12
MONSTER ATTACKS AGAINST PLAYERS FELL UNDER two general categories. One was direct attacks that dealt HP damage.
The other was indirect attacks that did not cause direct damage but occasionally posed a significant threat—in other words, debuffs.
Akihiko Kayaba, the designer of this game of death, at least had a minimum of sympathy for new players, for he did not grant any of the kobolds in the first-floor labyrinth debuff attacks. The delay effect that led to Diavel’s death was a debuff, in a way, but it was an effect that occurred at a high likelihood when suffering multiple consecutive attacks, and wasn’t a special skill that the kobold lord could use at will.
Which meant that the tauruses that dwelt in the second-floor labyrinth were the player’s first real experience with serious, regular debuffs.
“Here it comes!” I cried, recognizing that the double-handed hammer was being lifted straight aloft.
The rest of my party called out their acknowledgment and jumped backward. The hammer stopped high overhead for an instant, its wide surface glowing with brilliant yellow sparks.
“Vrrroooooo!!”
With a roar so fierce, it might as well have been a long-range attack of its own, the beast brought down the hammer. The mass of metal, rippling with lightning, slammed against the dark stone floor. It was the taurus race’s special debuffing skill, Numbing Impact.
No one was standing within the direct damage range of the blow, of course, but there were also narrow sparking tendrils that extended out from the impact point. One of them shot toward me along the floor, fading out, until it just barely licked the end of my boot.
Instantly, I felt an unpleasant prickle at my toes. Fortunately, I was just outside of the debuff range, so there was no stun icon showing beneath my HP bar. Everyone else kept farther away from the shockwave, so none of them were affected.
“Full-power attack!” I shouted, and the six of us fanned out in a semicircle around the taurus and closed. Each person unleashed the strongest sword skill in their weapon’s repertoire. Agil’s two-handed axe, his crewmates’ similar weapons, Asuna’s Wind Fleuret, and my Anneal Blade blasted the beast with an array of colored lights. The bull-man’s three-part HP gauge finally emptied its first bar and opened the second.
“I think we can do this!” Asuna shouted from her familiar position to my left.
“Yeah, just don’t get overconfident! Once we get to the third bar, he’ll start using consecutive numbing attacks! Plus,” I raised my voice to ensure that Agil’s group heard me, “based on the first-floor battle, we should assume there might be a new attack when we hit that last bar! If that happens, we all pull back!”
“Got it!”
The taurus recovered from its delay at the same time our skill cooldown ended. Agil’s tanks recognized that the next attack would be a sideways blow and took defensive stances along its trajectory. Asuna and I hung back, waiting for the right moment to counter.
Just over five minutes had passed in the battle against the boss.
So far, our team was performing well. None of us had suffered the Numbing Impact effects yet, and none had taken heavy damage. The four tanks were losing HP with each attack they blocked, of course, but the pace of damage was slow enough that we were making do with just a one-man pot rotation so far.
And yet, the fact that our battle was going well meant hardly anything.
The blue-skinned, bull-headed beast that team H faced right now was only Nato the Colonel Taurus, an extra thrown into the boss monster fight … a distraction at worst.
“Evade! Evaaaade!” came a somewhat panicked scream from the other side of the vast boss chamber. When I had the chance, I glanced over the heads of the dozens of players to see a frightfully large shadow.
A bristly, crimson red pelt enveloped rippling muscles. His waist was covered with a luxurious golden cloth, but in keeping with taurus tradition, his upper half was bare. The chain dangling over his shoulders was also made of gold. To top it off, the golden battle hammer in his hands shone with a dazzling brilliance.
Coloring aside, Colonel Nato might as well have been a body double of Baran, but there was one other major difference: size. General Baran, the boss of the second floor, was at least twice the size of Nato.
Because of the physical height limit of the ceilings in the labyrinths of Aincrad, Baran was not as tall as the mammoth Bullbous Bow that prowled the landscape, but there was no escaping the primal fear inspired by a sixteen-foot beastman. Even the kobold lord from the first floor felt huge, and he was only seven feet tall and change.
Naturally, General Baran’s golden hammer was massive as well, its powerful head the size of a barrel. When he lifted it, the surface shot golden sparks. The tanks and attackers pulled back as one, in accordance with Lind’s order.
“Vrrruuuuvraaaaa!!”
Baran’s roar was appropriately twice as fierce as Nato’s, and he smashed the floor. Even at our distance, we could feel the shockwave, which was followed by a burst of sparks. Again, the effective range was twice that of his subordinate. It was Baran’s unique skill, Numbing Detonation.
The queuing-up motion was very easy to identify, but the blast radius was so wide that two members failed to get to a safe distance, and their feet were swallowed by the golden sparks. The lightning wrapped around their limbs and demobilized them—the stun effect, one of the most common debuffs of the many in the game, though not one to be overlooked. The stun effect caused by the taurus’s numbing attacks lasted three seconds, and unlike many debuffs, it wore off automatically.
But while three seconds might not feel long against garden-variety mobs, it was a lifetime against a deadly floor boss. Even at this distance, I was keenly aware of the fear and panic those stunned warriors were feeling.
One second, two seconds … and just before the third, one of the stunned fighters dropped his short spear to clatter onto the ground. It was a fumble, a secondary debuff that sometimes occurred in the midst of a stun. In the next instant, the soldier was free, and the blue-shirted member of Lind’s group bent over to pick up his weapon.
“No—”
Get back, here comes the next one! I wanted to yell, but I held it in. He wouldn’t hear me at this distance, and my companions in team H would confuse it for an order directed at them. After a brief but powerful Slant to Colonel Nato’s ribs, I looked to see General Baran raising his hammer again.
Thwam! A second Numbing Detonation.
The hammer struck the same spot as the last one, and more yellow lightning shot forth. Again, they swallowed the spearman attempting to pick up his weapon.
But while he’d been standing upright last time, he fell down to the floor in this instance. The visual effect that surrounded his avatar was not yellow, but pale green. This was not a stun but a more powerful and dangerous debuff, paralysis.
It was the true terror of the tauruses’ numbing skills—the second hit in succession would turn the stun to a paralyzing effect.
Unlike a stun, paralysis did not disappear after a few seconds. It wasn’t indefinite either, but even the weakest effect would last ten minutes … a full 600 seconds. Obviously, no one could survive a battle while prone for that length of time, so healing items were necessary.
The main methods of recovery were healing potions or purification crystals. The latter were impossible to find until later in the game, so potions were the only choice. However, paralysis left only the dominant hand of the player able to move—and slowly, at that—so even pulling a bottle out of a pouch was a trial. Crawling out of the boss’s attack range was completely out of the question.
I told them not to pick up their weapons but wait until they were sure the boss wasn’t going to attack twice!
But there was no use complaining to myself. Besides, picking up a dropped weapon was just human instinct. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d done the same thing and suffered additional hits during the beta. I only learned to deal with that particular challenge with a cool head once I gained the Quick Change mod so that I could call up a replacement from my inventory.
Baran callously targeted the paralyzed spearman and prepared to stomp him with a massive foot. Fortunately, his party members quickly intervened to pull him out of harm’s way.
I heaved a sigh of relief, but when I saw where they were taking him, my eyes bulged.
Lined up along the back wall were already seven or eight players, clutching green potions in their stiff hands and waiting for the effect to wear off. The entire time that we’d been carefully chipping away at Colonel Nato, a large number of the main force was suffering from secondary numbing.
“Things aren’t going well in the main fight,” Agil rumbled as he returned from his potion rotation.
I quickly responded, “Yes, but the more they fight, the more they’ll get accustomed to the rhythm. I haven’t seen any differences from the beta yet, so I think—”
We’ll be all right, I was about to finish, but Asuna cut me off with a sobering note.
“But Kirito, if any more of them get paralyzed… it’ll make a temporary retreat much harder.”
“… !”
I tensed and clenched the handle of my Anneal Blade. The weapon wouldn’t fall unless I intentionally dropped it (or an external factor caused me to fumble it), but my subconscious was working in overdrive after witnessing the prior scene with the spearman.
The boss chambers in Aincrad, at least as far as I’d seen, did not lock the players inside once the battle had begun. If things got hairy, it was always possible to beat a hasty retreat. That didn’t mean it was a simple matter, of course; there was a considerable distance between the battle zone and the door, so if everyone took off running at once, the boss would catch up to us in no time and cause delays, stunning, and ultimately, death.
So in a way, escaping from the boss chamber required a trickier coordinated effort than actually fighting the adversary. Could we even pull it off, burdened by a large number of paralyzed fighters?
For one thing, lifting an immobile player in your arms to carry them out required a significant strength value. I couldn’t lift Asuna up with my skinny arms when she had passed out in the first-floor labyrinth, so I had had to drag her out using a sleeping bag—an emergency measure still fresh in my memory.
From what I could see, about four-fifths of Lind and Kibaou’s forces were balanced or speed-first fighters, with only a few pure-strength tanks. As Asuna pointed out, if many more players got paralyzed, it would be much harder to disengage.
“We might need to refocus and prioritize dealing with the numbing,” I said, stepping out of the way of a three-part hammer combo from Nato. Asuna nimbly matched my steps beside me.
“I agree. But if we start calling out orders for the main force, it’s only going to confuse the chain of command. We need to get our ideas to Lind’s ears.”
Her hazel eyes darted over the HP of team H, and then Colonel Nato.
“We can handle him with just five. Go and talk to Lind, Kirito.”
“Um… a-are you sure?”
“Yeah, no problem!” boomed Agil, who must have overheard. “The four of us can handle guarding for now! You’ve easily got two or three minutes to go talk with him!”
I turned back to look at the chocolate-skinned warrior and his friends, who seemed resolute, and I made up my mind. The key to defeating Baran was to keep his paralysis out of the equation. The battle was holding up for now thanks to our large number and high average level, but if this was the same party that tackled him in the beta, we’d be wiped out by now.
“All right, just for a bit! I’ll be right back!”
Before I left, I unleashed a Vertical Arc into Nato’s back as he stood frozen after missing with a big attack, and sped off for my target.
I shot across the coliseum-styled chamber, more than a hundred yards across, and headed for the main battle in the back. My pasty, skinny real body back home would be lucky to break fourteen seconds in the hundred-meter dash, but the agility-heavy Kirito crossed the space in ten flat. My bootheels screeched to a halt as I lined up next to a blue cape at the rear.
For a moment, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever been face-to-face with Lind, leader of this raid and former confidant of Diavel the knight.
Ten days earlier, just after we defeated the previous boss, he’d screamed, Why did you abandon Diavel to die? You knew the moves the boss was using! If you’d told us that information to start with, Diavel wouldn’t have died!
I hadn’t apologized. I’d met him with a cold smile.
I’m a beater. Don’t you ever insult my skill by calling me a former tester.
And having said my piece, I had put on the Coat of Midnight I was still wearing, and left the first-floor boss chamber. I hadn’t interacted with Lind since that very moment.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that when I sidled up next to him, Lind’s first reaction was a grimace of disgust. His narrow eyes went wide, his blade-sharp chin trembled, and his thin lips went even thinner.
But that manifestation of his true emotions soon sank back beneath his skin. It bothered me that both he and Kibaou were attempting to mask their true feelings about me—though it also wasn’t my business to care about it—but now was not the time to worry about feelings.
“I ordered you to handle the sub-boss. Why are you—” he growled before I interrupted with the line I’d prepared.
“Let’s regroup. If any more members get paralyzed, it’s going to make escape nearly impossible.”
The raid leader looked back at the seven or eight players waiting to recover, then at the state of the fight itself. Following his lead, I checked the HP bar of General Baran. Out of his five bars, they’d lowered the third to the halfway point—we were already half-done with the boss.
“We’re halfway there. Why would we need to retreat now?”
I had to admit, there was a part of me that thought it would be a waste to give up now. In the ten minutes since we had started the battle, several people had been paralyzed, but no one’s HP had fallen into the red zone, and the pace of our damage against the boss was better than expected. There was more than a small chance that we could continue to press on, and make it through…
But as if seeing through my hesitation, a voice rang out from behind us.
“How’s about we pull back if one more person gets paralyzed?”
I turned around to see Kibaou’s familiar, light-brown spikes of hair. No doubt he was also filled with a powerful disgust at me for being a tried-and-true beta tester, but the look on his face was honest and forthright.
“Everyone’s got the hang of the numbing range and timing. They’re focused, an’ morale is high. We been poundin’ paralysis and healing potions, so if we stop now, we might not have the supplies ta give it another shot until tomorrow.”
“…”
Again, I let my mind race for half a second before reaching a conclusion.
The most important thing here was not the number of tries or the sum of spent resources but human life. We had to succeed without losing anyone. That was the first rule of any boss battle in Aincrad.
But Lind and Kibaou already knew that. And if the leader and sub-leader of the raid decided that we could still win, the only thing that a single fighter from an outlying party would do by disagreeing was sabotage the chain of command—obviously, a bad decision. And on top of that, my own instincts were telling me that if we could just maintain our current progress, we could defeat Baran without any casualties.
“All right, one more. Just be careful when we get down to the last HP gauge,” I said. Kibaou growled in acknowledgment and turned back to his station. Lind nodded silently and resumed his command.
“Team E, prepare to retreat! Team G, prepare to advance! Switch at the next stagger!” he ordered as I turned back and crossed the coliseum to rejoin team H.
Asuna wasted no time in asking, “What happened?!”
“We’ll pull back if one more person gets paralyzed! But at our current pace, we can probably make it!”
“I see …” She briefly looked upset and glanced over at the main battle, but grudgingly agreed with the decision. “All right. In that case, let’s finish off this blue guy quick, so we can join the others.”
“Yeah!”
Having reached a rapid consensus, we turned back to see that Colonel Nato had just unleashed a massive attack that was expertly blocked by Agil’s group. There was just a bit over one full HP bar left. With perfect precision, we hit the beast with sword skills to either flank.
That attack brought Nato to his final HP bar, and the blue-skinned minotaur bellowed up at the ceiling. He stamped the ground with hooves as big as buckets, then hunched over to expose his horns and tensed like a coiled spring. It was a new pattern to this fight, but not one I’d never seen before.
“He’s gonna charge! Watch the tail, not the head! He’ll go along that diagonal!”
Nato turned to his left and charged right for Agil. But the axe-warrior, poised and prepared, easily dodged out of the way and unloaded his double-handed combo, Whirlwind. He stepped back, and Asuna and I switched in to continue the onslaught. The damage was so great that spinning yellow rings appeared over the colonel’s head, and he began to wobble. We’d inflicted our own stun status on him.
“Now’s our chance! Everyone use two full-power attacks!!”
“Raaah!!”
All six of us surrounded the taurus and pummeled him with flashes of light in red, blue, and green. His HP bar lost refreshingly large chunks in quick succession and soon plunged into the yellow zone that signified less than half remained.
Our full attack a success, we held distance once more, and the taurus’s skin turned purple as he raged even louder. This berserk state before he died was, again, the same as in the beta. His attack speed was half again as fast as before, but with a calm head, this was not an issue.
On the other side of the chamber, the players let out a roar. I nearly lost my balance for a moment before I realized it was a cry of high spirits. General Baran’s final HP bar had gone yellow as well. Meanwhile, the number of paralyzed along the wall had not risen but had shrunk to five.
“It’s a good thing there weren’t any surprises since the beta,” Asuna opined to me while we waited for our skills to cool down behind Agil’s protective wall. I looked back to the battle at hand and nodded.
“Yeah. But if we’d been paying attention against the kobold lord, we’d have noticed that the weapon on his back was a katana, not a talwar. And General Baran hasn’t changed an inch from the beta. So …”
I suddenly realized that a shadow had passed across Asuna’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Um…nothing. I’m just overthinking things … I was just noticing that it’s weird the first-floor boss was a lord, but the second one is only a …”
Ga-gong!
A sudden crash interrupted our conversation. We all turned as one to the source of the sound—the center of the coliseum chamber.
But there was nothing there. Only a series of concentric floor rings made of blackish stone …
No. It was moving. The three circles of paving stones were sliding, rotating counterclockwise and slowly picking up speed. The stones were rising from the floor before my eyes, elevating into a three-step stage at the center of the room.
Suddenly, the view of the far wall over the center platform began to waver.
“Uh-oh…” I grunted. That was the visual effect that signaled a very large object being generated into the map. As I feared, the wavering in the air rapidly spread and began to generate a thick, menacing shadow at the center.
The shadow soon coalesced into a humanoid form and grew two legs thick as tree trunks that thudded heavily onto the stage. Sturdy, dark chainmail covered the figure’s waist, but its torso was, as usual, bare. This one had a long, twisted beard that hung down to its stomach. The head was that of a bull, but it had six horns instead of two, and atop the center of its head was a round accessory of silvery platinum—a crown.
The mammoth figure, so black it might as well have been painted with ink, reared back, and the third and largest of the tauruses let out a roar. Flashes of lightning spread around the minotaur, filling the chamber with blinding light.
Finally, a six-part HP bar appeared so high in my field of view that it seemed to be stuck to the ceiling. I gazed dully at the letters that appeared.
Asterios the Taurus King.
Keep your mind moving! Think! I told myself so hard that if I wasn’t gritting my teeth, I’d have spoken the words aloud.
It was clear what had just happened. General Baran, whom every player present, including me, had assumed was the second-floor boss, was just as much an opening act as Colonel Nato.
Baran’s final HP bar turning yellow must have been the trigger to generate the true boss—the pitch-black King Asterios. But speculation about the origin of the creature was pointless. What mattered was what we did next.
There was no need to think. We had to retreat out of the chamber. We didn’t even know how this monster would attack… and the risks of fighting this taurus king were clearly far greater than that of the general.
The problem was that Asterios had spawned in the center of the chamber, and the raid party was fighting in the back of the room. The group would need to charge through his attack range in order to reach the exit. Team H, fighting Colonel Nato, was the closest to the exit, and we could probably make it out safely now, if we broke for it … but if we did that, and teams A through G were wiped out by the king, our chances of beating this game of death disappeared along with them.
How to evacuate a forty-seven-man raid party? The first step was eliminating our present foes as quickly as possible.
Time seemed to spring back into motion once our path became clear, and I promptly raised my sword high and shouted, “All units, all-out attack!!”
I tore my eyes away from Asterios atop his three-step stage, and fixed a gaze on the berserk Colonel Nato. I leapt as hard as I could, following the path of his hammer as he raised it behind him.
As a speed-focused swordsman with no heavy metal armor, I could jump about six feet from a standing position. Nato was closer to seven or eight feet, but with the added reach of my sword, I could easily get to his head.
My Slant skill hit the shining black horns directly. Nato’s attack motion stopped partway, and he reared back and roared. The tauruses of the second-floor labyrinth, excepting only a few (say, the Taurus Ironguard, which wore a heavy metal helm), were weak to blows to the horns. I hadn’t tried to strike their foreheads at any point until now because jumping attacks were inherently risky, and even a clean hit from a sword skill was no guarantee that the opponent would suffer a movement delay. But this situation called for desperate measures.
At the exact moment I landed, Asuna and Agil’s team followed up with attacks of their own, knocking Nato’s HP into the red zone. His delay wore off, and the minotaur roared and began his motion for a numbing skill. In any other case, now was the time to pull back, but I pushed forward.
“Raaah!”
With a roar of my own, I unleashed my very best Horizontal. Even if I hit the beast’s weak point, I couldn’t stagger the creature on consecutive attacks, but it wasn’t the forehead I was aiming for—it was Nato’s giant hammer. The timing window was extremely short, but if I hit his sword skill with one of my own just before he fired it off, it was possible to cancel the attacks out.
There was a piercing clang that seemed to strike directly into the center of my brain, and my sword shot backward. Meanwhile, the hammer was pushed back overhead. Without missing their chance, my five companions proceeded to launch another wave of attacks. Only a few pixels of HP remained.
Under normal circumstances, chaining sword skills together was impossible. But I knew from our hunting of the Windwasps the other day that you could get past that limitation if you used weapons of different categories. I curled up in midair and kicked out with my left foot. The resulting Crescent Moon, a vertical kick attack as I spun backward, caught Nato right on the forehead.
The taurus hurtled backward and let out a high-pitched screech before freezing stiff, then exploding into a massive cloud of polygons. It must have been treated as a proper sub-boss, not just a typical mob, because I promptly saw a Last Attack bonus readout. I didn’t have time for that, however; I spun around as I hit the ground.
The first thing I saw across the room was a towering ebony back. King Asterios was on the move. Fortunately, he hadn’t targeted any of the five paralyzed along the east wall, but his destination was the thirty-six remaining fighters of the main party—who were still busy with General Baran.
My worst fear was that the main force would fall into total panicked chaos and retreat if faced by a boss on either side. Fortunately, that was not happening. But very soon, his lumbering steps would take him within attack range of the raid. We had to defeat the general before then.
“Let’s go, Kirito!” said Asuna, her voice tense. But I wasn’t sure if I should agree. It wasn’t that I was afraid for my own life—for some reason that I couldn’t explain, I was gripped with a sudden feeling that once I set foot into the battle ahead, I could not guarantee that she’d survive.
I knew damn well just how good Asuna was. I wasn’t even sure if I could beat her in a one-on-one duel. But there was no denying my urge to force her to escape right there and then.
After I had abandoned my first and only friend at the start of this game, and was nearly killed by a fellow beta tester just hours later, I had sworn to live as a solo player, relying on no one but myself. The week that we had just spent as a partnership-of-sorts was only a means to uncovering and stopping Nezha’s fraud. Nothing more.
So why was I being ruled by this emotion… this sentimentality?
Why was I so desperate to keep Asuna from dying?
“Asuna, you need …”
To run, I wanted to say—but I saw the powerful light in her hazel eyes. They told me that she knew full well what I was thinking. Her eyes were full of an emotion that was neither anger nor sadness but something even purer. Again, she said, “Let’s go.”
She was asking me why I’d run toward her when I realized the taurus’s breath attack was coming, rather than darting directly out of harm’s way. I wondered what the answer was myself, but it did not become apparent. All I could say was “I don’t know.”
And for reasons that were once again a mystery to me, she smiled gently, closed her eyes, and set her hooded head against my shoulder.
I looked over Asuna’s back to see Asterios raising his massive hammer high overhead. The crushing implement, twice as large as even Baran’s, was aimed right at Lind and Kibaou.
So this is it, I told myself.
If our two leaders died, the rest of the raid party would flee out of the boss chamber, leaving behind the ten or so paralyzed, including me and Asuna, to die … But at some later point in time, they would be able to use the information gleaned from Asterios’s appearance and attacks to launch a second attempt.
The worst regret of all this was that I wasn’t able to save Asuna and her limitless potential. As I’d told her after the first-floor boss, she could have one day led an enormous guild and been a leader to the player population. Like a shooting star, endlessly lighting up the sky of this dark, hopeless game of death.
I hallucinated a strange light, passing across the ceiling of the dim chamber.
But even after opening my eyes wider, the shining arc did not disappear. It reached an apex and began to fall, heading right for the crown on Asterios’s brow as he was preparing to swing his hammer …
It wasn’t until a high-pitched squeal of metal rang through the coliseum and Asterios lurched in pain that I realized the light wasn’t a trick of the eye.
That was a long-range attack that shouldn’t have been possible at this point in SAO, a sword skill under the Throwing Knife category. But the thrown weapon didn’t simply fall to the ground after hitting the boss’s weak point; it spun around and flew back across the room, as though pulled by an invisible string.
Asterios recovered from his delay and roared in anger, making a slow turn back to his attacker. That was the first actual hit on the boss, so it automatically drew the enemy’s attention.
Suddenly, a powerful set of arms pulled me and Asuna off the floor. The mighty warrior, holding two people aloft without any help, spoke in a deep baritone.
“Sorry about that! I actually got a little spooked!”
Agil the axe-warrior carried us over to the eastern wall. His three companions were also busy moving paralyzed party members to a safer position. As if brought to their senses, the remainders of the blue and green teams raced over to the other immobilized fighters.
I tried to crane my neck up so I could see as he ferried us under his arms like suitcases. As we moved, the southern side of the coliseum came into view behind the boss’s massive bulk.
About thirty feet from the entrance, a small figure clutching a bizarre weapon was staring up at the looming giant with a resolute look on his face.
“Isn’t that—?!” Agil cried in surprise as he dropped us on the floor against the wall. And it wasn’t just him—virtually everyone in the chamber was staring with shock at this new, forty-eighth player.
Not because he had suddenly appeared just before the boss routed us, or because he used a strange and unfamiliar weapon. It was because we had all seen this man hammering away at an anvil in the eastern plaza of Taran just a few days ago. It was Nezha the blacksmith.
He was dressed much differently now, of course. The brown leather apron was replaced by a bronze breastplate, gauntlets of the same material, and an open-faced helmet. But the image of a beardless dwarf that his short, stocky build and round, dour face created hadn’t been neutralized by this new look; if anything, his outfit accentuated it.
The entire raid was shocked that a blacksmith would be here, participating in the boss raid, with only two exceptions: Asuna and me, the ones who’d convinced him to change careers in the first place. I was surprised as well, of course, but only because I hadn’t expected him to be able to charge straight through the labyrinth alone, after just three days of training.
But there were others here who would be shocked in a much different way from the rest of us. As soon as the thought occurred to me, a group rushed forward from the raid party in the center of the room. They came to a stop once they reached an angle that gave them a clear view of Nezha’s face around the side of the boss. It was team G … the Legend Braves.
“Nez…”
Orlando started to call the name of his missing partner, but he held back at the last instant. It seemed the Braves were still trying to hide the fact that Nezha was part of their guild.
For an instant, Nezha looked back at his silent former companions with a pained look, but he composed himself and yelled, “I’ll draw the boss away! Get everyone back on their feet now, while you can!”
Asterios’s walking speed—for the first of his many HP bars, at least—was quite slow. If Nezha used the hundred-yard hall effectively, he could probably continue to occupy the enemy’s attention all by himself. If he held out until all of the paralyzed had recovered, we might be able to evacuate the entire raid group safely…
But no. It wouldn’t work. The boss moved slowly, yes, but he had that instantaneous lightning breath to make up for it. There was no way to dodge that onslaught on your very first encounter with it. And based on the moment of Nezha’s appearance, he probably hadn’t seen Asterios’s first attack.
“Agil, warn him about …”
The breath attack, I wanted to say, but I was already too late. Asterios stopped still and pulled his head back again, sucking in breath. His chest puffed up into a round ball, and little sparks crackled out of his nostrils. Nezha was standing still, looking up at the boss’s head.
“Move …” I rasped.
“Get out of the way!!” someone in the raid shouted. But Nezha nimbly leapt aside before the words were even out of his mouth. The next instant, a brilliant cone of white lightning shot from the boss’s gaping mouth. The breath attack reached nearly to the exit of the room, but Nezha was clear of its path by a good six feet.
The way he moved… Did he know exactly when to dodge?
My eyes went wide, and I suddenly heard a very familiar voice… but not one I would have expected to hear here, of all places.
“The boss’s eyes glow just before the breath attack.”
I looked up from the floor, stunned, to see the tile pattern on the wall warp out of place. An even smaller figure than Nezha appeared out of thin air. My mouth fell open (as did Asuna’s and Agil’s, if I had to guess) as I stared at that familiar whiskered face—Argo the Rat, the information dealer.
It was only afterward that I learned that she’d undertaken a series of quests beginning in the jungle outside the labyrinth that eventually earned her information on Asterios the Taurus King, the true boss of this floor. She learned not just his attack patterns, but the best way to counteract him—such as staggering him with a thrown weapon to the crown atop his head.
When Argo discovered that quest, she zipped around turning in objectives, and only finished just after the raid party entered the labyrinth. Messages couldn’t reach anyone in a dungeon, and it was a question whether Argo and her agility-heavy build could make it through the labyrinth alone.
As she wavered with indecision outside the tower, she happened across Nezha, who was also preparing to brave the dangers of the labyrinth alone. They worked together—using Argo’s Hiding skill and Nezha’s throwing weapons to avoid or lure mobs out of their way—and reached the boss chamber just before Asterios appeared and threw the battle into chaos.
“Why are you still lying around? You’re not paralyzed anymore,” Argo said. I finally noticed that the paralysis icon beneath my HP bar was gone. I sprang to my feet and sprinted over to the Anneal Blade where it lay after I was hit by the breath attack. Asuna’s Wind Fleuret was also nearby, so I brought them both back to the wall. I considered whether or not to address what Asuna said while we were on the ground, then decided it wasn’t the right moment.
A quick look around told me that nearly everyone else had recovered from their paralysis. Lind and Kibaou were on their feet, but I saw Argo marching over toward them. For an instant, I even forgot that Nezha was single-handedly keeping the boss occupied.
Argo the Rat was, along with me, one of the most prominent publicly known beta testers in the game, and Lind and Kibaou were leaders of the anti-tester movement. As I expected, Lind didn’t even pretend to hide his disgust, while Kibaou’s expression was more uneasy and uncertain.
“Hey, spiky. Long time no see,” Argo greeted Kibaou, ignoring Lind entirely. That’s when it hit me.
Kibaou was the very man who’d attempted to buy my Anneal Blade through Argo. It was the kind of shady dealing that no leader would want associated with him, and Argo could sell the details to anyone who paid the price.
He didn’t respond to her greeting, so she continued, “If you’re gonna pull out, better do it now. But if you want info, I can sell it to you. For the low, low price of … nothing.”
The moment Asterios’s lightning breath hit Lind and Kibaou, they were at the greatest risk of dying of anyone in the raid. So it was a bit of a surprise to me that after just a few seconds of deliberation, they chose to continue the fight. Of course, we wouldn’t know if that was the right choice or not until the end of the fight. But the tables had turned significantly since the moment just after the boss appeared. Nezha had successfully pulled Asterios’s aggro for over two minutes, giving the rest of the raid enough time to recover from paralysis and refill their HP. On top of that, now we had the details on the boss’s patterns.
“All right, let’s begin the attack! Teams A and D, forward!” Lind ordered. The heavily armored tanks rushed in at King Asterios. Their body-blow charge hit him in the legs, finally drawing his attention away from Nezha.
Instantly, he started to sway, as though all of the tension keeping him upright had snapped. Asuna and I raced over.
“Nezha!”
The former blacksmith looked up, his expression as weak as usual … but with a new core of strength behind his smile. He held up the throwing weapon in his right hand.
It was the weapon I’d given him—a thick, bladed, circular throwing tool about eight inches across. The only way to get it at this point was as a rare drop from the Taurus Ringhurler enemies in this labyrinth. It fell under the Chakram subcategory of throwing knives, but unlike the actual chakrams from ancient India, this one had a leather grip along part of the circle. The grip made it useful for both throwing like a disc, or augmenting a punch like a set of brass knuckles.
Because of that versatility, chakrams in SAO couldn’t be used with the Throwing Knives skill alone. They also required the mastery of Martial Arts, the extra skill that could only be learned from the bearded master hidden deep in the mountains.
As he said himself three days ago, he could hit monsters with a thrown weapon without having to worry too much about his perspective issues. But orthodox throwing knives were a quantifiable weapon that ran out over time and weren’t suited for a main weapon. But the chakram was like a boomerang: It returned to the thrower’s hand automatically. Thanks to that, he didn’t need to worry about ammunition.
Nezha steadied his weary legs and held up his chakram. The blade was glowing yellow. Even though I was the one who’d given him the weapon, I didn’t know the name of this sword skill.
“Yaah!”
With a powerful cry, his hand flashed, and the sparkling ring flew high in the air. It raced across the ceiling, a brilliant burst of light, and hit Asterios on the crown with perfect accuracy as he raised his giant hammer. There was another high-pitched clang, and the boss’s muscled torso writhed. One of the attackers in Kibaou’s team shouted, “Nice!” from the taurus king’s feet.
The chakram hurtled back with alarming speed and smacked right back into Nezha’s hand, thanks to the assistance of the game engine. He turned to me and Asuna and smiled again as though he were about to burst into tears.
“It’s like a dream come true. Here I am… in the boss battle, playing a role …”
His voice quavered and died out there. Nezha swallowed and tried again.
“I’ll be fine! Go ahead and join the battle!”
“All right. Do your best to read his lightning breath ahead of time and stagger him before he uses it. You’re the key to our victory!”
I turned around and saw not just Asuna but Agil and his band of hearty toughs, ready for action.
Wasn’t Agil supposed to be the leader of this team? I’ll have to apologize to him later for taking over.
I shouted an order to the group. “Let’s go!”
They echoed my call, and we headed for the unceasing series of sword flashes centered around our foe.
The true boss of the second floor of Aincrad, Asterios the Taurus King, was a third bigger than even Baran the General Taurus. His paralyzing lightning breath had terrified us momentarily, but with Argo’s knowledge of his patterns, the group had devised a safe and steady strategy that was chipping away at his health.
The greatest role in the battle was undoubtedly Nezha and his throwing weapon, but it soon became clear that the single strongest group was team G—not Lind or Kibaou’s forces, but the Legend Braves.
Like General Baran, Asterios used the area-effect skill Numbing Detonation, but Orlando and his team were able to take the numbing effects at very close range without ever being stunned. When the king lifted his mighty hammer, the other groups had to evacuate to safety, but team G stayed right on him, continuing their assault without fear of his detrimental attacks. Even Lind had no idea when to give the order for them to retreat.
All of the Braves had high debuff resistance, thanks to their heavily upgraded gear. The unfortunate truth was that they’d “earned” the money for that herculean task through Nezha’s upgrading scam, but now that Nezha was no longer a blacksmith, there was no longer any chance that they’d take the heat for it.
“… It’s a complicated feeling, isn’t it?” Asuna mumbled when we retreated temporarily to drink healing potions.
“Yeah. But at least they shouldn’t be able to do it anymore,” I replied, referring to the weapon-switching fraud. “If they’re able to help us advance through the game like this, we’ll just have to accept it. I still feel bad for those who lost their weapons, though.”
“Yeah …”
She still looked conflicted, so I took her mind off things by leaning in close and sharing an idea.
“Y’know, I don’t really feel like letting them win the battle MVP, so how about we fight back a little bit? If the timing permits it, of course.”
“Fight back …?”
I lifted the edge of her hood and whispered into her ear. Asuna’s eyes looked skeptical and exasperated, but she nodded in agreement. When she pulled the hood back up over her head, I thought I detected a hint of a smile on her lips, but I couldn’t peer in close for a second look.
“Hey, Kirito,” Agil rumbled from behind, with an odd tone in his voice and an empty bottle in his hand, “You said you weren’t a pair, right?”
Asuna straightened up and pivoted on her heel. Her voice was frosty.
“We are not.”
Fortunately, I didn’t need to weigh in on the topic, because a cheer broke out from the direction of the battle. Asterios’s last HP bar had gone red. Our team’s HP had just hit maximum again, which was perfect timing.
“Team E, pull back! Team H, up forward!” Lind commanded. I held up my free hand and clenched my Anneal Blade +6. Even if it was our turn in the rotation, it spoke to Lind’s fairness as a leader that he didn’t try to hold me back.
“Okay, hang on,” I said, waiting for the right timing. “Go!”
We darted in to take the place of green team E along the boss’s left flank. First, Asuna and I traded off with single skills against those tree-trunk legs. The monster roared in rage and swiped at us, which Agil and his friends blocked as they switched in.
Asterios’s size was certainly frightening, but on the other hand, the larger a monster was, the more people could attack it at once. One full party was all that could fight Colonel Nato at a time, while two could tackle General Baran, and King Asterios was large enough for three at once.
Team H took the left side, blue team B handled him front and center, and Orlando’s team G was still tearing away at his right flank. The king’s black skin was burning through like coal, a sign of his berserk state, but we were on pace to finish him off with this set.
“Vrrruaaraagh!!”
With a terrible, primal roar, Asterios began to suck in air again. I didn’t need to see the sparks around his mouth to know he was preparing his breath attack. But just as quickly as he started, the chakram flew in and struck him on the crown. Lightning exploded harmlessly from the king’s nostrils.
If this was a normal MMO, that 100-percent-guaranteed stagger from the chakram would get nerfed to oblivion, I thought to myself, referring to the practice of reducing its power to restore proper game balance.
Floor bosses in SAO were a one-time affair—once defeated, they would never return. If Akihiko Kayaba was indeed watching over the battle from afar, would he be gnashing his teeth at the sight of his guardian, unable to stay poised long enough to unleash its best attack? Or would he be applauding the ingenuity (and luck) of the players who hit upon this unlikely strategy?
We’re going to beat your second floor in just ten days, Kayaba! I thought triumphantly. A glance at the king’s HP bar showed just a tiny sliver of red about to disappear. He raged even harder, stomping three times in succession before raising his hammer. Team B pulled back, recognizing the Numbing Detonation motion, while team G readied their best sword skills.
If the Legend Braves seized the Last Attack bonus here, they’d go from the backup force during the Bullbous Bow fight to the best fighters in the game. But I wasn’t charitable enough to sit back and let them reap those rewards. I had a beater reputation to uphold.
“Now, Asuna!”
I leapt as high as I could. The fencer kept right up with me—in fact, her jumping speed was faster than mine. The force ripped the hood off of her head, and long chestnut-brown hair flowed through the air.
“Vraaaah!!”
Asterios brought down the hammer. A circular shockwave spread from the impact point, followed by bursts of sparks. Two of the Braves couldn’t fully resist, succumbing to the stun effect of this final attack. Numbing Impact was weaker, but Detonation couldn’t be avoided just by jumping, so Asuna and I would suffer the same effects once we touched the ground.
But …
“Sey-yaaaa!”
Asuna unleashed a fierce cry and shot off the rapier charge attack Shooting Star in midair.
“Rrrraaaah!”
I followed her with the one-handed sword charge attack Sonic Leap. We both shot up vertically, followed by trails of blue and green light. We were headed straight for the forehead of King Asterios, which was protected by his metal crown.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the flashing of the three mobile members of the Legend Braves firing off their own sword skills.
The next instant, our Anneal Blade and Wind Fleuret pierced the crown entirely and sank deep into the enemy’s head. The crown splintered and cracked into pieces.
The massive body of King Asterios burst in an explosion that filled the entire coliseum chamber.
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