10 “UPGRADE, PLEASE.” I roughly thrust my sword and scabbard forward. Nezha the blacksmith looked up at me doubtfully. He was suspicious because he wasn’t looking at my face, but the great helm that completely covered it. The only thing it featured were narrow slits at the eyes. Such helmets were excellent in terms of defense but terribly limited the player’s vision. It was one thing for a tank in the midst of a group battle to use it, but hardly any player would bother to wear such a thing in town. As I was a vowed disciple of light, versatile armor, the only reason I’d ever wear this great helm was for disguise. And because I’d been present for the destruction of Asuna’s Wind Fleuret three days earlier, I couldn’t use my favorite bandanna instead, or Nezha would recognize me. Perhaps this disguise was not that much better, but Asuna insisted that if I didn’t want to stand out because of the funny helm, I should commit to the full outfit, and simply play one of those people. So the great helm was only part of the costume. I was covered in thick plate mail all over and held a tower shield the size of an entire door. All the items were the cheapest of that type available at NPC shops, and the equipment weight was just light enough not to send me into the red, but the cramped, closed-in sensation threatened to make me go claustrophobic within half a day. Feeling a newfound sense of appreciation for those tanks who’d taken part in the boss raid, I handed over my sword—the Anneal Blade, my only truly rare piece of equipment right now. “I’ll take a look at its properties,” he said quietly, tapping the hilt. When he saw the contents of the window, his downcast eyebrows shot upward. “Anneal plus six … two attempts left. And its upgrades are S3, D3. A challenging sword, but a very good one …” I watched his lips creep into a tiny smile, and I confirmed that my initial suspicions about him were correct. This blacksmith wasn’t an irredeemably evil person. But just a second later, Nezha’s smile of admiration disappeared, replaced by a grimace of pain. Through gritted teeth, he murmured, “… Which value did you want to upgrade?” Sunday, December 11, just before eight o’clock in the evening. A chill wind blew through the eastern plaza of Taran. There were no other players or NPCs in sight. There were only Nezha the blacksmith, just before he closed up his streetside shop, and me, his mystery customer. Somewhere in the empty houses lining the plaza, Asuna was watching our encounter, but I couldn’t feel her gaze for all the thick metal armor. It was the preceding Sunday that we defeated the first-floor boss and opened the teleport gate to the main city of the second floor, so today marked a full week since then. I had run into Asuna in the eastern plaza of Urbus three days ago, and it was two days before that I had discovered the truth behind Nezha’s upgrade fraud. Technically, I hadn’t identified the trick, only been “certain” that I had, but there was a reason that I’d waited a full two days to attempt to ascertain the truth of the matter. I needed to master the technique Nezha was using to switch out weapons. Of course, this all depended on Nezha accepting my work request. Telling myself that the hassle of all this full plate armor had succeeded in convincing him, I murmured an answer to the blacksmith. “Speed, please. I’ll pay for the materials. Enough for a ninety-percent chance.” Nezha had heard my voice three days ago, but the distorting effect of the great helm helped disguise it enough to keep him from realizing that I’d been the companion of the woman with the Wind Fleuret. “Very well. For enough to boost the chances to ninety, that will be … two thousand seven hundred col, including the cost of labor,” he explained, his voice tense. I agreed in as flat a tone as I could muster. Beneath the thick breastplate, my heart was already racing, and my gauntlets were clammy with sweat. If my suspicions were all entirely wrong, and Nezha wasn’t in fact a fraudster, and weapon destruction had indeed been added as a possible failure state, then my beloved Anneal Blade +6 might be gone forever in a manner of minutes. No. That was not all. After all, we had retrieved Asuna’s Wind Fleuret through the use of the Materialize All Items command. Even if my theory about the trick was wrong, I could still get the sword back within an hour by using that button. So all I had to do was stay calm, watch everything that happened, and hit one icon at the proper moment. Nothing more. I waved my left hand to bring up the menu, flipped to the trade tab, and paid Nezha his price. Normally I might have closed it after that, but this time I left it open on the top screen. Fortunately, Nezha did not seem to find this suspicious. “Two thousand seven hundred col, paid in full,” he muttered, and turned to the forge. Very naturally, he let the end of the sword in his left hand dangle just inches above the many products crammed on top of his carpet. It all started here. My concentration had been sucked toward the portable forge the last time, so I kept my gaze directly fixed on his left hand. My field of view was greatly limited by the helm’s eye-slits, but that helped me ignore any misdirection he attempted through the flashy forge display. Nezha must have tossed the upgrade materials straight from his stock into the forge, because everything flashed bright green for a second. If I’d had a view of the forge, my eyes would have been dazzled by the light for just a second. But the next moment, Nezha’s left index finger stretched and lightly tapped between two swords on the carpet. For just the briefest of instants, the Anneal Blade blinked. That was it. The switch was complete. Such a brilliant, perfect trick. He could do this in front of a crowd of a hundred in broad daylight, and not a single one would notice. Like Nezha when he saw the detailed properties of my sword, I let out a sigh of admiration. But I said nothing—I let the blacksmith finish his upgrading process. Once the green light filled the forge like a liquid, Nezha lifted the sword in his left hand and pulled it from the scabbard with his right. The blade was the darkened steel color unique to the Anneal Blade. But to my eye, its shine was just a bit duller than usual. The sword Nezha was holding right now was not my +6 sword, but the spent +0 blade he had bought from Rufiol three days before. It was only a guess, but I was sure of it. The blacksmith laid the weapon in the portable forge, suffusing the blade in its green glow. He moved it to the anvil and started striking it with his smith’s hammer. Clang, clang, the same crisp sound I heard when he upgraded Asuna’s fleuret. When the fleuret broke and Nezha offered to return the cost of his labor, I’d said, “It’s all right, you did your best. There are some crafters who say it doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you hit the weapon enough times, so they just whack away.” However, the reason these strikes sounded so heartfelt was not because he was praying for the operation to be a success through them. Nezha was mourning the loss of the weapon he was about to break for the sake of his deception. Once a piece of gear was spent—no more upgrade attempts left—it would break without fail when the process was initiated again. Argo had confirmed that for us two nights ago. That phenomenon was about to happen right before my eyes. … Eight, nine, ten. The last hammer strike rang loud and high. The sword burst into shards atop the anvil. Nezha’s back shivered and shrank. His right hand with the hammer slumped downward, and the sword-bound sheath in his left hand disappeared. Hunched over, Nezha took a deep breath, screwed up his face, and was about to shriek an apology—until I cut him off. “No need to apologize.” “… Huh…?” He froze. I went up my equipment mannequin from the bottom, switching out armor. Giant ski-boot greaves, plate leggings, gauntlets, plate armor, heater shield… The items that made up my disguise vanished one by one. When the great helm came off, my bangs flopped down over my forehead. I pushed them back and heaved a deep breath. Finally, I equipped the Coat of Midnight, its black hem swaying. Nezha’s narrow eyes went wide. “… Y … you’re … the guy … from…” “Sorry for dressing in disguise. But I figured you would refuse my request if you recognized me.” I meant to say this in my most friendly, understanding tone of voice, but the moment he heard it, Nezha’s shock morphed into fear. In that moment, he knew that I’d discovered the existence of his scam and even how it worked. Without taking my eyes off the frozen blacksmith, I pushed an icon on my main menu—the weapon skill mod activation button.
With a quiet swish, another sword appeared in my right hand, heavy and wrapped in a black leather sheath. It was my partner in battle since just after this game of death began: my Anneal Blade +6. Nezha grimaced. It almost pained me to see that expression. “No one would suspect another player of having the Quick Change mod so early, especially not a blacksmith… And hiding the menu to use it between the wares lined up on your carpet? Brilliant. Whoever thought that up is a genius.” Nezha’s shoulders slowly sank, until he finally slumped over and hung his head. A skill mod—short for modification—was a skill power-up available to the player at certain intervals of proficiency in a particular skill. For example, when the Search skill reached a level of fifty, the first mod became available to the player. You could then choose from a number of options, such as a bonus to search for multiple targets, a bonus to increase search range, or the optional augmentation ability of Pursuit. There were tons of useful mods, and choosing between them was as hard as it was enjoyable. Mods could also be applied to the numerous weapon skills in the game. Quick Change fell into that category. It was a common mod available at the very first choice for most one-handed weapons, but very few players ever picked it first. There was no need for anyone to make use of it until at least the fifth floor of Aincrad. Following that theory, when my One-Handed Sword skill reached fifty halfway through the first floor, I chose the “shorten sword skill cooldown” mod. When I reached one hundred, I would choose “increase critical hit chance,” and only at one fifty would I go for Quick Change. Quick Change was an active mod, not a passive one. By pressing a shortcut icon on the front page of the menu, my equipped weapon would switch out instantly. The regular method of changing weapons was a five-step process: (1) opening the window, (2) tapping the right- (or left-) hand cell in the equipment mannequin, (3) selecting “change weapon” from the list of options, (4) selecting the desired weapon from the available items in storage, and (5) hitting the OK button. When faced with a monster that had the Snatch ability, it was a long enough process that anyone would take at least one defenseless hit while trying to equip a backup weapon. But with Quick Change, several steps were removed: (1) opening the window, and (2) hitting the shortcut icon. With enough practice, it could be done in half a second. The instant after you lost your weapon, you could have another one in hand and ready for battle. On top of that, Quick Change had a great variety of options to specify exactly which hand received exactly which weapon when the icon was hit. You could set it to pull up a specific weapon, tell it to make you empty-handed—even allow you to automatically pull the same type of weapon as the one you were equipping, if you had a spare. That last part was the secret at the heart of Nezha’s weapon-switching trick. He held the customer’s weapon in his left hand, temporarily creating the condition in which it was “equipped” there. The ownership right was still with the client, but it was the same as the hand-over feature that made it possible to toss weapons to each other in the middle of battle. He could still use that weapon to activate sword skills … even Quick Change. Next, Nezha extended the pointer finger of the hand holding the weapon to touch the shortcut icon on his window, which was cleverly hidden beneath his tightly packed wares. At that instant, the client’s sword in his hand went into his storage, and a sword of the same type was automatically pulled out. Except this weapon was spent, guaranteed to break into pieces as soon as he attempted to upgrade it. The only outward signs of this elaborate trick were a momentary blink of the weapon and a faint swishing sound. Given that it happened at the exact same time that he tossed the upgrading materials into the forge with a bright flash and bang, you’d have to be watching for that precise action to even notice he was doing it. And if the customer realized he was switching weapons and tried to confront him about it, Nezha could simply employ the same trick just as quickly and get the client’s original weapon back. Plus, once he shattered the spent weapon on his anvil, there was no proof of anything. In other words, to prove Nezha’s upgrade fraud was happening, I either had to utilize the Materialize All Items command to spill all of my belongings onto the ground here, or use Quick Change myself, thus pulling the sword directly out of Nezha’s storage whether he liked it or not. It was following the latter choice that had taken me two days from the time I noticed the trick to actually attempting it myself. I had spent all of the previous day and today in the second-floor labyrinth fighting endless hordes of half-naked bull-men tauruses to get my One-Handed Sword skill to one hundred so that I could take the Quick Change mod earlier than planned. As a side benefit of this activity, I got some rare loot and mapped much farther into the twenty-level labyrinth. As usual, I offered the map data to Argo at no cost, and this generosity was apparently rankling both the Lind and Kibaou squads. They were upset because someone else was always one or two levels ahead of them in the tower, but they hadn’t realized yet that it was Kirito the evil beater. It was only a matter of time before they knew the truth. If there was one reassurance, it was that our relationship couldn’t possibly get any worse. At any rate, the two days of trouble were worth it, as I had finally uncovered and proven Nezha’s upgrade fraud trick. I looked down at the curled-up blacksmith and sighed in satisfaction. My goal was complete. It was not a quest, so there was no reward or bonus experience. On the contrary, it had cost me the 2,700 col for labor and ingredients, but all I really cared about was making sure that Nezha didn’t attempt this dangerous scheme anymore. The trick itself was brilliant, but if he kept filching valuable weapons from other players, someone was going to notice. Depending on who that person was, Nezha might find himself on the wrong end of an ugly lynch mob. The worst possible outcome was if all the players decided he ought to be executed and it became a precedent for how to deal with such crimes. I wasn’t of the mind that Nezha should be forgiven for his part in this. Rufiol and Shivata had lost their beloved swords … and even though it was returned in the end, Asuna cried at the loss of her Wind Fleuret. They deserved to see some kind of justice. But that punishment must not be the murder of another player. If that was allowed once, it would lead to pure anarchy—squabbles over hunting grounds and loot would be solved with violence rather than words. I’d taken on the scarlet letter of the beater to prevent the retail players from purging the former beta testers. That sacrifice couldn’t go to waste. My solution to this was to demand that Nezha either function as a proper, honest blacksmith from now on, or to give up his smithing hammer and become a warrior. Asuna and I had talked it over and decided on this choice. Once the source of their ill-gotten wealth dried up, the Legend Braves would sink back to a level appropriate to their skill. I stood there, lost in thought, sword dangling from my right hand, when the blacksmith spoke in a tiny voice. “… I suppose this isn’t something that a simple apology will atone for.” Nezha’s body and voice were scrunched up in such a compact form that it seemed as though he were trying to disappear entirely. “… It would be nice if I could return the swords I stole from all those people … but I can’t. Nearly all of them were turned into money. The only thing I can do now is … is this!” His voice reached a shriek by the end. He unsteadily got to his feet. The smithing hammer fell from his hand, and he took off running without a backward glance. But he didn’t get farther than a few feet. A new player descended upon his exit path, long hair gleaming in the streetlamps beneath a wool hood: Asuna the fencer. She’d jumped out the second-story window of an empty house and blocked his path, lecturing sternly. “You won’t solve anything by dying.” This time, Nezha recognized the face within the hood immediately. She was the female fencer whose Wind Fleuret he’d (temporarily) stolen three days earlier. His already-timid face crumpled even further. I was the very model of an imperceptive dunce, and even I could feel the powerful guilt, despair, and abandon raging within him. Nezha turned his face down and away from Asuna, as though trying to escape her gaze. His voice was strained. “… I decided right from the start … that if someone discovered my fraud, I’d die in atonement.” “Suicide is a heavier crime than fraud in Aincrad. Stealing weapons might be a betrayal of your customer, but suicide is a betrayal of every player working to defeat this game.” Her eloquence was every bit as sharp and piercing as her Linear. Nezha trembled and tensed—and his face shot upward as though on a spring. “It’ll happen anyway! I’m such a slow, clumsy oaf, I’ll die eventually! Whether I get killed by monsters or kill myself, the only difference is whether it happens sooner or later!” I couldn’t stifle a small chuckle at those last words. Asuna glared daggers at me. Nezha’s teary face looked hurt among the desperation, so I put up both hands and tried to apologize. “Sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just that it was the exact same thing this lady here said just a week ago…” “Huh…?” Nezha, wide-eyed and bewildered, looked at Asuna again. He took several breaths, then finally worked up the will to ask, “Um… are you…Asuna, from the front-line fights?” “Huh…?” Now it was Asuna’s turn to blink in surprise. “How did you know?” “Well, the fencer in the hooded cape is pretty well-known around here. You’re the only female player on the frontier …” “… Oh … I see …” She sounded very conflicted and shrank back beneath her hood. I took a few steps closer and offered some advice. “Sounds like your disguise is actually starting to identify you. Maybe you should try something else, before you get stuck with a nickname like Little Gray Riding Hood.” “Mind your own beeswax! I happen to like this hood! Besides, it’s nice and warm!” “Oh … I see.” I wisely chose not to ask her what would happen when the weather got warm again. Instead, I glanced at the stunned Nezha. I couldn’t overcome the urge to ask him a follow-up question. “So, erm… Do you know who I am…?” It wasn’t because I was interested in finding out how famous I was around the game. This was purely research to see how far the stories about “the first beater” had spread from that initial front-line squad. “Um, well … I-I’m afraid I don’t …” My reaction was equal parts relief and shock. That conflict must have showed on my face, for Asuna patted me on the shoulder. “There, what have I always told you? Stop worrying about it so much.”
“But … I really like that bandanna.” “Tell you what—I’ll give you your own nickname. How about the Ukrainian Samurai?” “Wh …why Ukrainian?” “That bandanna’s got blue and yellow stripes, just like the Ukrainian flag. I guess you could also be the Swedish Samurai, if you prefer.” “… Sorry, can I choose neither?” Nezha listened to our back-and-forth in timid silence, then worked up the nerve to interject. “Um, pardon me … Is what you said true? Did Asuna really say she would die eventually …?” It was obviously a difficult thing for her to answer. I tried to smooth things over by answering for her in as light and breezy a tone as I could. “Oh, yeah, yeah. It was wild, she just passed out right in front of me during a four-day camp-and-hunt expedition in the labyrinth. I couldn’t just leave her there, and I didn’t have the strength level yet to carry a player, so I had to take a sleeping bag and—” Shunk. Asuna slammed her heel down hard on my toes to shut me up. She composed herself and said quietly, “To be honest, that feeling hasn’t disappeared. We’re only on the second floor, and there are a hundred. There’s a constant conflict inside me between my desire to get that far, and resignation that I’ll probably fall along the way. But …” Her hazel eyes shone bright from the shade of her hood. While the brightness of that shine was no different from what I saw that first day in the labyrinth, it seemed to me that the nature of it had changed. “… But I’ve decided that I’m not fighting in order to die. Maybe I’m not quite optimistic enough to say that I’m doing it to live, to beat the game … but I’ve found one simple goal to strive toward. That’s what I’m fighting for.” “Oh… really? What’s your goal, to eat an entire cake of that Tremble Shortcake?” I asked earnestly. Asuna sighed for some reason and said, “Of course not.” She turned to Nezha again. “I’m sure you can find your own reason. It’s already inside of you. Something you ought to fight for. I mean, you left the Town of Beginnings on your own two feet, didn’t you?” “…” Nezha looked down, but his eyes were not closed. He was staring at the leather boots on his feet. I realized that they were not non-functional shoes for wearing in town, but actual leather armor. “… It’s true. There was something,” he mumbled. Amid the resignation, it sounded like a tiny kernel of some kind, a burning ambition. But he shook his head several times, as if trying to extinguish the flame. “But it’s gone now. It was gone before I even got here. That happened the day I bought this NerveGear. When I … when I tried the first connection test, I got an FNC …” FNC. Full-Dive Nonconformity. The full-dive machine was an extremely delicate apparatus that sent signals back and forth to the brain with ultra-weak microwaves. It had to be finely tuned to work with each individual user. But of course, they were producing thousands and thousands of units for mass-market use, and they couldn’t spend ages of time on fine maintenance. The machine had an automatic calibration system that went through a long and tedious connection test on first use. Once that was done and it knew the player’s settings, you could dive in just by turning on the unit. But on very rare occasions, a person received a “nonconforming” response during that initial test. Perhaps one of the five senses wasn’t functioning properly, or there was a slight lag in the communication with the brain. In most cases it was merely a slight obstacle, but there were a few people who simply could not dive at all. If he was here in Aincrad, Nezha’s FNC couldn’t have been that serious—but he would have been luckier if it had prevented him from playing. He wouldn’t be trapped in this game of death. We packed up all the tools and items into the carpet and moved to an empty house near the plaza to continue hearing out Nezha’s story. “In my case, I have hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but there’s an issue with my sight …” As he spoke, Nezha reached out to the cup of tea Asuna left for him on the round table. But he did not immediately grab it—he reached his fingers closer, and only when his fingertip brushed the handle did he carefully lift it up. “It’s not that I’m entirely blind, but I have a binocular dysfunction. It’s hard for me to grasp distance. I can’t really tell how far my avatar’s hand is from the object.” For an instant, I thought this didn’t seem so bad … but I soon reconsidered. If SAO was an orthodox fantasy MMORPG, Nezha’s disability wouldn’t be such a big deal. There were classes that had auto-hitting long-range attacks—a mage, for example. But SAO didn’t even have archers, much less mages. Every player who fought in the game did so with a weapon in his hand. And whether sword, axe, or spear, the ability to judge distance, to tell exactly how far away the monster was, made all the difference in the world. The very cornerstone of combat here was understanding, on a physical level, how far your weapon could reach. Nezha took a sip of tea and carefully returned the cup to the saucer. He smiled hollowly. “Even hitting a stationary weapon on top of an anvil with my short little hammer is extremely difficult …” “So that was why you carried out the steps of the process so painstakingly.” “Yes, that’s why. Of course, I did also feel apologetic toward the swords I was breaking … but …” He looked back and forth at me and Asuna, smiling weakly. “It might not be right for me to say this, but … I’m impressed that you saw through my switching trick. But it wasn’t just today … you remotely retrieved Asuna’s Wind Fleuret plus four three days ago. So you must have known then …” “Oh, at that point it was just a suspicion. At the time I noticed, the hour limit to maintain ownership was nearly up, so I had to burst into Asuna’s bedroom and force her to use the Materialize All Items command, then—” I felt a piercing stare from the right and narrowly avoided spilling the beans on what her inventory contained. “—the Fleuret came back. That was when I knew you’d committed fraud … but it was two days ago that I figured out you were using Quick Change to pull it off. The key was in your name, Nezha … or should I say, Nataku.” “… !!” Nezha (or Nataku) sucked in a sharp breath. His fists clenched and he even lifted up out of his seat for a moment. When he sat again, he looked straight down in shame. “… I had no idea you’d figured that out, too …” “Well, that required an information dealer to discover. I mean, even your friends in the Legend Braves were calling you Nezuo. It means they didn’t know either, did they? Why you’re named after Nataku.” “Just call me Nezha. I picked that spelling because I wanted people to call me that,” the blacksmith said. He nodded and began to explain. “Yes, you’re correct …” Nataku. Also known as Na-zha, or Prince Nata. He was a boy god in the Ming period fantasy novel, Fengshen Yanyi. He used a variety of magical weapons called paopei and flew through the sky on two wheels. He was every bit the legendary hero as Orlando or Beowulf. In the Western alphabet, the Chinese name was transliterated to “Nezha,” but only a true fanatic of Eastern mythology would recognize that as a reference to Nataku. It would be especially difficult here in Aincrad, without any Internet search engines. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of brain trust Argo had in her network of contacts. At any rate, when I saw the blacksmith’s true name at the end of her write-up on the Legend Braves, I finally had an epiphany. He did not join this game intending to be a crafter. He tried to be a fighter, but due to his circumstances, he was eventually forced to become a blacksmith. However, that meant that despite playing as a smith now, his weapon skills might already be above a certain level. Following that line of logic, I eventually hit upon the possibility that he was using the battle skill mod Quick Change to switch out weapons, and the rest was history. “The Legend Braves are a team we formed for a different NerveGear action game, three months before SAO came out,” Nezha explained after another sip of tea. “It was a very simple game, where you used swords and axes to fight off monsters in a straight-line map, and tried to get the high score … but even that was difficult for me. Because I had no perspective, I’d swing when the monsters were too far away, and then they’d come in close and hit me. The team could never get into the top ranks because of me. It wasn’t like I knew Orlando and the others in real life, so I probably should have left the team or quit playing the game … but …” He clenched his fists again, his voice trembling. “… No one told me to leave the team, so I used that as an excuse to stick around. It wasn’t because I liked that game. It was because we decided that we’d all switch over to the very first VRMMO, Sword Art Online, when it came out in three months. I really, really wanted to try out SAO. But because of the FNC, I didn’t have the guts to start it up on my own. I was … weak. I figured, if I got to be in Orlando’s party in SAO, I might be able to grow stronger … even if I still couldn’t fight that well …” We could only sit in silence as we listened to his painful confession. It would be easy to say that I understood how he felt. The moment I saw the very first trailer for SAO, I swore to myself that I would play this game. Even if I’d had a worse FNC than Nezha, I’d have gone in headfirst, as long as I was able to dive. But I couldn’t say that aloud. I abandoned my very first friend back in the Town of Beginnings—someone seeking help, just like Nezha. However he interpreted my silence, the blacksmith smirked in self-deprecation and continued his tale. “I went by a different name in the previous game … I used a name that anyone would recognize as a hero, like Orlando or Cuchulainn. The reason I changed it to Nezha was a sign of humility, or flattery. I was trying to say, ‘I won’t call myself a great hero like you guys, so can I still stick around?’ When they asked what it meant, I said it was based on my real name—that was a lie, of course. Every time they call me Nezuo, I want to say that it’s still a hero’s name. I don’t know … It’s silly …” Neither I nor Asuna denied or agreed with Nezha’s self-flagellation. Instead, a quiet question emerged from her hood, which was still up, even indoors. “But then things changed when we got trapped in here, didn’t they? You stopped venturing into the fields and switched to crafting. As a blacksmith, you can still support your friends without fighting. But … why would you make the jump to swindling people? Whose idea was it in the first place? Yours? Orlando’s?” She leapt to the point as quickly and accurately as if she were in battle. Nezha had no response. When he did answer, it was a surprise. “It wasn’t me, or Orlando … or any of us.” “Huh …? Then, who?” “For the first two weeks, I tried to cut it as a fighter. There’s one skill, just one, that allows you to fight remotely … I thought I might be able to hack it that way, even without being able to judge distance …” That didn’t seem like it would work to me, but I explained for Asuna’s sake. “Ahh, the Throwing Knives skill. But that’s kind of …” “Yes. I bought as many of the cheapest throwing knives as I could in the Town of Beginnings, hoping to train up my skill, but once I used up my stock, there was nothing I could do. Plus, the stones out in the field you can throw hardly do any damage. So it wasn’t really much use as a main weapon skill … I gave up once my proficiency reached fifty or so. And because the other Braves stuck around to help me with that, we ended up getting off to a slow start …” The Legend Braves’ slow start was probably not due to them helping Nezha train with throwing knives, but because the other beta testers and I rushed off at top speed on the very first day and left everyone in the dust. I had a feeling Asuna would throw me some very dirty looks if I mentioned that, however, so I kept it to myself. “Things got very … tense when I said that I’d give up on learning how to use throwing knives. No one said it out loud, but I’m sure they were all thinking that the guild got off to a slow start because of me. Even after becoming a blacksmith, training a crafting skill takes a lot of money … It seemed like the other guys were just waiting for someone to suggest that they cut me loose and leave me back in the Town of Beginnings.” He bit his lip before continuing, “Really, I should have offered on my own … but I just couldn’t say it. I was afraid of being alone … Anyway, in the corner of the bar where we were talking, someone I thought was just an NPC came up and said, ‘If you’re going to be a blacksmith with some weapon experience, there’s a really cool way to make more money.’ ” “… !” Asuna and I shared a look. It hadn’t occurred to us that the idea for the Quick Change weapon trick came from someone outside of the Legend Braves altogether. “Wh-who was it …?” “I don’t know the name. They only told me how to switch the weapons, and left immediately after that. Haven’t seem ’em since. It was a very … strange person, too. Funny way of talking … funny outfit. Wore a hooded cape like a rain poncho—glossy and black …” “Poncho …?” Asuna and I repeated together. Hooded capes were a fairly common item in fantasy-styled RPGs like SAO—practically a staple of the genre. Asuna herself was wearing one of her own at this very moment, though it was on the shorter side. Just minutes earlier, she had claimed she wore it for its warmth, but the real reason for those hoods was not the ability to keep out the cold and rain but to hide her face. And whoever this man in the black poncho was, he likely wore it for the same reason … Asuna seemed to read my mind, and she pulled back her gray hood with a snort. Even in the empty room, lit only by a single lamp, her gleaming chestnut-brown hair and pale skin seemed to give off a light of their own. Upon seeing her face clearly, Nezha’s wide eyes squinted, as though staring into the sun. Given that player names were not displayed by default in SAO, the main means of recognizing a person was the face, followed by the body. Eventually, the equipment and fighting style of a player might become part of their persona, but at this point in the game, everyone was rapidly switching to newer gear and even changing their main weapon skill. Someone playing a knife-wielding thief in leather armor one day might be a heavy warrior decked out in full plate armor the next. Essentially, with an average build and a concealed face, pretty much anyone could pass anonymously. Even voices could be altered using a few special means, such as the great helm I was wearing when I approached Nezha. But there might be a way to learn more identifying features of this man that taught Nezha how to swindle others. He was still staring at Asuna, so I brought him back to the topic at hand. “About the guy in the black poncho …” “Ah … y-yes?” “How did he demand the margin be paid? I mean, how did he want you to hand over his share of the money you made?” I asked. Asuna nodded in understanding. If they were making cash handoffs, we could stake out the place and catch a glimpse of the man. But Nezha’s answer blew that possibility to smithereens. “Um, actually, he didn’t really say anything …” “Huh? What do you mean?” “Well … like I said, he taught me how to use Quick Change and the Vendor’s Carpet to pull off the weapon-switching trick, but he didn’t say a word about a share, or the payment for his idea, or anything.” “…” Asuna and I stared at each other again, dumbfounded. The trick was brilliant and nearly flawless. I made sure Nezha knew my opinion of it. The trick was certainly possible back in the beta test, but not one of the thousand testers had come up with the idea. Whoever devised it was a creative genius. If Nezha had chosen a player handle based on his own given name, or Asuna hadn’t asked Argo for info on “Nataku,” I would never have figured the trick out. But because of that, it was very jarring to hear that the poncho man who devised this brilliant idea would hand it over without asking for anything in return. If he hadn’t asked for col … what did he stand to gain from giving his idea to the Legend Braves? Clearly it wasn’t out of sheer altruism. It was fraud, a means of ripping off other players. “So you’re saying … he just butted into your conversation, explained how to switch weapons like that, and then disappeared?” Asuna asked. Nezha was about to agree, but he stopped before committing. “Well … Technically, he did say a bit more. A scam is a scam, so Orlando and the others weren’t into the idea at first. They knew it was a crime. But then he just laughed. It wasn’t put on or menacing. It was just a really pleasant laugh, like out of a movie.” “Pleasant … laugh?” “Yes. It was like—like just hearing it made everything seem so unimportant anymore. The next thing I knew, Orlando, Beowulf, all of us were laughing with him. Then he said, ‘We’re in a game, don’t you know? If we weren’t supposed to do something, they’d outlaw it in the programming, right? So anything you can do … you’re allowed to do. Don’t you think?’ ” “Th-that’s total nonsense!” Asuna exploded before Nezha had barely finished. “That would mean you could butt in and attack someone else’s monster, or create a train that attacks someone else, or any other thing that’s completely against proper manners! In fact, since the anti-crime code is turned off outside of towns, that would mean it’s totally okay to—” She stopped mid-sentence as if afraid that saying it out loud might cause it to come true. Without thinking, I reached out and brushed Asuna’s arm, the white skin even paler than usual. In most cases, she would pull several feet away in disgust, but now, that contact grounded her emotions, and the tension drained out of her. I pulled my hand away and asked Nezha, “Was that all the poncho man said?” “Er … yes. We nodded to him, he stood up, said ‘good luck,’ and left the bar. I haven’t seen him since,” he said, his eyes wandering as though searching his memory banks. “Now it all seems very mysterious … After he left, the guild most certainly changed. Everyone seemed very gung ho on the idea. I’m ashamed to admit that I decided I would rather be the centerpiece of the money-making scheme than be relegated to useless baggage, dragging everyone down. But …” Expression flooded back into Nezha’s face. He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced. “But … the first time I tried the trick … when I broke that substitute weapon and saw the look on the customer’s face, I knew. Just because it was possible within the game didn’t make it right. I should have given the real sword back and explained everything … but I didn’t have the guts. When I went back to the hangout bar, I was going to say we should call it quits, but … but when they saw the sword I stole … they were so, so happy, and they said how great I was, and … and … and I just couldn’t—!” Wham! He suddenly slammed his forehead down straight onto the table. Purple light flashed off the walls of the room. He did the same thing again, then again, but his HP were protected by the game code in town. He didn’t know what to do. We’d prevented him from attempting suicide, he had no means of replacing the victims’ belongings, and he couldn’t even return to his friends. If there was one way to atone for his sins, it would be to publicly admit his actions and apologize to the playerbase. But I couldn’t demand that he do it. I couldn’t guarantee that all of the honest, upfront players fighting to free us all from Aincrad, some of whom were his victims, would forgive Nezha for his actions. And I couldn’t imagine the punishments they might devise for him if they didn’t. The only realistic solution I could come up with was to have him go through the teleporter back to the Town of Beginnings and hide himself in that vast city. Or perhaps he could reverse course, going back to fighting, and find some way to contribute through battle. The problem with that was that throwing knives were a total sub-skill, better for nothing more than distracting enemies … But then I remembered a rare piece of loot I had gotten from a difficult Taurus Ringhurler in the labyrinth just earlier that day. It was rare but not particularly valuable, and of no use to me—something very eccentric and long-ranged. “… Nezha.” He raised his forehead off the table an inch. I saw cheeks wet with tears. “What’s your level?” “… I’m level 10.” “Then you’ve still only got three skill slots. What are you using?” “One-Handed Weapon Crafting, Inventory Expansion … and Throwing Knives …” “I see. If I told you that I had a weapon you could use … would you be prepared to give up on crafting? On your Blacksmith skill?”
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