Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 5 - Chapter 3

3 
WHEN WE RETURNED TO STACHION, THE TELEPORT square was jammed with players. The majority looked like tourists from the first floor, but there were also a surprising number of “catchers-up” loaded with fairly decent gear. 
This second group had gotten off to a start a month or two later than the present-day advancement group and weren’t a high enough level to hang in the frontier zones, but shopping in town was perfectly safe. And since it was RPG custom that the further a town was in the game, the better its equipment, every new destination was a chance to buy into a better round of gear—if you could afford it. 
In that sense, Kibaou’s Aincrad Liberation Squad and their stated aims of sharing money, items, and information as widely as possible weren’t wrong. If the frontline groups used their earnings to help outfit the people catching up, they’d be able to gain XP more safely—and reach the frontier much quicker. 
But the actual method of distribution was rather tricky. It wasn’t as if the advancement group was drowning in money, so you’d only want to distribute money to those players who were truly serious about reaching the front line. But in order to identify them from the rest, you’d need to do some time-consuming background checks and skill tests. Even the large ALS didn’t have the man power to bother with something that involved, and if they did, acting like heavy-handed police or military might only inspire mistrust instead. 
When I beat everyone to the punch by defeating the fifth-floor boss and looting the guild flag first, Kibaou quietly thanked me. He must’ve understood that we were forced to do this to prevent the coalition of frontline groups from fracturing. He might have a foul mouth, but he wasn’t a bad person. It was why he was so dedicated to the noble cause of redistributing resources to give everyone a fair shot. 
On the other hand, Lind of the Dragon Knights Brigade was the polar opposite—a man who proposed concentrating resources instead. He wanted to create a band of heroes who would accumulate all the money and gear and experience, shining bright at the forefront of the game. The idea was that this would inspire the lower players to work even harder in the hopes of joining his team—a choice of ideals that seemed at odds with reality. 
But one thing was certain: If the unique guild flag item was going to work better in either the ALS or DKB, it would clearly be the latter. And Asuna and I needed to explain the flag’s crazy effects to Lind’s guild, as well as the requirements for us to actually give it up. 
“…Just five more minutes now…Have they settled on a place?” Asuna asked after she emerged from the teleporter. I checked my instant messages. 
“It says we’re meeting at an inn called the Pegasus Hoof. It’s that one over there,” I said, using my memory from the beta to point at a white building on the north side of the square. It was much bigger than the Fifteen Numbers, where we were staying. 
Stachion was arranged like a gentle series of steps, with the northern side being higher and the southern sinking lower. I used the word steps rather than hill because the ground was made up of those eight-inch cube tiles, so there was no natural slope to be found. It wasn’t as simple as just uniform steps lined up across the entire town, but if you traveled north and south enough, you would undoubtedly find yourself going up and down stairs. 
As we walked toward the inn, Asuna looked up at the north side and asked, “So…who lives in the biggest building up at the north end?” 
“That’s the lord’s mansion. He’s, uh, a guy named Cylon, with a beard. He gives you a bunch of quests, so we’ll be there a few times. It gets real tiring climbing all those stairs, though…There’s just something mentally draining about stairs, as opposed to an ordinary hill.” 
Asuna didn’t comment on any of that. She frowned and murmured, “Cylon…Where have I heard that name before…?” 
“Wasn’t that the bad guy from The Lord of the Rings?” 
“That was Sauron, dummy…Well, whatever. How many minutes to go?” 
“Um…one minute, twenty-two seconds.” 
“They’re going to be so conceited if we’re late. Let’s run!” 
The fencer tore off down the tiles for our destination, and I had to rush to keep up. We passed through the large door of the Pegasus Hoof at seven seconds before twelve thirty, but the blue-haired man seated on the sofa in the lobby promptly and loudly said, “You’re late. It’s common practice to arrive for any meeting five minutes before the agreed-upon time.” 
If we were going to get sniped at one way or the other, I wished we’d come five minutes late. Instead, I had no choice but to wave at Lind, leader of the Dragon Knights Brigade guild, and his officers Shivata and Hafner. “Yo. You guys eat already?” 
As young as they might have looked, they were at least in their late teens, so as a middle schooler, I ought to have asked, “Did you gentlemen already enjoy your lunchtime?” But this was Aincrad, the land of outlaws. On top of that, people seemed to think I was two, three, maybe even four or five years older than I really was, so the only thing all that extra verbiage would do was clog up my online connection with voice data. 
Lind didn’t seem bothered by my attitude. It was more the content of the message he took offense to, a furrow running through his brow. 
“We have been waiting here for fifteen minutes already. Where would we find that kind of time?” 
It seemed to me like that was plenty of time, but I decided to keep it friendly and suggested, “Then why don’t we talk over a meal? You’re just going to head right back out for more adventuring in the afternoon, aren’t you?” 
This was a profound bit of strategizing by my standards, hoping that Lind’s attitude might soften over some good food, but the blue-haired guild master shook his head. “No, I don’t want any chance that we’ll be overheard…We’re going to talk in a room that my guild has reserved for the purpose.” 
“…Got it,” I said after a pause. If Lind was renting the room, no one else might be able to unlock the door, but it would still open from the inside, and we were within the town, so they couldn’t do anything to hold us there by force. I didn’t think the leader of a powerful guild would stoop to such a thing, but the guild flag had all the magical allure of the One Ring, so I had to be careful. 
Lind rose from his seat and took Shivata and Hafner—whom I secretly nicknamed the track athlete and soccer player, respectively—toward a staircase at the back of the lobby. If anything, Lind seemed like a member of the calligraphy club, although that might’ve just been because the back of his ponytail looked like the tip of a brush to me. 
As I followed the trio, I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering over some truly pointless subjects. Maybe, if I really need to write something on parchment, and I have ink but no quill pen, I could dip that tail into the ink and… 
They led us to the Pegasus Hoof’s third-floor suite. It seemed like a sure sign that they were a big, wealthy guild…except one thing stuck out to me. 
“Hey, guys, did you go into this room ahead of time?” I asked, right before we reached the door. 
Lind turned around and answered peevishly, “No, we just rented the room at the desk.” 
“I see…so you haven’t tried this puzzle yet.” I pointed at a very complicated, messy metal object placed in an alcove next to the door. 
“What’s that?” Hafner wondered, raising a thick eyebrow. But Asuna seemed to have recognized what the object was. 
“Where did the DKB stay last night?” she asked them. 
“Well, we were having fun as a group at the year-end party…and we ended up passing out at the room in Karluin where we were celebrating. We didn’t come up to the sixth floor until this morning.” 
“I see.” 
Asuna shot me a glance. Apparently, explaining the situation was my job, so I cleared my throat. 
“Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed that this town—in fact, this entire floor—is covered in puzzles…and so are the inns. Pretty much every inn requires you to solve some kind of puzzle before you can open your room door. The type varies depending on the establishment, and the Pegasus Hoof specializes in cast metal puzzles…which are like big, heavy disentanglement puzzles. The cheapest rooms are fairly simple horseshoe puzzles, but the more expensive the inn, the trickier they get…” 
“…………” 
The track, soccer, and calligraphy club members stared at the metal object in the wall niche. After they traded a series of looks that suggested No, you go first, Shivata gave up and reached for it. 
The puzzle was three tightly interlocked U-shaped parts with little protrusions like deer antlers on them. Two of the parts were chained to the wall, and the third had the door key stuck to it. It would not come loose unless it slid off at just the right position and angle. It must’ve taken quite a lot of precision and data to re-create such a complex puzzle with 3-D models. 
Shivata rattled the puzzle for about thirty seconds before he threw up his hands and backed away. Hafner didn’t even last for twenty. Lind was third, positively glowing with an aura that said For the glory of the guild! 
Observing from a distance of six feet, Asuna whispered to me, “I guess the name Pegasus Hoof was a hint as to these horseshoe puzzles.” 
“The fifteen puzzles at our inn were a lot better, huh?” 
“Once you figure out the trick, maybe…” 
Lind’s valiant attempt at the puzzle continued while we chatted, but he, too, came to a stop after about a minute of trying. 
“…It is not coming off. Something must be stuck.” 
“Now, now, Lin, it wouldn’t be a true puzzle if there’s no solution.” 
“Then you do it, Haf.” 
“Listen, I’m not good at these things…” 
A part of me wanted to keep observing this very rare glimpse at the DKB members acting casually, but the conversation we were supposed to have would be tricky enough as it was, so this was my cue to step in and help. 
“Pardon me,” I said, barging in with a little hand chop and taking the tangled metal puzzle. It was four months ago that I’d been tackling this town’s puzzles in the beta, but the muscle memory for these cast-metal puzzles was still there…I hoped. 
At the time, if you fell asleep in an inn bed, the NerveGear automatically logged you out of the dive, so that when you woke up, you were in your real-world room again. The sleep log-out was a popular trick among beta testers because it allowed you to avoid the usual intoxication of emerging from a full dive, but I didn’t get to try it more than a few times before the test was over. 
In the meantime, I kept my hands moving, slowly getting past one protrusion after another, until the part with the key on it came loose. 
“Here.” I handed it over to Lind, who looked conflicted about this development. He stuck it into the lock and turned it left. The lock clicked heavily. 
“So…what do I do with this n—” he started to ask, but the key rose out of his hand on its own and floated back into the wall niche. It tangled itself back up with the two chained pieces until the puzzle was back to its original position. 
“……The heck was that?” asked Shivata. 
“It’s kind of like magic, kind of like a curse. The lord here will explain it to you,” I told him, clapping Lind on the shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get this conversation going. I’m sure you’re busy, too.” 
The Pegasus Hoof suite was, indeed, quite deluxe—in addition to a large living room, it had two separate bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. Asuna’s fixation kicked in briefly as she glanced toward the bathroom door, but given that she had just bathed at the dark elf camp, her bath meter was stable for the moment, and she passed by it without further inspection. 

“…Why did you rent such an expensive spot?” I wondered, gazing out the large window at the town of Stachion below. 
It wasn’t Lind, but it was Hafner who said, “It’s an issue of security. If someone just happens to wait outside the door with the Eavesdropping skill, it’s more likely that we’ll be out of their effective range if the room is extra-large, right?” 
“Ah, I see…” 
That at least confirmed for me how serious a matter the DKB considered this talk to be. There was a sofa set in the middle of the living area, but Shivata and Hafner decided to move it to the window on the south side out of an abundance of caution, getting it as far from the door as possible. I was going to suggest that they should just post guards outside the door, but then I realized they’d naturally have other members hiding out in the lobby below already. 
The furniture set featured a sofa long enough to seat three, and two armchairs. I assumed Asuna and I would take the chairs, but Lind motioned us toward the sofa, so we followed his lead. 
Lind and Hafner sat in the armchairs, and Shivata stood to the side. I wasn’t sure if they’d decided to have us sit down and then leave one of their own standing as psychological pressure, or if it was just a coincidence. 
Abruptly, Hafner said, “Shivata and I explained what happened with the fifth-floor boss to Lind. Including the reason you wanted to get a jump start on the boss, and the reason we decided to participate.” 
I blinked twice in surprise and said, rather foolishly, “Oh. You did?” 
When Shivata and Hafner decided to join our impromptu raid party, they hadn’t said anything to Lind, their guild master, about it. I figured we’d either keep that a secret today or use that revelation as the starting point—but it seemed they’d already saved us the trouble. 
At that point, we could probably just jump right into it, but Asuna, sitting to my right, shot Shivata a look. I followed her eyesight and saw that the short-haired swordsman was giving us some kind of very awkward signal with his eyes. 
I squinted, trying to figure out what message he was trying to send, but Lind noticed my expression and swung around to his right to look at Shivata. Immediately, Asuna said, “Then you must know all about the guild flag already, Lind.” 
With the mention of the item at the center of everything, Lind turned forward again. “Yes…but only the concept. And I’ll be honest—I’m still not sure whether to believe it or not. Before we negotiate, I’d like to see the item first.” 
The use of the word negotiate rather than discuss was ominous, but it wasn’t enough of a reason to call things off at this stage. 
“All right,” I said, opening my menu. But before I materialized the item, I decided to set up a safety measure. 
First, I went to my equipment mannequin and dragged the icon for the Sword of Eventide +3 from my right-hand slot to my inventory. I’d removed my equipment before we walked into the building, so this action changed nothing about my appearance. 
Next, I chose the Flag of Valor from the weapon category of my inventory and dropped it onto my mannequin. It was a two-handed weapon, so the spear icon appeared in both my right- and left-hand slots. Light glowed in my hands before sharpening into the long narrow weapon—er, flag. 
When pulling weapons out of item storage, simply choosing to materialize it would pop the item into existence above the window. But if you were equipping it, the weapon appeared in one of two places. 
If you had your weapon location selected ahead of time—for a polearm, it was on your back by default—it would appear directly in that spot. But if the setting was still in its initial state, or if you didn’t have enough physical space to fit it, the item would appear in your hands instead. Because I had my hands resting atop the window, Lind’s group wouldn’t be able to tell if I’d just brought the guild flag out as a simple item—or if I was equipping it. 
The moment he caught sight of the ten-foot platinum longspear, Lind’s eyes bulged. The butt of the spear reached nearly to the window, while the tip crossed Asuna’s knees and jutted out over the end of the sofa. The top quarter of the pole was wrapped in a white cloth, and the string that held it in place was silver. Its stats as a weapon were frankly unimpressive, but the finely carved detail in the handle, the beautiful edging of the flag fabric—the overall informational “weight” of all that detailed data—made it clear this was a special item. 
If I’d just taken the flag out in one single step, Lind could grab it and run out of the room. If he escaped for five minutes while Shivata and Hafner prevented me from utilizing the Materialize All Items command, ownership of the flag would transfer to him. But because I had equipped it first, my period of automatic ownership lasted for a full hour. 
I gave the chances of them attempting such a stunt no more than 0.1 percent, but Lind merely tapped the pole to bring up the properties window, read it closely, sighed, and handed it back. He waited for me to put it back into my inventory, then leaned back in his seat and grumbled. 
“Yes…I see…Seems like quite the balance-breaking item to have shown up on just the fifth floor…” 
“I don’t know just how well it works without trying it, though,” I admitted. 
The guild master shrugged. “The listed properties won’t be false. A hundred feet in diameter with four different buffs…Just from that alone, it’s almost too powerful to be real. I don’t blame Kibaou for trying to slip past the rest of us to get it—even if I find him obnoxious.” 
He didn’t seem as angry as I imagined he might be. Asuna had the same impression. 
“Did you already talk with the ALS?” she asked. 
“No, we’ve said nothing. I had a toast with Kibaou at the party last night, but I wasn’t aware of the existence of this flag at the time,” Lind said, a self-deprecating curl present at the corner of his mouth. He looked to the side, where Hafner was scratching his head guiltily. 
That would mean Lind had only heard the explanation in the last few hours. So perhaps the fact that he was so calm and cool about it was a sign that, like Kibaou, as long as the other guild didn’t have it, he was fine with the matter. I certainly prayed so. 
“Well, now that you’ve seen it for yourself, I’m going to explain the conditions under which I would hand it over,” I continued. “Naturally, they’re the same conditions I gave the ALS. Situation one is if another guild flag drops somewhere. If it’s going to happen, I’m sure either the ALS or DKB will get it this time, so in this event, I would hand the flag to whichever guild did not get the drop, free of any charge. Situation two is if the ALS and DKB merge guilds. If that happens, I will hand over the flag unconditionally.” 
When I’d suggested these to the ALS in the fifth-floor boss chamber, they’d yelled at me: That’ll never happen! and You gotta be joking! But Lind might’ve known about them already, because he barely batted an eye. 
Instead, he asked me a very curious question. “Kirito, in the beta test, you failed to beat the tenth-floor boss, correct?” 
“Uh…yeah, that’s right. The labyrinth was this traditional Japanese-style place called the Castle of a Thousand Serpents. We only got partway through it.” 
“And the guild flag did not drop from any more bosses to that point?” 
“It didn’t…I believe.” 
“Right,” Lind murmured. “So that would mean it’s highly likely that situation one cannot happen until at least the tenth floor…” 
I nodded. If it dropped on the fifth floor, it seemed like the tenth would be a good bet, but there was no use making guarantees. At this point, I wished that we’d tried a bit harder in the beta and actually beaten the tenth-floor boss, but there was no whining about that now. Besides, the monsters in the Castle of a Thousand Serpents—especially the snake samurai Orochi Elite Guard and the snake ninja Kuchina Elite Assassin—were devastatingly powerful, and just the thought that if we kept going we’d be forced to fight them one day soon sent a chill down my back. I didn’t even want to imagine the floor boss who ruled over them. 
Man, I could really go for a cup of hot green tea, I thought, waiting for him to continue. But Lind did not comment on the feasibility of the second option. He opened his window. I watched his hand movements out of an abundance of caution, but what he brought out was not a weapon but an extremely large leather sack. 
He grabbed it off the top of the window and set it down on the low table. It made a heavy, metallic scraping sound. 
“There’s three hundred thousand col in there,” Lind announced to our astonishment. “It’s the most the DKB can give you at this moment. Will you sell the guild flag to us at that price?” 
Later—much, much later—Asuna would chuckle and say to me, “If you had immediately agreed to sell it, I would’ve grabbed the bag of money and chucked it through the window.” 
But in that moment, I stared at the leather sack on the table, unable to respond. I wasn’t stunned by the sheer presence of 300,000 in col presented to me, and I wasn’t trapped between the options of selling or not selling. No, my mind was swept up in a sudden flash to the past. 
It was about a month ago: the evening of December 2, 2022. I remembered the date because it was the day of the first boss-strategy meeting in the first-floor town of Tolbana, and it was the day I met Asuna for the very first time, deep in the labyrinth—though the memory that came to mind was unrelated to either of those events. 
Through Argo the Rat, the information agent, someone made an offer to buy my Anneal Blade +6. The offer was for 29,800 col, which was upped to 39,800 a few hours later. 
The Anneal Blade had two upgrade attempts left—meaning I’d gotten it to +6 without failing—which made it quite valuable at the time, but at most, it was worth thirty-five thousand. Suspicious, I doubled Argo’s silence fee from five hundred col to one thousand, and she revealed that her client was none other than Kibaou. I was even more skeptical after that, but it wasn’t until the middle of the first-floor boss battle that I realized Kibaou had been a go-between, too. 
The man who was actually attempting to buy the Anneal Blade was Diavel the knight, leader of SAO’s first raid party. His idea was not to power himself up, but to power me down, allowing him to score the last attack bonus on the boss and cement his position as the leader of the game. 
But Illfang the Kobold Lord’s attack pattern had changed completely since the beta, and as a former beta tester like me, Diavel fell into a trap set by his own past knowledge and expectations, and he perished. 
Despite his outward distance, Kibaou had revered Diavel enough to take on the dirty work of buying someone else’s weapon for him in secret. Lind had been his faithful, dedicated party member. They both wanted to take over his position, but their significant discrepancies in ideals led them to start their own guilds, which were now the two biggest in the game. 
The 300,000 col on the table now was ten times the sum that Diavel offered for my Anneal Blade. That had to be a coincidence; Lind wouldn’t have known about what Diavel was doing in secret. If I ever found myself sharing drinks with Kibaou, I’d have to ask him why he took on that request from Diavel, and what he thought about it… 
I emerged from my brief reverie, looked Lind right in the face, and shook my head. “No…I wouldn’t sell this for even ten times that much. Besides, the ALS would string me up for doing it, and I mean that literally…Plus, let’s be real. You didn’t actually think I was going to say yes, did you?” 
The guild leader shrugged and said simply, “Not really. But it’s important to put it out there. If you were actually willing to sell it, it would be worth it, and if you refuse, I get you on record as saying that you can’t be bought with cash.” 
“Ah, I see what you mean. But if we’re talking a hundred times…maybe thirty million col could convince me to— Huk!” 
I finished my sentence in some strange demihuman dialect thanks to Asuna reaching over with a smug expression and spearing me in the side with her hand. Lind did not react, but both Hafner and Shivata rolled their eyes. 
I cleared my throat and got back to the subject at hand. “At any rate, may I conclude that the DKB accept and understand the terms for receiving the item now?” 
“Yes…I shall have to acknowledge the current situation as the most reasonable compromise. I do not wish for the standoff between us and the ALS to get worse, either. But after having seen its stats for myself, it’s a terrible shame that we can’t use the guild flag in the next boss fight.” 
“I agree. We’ll try to think of a way to put it to use, and I’m always looking out for ideas, so send me a message if you think of something.” 
“Understood.” 
At that, Lind and Hafner rose to their feet. I was going to watch them go, but then I remembered that it was the DKB who rented this room, so I got up in a hurry. 
We filed out of the room in a line, and then Lind turned back toward me. “By the way…are the other inns outfitted with these obnoxious puzzles?” 
“Your answer is half yes, half no,” I said, grinning. Lind looked skeptical. “I mean, it’s not just the inns. The NPC shops, the houses, the other locations…Aside from the front doors, every door to every room in this town has a puzzle on it. So have fun with that.” 
I patted the stunned brush master on the shoulder and hurried down the stairs.