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“S … S-SCREW YOU!!”
My feet stopped when the high-pitched shriek hit my ears.
I took a few quick steps to the side and pressed my back against the wall of the NPC shop. Up ahead, the path opened into a wider plaza, from which the disturbance was coming.
“P-put it back! Back to the way it was!! That was a plus-four … P-put it back to what it was!”
Another shriek. It sounded like an argument between two players. Given that we were in the protected zone of Urbus, the main city on the second floor of Aincrad, the disagreement was unlikely to lead to physical harm to either player. I certainly had no reason to hide, given that it had nothing to do with me.
But even though I understood that well enough, I couldn’t help but be more cautious than usual these days. After all, Kirito the level-13 swordsman was the most hated solo player in Aincrad—the first man to be known as a beater.
Thursday, December 8, 2022, was the thirty-second day of Sword Art Online, the game of death.
Illfang the Kobold Lord, master of the first floor, was dead. Four days had passed since the teleport gate of Urbus went active.
In those four days, the story of what happened in the boss chamber had spread among the game’s top players, albeit with wings of its own.
A boss monster with the Katana skill, a piece of information that wasn’t previously known. The death of Diavel the Knight, leader of the raid. And one beater, a beta tester who got further than anyone and used his knowledge to steal the last hit on the boss and reap the rewards.
Fortunately for me, while the name Kirito had spread like wildfire, only forty or so players had actual knowledge of my physical appearance within the game. And in SAO, the names of strangers did not appear on their in-game cursors. That was the only reason I could walk through town without fear of being pelted by stones. Then again, even if that happened, a purple system wall would deflect the projectiles.
Even still, I felt ashamed that I was removing my signature Coat of Midnight—my prize for defeating the boss—and wearing a wide bandanna to escape notice. It wasn’t that I was so desperate for human contact that I would sneak into the city in disguise; I just needed to refill on potions and rations as well as perform maintenance on my equipment. There was a small shop at the village of Marome about two miles southeast of Urbus, but its selection was poor, and there were no NPC blacksmiths I could pay to repair my weapon.
Due to these factors, I was busy in the market on the south side of Urbus, filling my item storage with sundry goods and supplies, then making my way along the side of the street toward my next errand when I heard the shouts.
Out of reflex, I had to check to make sure the angry screams weren’t directed at me first, then sighed in disappointment at my own timidity. Satisfied that it wasn’t me, I resumed my trip to the eastern plaza, which was both my destination and the source of the argument.
In less than a minute, I arrived at a circular, bowl-like open space. It was relatively crowded for three o’clock in the afternoon, which was normally prime adventuring time. Most likely, the foot traffic was due to the recent opening of the town—there were plenty of players coming up from the Town of Beginnings on the first floor to visit the new city.
The flow of pedestrians slowed down in a corner of the plaza, and I could hear the same shouts coming from that area. I slipped through the crowd and craned my neck, trying to detect the source of the argument.
“Wh-wh-what did you do?! The properties are all way down!!”
I vaguely recognized the red-faced man. He was a proper frontier player, not a tourist. He hadn’t taken part in the first-floor boss raid, but his full suit of metal armor and large three-horned helmet spoke to his level.
What truly drew my eye, however, was the naked longsword clutched in the three-horned man’s right hand. The edge couldn’t hurt anyone inside of town, but the idea that he would wave it around in the midst of a crowd was distasteful. He was too furious to think straight, however, so he stuck the tip into the pavement stone and continued bellowing.
“How could you possibly fail four times in a row? You can’t have reduced my sword to plus zero! I should have left it with a damn NPC! You owe me for this, you third-rate blacksmith!”
Standing quietly in a plain brown leather apron and looking guilty through the minutes of raging insults was a short male player. He’d set up a gray carpet at the edge of the plaza with a chair, anvil, and shelf crowded together. The rug was a Vendor’s Carpet, an expensive item that allowed a player to set up a simple shop in the middle of the town—a necessity for any enterprising merchant or crafter.
You could display your wares without a carpet, of course, but when left abandoned in the open like that, the items would lose durability bit by bit as time wore on, and there was no defense against thievery. In the beta test, I’d seen lively player markets along the main streets of all the major cities with carpets of every color, but this was the very first I’d noticed since SAO’s retail version had turned deadly. In fact, it was very first non-NPC blacksmith I’d seen.
Now that I recognized the circumstances, the reason for the uproar was clear.
The man repeatedly slamming his sword against the ground had paid the silent, drooping blacksmith to fortify the blade. In general terms, a player of the same level would be better at augmenting weapons than an NPC. The requisite production skills had to be at a certain level, of course, but that could generally be recognized at a glance. The crafting tools used—in this case, the blacksmith’s hammer—were all grouped into tiers that could only be equipped with the right level of skill proficiency. The Iron Hammer resting on the silent blacksmith’s anvil required a higher level than the Bronze Hammers this town’s NPCs used.
So this blacksmith should have better odds at strengthening weapons than the NPCs of Urbus—in fact, he couldn’t run a business without them—which was why the three-horned man had entrusted him with his beloved sword.
Unfortunately, however, weapon augmenting in SAO was not a surefire success unless one’s skill proficiency was quite high. With a failure rate of 30 percent, there was a 9 percent chance of failing twice in a row and a 3 percent chance of three failures. Even the tragic outcome of four consecutive failed attempts had a 0.8 chance of occurring.
The terrifying thing was that in a vast online RPG world, these odds were just high enough to happen every now and then. I played games before this that featured rare items with drop rates like 0.01 percent that made you want to scream, “You’re joking!” And yet plenty of lucky players wound up with them. I prayed that such cruelly rare items did not exist in SAO, but a part of me knew they must and that I would spend days and days in the dungeons looking for them…
“What’s all the ruckus about?” someone muttered in my ear, startling me out of my thoughts.
It was a slender fencer. She wore a white leather tunic, pale green leather tights, and a silver breastplate. Her facial features were so pristine and graceful that you might wonder how an elf wandered into the world of Aincrad, but the crude gray wool cape from her head to her waist ruined that effect.
But she didn’t have much of a choice. If she’d taken off the cape and let her luscious brown hair and elven beauty catch the sun, she’d never escape the attention of the crowds again.
I took a deep breath to calm my head and responded to this person I might actually call a “friend” … one of the very few I had in this world.
“Well, the guy with the horned helmet wanted the other one to power up his …”
At this point I realized that I, like her, was in disguise. I didn’t want to believe that my nondescript costume of plain leather armor and a yellow-and-blue striped bandanna was that easy to see through. Perhaps I ought to pretend that I did not know her.
“Er, well … have we met before?”
The look I got in response was like twin rapier thrusts burning holes through the center of my face.
“Met? Why, I believe we’ve shared meals and been in a party together.”
“… Oh … Now I remember, of course. I believe I lent you the use of my bath—”
Thunk. The sharp heel of her Hornet Boots slammed down on the top of my right foot. A piece of my memory disintegrated.
I cleared my throat, pinched the edge of her hood, and walked her a few yards away from the crowd so we could have a proper conversation.
“H-hi, Asuna. Long time no see … if two days counts.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Kirito.”
Two days ago, when I’d met her on the front line, I claimed that there was no need for formality between avatars. But as this was her first VR game, she seemed to have difficulty getting over that. And when I’d offered to call her “Miss Asuna” in return, she said it was a pain in the neck and totally unnecessary. I didn’t understand women.
At any rate, once the pleasantries had been peacefully exchanged, I turned back to the unpleasantness with the blacksmith and gave her a brief explanation.
“It seems the guy in the three-horned helmet asked the blacksmith to strengthen his weapon, but the process failed four times in a row, returning it back to a plus-zero state. So he’s furious about it—which I can understand. I mean, four in a row …”
Asuna the fencer, the fastest and most coolheaded player I knew in Aincrad (I’d add “most beautiful,” but I didn’t want to cross the line of my personal harassment code) shrugged her shoulders and said, “The one who asked the other had to be aware of the possibility of failure. And doesn’t the blacksmith have the rates of success for different weapons posted? Plus, it says that if he fails, he’ll only charge the cost of the upgrade materials, and not the labor.”
“Uh, really? That’s quite considerate,” I muttered, recalling the image of the short blacksmith bowing and scraping repeatedly. Forty percent of my sympathy had been for the three-horned man whose weapon had been ruined, but now it dropped to closer to twenty.
“I’m guessing that after the first failure, the blood rushed to his head, so he kept demanding another attempt to make it up. Losing your self-control and paying a terrible price for it is a constant feature of any form of gambling…”
“That almost sounded like it had personal experience behind it.”
“N-no, just a common-sense observation.”
I avoided looking at her, sensing that telling her I’d lost all of my money at the seventh-floor monster coliseum during the beta test was not going to win me any points. Asuna gave me a piercing look for several seconds before mercifully returning to the topic at hand.
“Well … I can’t say I don’t feel a little sorry for him, but that kind of rage doesn’t seem necessary. He can just save up the money for another attempt.”
“Um…well, it’s not that simple.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. I jabbed a thumb at the Anneal Blade +6 strapped over my back.
“The three-horned guy’s sword is an Anneal Blade, just like mine. He must have gone through that terrible quest on the first floor to get it, too. On top of that, he’d gone to the trouble of having an NPC bump it up to plus four. That’s not too hard to reach. But once you get to plus five, the odds really start to drop—that’s why he had a player blacksmith try it. But the first attempt failed, so now it’s back to plus three. He asks for another attempt, hoping to get it back to where he started, but it fails again, down to plus two. Then the process repeats. The third and fourth attempts fail, so now he ends back at zero.”
“But … there’s no way to fall further from zero. Can’t he just try to get it up to plus five again…?”
At this point, Asuna seemed to understand where I was going with this. Her hazel eyes widened in the shade of her hood. “Oh… there’s a maximum limit to attempts. And what’s the limit for an Anneal Blade?”
“Eight times. He got four successes and four failures, which put him at even and used up all his attempts. That sword can’t be smithed anymore.”
It was the trickiest part of SAO’s weapon upgrading system. Every piece of equipment that could be powered up had a preset number of possible attempts. It wasn’t the maximum level you could reach with the weapon, but the number of attempts. For example, a Small Sword, the starting weapon at the beginning of the game, only had a single potential attempt. If the process failed, that sword could never be a Small Sword +1.
Even worse, the success rate could actually be affected by the effort of the owner. Obviously, finding the best blacksmith possible was a major part of that—and ultimately, one could master the Blacksmithing skill themselves, though at this point in the game, it was an unrealistic option. One could also increase the chances of success through better materials, either in quality or quantity.
Most player blacksmiths set their upgrading fees based on a success rate of around 70 percent. If the client wanted a better chance, they could pay extra to have more crafting materials added, or simply provide them directly to the blacksmith.
Which meant the biggest fault of the three-horned man was that he’d gotten worked up and gambled on more attempts. He should have taken a deep breath after the first failure, then paid (or provided) extra to improve his chances the next time. That would likely have prevented his tragedy of an Anneal Blade +0 with no remaining attempts.
“I see … Well, I can understand why he’d be upset. Just a little.”
I nodded in agreement and offered a moment of silence to the fateful blade. Suddenly, the screaming man ceased his rage. Two of his friends had raced over and put their hands on his shoulders, offering support.
“C’mon, Rufiol, it’s gonna be okay. We’ll help you try the Anneal Blade quest again.”
“It’ll only take a week to get it back, then we can push it all the way up to plus eight.”
Wow, now it takes three players a week to get it? Glad I got mine early, I thought. And you guys … take care of your pal. Don’t let him gamble it away again.
Rufiol seemed to have recovered his cool. He trudged off out of the plaza, shoulders slumped.
The blacksmith, who’d withstood the insults in silence the entire time, finally spoke up.
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