6
IN THE LONG-DISTANT PAST…
The world was split into the forest elven kingdom of Kales’Oh, the dark elven kingdom of Lyusula, the human Alliance of the Nine, the underground realm of the dwarves, and various other groupings along racial lines, and while there were skirmishes at times, the land was at peace.
But one day, something happened, and a hundred varied regions from around the world were cut in circles from the earth and summoned up to the sky. The circles were under two miles across at the smallest and over six at the largest. They were stacked in a conical formation to form a gigantic floating fortress a hundred floors tall.
This castle held its countless towns and villages, mountains, forests and lakes, and never again returned to earth. The magic powers that caused the old civilizations to flourish were lost, and with them, the nine kingdoms of man. Most towns reverted to maintaining themselves, and the floors lost contact with one another. A great length of time passed. Legends and tales of the Great Separation still existed among the two elf races, the only people to keep their kingdoms intact from that fateful time…
“…and that’s how the story goes,” I said, summarizing the backstory of Aincrad’s genesis as best I’d learned it that day while I leaned back against the tent. A watery voice answered from behind my back.
“Hmm…So it feels like we learned some stuff, but none of it is very useful.”
“Pretty much,” I replied, looking up with my hands folded behind my head. Beyond the steam issuing from the exhaust pipe built into the roof of the bathing tent, the bottom of the fourth floor gleamed dark and foreboding.
According to elf legend, someone had yanked the ground straight out of the earth and connected it all with a framework of steel and stone so that the pieces were stacked one atop the other. Of course, the true creators of SAO were Kayaba and the Argus staff, and the legends of the Great Separation were nothing but background info they’d added to the game, but it was hard not to be curious about it all. Who had created this floating castle and why? Was it the whim of a godlike figure, or the work of a human, or elf, or something else?
Asuna was pondering a similar topic within the bath. When she spoke, there was a bubbling filter applied to her voice.
“By the way, it doesn’t seem like there’s much in the way of gods to this story. When I read or watched fantasy stories as a little girl, there were always a bunch of different gods with fancy names.”
“Hmm, you may have a point there. There are churches in the bigger towns, and NPC priests, but I don’t even know what god they’re worshipping…Then again, that might actually be fitting, based on most fantasy-themed games. All they have is a vague godlike figure.”
“Because the player is supposed to fill in the blank for herself? Then I guess your god must be the god of Last Attack bonuses. You managed to win yourself the bonus against today’s field boss, after all.”
I tried to answer her half-joking response with another of my increasingly weak excuses.
“I-it’s not like I’m going out of my way to win them. I just play a character build that excels in attack power, which happens to raise the chances that I’ll get the last hit…Besides, if we’re talking about gods, then yours must be the god of the bath or something. It ensures that everywhere you go, you find lodgings with baths attached…In fact, that reminds me of my place back in Tolbana—”
A ball of water smacked the other side of the tent wall behind my head. I remembered that I was supposed to have erased that memory and hastily changed the topic.
“A-anyway, aside from us, it looks like only Lind and the DKB are working on the campaign quest. Seems like a waste, especially since Argo put out Volume One of her Elf War strategy guide.”
“And we added a lot of information on our own. But maybe everyone saw that guide and got a bit intimidated. I mean, it said right there that the campaign doesn’t end until the ninth floor. Even Agil said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got the time to mess around with a long-ass quest like that.’”
I snorted at her surprisingly accurate impression of Agil.
“Well, I guess there’s always the option, once we reach the ninth floor, of rushing back here to blaze through the entire questline. Plus, you’d be at a much higher level, so it probably gives you a better chance at saving the elf champion in that first duel,” I noted, then realized something.
Challenging a campaign quest that spanned seven floors was predicated upon the player’s assumption that we’d make it to the ninth floor anyway. I had gotten that far in the beta already, and I hadn’t been thinking about anything but leveling since we started the quest, but at the present moment, the ninth floor seemed like a distant fantasy, a future too difficult to fathom at our current rate. Once you started looking up, you had to think about the fact that there were ninety-seven floors over our heads.
“…But you know what?” Asuna started from within the tent, as though reading my mind. There was a heavy splash and the sound of wet feet slapping against the wood deck. I heard her sit down right on the other side of the heavy, hanging flap.
She continued, “It’s not as scary as it used to be, to think about all the floors left. I’m still trying my hardest to survive each and every day, but now I’m looking forward to seeing the dark elf queen’s palace, for example. If the dozens of floors ahead of us were all ripped from the surface centuries ago, then there must be all kinds of sights and sounds to experience. It’s more of a feeling of anticipation.”
“…I see,” I responded simply, impressed once again with Asuna’s strength of spirit. It seemed like an inadequate statement, so I searched for something else to add. “I bet there are all kinds of baths up there, too.”
A sharp elbow (I think) slammed into the small of my back through the heavy tent wall.
Sunday, December 18.
Three days had passed since the first strategy meeting in Zumfut. We hadn’t returned to the human town since then but stuck to the dark elf camp, completing quests, collecting upgrade materials, and buffing up our skills to earn mods.
With a fresh new level gained, I was at 16, and Asuna at 15. This was probably as far as we’d get here on the third floor. During the beta, the recommended level for fighting the boss was three times the floor number—which would probably change as we got further into the game—and we were already half a dozen over that number. Accordingly, the experience we were receiving dropped precipitously. Killing mobs in the forest and dungeons barely moved the EXP bar in the least.
More surprising to me was that Kizmel actually earned a level-up to 16 during our journeys together. I accidentally congratulated her on the level-up when I saw the customary flash, but she already interpreted the number as a kind of sword rank and did nothing more self-aware than thank me.
With the help of our even-stronger knight companion, the campaign quest proceeded smoothly, but as Asuna had noted earlier, we didn’t really learn any more about the birth of Aincrad than before.
After the “Jade Key” and “Vanquishing the Spiders,” the third act of the campaign was a collection quest titled “The Flower Offering,” in which we gathered items to offer to the memory of the slain scout from the previous quest. The fourth act, “Emergency Orders,” was another search for a missing scout, but unlike in the second quest, we successfully rescued the elf this time. But the fifth quest, “The Missing Soldier,” revealed that the scout we’d brought back to the camp was none other than a forest elf using a disguise charm.
I knew how it all went already, of course, and I was considering whether or not to expose the imposter during the fourth quest, but not only did I not know how to undo his charm, there was also the possibility that the campaign might fall completely off the tracks right then and there. I kept an eye on him after we got back to the base, and raised an alarm after he tried to steal the Jade Key from the commander’s tent, but I soon lost sight of him thanks to his elven hiding abilities. It was better than in the beta, when the key was stolen from under my nose, but the imposter still had to be chased. We formed a temporary party with the camp’s Dark Elven Wolfhandlers, plus Kizmel, and followed the imposter scout’s tracks directly to a large forest elf camp.
It was at this point that we had to pause the quest, for earlier that day was the battle against the field boss that guarded the cave leading to the labyrinth.
We defeated the boss on the first attempt, with no fatalities. Aside from the outcast beater jumping in and stealing the LA bonus again, it was a rousing success. But I couldn’t help but feel that the sparks of anger that had been smoldering within the group were rapidly turning into a raging fire with the creation of the two big guilds.
“Hey, Asuna,” I shouted at the bathing tent, rubbing the sore spot on my back. The only answer I got was the sound of the exit flap being lifted. I turned to see a slender silhouette leaving the tent, profiled against the dying light.
She was in the water just a minute before, but the leather-tunic-clad figure showed no signs of having just bathed. One of the convenient things about virtual bathing was the instant drying effect, but as the most vocal bathing admirer of the frontline team, you’d think Asuna would not like the deviation from realism.
Thanks to this mental diversion, the question that eventually left my lips was not what I’d meant to ask.
“…Don’t you ever feel like changing outfits?”
Even in the dim light, the furious crevice between her eyebrows was as clear as day.
“Is there a problem with me not changing?” she snapped, voice freezing cold. I rapidly shook my head back and forth.
“N-no, no problem at all. I just wondered if you felt like wearing something that…fit the mood better once you were done bathing. You know, like a yukata, or a bathrobe, or a single T-shirt…”
Too late to stop the words, I decided to blame the last option on my subconscious bringing up what my little sister always wore after a bath, but Asuna held it in and did nothing worse than twitch her eyelids for a few moments. She looked down at herself and sighed.
“…As I’m sure you remember, I do have extra outfits. In fact, most of my storage space is packed with them.”
I did remember. When I had forced her to use the MATERIALIZE ALL ITEMS command in Urbus so she could retrieve the sword that had been swindled from her, the room had exploded with small, frilly white articles of clothing.
Asuna pinned me with a sharp gaze to ensure I didn’t go remembering too many of those details, leaned against the tent support, and stared up at the night sky.
“But those clothes aren’t meant for my own enjoyment.”
“Huh? Why did you buy so many of them, then?”
“I didn’t.”
I blinked in surprise, then understood. Many copies of the same crafted items often represented a means, not a purpose.
“Are you saying…you crafted those yourself to raise your Tailoring skill?” I asked softly. Asuna nodded. “B-but, when did you do all of that? It wasn’t after we teamed up on the second floor, right?”
“No, it was before. You know how when you farm monsters on the second floor, you end up with tons of wool and cotton items? I just decided to use them on a whim…”
“Gotcha. I usually just sell them off to an NPC once I get a big stock of them. I’m surprised you were in the mood to work on a crafting skill. Isn’t it boring?”
For some reason, she did not react. After watching her stand there silently, I noticed something. At present, it wasn’t the length of time that was the issue with crafting skills. It was the number of slots.
At level 1, a player started with two skill slots. It expanded to three at level 6, four at level 12, and five at level 20. From that point on, every ten levels provided a new slot, as far as I knew.
At level 16, I had four slots, and they were all filled with battle skills: One-Handed Sword, Martial Arts, Search, and Hiding. Asuna had four slots as well, but I realized I’d never asked her what skills she was using, aside from Rapier. She wore a metal breastplate when out adventuring, so she had to have Light Metal Armor, but the other two were a mystery. If one of them was Tailoring, why would she choose that?
Asuna claimed she did it to get rid of the materials, but skill slots were crucially important factors in a character’s build, not something to be chosen on a whim. As a frontline player, it made much more sense to ditch the crafting skills and maximize her battle potential and survivability with Hiding or Search like me, or perhaps Acrobatics or Weight Limit Expansion. Asuna didn’t need me to explain these things to her. She understood the logic.
Asuna seemed to recognize the confusion in my gaze. She glanced at me, looked down, and caught me by surprise once again.
“Just so you know, I removed Tailoring from my slot. And most of the clothes, I turned back into fabric.”
“R-really? So it was all just a whim, nothing more?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? But…that’s not all there was to it…”
“Meaning…?”
“It’s a secret. I’ll tell you someday, if I feel like it.”
There seemed to be a hint of a smile behind that standoffish answer. Asuna pulled off of the tent pole. “So, what about you? If you want to take a bath, I’ll stand guard out here.”
“Uh, that won’t be necessary. It’ll only take three minutes. You go ahead to the dining hall.”
“Okay. While we’re eating, you better tell me what you got out of that giant spider today.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I replied, getting to my feet. Asuna waved and marched off to the nearby dining tent. I watched her go, then stepped through the hanging door flap of the tent.
For the last five days, we’d made a practice of beelining for this bathing tent when we returned to the camp, and I would stand guard at the entrance while Asuna bathed. At no point in any of this had a dark elf of either sex attempted to visit the tent while someone was inside. It felt like standing guard wasn’t even necessary, but it was hard to get over that idea when the only thing separating you from anyone else was a simple flap of fabric.
On the other hand, a man had little use for bath-place security. I stepped onto the wooden deck installed within the tent and hit the REMOVE button three times on my equipment mannequin, sending all of my gear into storage. I shrank back at the immediate chill and headed straight for the large bathtub at the rear of the tent. If it weren’t for the fear that the dark elves might be drawn by the sound, I would have leaped into the water. Instead, I slipped in as gracefully as I could manage.
The bathtub was at least seven or eight feet long—heating that much water seemed like it would be hard, but it was just another elven charm at work. The water was a pale green color, brimming with a pleasant scent like mint or cypress. Once I was up to my shoulders, I felt a delightful heat and pressure enveloping every inch of skin. It made sense that Asuna had such a fixation on bathing, but it was also distracting to notice the ways in which it didn’t match up to the real thing. Something about it just didn’t quite feel liquidy enough.
In a general sense, I did my best not to think of my body and everything else in Aincrad being a polygonal creation. I was afraid that if I imagined any of it being fake, that my subconscious might think that this didn’t matter, that I could always retry any mistakes. The fighting, eating, and sleeping were certainly realistic enough, but there were times when the cracks in the edifice were noticeable. That must have been why I never took to bathing much…
But…no, that was an excuse. Even in the real world, I wasn’t much of a bather as a little kid. Maybe the baths here were actually more suited to me, given that I didn’t need to shampoo my hair, scrub my body, and dry off.
Small pots filled with what I assumed to be shampoo and soap were lined up at the edge of the deck, but I’d never used them. Perhaps Asuna was using them to gain some kind of statistical advantage. Was that the kind of question it was safe to ask?
Two minutes had passed. I stood up, ready to finish my brief bath.
Suddenly, someone lifted the entrance flap of the tent from the outside.
Did Asuna forget something in here? No, there’s nothing on the wooden deck.
Is another player coming for a bath? No, this is an instance.
Is it a forest elf hit man, coming to kill me? No, that looks like the brown skin of a dark elf…
I stood there, frozen, clutching the rim of the bathtub. The visitor’s onyx eyes blinked just once, and she spoke as though nothing was amiss.
“Oh, I didn’t realize you were in here, Kirito.”
I expected her to continue with I’m sorry, I’ll come back later, but the armored dark elf walked straight through the entrance and reached out to the clasp on her shoulder piece.
“Do you mind if I join you in the bath?”
The key to survival in SAO was judgment: Observe and identify the situation quickly, analyze all possible actions, and react based on your best expectations. In the half second that Kizmel waited for my answer, my brain raced faster than ever before. Depending on my choice, I might wind up clapped into chains in the prison beneath Blackiron Palace.
I recalled a magazine interview published during the beta test, claiming that implementing the anti-harassment code was an extremely difficult decision for the development team.
Unlike physical attacks and theft, drawing the line around “inappropriate contact” that constituted a crime was a very tricky task. At first, they considered simply leaving the policing of manners and morals up to the playerbase. A hardcoded detection system might misdiagnose certain cases, and there was the fear that the code could be twisted in unintended ways by wicked players.
But the fact that NPCs were visually indistinguishable from players and the fact that this was an experiment in a totally new genre forced their hand, and they eventually added the code. The fact that players could find young female NPCs and grope them to their heart’s content in the full-dive setting ran afoul of the game ratings agency’s ethical standards. I couldn’t help but wonder what made that different from being able to PK someone, but that had always been a case of different standards. The interview this information came from was with the Argus staff rather than Kayaba, but they probably had their own bone to pick with the real-life factors forcing their decision.
At any rate, the addition of the anti-harassment code to SAO was meant to curb inappropriate actions toward NPCs of the opposite sex, not players.
But in that case, how would the system react if an NPC chose to barge into the bath with the player? Would the code stay put as long as the player didn’t touch the NPC, or would I run afoul of it just for looking at her with all gear removed? Or was this situation so far beyond the regular bounds of the system that it would ignore everything entirely?
My brain was at its maximum capacity—I could imagine white smoke issuing from the top of my head.
“G-go right ahead. I’m just getting out,” I said. That was the proper social response, regardless of how the system worked. There was just one problem: I had all of my clothing removed and couldn’t leave the bathtub. Some male players thought nothing of their virtual nakedness and changed outfits in the middle of town without hesitation, but I sadly did not share their courage.
I hung to the rim of the tub, waiting for the moment Kizmel looked away to emerge.
“I see. Thank you,” the elf woman said, turning to the washing station on the right side of the tent and pressing the magic clasp.
With the same familiar jingle from the other day, the armor and cape vanished with a flash of light. She was wearing a single silk undersuit. The sight of her brown skin peeking through the fine, sheer black lace put me under a stun effect, but I’d seen that before. I tried to maintain focus and leaped from the tub when she turned away. I had my menu open before I even hit the ground, instantly popping the UNDERWEAR button. The security of fabric around my waist gave me the courage to continue to my shirt and pants—
Jingle.
The beautiful, dangerous sound rang out again. I automatically looked to the right and saw the bodysuit disappearing from Kizmel in a shower of light.
“Nbwha…”
A nonsense syllable escaped my lips, and I lost my balance in midair. Naturally, I stumbled upon landing and fell into a Tumble status, landing with a pathetic splat on the wood deck. Kizmel started to turn around.
“What’s wrong, Kiri—”
“N-n-n-nothing! It’s nothing!”
“Oh? Be careful; the bathing area can be slippery,” she said, like a mother scolding a clumsy child. She turned back to the wall just before the point of no return and sat down on a wooden bathing chair. Reaching into one of the small urns lined up on the counter, she removed a thick liquid and spread it on her skin. A sudden surge of white suds flowed forth, coating her bare back.
I wasn’t just sitting there, staring; I crawled toward the exit on all fours rather than wait for the Tumble to subside. The problem was that my wild jumping had left the wooden deck slick and slippery, slowing my progress. I had gotten about six feet across the room when…
“Since you’re here, would you do me the favor of washing my back?” came the knight’s request from on high.
In the end, I was not sent to Blackiron Palace for inappropriate contact, but I didn’t know if that had anything to do with Kizmel’s unique nature within the game. The bathing tent had its own brush for scrubbing, which meant I didn’t need to touch her skin directly.
“Ahh,” I murmured.
My eyes then went wide, and I silently gaped.
That dream.
Was it…
Memories of the SAO beta test?
I was so shocked, I nearly asked Kizmel this question, knowing she couldn’t possibly understand it.
The only thing that prevented me from doing so was a steely voice that piped up from beyond the hanging entrance flap of the tent.
“Kirito, how long are you going to keep me waiting? It’s been nearly ten minutes.”
It was, of course, the fencer who had gone off to the dining tent before I bathed.
Didn’t I tell her I was only going to take three minutes? I recalled, far too late to do anything about it. Beyond that, the overwhelming danger of the situation—Asuna standing outside, separated by only a flap of cloth, while I scrubbed the back of a totally naked Kizmel inside—left me unable to formulate a response.
I sat there frozen, brush clutched in my hands, and heard a more menacing statement this time.
“Well, say something. I’ll give you three more seconds before I walk in there.”
She was clearly angry about being stood up for dinner. The dining tent’s menu was probably seasoned whitefish (Asuna’s favorite) or the rooty brown stew. Oddly enough, though the elves in this world didn’t cut down living trees, they also weren’t vegetarians. I could have sworn I’d read a story once about an elven heroine who didn’t eat meat.
But this wasn’t the time for distractions. At the two-point-eight-second mark, I summoned my courage and sucked in a breath.
“S-sorry! I’ll be out soon, just give me one more minute!”
The flap was already lifted several inches at that point, but it dropped back to its hanging position.
“…I’ll give you two minutes out of pity. I’ll order your food, too, so stop by if you want to eat.”
Her footsteps trod away. I let out my breath in relief. When Kizmel spoke, there was a jovial, teasing note in her voice.
“Do you human warriors not normally bathe together?”
“N-no, especially not men and women together. What about elves?”
“The knight’s manor at the palace has separated bathing quarters, but this is a battleground. We cannot expect luxuries.”
“I see. Um…can you tell me more about that dream some other time?”
Perhaps Kizmel did possess memories of the beta within her. I was fascinated and deadly curious, but I felt I needed to process this information before I knew what to ask her.
She leaned just a little bit toward me and muttered, “Yes. I, too, would like to know what that dream means…”
It felt like she was talking more to herself than me.
Eleven forty-five at night.
My eyes popped open at an alarm that only I could hear, and I waited for my senses to fully return before sitting up.
The lamp hanging off the center pole of the tent and the fires of the heater below were both extinguished, but there was enough moonlight coming through the exhaust vent in the roof to see by. In the center of the pelt-covered floor, Kizmel and Asuna lay close together, fast asleep.
NPCs acted like players in that they went to sleep at night, but in their case, they simply closed their eyes and went inactive according to the rules of their programming. At least, that’s what I’d always assumed—and perhaps it was true, for NPCs other than Kizmel.
But six hours ago, she told me that she had a mysterious dream every night.
At that point, the possibility that someone in the real world could be role-playing as the dark elf knight disappeared entirely. Bringing up the topic of the beta test destroyed the illusion of a simple NPC, and my appearance now was completely different from the beta days. Someone on the development side would know that, and they wouldn’t say something like “Your face is always the same at the end.”
So assuming Kizmel was a true NPC, what did that dream mean to her? The function of dreams was still largely unexplained as far as humanity knew it. Did it mean that Kizmel’s host program was still active and calculating while her process slept?
I challenged the “Jade Key” quest three times in the beta, and I remembered seeing her die in each case. Was that data accumulating in her system, and her program was simply trying to find some kind of logic to this memory that should not exist?
Did she remember the beta because she was an exceptional NPC?
Or had she gained her exceptional nature because those memories still existed within her?
A gentle night breeze through the gaps in the entrance flap ruffled my hair. I recalled the day this game of death began.
I left my first and only friend, Klein, back in the Town of Beginnings, raced through the open fields, and didn’t stop until I reached the village of Horunka deep in the forest. I was heading straight for the quest that would reward me with an Anneal Blade—the weapon I still used today.
The quest was offered by the mother of a sickly child and required me to hunt plant monsters for a special herb. In the midst of that quest, I ran across another former beta tester for the first time. He invited me into a party, and when we’d collected enough herbs for one of us to turn in the quest, he tried to kill me with a monster trap.
Instead, I just barely survived and returned to the village to give the mother her herbs. When I did the same quest in the beta, I took my sword and raced off for the next place of interest, but for some reason, this time I watched her prepare the medicine and followed her into the child’s room next door.
As I watched the sick little child NPC named Agatha slowly recover thanks to the potion, I recalled how I had cared for my sister when she was sickly. The emotions that had been building up inside of me since I learned that I was trapped in a game of death suddenly burst forth, and I wept into the blankets of the bed. Agatha reached over, looking concerned, and rubbed my head, over and over and over until I stopped…
“…”
I took another deep breath and pushed the memories out of my mind.
Kizmel and Asuna were lined up together, fast asleep like sisters. After bathing and eating, we went back out into the forest and, with Kizmel’s help, completed all the quests we picked up in Zumfut. We’d have to turn them in later, but after a solid four hours fighting spiders, treants, and wolves, they must have been exhausted. Did NPCs even have a fatigue stat, though?
I could have stood to sleep some more myself, but there was another mission to be undertaken tonight. I crawled along the floor, slipping out of the entrance with a minimum of disturbance, and took another deep breath.
That lungful of crisp, cold air shook me fully awake, and I snuck away through the night camp. I passed by the now-familiar night guards with a wave and headed through the canyon into the forest for the third time today.
The Forest of Wavering Mists was dangerous at night; when the heavy mists rolled in, there was nothing to see but a blue-gray haze. I had a solid grasp of the terrain by now, though. I proceeded through the forest, mindful of the presence of monsters, and in less than ten minutes, I reached the familiar staircase leading back down to the second floor.
Bathed in pale moonlight, the stone structure appeared to be empty, but as I drew nearer, a silhouette melted out of otherwise thin air from the shadow of one of the pillars. This player’s Hiding skill was on par with Kizmel and her cloak of invisibility.
The person I was meeting grinned, three painted whiskers crinkling beneath her heavy hood.
“Seven seconds late, Kii-boy.”
“Sorry. Blame it on the train driver.”
Her hood shook ruefully at my earnest attempt at humor.
“I can sell you some better jokes, if you’re looking to improve.”
“No thanks, I’ll manage with what I’ve got. I hate to rush you, but…did you learn anything about what I asked for?”
“Always the impatient one, you are. The hastiest rats are the ones that don’t make it back to the hole.”
My grinning guest hopped up onto a collapsed pillar nearby and crossed her legs. I took a position leaning against the pillar facing her.
Argo the Rat was the first, and best, information agent in Aincrad. I’d known her for a long time (if a month counted as “long”) but barely knew anything about her personally. I was pretty sure she was a girl, pretty sure she was somewhere between her late teens or early twenties, and pretty sure she was also a beta tester. She collected information from her beta experience, as well as nuggets bought from me and other testers, and compiled them into her own series of strategy guides that she sold through NPC item shops throughout the game. Most important of all to remember was her motto: Any information with a price would be sold.
That meant that if I asked Argo to sell me personal information, like her height, weight, favorite foods, skill layout, and so on, she would do it…as long as I paid the price.
Fortunately, the cost of the information I wanted in this case was quite reasonable. I pulled a five-hundred-col coin out of my coat pocket and flipped it to her, which she caught nimbly between two fingers. The coin danced along her fingers before disappearing entirely.
“Thankee. I’ll tell ya what I know so far.” The grin on her whiskered face disappeared, and she continued in a low voice, “Seems like there’s only one player who joined up with Lind’s Dragon Knights Brigade since reaching the third floor. His name’s Morte, he uses a one-handed sword, and he never takes off his metal coif, even in town…That’s all I got for ya.”
“Morte,” I repeated, thinking that it sounded like a type of candy.
A man wearing a coif. That had to be the man I saw in Lind’s team of five the other day. He was probably a beta tester like me and was feeding Lind information on the campaign quest…
Suddenly, I recognized a contradiction there.
“Wait…but at the last strategy meeting, which I assume you were watching, the DKB still had eighteen members, same as during the last boss fight. So if Morte joined, does that mean one person dropped out? And was it voluntary or forced?”
Argo waved my suspicions away.
“Nope, the eighteen at the meeting were the same from the boss battle.”
“…Do you know all the names and faces of the DKB?”
“I wouldn’t be much of an informant if I didn’t. Same goes for the ALS.”
“It was silly of me to ask,” I said, raising my hands in surrender. “So…Morte just joined up on the third floor but wasn’t present at the meeting. And the reason for that is…”
“A mystery to me, ’fraid to say.”
“You’d have to ask him or Lind to know why, I guess.”
I played back my recollection of the strategy meeting in Zumfut three days ago. But I couldn’t remember the faces of the other seventeen dressed in blue. Part of it was that I sat at the very top row of the stadium-style seating, so I could only see the backs of the others present. And halfway through the meeting, most of my mind power was spent worrying about the imminent explosion of anger from Asuna.
Still, it had to be a problem that, forty days after this game started, we were still putting our lives in the hands of other players whose names or faces we couldn’t even recall.
I wasn’t going to get into the business of selling information anytime soon, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put more effort into remembering people. It just wasn’t a skill that came naturally to me.
I asked Argo, “So how did this Morte character get into the guild?”
“Looks like he requested to join. The day after the third floor opened up, Lind introduced him as a new recruit to the other main members of the DKB guild—well, technically it wasn’t a guild yet at that point.”
“Ahh…So it was Lind who took his request directly. I’m surprised that Lind would just rubber-stamp him like that. Maybe Morte is just that powerful…How does he seem to you?”
It was just an idle, curious question, but Argo grimaced atop the stone pillar and rocked back and forth.
“The thing is, I haven’t seen this Morte fellow for myself yet…I staked out the pub the DKB is using as a base in Zumfut, but I haven’t seen anyone who matches the description.”
“Wow…If even you can’t spot him, he must be trying to hide himself…”
“That’s what I think. If it’s on Lind’s orders, then perhaps he’s supposed to be a secret weapon to help them jump past the ALS. I’m sure he’ll be involved in the boss battle, so at the very least, I’ll check him out there.”
“Please do. Well, I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth of info here.”
“Glad to hear it,” Argo grinned. She hopped off the five-foot-tall pillar without a sound and raised her hand to her face. The coin I’d paid to her just a minute ago was there in her fingertips, glinting in the moonlight.
“By the way, Kii-boy, any interest in selling some intel?”
“Oh? What kind?”
“Like where you’ve been staying with A-chan since we got here.”
“Not selling that,” I replied immediately. Argo grinned again.
“I see. You didn’t immediately deny that you were lodging with her. But don’t worry; I won’t go selling that juicy nugget.”
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