8
I WASN’T SURE IF IT WAS BASED ON THE SPIRAL structure of the town, but Mananarena’s local specialty was a jumbo roll cake of thin sponge and heaping helpings of banana-flavored cream. I was determined to have one when I got here, but now that the moment had arrived, I’d lost my appetite.
The eight-inch-long spiral of cake stared me in the face from the middle of the table. Meanwhile, on the other side, Asuna looked deadly serious.
“…So I wonder if they’re officially a couple.”
“…Huh?”
It was not at all what I’d expected her to say. She continued, her manner still completely serious.
“Shivata and Liten, I mean. How they got together and what’s happened between them since— We missed out on all the important details.”
“Y-you’ve got a point…”
I honestly didn’t know how I would be expected to react to a story of that nature, so for my part I was relieved that Shivata abridged the details, but Asuna seemed quite interested. I forked a large piece of banana cake and brought it to my mouth, choosing my words carefully.
“But…that deadly serious track athlete was calling her ‘Licchan,’ so I’d say they’re going out.”
“Ohh? Shivata’s on the track team?”
“No, that’s just what I imagine.”
“And to think I actually believed you for two seconds!”
She raised an eyebrow at me skeptically and stuffed a big bite of cake into her cheeks. The miraculous power of the specialty dessert eased the crease between her brows, and I decided it was safe to present a concern of mine.
“But…what exactly does ‘going out’ entail in this world?”
“What does it entail? Well, it’s the same as in the regular world,” she said matter-of-factly. I would be lying if I said that didn’t make me more than a little curious about her real-life experience in that field, but I couldn’t very well ask, so I deleted that question from my mind and moved on.
“Anyway…I would think that doing the same stuff as the regular world is impossible here…”
“Huh? Oh…right. Because of the protective code,” Asuna muttered, glancing around.
After the two of us parted ways with Shivata and Liten, we moved to this café, a secret landmark in Mananarena. Unlike the restaurants where the DKB and ALS hung out, it didn’t face the main spiral road, so you had to know where it was first. As I hoped, there were no customers inside, but we were still in the mood to speak in hushed voices.
The Harassment Prevention Code in question was the most uncomfortable of SAO ’s many in-game systems to discuss.
I knew why it was necessary. Without it, there would no doubt be some male players who exposed enticing female NPCs to unsavory behavior. The system worked in very simple ways: Any inappropriate contact with an NPC or player of the opposite sex over a certain length of time would elicit a warning and a repelling force, and repeat violators would be automatically teleported to the prison within Blackiron Palace in the Town of Beginnings. I myself was momentarily terrified of being spirited away in the workshop of old man Romolo, the shipwright on the fourth floor, when I shook Asuna’s shoulder in an attempt to wake her from a rocking chair.
Asuna was rubbing her left shoulder and glaring at me, clearly remembering the same situation. She cleared her throat.
“Well…yes, you might not be able to touch the other person…but you could still be in a relationship.”
“Ah, r-right. But the conditions of the code are too vague to grasp…How do you know where the fine line is on inappropriate contact? In my case, I didn’t get a warning or a shock or anything before you got the forced teleportation window…Maybe a bit of research is in order…”
“So if I’d pressed the YES button, you would have gotten very valuable data.”
“Er, never mind…” I said, shaking my head. Asuna glared at me again, then thought something over.
“But on that topic, I didn’t even get a teleport window this last time…”
“Last time?”
“You know, after we escaped from those guys in the catacombs, you—”
She suddenly stopped still, so I looked up from cutting myself a fresh piece of cake. The fencer turned away just before we would have made eye contact, but upon seeing the tinge of red to her cheeks, I remembered.
“Ahhh, r-right…”
She had a point there. After Morte and his companion were chased by the swarm of monsters, Asuna was so overcome with the release of her tension that I had to hold her and stroke her head to calm her down. Thinking back on it now, I was impressed with myself. The contact lasted for at least three minutes, much longer than the contact at the workshop. So it was a mystery that Asuna hadn’t received a window prompt to teleport me away.
“Hmm…Maybe the shoulders are a no go, but the head is okay…?”
“But if the one being touched doesn’t like it, there’s no difference between the head and shoulders. Besides, you were also touching my shoulder at the time.”
“Oh, I-I was…? Hmm, it’s a mystery…Maybe it’s because on the fourth floor, you were asleep…”
“That wouldn’t be it. Why show a window to a sleeping player? They can’t press the buttons.”
“Very true…Oh! We should just ask Shivata next time.”
“Ask him what?” Asuna wondered.
I unveiled my brilliant idea: “Well, if that track athlete tries to make physical contact with Liten, then he should inevitably be collecting data on the limits and conditions of the Harassment Code, right?”
Suddenly, the fork in the fencer’s hand shot audibly forward toward my nose. If it had been a knife, she might have successfully pulled off a Linear.
“L-listen to me! You are absolutely not allowed to ask an indecent question like that! I don’t care about the guy, but it’s not fair to Liten!!”
“I-I understand. I won’t suggest it again, so please put the fork down…”
Once it was safely resting on the surface of the table again, I breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back in the chair.
“Hmm. The only other thing I can figure is that it evolves depending on the target player…”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying that it could be triggered most easily between two strangers who have never had contact before, but that it gets eased as the players’ relationship grows…I just can’t imagine how they track and quantify the emotional closeness of the two players…”
I looked down from the ceiling, and the fencer was quiet, her expression flat. I worried that I might have said something stupid again, but for whatever reason, I noticed that redness was rising on her skin, from the collar of her cape up toward her mouth and nose.
Anticipating an eventual eruption, my legs tensed, prepared to dart away in escape, but to my considerable fortune, the jingling bell at the door rang at that moment, cutting through the thick tension.
The visitor to the café was none other than Argo, who had set up in Mananarena before we arrived. It wasn’t coincidence, of course; I had sent her a message as soon as we were done with Shivata and Liten.
“Heyaaa.”
The tired-looking whiskered broker walked over and sat in the chair next to Asuna. She ordered a roll cake, triple thick, and let out a long breath.
“You dragged me outta my own business, so I hope this is more important than the boss quests, Kii-boy.”
“O-of course,” I reassured her. For a brief moment, I considered breaking the ice with a silly question about the Harassment Code conditions, then decided it wouldn’t be worth it if nobody was going to laugh.
“Umm, I think we figured out why the ALS is planning to sneak ahead on the boss.”
As befitting a creature that fed on information, Argo’s face immediately brightened up.
“Wait, really? Even I haven’t caught that morsel in my net of intelligence. This is quite impressive.”
“Rather surprising, isn’t it?” I asked.
“…What is?”
“Well, I would have thought you knew already…Don’t you remember anything about an item from the fifth-floor boss causing trouble in the beta?”
“Trouble…?”
Her painted whiskers twitched—I had successfully tweaked her pride as an informant. Argo pursed her lips for a while, consulting her memory, then eventually lifted her hands in surrender.
“I hate to admit it, but I can’t remember. If I can make an excuse, I wasn’t an info broker in the beta. I also wasn’t a front-runner, so I didn’t take part in that boss fight…”
“Oh, you didn’t? Well, I won’t hold it over your head, then…I think the ALS is after a guild flag.”
“Guild…flag? Why would they want a flag?”
“As an object, it’s no more than a low-powered long spear…but if you do this…” I stood the fork in my hand straight up and struck the base of it against the table. “When the player with it equipped sticks it into the ground, all guild members within fifty or sixty feet get increased attack and defense, as well as extra resistance against debuffs.”
“Wh…what…?” Argo said, the same as Shivata’s stunned reaction. She pointed at the fork in my hand and asked, in rapid succession, “C-can the player with the flag move around? How long does the buff last? Is there a limit to how many players it affects?”
“The answer to your first question is a half yes. If you take the flag out of the ground, the buff shuts off, but once you move and plant it again, it kicks right back in.”
“…Hmm.”
“The answer to your second question is: as long as the flag is planted.”
“…Hmmmm.”
“The answer to your third question is: no limit, as long as they are guild members.”
“…Hmmmmmmmm.”
Argo crossed her arms, grunting, as a piece of banana cake three times as thick as mine and Asuna’s arrived. At eight inches long and over two inches wide, it was nearly the size of a small whole cake. Argo split a quarter of it off with her fork and stuffed the entire mound into her mouth.
“…That is indeed very big trouble, Kii-boy.”
“Exactly…”
“The statistical boost is one thing, but the effect on the players’ mentality is especially dangerous…If the ALS gets that item and plants it during battle, their morale is going to skyrocket, and the DKB’s will plummet. The same would hold true for the reverse…It’s more than powerful enough to crush the uneasy balance that exists now.”
“You can understand why Kibaou would decide to attempt the boss prematurely once he learned about it,” I murmured, bringing a piece of cake up to my mouth. In the meantime, Argo had made another quarter of her own cake disappear. She glanced over to her left.
“…You seem pretty quiet today, A-chan.”
“…Er…uh, no, it’s nothing!” Asuna insisted, finally getting her conscious brain back in motion. She scrambled to eat more cake, and Argo blinked in surprise.
“So…how’d that spiky-haired buffoon manage to get word about this item? It’s kind of a shock to me that they got this intel before I did.”
“W-well, you and I aren’t the only beta testers, Argo,” I pointed out.
I hadn’t told Argo about the PK gang lurking in the shadows of Aincrad, a decision that Asuna was holding me to. Naturally, we were afraid that if she learned about them, she would attempt to collect information about them on her own—and that was a job far more dangerous than compiling boss intel.
I didn’t doubt Argo’s ability. I knew that she had the speed to dart out of the most dangerous locales. But the ability of the man in the black poncho, the suspected leader of Morte’s gang, was a total unknown. Until I could find out what kind of danger he represented, I didn’t want Argo to get involved with them.
The informant smiled in an all-knowing way and nodded, giving in. “Well, ya got a point there. What’s important now isn’t where the deets came from, but what to do about ’em…If it’s really that huge of an item they can loot, the ALS won’t be deterred by direct arguments.”
“Um, I was thinking…” Asuna started. She had finished her cake a bit later than I did, and took a sip of tea before suggesting, “What if we simply share the information about the guild flag with the DKB? The reason the ALS is being so reckless about looting it isn’t because they want it that bad, but because they’re afraid the DKB will get it, right? If Lind proposes a fair way to split the loot…”
“…Yeah…That’s not a bad idea…”
I thought of Lind’s deadly serious face. If Shivata was an imaginary track-and-field athlete, then Lind belonged to a martial arts club or even a calligraphy club.
“No matter what, Lind can be reasoned with…He might be able to force a conversation with the ALS. It’s just…joint managing the guild flag is impossible, much less sharing its power. Once the item is registered under a guild, I can’t imagine that you can alter it, and it wouldn’t be possible to split the flag and the staff apart, either. Ultimately, they’re going to come down to a rock-paper-scissors match, or a roll of the dice, or even a five-on-five group duel.”
“…I can’t imagine that Kibaou would accept that proposal…” Asuna muttered. Both Argo and I nodded.
It was an ironclad belief of Kibaou that all resources should be shared to hold the casualties of the game to a minimum: gold, items, information. It was the foundational philosophy of the guild he started.
Lind and DKB held that the top players with the deepest knowledge and greatest power should fight bravely at the front line and serve as a symbol of hope, thus generating the energy and inspiration to defeat the game.
I didn’t know which was right. All I could say was that both were successors to Diavel the knight. And both would strongly desire the guild flag to further their respective causes. Neither would dream of ceding it to the other.
Why did you have to die, Diavel? I asked the departed knight, leaning back in my chair and staring up at the boarded ceiling.
There was no answer, of course. But somehow, I heard his final words repeat in my mind.
You have to take it from here, Kirito. Kill the…b—
His avatar had blasted into pieces before he could finish his sentence. Yes—I, too, had inherited something from him.
Kibaou inherited the knight’s sense of fairness, and Lind had taken on his heroism. And what I took, as a fellow beta tester…was his sense of realism.
I opened my eyes slowly, looked at Argo and Asuna in turn, then spoke.
“…Let’s beat the boss.”
The words melted into the air of the room, echoing and vanishing, but the info dealer and fencer did not speak.
Argo’s fork, which had been hovering in the air for several moments, finally stabbed into the remaining half of the thick roll cake, then lifted the mass of sponge and cream, which disappeared as if it was a magic trick. In true rodent fashion, the Rat’s cheeks bulged comically as she chewed away at her meal.
At last, she asked, “You mean the three of us?”
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