
Monsters weren’t designed to populate the areas right around roads, even in the danger of the wilderness, but that only applied when players were quiet and minding their own business. I’d been worried that the screeching of the dagger user trying to save Morte might have brought the monsters down upon us, but fortunately—or in this case, unfortunately—there hadn’t been any in range of his shouting.
That meant we’d have to go into the forest to find one, but would it be in time? Morte and his group were already criminals, so they couldn’t go into any town or village, making it difficult to find a safe harbor—but they would’ve been aware of that when devising this plan. If they had an evacuation area somewhere nearby, it would come down to whether they reached it first—or we found a Muriqui Snatcher…
“—rito. Hey, Kirito.”
The mention of my name caused me to snap to attention. My partner was pointing not to the north, but behind me to the south. I turned and looked to the darkened woods.
“Ooh…oo-ooh!”
The sound of calls vaguely humanoid and animalistic came into hearing range, and I noticed a number of small silhouettes among the tree branches. Above their heads, reddish cursors that identified them as monsters sprang into being. There were ten—no more than fifteen of them.
“Look! They’re all muriquis!” Asuna pointed out. Indeed, all of their displayed names began with MURIQUI, but this was no situation for celebration.
I was level 19 at the moment, and Asuna was at 18. This was considerably higher than the needed level at the start of the sixth floor, so all the cursors were only a pale pink color, but they were numerous. And there weren’t just the Snatchers that I wanted, but others like Muriqui Brawlers and Muriqui Nut Throwers were in the mix as well. It turned out the man’s screech was quite effective after all; he’d called down an entire pack of muriquis that normally stayed deep in the woods.
All players in SAO were capable of producing the same vocal volume, but because it sampled the actual voice of the player for use in the environment, the tenor of your voice made a difference in how well it carried. The dagger user had a hideous, shrieking voice that refused to blend into the natural ambience and was bound to carry farther, even in the noisy night forest. Being able to gather a wide range of monsters just by screaming was an effective ability for a PKer—not that I thought that was why he chose to engage in the activity.
“So…what now?” Asuna asked.
It was directed at me, of course, but a number of the muriquis descended from the tree branches down vines and trunks as though answering that query. Hoo-hoo, they called, approaching the abandoned carriage. Once out from under the tree canopy, the moonlight illuminated their forms.
“Oh…they’re monkeys,” Asuna remarked. Indeed, the muriquis were monkey-type monsters with furry coats, tails, and long arms. They were much smaller than the apes that appeared in higher floors and only four feet tall when upright, but they were also very quick, and they made use of the trees to leap about in three dimensions in aggravating ways.
Four of them had gone to the ground—three of which were Snatchers with kangaroo-like pouches on their bellies, and the last was a Brawler with a club-like stick in its hand. Asuna and I could eliminate these four in an instant with sword skills, but attacking would probably bring the other dozen down on us from the trees. We’d been training and completing quests nonstop since this morning, and just after this fight to the death against Morte and
his friend, I was sure that Asuna was more exhausted than she let on. In order to permanently seize the mysterious poisoned needle and their melee weapons, battle against the muriquis would be unavoidable. The only question was how hard to push ourselves.
As I mulled this quandary over, the trio of Snatchers approached the rear of the carriage and began picking up the coins and stuffing them into their stomach pouches. Asuna seemed a bit perturbed by this.
“H-hey, they’re picking up Cylon’s things!”
“Yeah, that’s the idea,” I muttered. She glared at me skeptically.
Just then, the heavy ax dangling from her grip vanished with a shwim! sound effect.
We were too late, I lamented—but then I realized that the dagger and poisoned pick in my hands were still there. That meant the two PKers hadn’t gotten to an evacuation point and used Materialize All Items; Morte had just used Quick Change to retrieve his main weapon, the one-handed ax.
Since the same thing hadn’t happened to these items, that meant the dagger user didn’t have the Quick Change mod yet. Still, the all-crucial poisoned pick was likely to vanish within the next minute. All Morte had to do was switch the item registered to the Quick Change icon from the ax to the pick, then use the skill again.
Better to let a monster pick it up than just have it taken away, so I hurled it at the feet of the Muriqui Snatchers. I commanded my partner, “Throw the dagger in the same spot!”
“O-okay.”
Asuna tossed the black dagger. One of the Snatchers approached, hooting, and quickly scooped both the pick and dagger into its pouch. They had the Robbing skill, so ownership of the items instantly transferred, and neither Quick Change nor Materialize All Items could remotely recover them. Once the pack of muriquis finished taking all the items, they’d retreat deep into the forest, so the odds were nearly zero that Morte and his friend would find the right monkeys to defeat them and take their weapons back.
I told myself that this course of action was for the best…and turned to Asuna so that I could suggest we head back to town. But before I could, she murmured, “I see. I finally understand…You wanted to do the same method as when you got my rapier back on the fifth floor.”
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