Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 5 - Chapter 4

4 
“…WELL, THAT WRAPPED UP A LOT QUICKER THAN I thought it would,” Asuna said once we were a fair distance away from the Pegasus Hoof. Something in her tone suggested disappointment. 
“Are you saying you’d have preferred if we argued over it more…?” 
“Of course not, you dummy.” 
The fencer brandished a fist, then glanced around before continuing in a quieter voice, “I was expecting a more forward-thinking response. It’s not like a second flag is going to drop any day now, so the only way for us to make use of it on this floor is the second option, merging—it’s obvious to everyone. So I figured, if anyone’s going to make the first notions toward that end, it would be the DKB, rather than the ALS…” 
“You did? Why do you say that?” I asked, sensing that both sides were more likely to say they’d prefer going to war than joining forces as a single group. 
Asuna said, “The ALS is a group pursuing a set of ideals, and the DKB is a group pursuing practical ends. I’m sure there’d be some amount of reshuffling in the event of a merger, of course, but doesn’t it seem like the DKB members would complain about it less? It’s like they already know they’re the true model for tackling this game, and they have the confidence to go along with it…” 
“Ahhh…Yeah, I see what you’re saying.” I looked up at the bottom of the seventh floor, hanging a hundred yards above us. 
The Aincrad Liberation Squad was obviously named for the final goal of liberating all ten thousand—well, eight thousand now—players who were trapped in this floating castle. But it also felt like it contained another message: liberation from a status quo where just fifty or sixty elite players monopolized all of the game’s resources. 
On the other hand, the name of the Dragon Knights Brigade, whoever had thought of it, didn’t seem to have much of a meaning. It was the typical kind of fanciful nomenclature you’d find in any online RPG. If changing the guild name was a sticking point in merging the two sides, Asuna was probably right that the DKB members would have less resistance to the idea. 
That was why she’d been hoping that the DKB would display an amenability to the idea, giving us a pathway to a possible merger. But… 
“The SAO system only allows for one guild leader,” I muttered. The footsteps next to me came to a stop. I slowed myself down and added, “Even if we could get merger negotiations on the table, neither Lind nor Kibaou would want to give up leadership in the end. Because both of them believe he’s the one carrying on in Diavel’s footsteps.” 
“…In that case—!” 
I was startled by her vehemence and looked over to my right. Asuna was standing there, her hands clenched into fists, staring down at the eight-inch tiles beneath her feet. 
“…In that case, why do they leave all the truly dangerous jobs to you? They squabble over these pointless things like ideas and pride, and they always leave you to pay the tab for them. That’s not what a leader does.” 
It was a statement very similar to what she said in the boss chamber yesterday. And I couldn’t give her a response that was any different. 
“They’re not forcing it onto me. It’s because I stuck my neck where it didn’t belong that I have the guild flag now. And really, I’m more sorry that I dragged you into all of this…” 
After I’d made that point yesterday, Asuna had cried. 
But today, she did not. She looked up, her hazel-brown eyes strong and determined. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but solid to its core. 
“You can’t be that flippant about this anymore. The man in the black poncho attacked you last night because you were preventing him from making the ALS and DKB fight, didn’t he? In fact, it’s more than that…I’m betting that he wanted to steal the guild flag from you, too. It’s the perfect tool for turning the frontline players against one another.” 
“What…? How would the information be getting out that fast? The only people who knew I had the guild flag at that point were the ones who took part in the boss fight with us, and the main members of the ALS…” 
And that was when I put it together. The ALS didn’t just have Morte the ax wielder, whom I fought on the third floor. They very likely had other members of the black poncho’s PK gang infiltrating their ranks. Which meant the info about the guild flag was being passed right along to them. 
The ALS was a bit behind the DKB in terms of member level and equipment stats, and they were trying to make up for it by swelling their ranks. Their practice of having a recruiting team that proactively brought in players who wanted to join the top group was admirable, but it also made the guild vulnerable to infiltration by those with ill intent. 
It was occurring to me that it’d be smart to get both guilds’ leadership together so I could share info about the existence of this PK gang. I shifted gears from my initial denial. “Actually, you might be right about that. But that just makes it more important that I don’t foist the flag off on someone else. I already have a decent idea of how they’re doing this, and I’ve got some experience fighting players from the beta…” 
Asuna sucked in a sharp breath but let it out after just a second, long and slow. Then she turned away—fingers brushing the silver rapier hanging at her left side. “And now that I’ve learned the basics of dueling from you, I have a duty to fight them as well.” 

“What?! N-no, that wasn’t my point…” 
“Well, I’ve decided!” she declared, letting go of the rapier and jabbing her finger at my chest. Like that, my temporary partner gave me my orders: “Listen up! You’re not going to rush off without a word to me again, the way you did when you went searching for Argo on the fourth floor! You must be within my sight for all twenty-four hours. Is that understood?!” 
“Whehh?!” 
It felt like she was treating me like a preschooler, but Asuna’s expression was anything but joking. I opened and shut my mouth a few times to no avail. At last, I protested, “B-but what about when we stay at an inn…?” 
To my surprise, Asuna already had an answer for that. Before this point, she’d probably get all red in the face and physically attack me, but now she not only didn’t hesitate or stammer, she had an instant response. 
“So we’ll rent a two-bedroom suite like the last one. If we split the cost, it shouldn’t end up being too bad.” 
“………Ah, r-right…” 
I didn’t really have any other option. 
“Good!” Asuna said like a pleased schoolteacher. She turned on her heel and started walking loudly across the tiles. Within three steps, she stopped and turned back to me again. “Also…where are we going now?” 
“Um…” 
I looked around. We were on a small path to the east of the central street of Stachion that ran north and south from the teleport square. Although it was a backstreet, it was wide, with a strip of greenery on the right side of the path and a row of tiny shops on the left. Some were restaurants, as evidenced by the fragrant smells tickling my nose. 
“……How about we get lunch first, then hit up the lord’s mansion?” I suggested. 
Asuna agreed, smiling again at last. “Good idea. I’d like to eat something that seems appropriate for the New Year holiday.” 
“That…might be tough…” 
But on the inside, I was running through my memory, trying to remember if the menus of the restaurants here had anything that fit the season. 
We had a lunch of meatloaf and shrimp fritters, which might be very generously interpreted as a Western-style take on Japanese osechi cuisine for New Year’s Day. Then we headed up the gentle staircase road north until we arrived at the mansion that overlooked the rest of Stachion. 
Behind the mansion was the outer perimeter of Aincrad itself, so the pale blue expanse was very close at hand. If you turned 180 degrees at the large front gate, you saw the rectangular town before you, followed in the distance by the wilderness of the sixth floor. 
“…When you see it all like this, you realize that six miles across really is a huge amount of space…” Asuna remarked. I was about to tell her that Aincrad was cone-shaped, and that each floor was about two hundred feet narrower than the one before, but then I realized it wasn’t really important enough to make a big deal over. 
“Your typical open-world RPG’s map is around six to twelve miles long in each direction, so it’s like a bunch of them all stacked atop one another. According to the legend of the Great Separation that Kizmel mentioned, Aincrad was built out of pieces of land cut from the continent below. Makes you wonder how big that map must be…” 
“…And in the forest elves’ legend, collecting the six keys and opening the Sanctuary will return Aincrad to the land,” Asuna said. It brought back all the details of the “Elf War” quest’s background. 
“And the dark elves said that opening the Sanctuary will cause Aincrad to fall to ruin…right? We definitely want to avoid things getting ruined, but I’d also rather not have it all go back to the earth. What if this map was suddenly dozens or hundreds of times larger? It’s hard to stay motivated to keep going that way.” 
“Wouldn’t you be able to skip having to do each and every labyrinth—and just jump straight ahead to the final boss’s dungeon?” 
“Oh, good point…but there’s no way you could beat him…” 
For an instant, I started to imagine the final boss waiting on the hundredth floor, as Akihiko Kayaba had said on the first day of our imprisonment. Then I shook my head to dispel the vision. 
“C’mon, let’s go inside. We’ll get the quests from the lord and try to finish all the ones in town by the end of the day.” 
Cylon, the lord of Stachion, was a small and skinny man who looked simply dreadful in his magnificent beard and flashy toga. He didn’t put on airs, however; he was quite welcoming to these strangers who showed up at his door. In fact, we had to wait awhile outside his chamber because there were three groups of players in line already, but that wasn’t his fault. They even served us tea. 
Cylon’s appearance and background story were exactly the same as in the beta, but it was still worth paying attention for a refresher. 
According to him, the abundance of puzzles all over the town was the result of a curse placed upon the previous lord. 
His name was Pithagrus, and he was a man who loved numbers and puzzles. He bragged day and night that there was no puzzle he could not solve. One day, a traveler visiting his mansion produced an exceedingly complex numerical puzzle, and Pithagrus could not solve it. In his rage, he picked up a nearby golden cube and beat the traveler to death with it. The traveler’s last breath was a curse, and ever since then, Stachion was possessed by puzzles of all kinds… 
“Pithagrus was driven mad by this, and he left Stachion forever, carrying only the bloodstained golden cube with him. It has been ten years already since then…I suspect he is no longer among the living,” Cylon said, sipping his tea dejectedly. 
“As Pithagrus’s senior apprentice,” he continued, “I took on the responsibilities of his office and worked my hardest to undo the curse the murdered traveler enacted, but the puzzles only grow—a new one appears in the town every day. Nearly all the town’s interior doors and storage boxes are afflicted by puzzles already, and their front doors will not be long. By that point, it will no longer be possible for us to live here…Good swordsman, please find the golden cube that Pithagrus took from this mansion and bring it back. If the cube is placed on the traveler’s grave, and prayers are dedicated to his memory, the curse of the puzzles will surely be undone. Please, please save Stachion from this menace!” 
Cylon bowed deeply, causing a golden ! to appear over his head. Asuna glanced at me and said, “Very well. We accept your request.” 
It promptly turned into a ? at that point. Next came the time for questions, but since we knew other players were in line to get their quests, we kept it to a minimum, then scurried out of the guest room. After that, we took a quick tour of the mansion, which was still very video game–like, thanks to its cubic construction. Lastly, we headed out into the backyard to say a quick prayer at the grave of the traveler who’d been killed by the previous lord. 
“Ahhh…Going into mansions like that, I always want to just rifle through all the bookshelves and drawers and pots and stuff,” I said, stretching my back. 
Asuna made an exaggerated show of pulling away in disgust. “Ew…Is that your fetish, Kirito…?” 
“What?! F-first of all, it’s not a fetish, and second of all, it’s an RPG staple that you go around ransacking people’s houses for items! Although, in a lot of the Western ones, the guards will chase you if you do…” 
For three seconds, Asuna greeted my protestation with an even more suspicious look. Then she burst into giggles. “Well, I suppose you’re not the type to go sneaking around and taking stuff. You’d rather dump out the owner’s entire inventory right in front of their face.” 
“I—I don’t recall doing any such…” 
Then I remembered when I had Asuna materialize all of her belongings on the second floor, and I suddenly had to clear my throat. 
“…thing with malice. My point is, let’s get cracking on these quests. The “Curse of Stachion” is a really long quest series, so if we don’t do them quickly, we could get left behind at the boss battle. And on top of that, we’ve got more ‘Elf War’ quests on this floor.” 
“I’m more interested in those, to be honest. Between all the murdered travelers and missing lords, the local story seems a bit dark.” 
“As a general rule, RPG quests tend not to be fun and delightful affairs,” I commented. But the truth was that I wanted to see Kizmel again as soon as possible. On the other hand, the longer a quest series was, the better the experience bonus you received. High-risk, high-return experience gains were tough to pull off—the last thing anyone wanted was to die—so diligently checking off quests was still the quickest way to level up. 
Asuna suddenly tossed her arms into the air and stretched like she was doing morning calisthenics. “Okay, let’s do this! Where are we going first?” she exclaimed. 
“To an old man who was the butler to the old lord—to ask him questions,” I answered. Her excitement meter visibly plummeted. 
“Ugh, that’s so boring…and we’re going to have to wait at the entrance again, aren’t we…?” 
“Shall we buy some ring puzzles to play with while we wait?” 
“No, thanks.” 
The fencer shook her head sadly and trudged off. I trotted after her. 
The former butler’s house was at the very southern end of Stachion, completely across town. If the northern half was the luxurious side with its ample greenery, the southern half was the more urban side, with small houses clustered around cramped alleys. Most of the buildings were made of wood—but eight-inch wooden blocks rather than boards and pillars—so they looked more like life-size block houses. 
Fortunately, there were no other players at our destination, and we were done talking to the elderly NPC in just over ten minutes and on our way. 
His story was the same as it had been in the beta. The former butler wasn’t present for the murder of the traveler; he heard the screams and rushed to the master’s chamber, only to see the ghastly body. The way he described it, the head was beaten to a pulp, and the humble traveling garb was covered in blood. In the beta, people had muttered, “This quest has to be rated R!” 
The butler had no leads on the location of Pithagrus or the golden cube, but rather predictably, he did say that the maidservant at the time might know something. So we headed to the servant’s home next. 
As we walked the narrow path, Asuna brought up a very reasonable question. “Say…don’t you know the final destination for this quest already, Kirito? Couldn’t we just skip all these steps and go right there?” 
“Actually…you can’t. If you don’t go in order, things break down. Characters won’t talk to you, and events won’t happen. If we hadn’t talked to Cylon first, that old man back there probably wouldn’t have let us into his home.” 
“…And how many more people do we need to talk to in town, by the way?” 
“Six.” 
She abruptly blurted, “Falyoon!” 
“…What was that?” 
“I was saying, ‘I much prefer the generic monster-killing quests to manhunt quests,’ in Elvish!” 
“Nga-grunga.” 
“…What was that?” 
“‘I completely agree,’ in Orcish.” 
And on and on, we chatted and joked as we made our way across Stachion to the home of the maidservant who’d happily married her way out of the job (they didn’t actually say that). 
From there, we went to the former gardener, then cook, then first apprentice, then second apprentice, then favorite bartender, until at last we got the piece of information that Pithagrus owned a separate home in a neighboring town. That was the end of the questline in Stachion for the moment. 
As we left the pub, the sky from the outer aperture was reddish-purple. It was five thirty in the afternoon by then, largely because at a number of these quest stops, the people had errands of their own to do. 
Asuna stretched. She looked tired. “So after all that…we didn’t learn very much. Pithagrus was an eccentric, but everyone seems to admire him, and he didn’t have a wife or children. That was it, I think? And nobody knows who the murdered traveler was—or where they were from…” 
“Well, that’s not so strange, now, is it? If you’re a traveler here, you don’t have a passport or social media accounts to follow.” 
“But the teleporters weren’t active ten years ago, so if it’s a traveler, they came from somewhere on the sixth floor, right?” she wondered, looking up. “There are maybe three or four other villages here, so if we wanted to track them down, it should be possible to identify them, don’t you think…?” At that, she stared straight at me. 
“Wh-what?” 
“Hang on…you know the ending to this quest, don’t you? Where did Pithagrus go? Who was the traveler?” 
“Um…you’re really gonna ask that question?” 
Whether it was online multiplayer or not, a game’s story was a sensitive area when it came to spoilers. Some people didn’t care at all, and some people got furious over it. Survival was the utmost priority in SAO, of course, and Asuna didn’t seem the type to get hung up on spoilers, but I’d been careful to not reveal the outcome of quests before we got to them. 
After a brief look of surprise, Asuna realized what I meant by that and let out a little giggle. “Ohhh, so you’ve been holding back for my sake! Well, it’s all right. I don’t get all worked up about this sort of quest.” 
“Um…this sort of quest…? Then what sort of quest would you get upset about—over spoilers?” 
“The heartwarming ones and the tear-jerking ones.” 
“……” 
Out of all the quests we’d done together, which ones would she classify as heartwarming and which as tear-jerking? And what category did the “Curse of Stachion” fall under? After a few seconds, I came to the conclusion that it was pointless to try to figure it out. 
“…Um, so am I correct in thinking that you won’t get mad if I tell you the ending of this quest?” 
“No worries. It’s totally one of the disappointing kinds, right?” 
“……” 
I hated to admit it, but she was right. After all the trouble I went through to finish it in the beta, I was left with such a bad aftertaste that I wanted a word with the scenario writer. 
“Okay, then I’m going to spoil the hell out of it…There was never any traveler to begin with.” 
“Huh?!” Asuna yelped. She came to a stop and turned toward me. “No traveler…? But the butler and the maidservant saw the body, right? And the gardener dug the hole for the grave in the backyard. So who was it that got killed and buri…? Oh!” 
She stopped herself in a moment of epiphany. I gave her a little round of applause. 
“Bingo. That was the body of Pithagrus, the former lord. And the one who killed him was…” 
“……Cylon?” 
“Bingo again. Cylon was the first apprentice of Pithagrus the puzzle king, but when he announced that a different apprentice would take over as his true heir, he got furious and beat his master to death. To hide his crime, he pulverized the face until it was unrecognizable, then put on shabby clothes to transform himself into a made-up traveler…” 
“I knew it! I knew it!” she shouted abruptly, hands on her hips with her face thrust forward. “I knew it was going to be a disappointing one! That’s why I don’t like this kind of quest! And what’s the ‘puzzle king’ supposed to mean anyway? What do you get by being the heir to the puzzle king?!” 
“D-don’t yell at me. I didn’t write it…I don’t know what they get out of it, but there are quiz kings and medal kings and so on. Some people just really want to have that honor, I guess?” 
“It doesn’t make sense…And for that matter, I don’t know what a medal king is supposed to be, either…” 
“Sorry, forget I said it. At any rate, that’s the ending. But you get a ton of experience for it, so let’s just tough it out and beat the quest.” 
“All right,” Asuna said, unconvinced. She looked up at the bottom of the floor above. The lid of rock and steel was turning deep purple, signaling that night would arrive within an hour. The next town over was a mile away, and there wouldn’t be many monsters along the road, so we could definitely get there before it was dark, but the problem was the next step after that. Pithagrus’s other home was an empty ruin now, and it would be full of astral-type monsters (i.e., ghosts) that we’d have to fight multiple times before we got the next clue. I decided to keep that part a secret, clapping the fencer lightly on the shoulder. 
“Let’s get dinner in the next town, and then we can continue the quest. If we can finish it up by the end of tomorrow, we should be able to get to the dark elf fortress the day after.” 
Asuna’s face lit up, and she gave me an energetic “Great!” 
Suribus, the second town on the sixth floor, was a beautiful place with a southern European air and absolutely no little eight-inch blocks. 
A large river running through its middle was spanned by numerous bridges—a sight that was reminiscent of Rovia, the main town of the fourth floor—though, regrettably, this river had not a single gondola in it. Still, the view of orange lights reflecting off the dark surface of the water had a kind of ethereal beauty you could only find in a virtual world. We had to stop on the bridge leading into the town for a moment to drink it all in. 
“…This town doesn’t have any cursed puzzles in it, right?” Asuna said right off the bat. 
“Nope,” I confirmed. “If you want some to go, they sell ’em in the gift shops.” 
“I don’t,” she stated firmly. “More importantly, let’s get something to eat. What’s good in Suribus?” 
“Hmm, let me think…” 
In the beta, I just ran through the quests and didn’t spend much time here, and upon further reflection, there weren’t many opportunities to eat in Aincrad back then. If I had time, I wanted to spend it leveling up, and if I got full in the virtual world, my mom and sister would yell at me. I tried to dig through what dim memories I had of the place to little effect. 
“It’s a wrap bake.” 
I spun around in alarm at the sound of a voice right behind us, covering Asuna to protect her. 
Leaning against the stone railing was not, however, the man in the black poncho who’d tried to kill me the other day; it was a small woman in a sand-brown cape. The top half of her face was hidden behind straw-yellow curls, but there was no mistaking the three whisker markings on either cheek. 
This was the best and only source of information in Aincrad, Argo the Rat. She looked stunned for a second, then pouted. “What’s this? What’d I do to earn this kind of reaction from you, Kii-boy? That hurts.” 
“S-sorry…I’m kind of on edge right now. It’s Sneak Attack Caution Week, let’s call it…” 
Asuna popped out from behind my back. “Good evening, Argo! I didn’t see you in Stachion—of course, you must’ve been over here already.” 
“Evenin’, A-chan.” Argo waved at her and pushed herself off the railing to walk closer. “Well, I’d like ta get my first strategy guide out by tomorrow, but it looks like most of the front-runners are already moving from the main town here to Suribus.” 
“Oh, they are? But why—?” I started to ask before the reason occurred to me. “Oh…It’s because the puzzles are a pain in the ass…isn’t it?” 
“Hee-hee-hee! Bingo. And the monsters aren’t too tough around these parts…so while I hate ta be the bearer of bad news, just about all the rooms in Suribus are booked. Only the expensive suites are available.” 
Asuna and I glanced at each other. We’d been planning to stay in a suite with two bedrooms tonight anyway, so the single rooms being taken wasn’t a problem. But given Argo’s rather menacing motto of “selling any info that can be sold,” this free tip was a bit—no, make that very—suspicious. 
“Ohhh, I s-see. But I’m sure that if we look, we can find an open room or two,” I replied. Argo’s eyebrow twitched, but she said nothing more on the matter. 
“Welp…based on what you were sayin’ earlier, I’m guessin’ you two are about to eat dinner?” 
“Yes, we were just deciding what to have,” Asuna said. “Argo, you said this town was famous for its wrap bakes? Do you have a recommended restaurant?” 
“I just made my way over here from Stachion earlier today, actually. Only had a chance to try out one place, but it was mighty tasty.” 
“Then let’s go to that one!” Asuna insisted. Argo had no choice but to grimace and go along with it. If it was me, she’d have demanded a price for that intel, but now that Asuna had identified her as a good friend, the Rat seemed unable to inflict her usual business practices. 
Argo took us to a place on the third floor of a building along the river that ran through Suribus. It was kind of a hidden, hole-in-the-wall type establishment. The first and second floor were just homes, and there was no sign, so you weren’t likely to find it unless you knew about it already. 
The stairs were narrow enough you could barely go two ways on them, and the door at the end was faded and marked with knots, but the interior of the place was quite clean. There was a counter and two tables for four, so we took one of them. 
I was imagining that the famous “wrap bake” would be something like gyoza dumplings, but what came out was essentially a round meat pie about eight inches across. Meat, tomato-flavored veggies, and plenty of cheese were all wrapped in a hot crispy crust. It wasn’t bad. In fact, it was great. 
In a blink, I’d reduced the circle pie to a semicircle. I took a long drink of cold herbal tea, then asked the info dealer, “Are all the wrap bakes in this town the same tomato-and-cheese flavor?” 
“Nope. If it’s like it was in the beta, each place will serve a different kind. Since it’s a riverside town, most of ’em were fish.” 
“Fish pie…? Seems weird to me…” I murmured. 
But Asuna had a huge grin on her face. “Just like the famous herring and pumpkin pie, I suppose.” 
“F-famous…?” 
I craned my head back the other way, wondering if there was such a staple dish in Aincrad, and saw that Argo was smirking as well. “A-chan, if you’re going to make a reference a game addict is going to understand, it has to be from a game.” 
“I suppose you’re right…” 
“You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you in your future…” 
“No kidding…I m-mean, not that I’ve decided this partnership is lasting forever!” 
“Nee-hee-hee-hee!” 
In the moment, I had the feeling that although it was hard to tell what exactly they were talking about, it was probably better that I didn’t know, so I returned my attention to the half-finished meat pie. 
Now that I thought of it, this might have been the first time I’d ever tasted a truly orthodox tomato flavor in Aincrad. Food in this world tended to be light on flavoring but heavy on spice. It was good once you got used to it, but most restaurants had one little thing—or sometimes a big thing—that felt unsatisfying afterward. 
This pleasantly overdone tomato flavor, however, was almost reminiscent of junk food to me. I’d have loved to try it heaped on top of soft-boiled spaghetti rather than in a neat little pie…but I still finished every last bite of the meal anyway. 
“Ahhhh…Nice work, Argo. You know the best places to go.” 
“Don’t I? Now, I’m not sayin’ ya owe me for the tip, but…” 
She looked around the room, ensuring there were no other players present, then whispered, “The big thing…How’d it all turn out?” 
Given that we were alone, it seemed like she could have just said the name of the item in question. But it was an important enough topic that I couldn’t get touchy about it. 
I leaned over the table and whispered, quiet enough that no Eavesdropping skill could pick it up through the door, “We gave the DKB the same conditions we did to the ALS. They did accept our terms, but…” 
“But?” 
“They also tried to buy it off us for three hundred thousand col.” 
Argo blinked once, very slowly. Her painted-on whiskers twitched. “Heh-heh. So that’s their tactic. Well, in that case…” 
“…He really is takin’ over for Diavel,” she left unsaid, downing the rest of her herb tea. Asuna looked at us for answers, but I whispered “I’ll explain later” before getting us back to the topic at hand. 
“At any rate, it looks like I’ll be holding on to it for the time being. The only problem is: That means we can’t use it for this upcoming boss fight…so they were on the same page in hoping to find a shortcut to it.” 
“A shortcut, huh…?” Argo folded her arms and murmured to herself. Then she grinned again. “Remember what the chakram guy who helped you with the fifth-floor boss said? If you started up a guild, all the Legend Braves would join ya. In fact, if ya made A-chan the leader instead of yerself, I bet you’d have a whole crowd o’ folks lookin’ to join. How about that?” 

“Wh…what?” 
Just this morning, Asuna had said she didn’t want to be the subleader of a guild. She shook her head back and forth so violently that the ends of her long hair smacked me in the face. 
“Y-you’ve got to be joking! It’s annoying enough for me to watch after him. I want nothing to do with any guild master job!” 
“A-annoying…?” 
I wasn’t expecting that her answer was going to throw me under the bus. Argo just chuckled to herself. 
We said good-bye to the info dealer outside the meat-pie place and headed right for Pithagrus’s other home on the edge of town. 
The river running through Suribus was flowing from a waterfall that emerged directly from one of the massive pillars at the outer aperture of Aincrad, and it continued through to the lake in the center of the floor. The town was built in a narrow strip along both banks of the river, with countless bridges crossing back and forth. Some of those bridges actually had full buildings on top of them, with roofs and everything. One of these “bridge houses” was our quest destination. 
We started this day training in the dark elf camp on the third floor, then talked with the DKB, followed by running all over town doing quests, leaving town and fighting our first monsters in the evening, and now reaching Suribus for dinner. Naturally, Asuna was looking a bit fatigued, but as soon as she saw the bridge where we were heading, her eyes lit up. 
“Ooh, it’s lovely! Just like the Ponte Vecchio!” 
The name sounded familiar to me, so I consulted my memories of the real world—in danger of being entirely overwritten by that of this fantasy realm—and asked, “Erm, are you talking about…the bridge in that, er…famous Tokyo theme park…?” 
Asuna blinked twice, then smiled. “Ah, right. They copied it there, too, didn’t they? In the water park, not the land one. But the original Ponte Vecchio is a bridge in Florence, Italy, spanning the Arno River. The real one’s much bigger than this one, of course, but it’s just as beautiful…” 
She looked up at the bridge house again, enchanted, while I fell into my thoughts. This was now the second time (ever since the fourth floor) my temporary partner had mentioned the name of a city in Italy. At this point, it was probably a good bet that she’d actually been there herself—not just read about it. That on its own wasn’t important, but it did fit a pattern, combined with her looks, communication skills, lack of gaming knowledge, and richness of other knowledge, that suggested Asuna had an extremely fulfilling and “normal” life in the real world. So how did she wind up logging into SAO on the very first day, when only ten thousand copies had been shipped (and nine thousand turned on), getting herself stuck in here…? 
“C’mon, let’s get going! I bet the river is gorgeous from up there!” 
She patted me on the back, and I returned to my senses. 
“Oh, y-yeah, I bet…” 
From the outside, Pithagrus’s second mansion was pretty, but it was a total wreck on the inside. It was also full of ghost-type monsters, which Asuna described as “not my forte”—which probably meant she was completely terrified of them. But before I could explain any of that, the fencer had marched off for the building, and the only thing I could do was chase after her. 
As we traveled along the river toward the bridge, three players were descending the stone stairs that led up to the house over the water. On instinct, we stopped behind the trees lining the road and listened to them speak. 
“…No way that door opens…” 
“Waste of time. Forget this whole thing. Three digits is bad enough, but six is impossible!” 
“Yeah, I just feel like there’s gotta be something good in there…” 
The grumbling trio passed by our position and left. From the tree next to mine, Asuna gave me a sidelong glance. 
“…Is there another puzzle door?” 
“…Yes.” 
“…You said they were only in the main town.” 
“N-no, it’s just the one here…I think,” I added, stepping back into the street. 
The bridge that Asuna compared to Ponte Vecchio was about eighty feet long and twenty feet wide. The first story was just a normal bridge, but the side railings were dotted with pillars that formed countless arches supporting the living space on the second story. After having spent so much time in Stachion with its uniform, blocky look, the structure here was, indeed, elegant and attractive. 
At the edge of the railing were especially large supports—the main pillars, as they called them—the sort that often featured a plaque with the bridge’s name on it. One had a short staircase attached to it that led up to Pithagrus’s house over the bridge itself. As I approached the old door, I couldn’t help but reflect that games taught you to want to head up little paths like this. 
On the surface of the stout wooden door was a six-part metal dial. It was a familiar locking device, where each wheel could turn through all the digits from zero to nine. 
Asuna reached it first and tried it out, the dials clicking as she moved the numbers. She turned to me. “None of the quests so far had anyone tell us the key for a numerical lock, did they…? Are we supposed to solve this on our own?” 
“You might guess a three-digit code, but six makes it just about impossible. It can be anything from zero to nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine, so that’s a hundred thousand possibilities…” 
“You mean a million.” 
“Huh? Oh…y-yeah, duh. A million possibilities. So even if you just ran through each and every one, it would take you several days. But, spoiler alert, you can find the correct combination in Cylon’s office.” 
“What? Where was it written?” 
“In the landscape painting on the wall,” I said. 
Asuna’s cheeks promptly puffed up. “Hey, you could have said something. If I’d known there would be a hint there, I would have looked closer and spotted it.” 
“No, I very much doubt that. The way it works is that you’re supposed to come here and think, ‘I don’t know the numbers!’ Then you go back to Stachion to ask Cylon, who won’t tell you, but he makes an odd show of trying to hide the painting. So then he kicks you out and you have to wait for him to leave before you can go back in to search the painting. It’s a huge pain…” 
“…You’re right, I’d rather not go through all that,” Asuna admitted. Then her brows knitted again. “But…how does that make sense? I mean, Cylon’s the—” 
I had a feeling she would blurt this out at some point, so I glanced over my shoulder and cut her off. “We can talk inside. I don’t want anyone to see us opening the door.” 
“Fine, fine, whatever you say. So…what’s the correct combination?” 
“Let’s see…” 
I started to answer according to my recollection from the beta, but my spine ran cold. If they had changed the combination between then and the release of the game, I was about to look extremely stupid. Hesitantly, I uttered the six digits. 
“…Six, two, eight, four, nine, six.” 
“Uh-huh…” 
She quickly spun the little dials into place. With a very clear click! the lock was undone. I stepped forward, relieved, but Asuna just stared at the dials without turning the doorknob. 
“What’s up? If you don’t open it soon enough, the lock will engage again.” 
“Oh…y-yeah. I was just thinking, the numbers seemed familiar somehow. Maybe I really did spot them in the painting without realizing it,” she said vaguely as she opened the door. It was pitch-black inside, and a draft of chilly, damp air swept outward. The fencer fell back on her heels a bit, sensing something foreboding, but I grabbed her shoulders from behind and kept her moving forward. 
Once we were inside, the door shut behind us on its own. There was a scraping sound, which was just the number dials from the lock shuffling themselves again, but I felt Asuna’s shoulders jump under my fingers. 
“…Um, it’s dark in here.” 
“Yeah, it’s night.” 
“…How are we going to search the place like this? Should we wait until the morning and come back?” 
“No, we’re fine.” 
I opened up my window and materialized an item that I always had on the first page of my inventory. 
“Laaanterrrn,” I said in a spooky voice, hoping this would lighten up the mood. All I got was a cold stare over Asuna’s shoulder. I cleared my throat awkwardly and lit the device, filling the area with orange light. 
As one might expect from a home belonging to the lord of Stachion, the entrance hall was quite spacious. Because it was built on top of a bridge, it was inevitably a bit elongated and narrow in shape, but the hallway that ran down the left wall was plenty wide enough not to feel cramped. 
On the other hand, there were bundles of cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, and broken utensils and torn pieces of paper were all over the floor. It very much had the appearance of an abandoned house. The look on Asuna’s face said this wasn’t what she signed up for. 
She turned to me. “So…back to what I was saying.” 
“What was that…? Oh, about Cylon?” 
“Yes. Does what he’s doing make any sense? If he’s the one who killed Pithagrus and buried the body in traveler’s garb in the backyard, why is he asking us to investigate the incident for him?” 
“Nuh-uh. Cylon didn’t ask us to investigate the killing of the traveler. He asked us to look for the golden cube that was used in the murder.” 
“Oh, right…” The small furrow between her eyebrows eased for a moment, then returned. “No, but that still doesn’t make sense. Cylon was the one who beat Pithagrus to death with the golden cube, right? So wouldn’t Cylon have hidden the weapon?” 
“Well, the reasoning behind that comes up at the end of the quest…but whatever. So Cylon got mad and beat Pithagrus to death, then mocked him up into a traveler who didn’t exist to hide his crime, right? He thought it all worked out in the end, but somehow the cube vanished from the murder scene—a cube with Cylon’s bloody fingerprints on it. On top of that, it’s the town treasure and the symbol of its lord—the very cube that formed the sizing basis of all the stone and wood cubes that make up the town. So Cylon’s idea is that the only way to purify the puzzle curse upon Stachion is to find the missing cube, clean off his prints, then place it at the grave of the traveler…who is secretly Pithagrus himself.” 
“……It just seems…very selfish. Or convenient. If he really wanted to undo the puzzle curse, he shouldn’t be bothering with the cube. He should admit that he killed Pithagrus and turn himself in to the police, right?” 
“Well, yeah. But there are no police in Aincrad.” 
Asuna murmured a soft “Oh yeah,” but her indignation still remained. She brought up the town guards, the dark elf fortress, even Blackiron Palace down in the Town of Beginnings on the first floor as a list of places he where he could turn himself in to a higher authority. 
“…Well?” she finished, looking at me. 
“Well…what?” 
“What do you think I mean? Who stole the golden cube? You’re not going to tell me it grew arms and legs of its own and ran away……Oh!” 
“‘Oh’…what?” 
“Is that actually what it is? You said the boss of this floor is like a giant Rubik’s Cube. Did the golden cube turn into some kind of monster form?” 
Now it was my turn to be stunned. As impressed as I was with the fencer’s imagination, I had to shake my head. 
“Sadly, that is not the case. Actually, maybe it’s not sad—if that boss cube were completely gold, you’d have no idea how to rotate it to solve the sides. But back to the point…we’ve already met the person who removed the cube.” 
“Whaaat?” She scowled, then let her eyes wander as she considered this. “So you’re saying…it’s one of the seven people we talked to in Stachion? The former butler, the maidservant, the gardener, the cook, the two apprentices, and the bartender he liked to visit…? And one of them has the cube now? Who is it?” 
“Let’s find that out on our own. We’re here to get the clues, after all,” I said with an evil grin. 
She pouted. “Fine, let’s get on with it. You know which room has the clue in it, right?” 
“Sadly, the place where the key item pops up is randomized.” 
“…So we’ll just have to start with the first room and go in order.” 
The swordswoman started walking down the entrance hall. As she went, I called out, “Oh, and a few of the rooms have ghosts, so don’t forget to prepare for battle.” 
“Sure, sure, whatever.” 
Step-step-step, pause. 
All of a sudden, she had teleported behind my back with her hands on my shoulders. An unyielding force pushed me on toward the first room. 
Fortunately, like in the beta, there was no dial lock on the inside doors. I pushed it open to a room that was actually darker than the hallway. Even with the lantern held up, the light didn’t reach all the corners of the room. 
“…Was there a ghost?” came a tiny voice behind my back. For the briefest of moments, my penchant for mischief kicked in, but I knew that playing pranks here would be the end of our partnership, so I gave her an honest answer. 
“Doesn’t seem like there’s one in this room.” 
“I don’t want seems! I want it on the record!” 
“Fine, fine. There are no ghosts in here.” 
At last, Asuna emerged from hiding behind my back, looking as smug and in control as ever as she inspected the room. “Ew…it’s in a terrible state…” 
I had to concur. It was probably a guest parlor originally, with a deluxe set of furniture in the middle of the moderate-sized room, and a huge fireplace on the far wall. But all the other furniture had collapsed after ten years of disuse, and the carpet was eaten through by insects. 
Asuna approached a side table that was still intact and ran a finger across its surface, which was piled high with dust. She made another face. “This was probably luxury furniture at one point. Not much use for it anymore…” 
“Well, you might be able to refurbish it if you take it to an NPC woodworker.” 
“Wait, you can do that? I thought you couldn’t move the objects in an NPC’s home.” 
“As a general rule. But in these safe-zone dungeons, there are a fair number of furniture pieces whose coordinates aren’t locked,” I explained, moving next to Asuna and grabbing the side table with both hands. When I pulled upward, the legs came right off the ground. 
“There, you see?” 
“You’re right…Hmm. But even if it got fixed up, I don’t think I’d want to use furniture that came from a place like this. For one thing, I have no idea when I might ever have a place of my own.” 
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” I said, lowering the table. But that vibration, as tiny as it was, managed to do in its remaining durability, and it crumbled pathetically into a pile of wood. 
“Ooooh, you busted it—you’re in trouble!” Asuna teased me, grinning wolfishly. She leaned onto the back of a nearby three-seat sofa, and instantly, the legs cracked off. It finished its act by splitting in two, through both the seat and the back portion. 
“Ooh, I’m gonna tell the teacher!” I taunted back, which I didn’t think I’d said even when I was actually in elementary school. Asuna snorted and grinded her left fist against my side. I couldn’t very well return that jab, and it left me helpless to do anything but grind my teeth in frustration. 
“There doesn’t seem to be anything else here. Let’s go to the next one,” I said, pointing at the door. 
“Fine, if you say so…but what are we even looking for anyway?” 
“Something that would suggest the location of the golden cube.” 
“And what is that something…? Well, if it’s the key to this quest, I bet they’ll make sure it’s visible one way or another.” 
“Let’s hope so…” I said knowingly as I headed into the hallway. I checked the front door just in case, but it didn’t seem to have been opened while we were in the parlor. Asuna checked the same direction and seemed to notice something, however. 
“Hey…what happens if someone else solves the combination on the dials while we’re already in here?” 
“It’s not an instanced location. So they’d come right in here.” 
“…And what happens if that person finds the clue item before we do?” 
“I’d say that the item would be locked in place so you can’t move or destroy it, or it would be something you could find infinitely. But in the latter case, it would spawn at certain intervals. There are some that take thirty minutes or an hour to reappear. Some even last as long as a day before they come back…” 
“Then we’d better find it and get out of here. C’mon, next, next!” 
Asuna pushed me several steps down the hallway until we came to a new door. 
The room adjacent to the parlor was a large dining room. The massive dinner table and chairs were still intact, but the way that ten or so table settings with cutlery included were laid out on top was quite eerie. The wine bottles and candleholders were gray with dust, and the chandelier hanging from the ceiling supported many spiderwebs. 
For five seconds, Asuna cowered behind my back. Once she was certain there were no ghosts here, she emerged as if nothing had just happened. 
“Can you move the wine and utensils, too?” she asked. 
“Probably. You wanna take that back and drink it?” 
“No, thank you. On the other hand, the clue item doesn’t seem to be here, either,” she murmured. Asuna strode closer to the dining table. 
Just then, there was a whooshing, rustling sound like the kind we heard in the underground chapel on the fifth floor, and a pale light spilled out from beneath the table. Passing up through the filthy tablecloth were two astral monsters—based on the long, slim silhouettes and tattered white dresses, they seemed to be wraiths. There were other kinds in this category—specters, phantoms, spirits, apparitions—but I honestly had no idea what differentiated them all. 
While she didn’t scream the way she had on the floor below, Asuna leaped upward a foot or so and ran through the air—at least it seemed that way to me because she was moving so fast—and darted around behind my back again. 
“Th-there they are! Hurry! Do something!” she ordered. I drew my Sword of Eventide +3, but rather than immediately attacking, I kept the wraiths at bay with the tip. 
“Asuna, I think it’s for the best if you experience some battle against astral types right here.” 
“B-but…” 
“It’s all right. You might have forgotten, but we’re in town now. No matter how much they attack, you won’t lose a single pixel of HP.” 
That’s not the problem, she seemed to say with her resulting sigh. But Asuna had thoughts of her own on this, and she peered around my left shoulder. While she immediately shrank back first, she then sidled her entire body until she was at my side instead. With her lantern held high in her off-hand, she drew the Chivalric Rapier +7 and pointed it at the wraiths situated atop the table. 
I focused on the ghosts myself, bringing up the automatic cursor. Beneath the HP bar, it said ANNOYING WRAITH in English, and the cursor itself was a very faint pink color. That meant that even if we weren’t in town, they wouldn’t be tough foes. 
“…I don’t recall seeing any ‘Annoying’ Wraiths before,” Asuna said, her voice a bit hoarse. 
As calmly as I could, I asked her, “What’s anoing mean?” 
“You didn’t learn that in English class? It’s, like, irritating—or troublesome…” 
“Ahh. That would fit for a quest event like this. Like I said, we’re in town, so we won’t lose any HP. But aside from that, these are the same as any ordinary wraith, so hitting their limbs or the end of their dresses won’t do much damage, and if they hit you, they can debuff you.” 
“Wait…you never warned me about that!” Asuna shrieked, and the wraiths seemed to react to the sound. They spread their arms and descended with a wail: “Hyoooo!” 
Human-type astral monsters could be male, female, or indeterminate, but wraiths were mostly female, it seemed. However, they had no beauty whatsoever; the arms extending from their ragged dresses were thin as bones, and two-thirds of their faces were skeletal. Blue fires burned in the eye sockets of these ones, and they swung long hands with knife-sharp nails. 
I evaded the first attack and swiped at the torso. The deep cut produced a white substance like smoke, but it left little impact, and the wraith only lost a tenth of its health bar. 
But the creature screeched hideously and flew to the corner of the dining room. I kept my sword pointed in its direction and glanced over to check on Asuna. 
“Why, you! Fngh! Shwaaa!” the fencer was hissing, not to be outdone by the wraiths’ bizarre vocalizations. She executed thrust skills with incredible speed—their frequency so thick that even the ghost couldn’t get past her rapier. As the wraith flew around in a figure-eight pattern, she occasionally clipped an arm, but it didn’t do much HP damage. 
Astral types had insubstantial bodies, and regular weapons did not inflict effective damage on them. Other games would have flame or light spells that could wreak havoc on them, but because of the ancient Great Separation of Aincrad, true magic had been lost here. You just had to make do with physical attacks, one way or another. 
The most common method was to place a blessing buff on your weapon, but at the moment, that could only be done in large towns with a church, and it cost money. You could also use sword skills with a high anti-astral effect (most of which were mace or flail skills) or bring many illumination items (astral monsters’ natural resistance was lower in the light), but these were tough requirements for a group of just two sword users. 
Fortunately, both Asuna’s Chivalric Rapier and my Sword of Eventide had received elven upkeep, which gave them minor effectiveness against the undead—enough to be good on its own against weak event monsters like these. I thrust my lantern forward and closed the gap so I could take my target out. In this situation, a fighter who used a shield or a two-handed weapon would just have to put the light on the ground to fight, but having a free hand meant I could just hold the lantern. And to get even more into the fine details, not only did having a light equipped in battle help with attacking power, a torch was better because it didn’t count as irregular equipment—and it had extra power against an astral foe weak to fire—with the only drawback being that you had to be careful swinging it around indoors, lest you accidentally burn something that could be destroyed. 
Lit by the yellow light of the lantern, the Annoying Wraith let out a high-pitched wail and slid to the right to get away. But that was just what I wanted; when it got into range, I used the three-part skill Sharp Nail on it. 
The strongest sword skills I had at the moment were the four-parters Horizontal Square and Vertical Square, which unlocked at proficiency level 150, but they were too wide-ranging for an indoor environment like this. If push came to shove, I couldn’t bother myself about not destroying the walls or furniture, but since this was in an anti-crime code area, and there were plenty of unbreakable objects around, I didn’t want to have my sword bounce off an obstacle and lose my skill combo. 
Sharp Nail, however, was a nice, compact trio of strikes with the same high-angle path. My silver-glowing sword sank into the torso of the Annoying Wraith without catching on the wall or ceiling. 
The first and second hits took it down to about a third of its health, but the last one seemed unlikely to finish the job. 
Yet, the moment the third erupted, the tip of the Sword of Eventide actually veered away, as if drawn by a magnet. It sliced the wraith’s shoulder, passed expertly through the center of the chest, then emerged out the side. Unlike the first two slices, this one came with the sensation of something small and hard breaking. 
Counter to my expectations, the wraith’s HP bar sank into the red zone and did not stop until it reached zero. The three visual slicing marks hung in the air like some fierce beast’s claws, overlapped by the usual blue bursting effect of any dying monster. 
I stared at the blade of my second-generation sword, still in the pose with which I finished the swing. 
That magnetic sensation I’d gotten was undoubtedly the aiming-adjustment system that the Accuracy boost had given my weapon. I’d thought the effect only kicked in when you intentionally aimed at a weak point, but I had no idea that a wraith-type monster had a little solid nodule in its chest as a vital area, so that meant the Sword of Eventide had basically hit the Annoying Wraith right in that spot of its own volition. 
“…Is that true?” I asked it in a tiny voice. The sword didn’t reply, of course. 
What I did hear, instead, was my partner screaming. 
“Uniiiieee!” 
It was probably an expression of disgust and frustration. I turned to see, on the other side of the large dining room, the fencer utilizing a sword skill. It was the best move she had at the moment, Triangular. 
A clean hit from that skill, with the power of the Chivalric Rapier +7, would be enough to take out half my HP. It riddled the wraith with near-invisible speed. But the enemy rose right before the skill executed, meaning it only hit the trailing skirt portion. That ectoplasmic white smoke tattered in its wake, but it left the HP bar with 30 percent remaining. 
“Hoh-hoh-hooohhh…” the wraith cried—somewhere between a scream and a mocking laugh—and swung its long arms at Asuna as she waited to recover from the skill delay. It didn’t do any damage, but Asuna’s HP bar lit up with an icon of a pale hand. That was the Chillness debuff that lowered body temperatures uncomfortably. 
“Fyah!” Asuna raged, leaping back as soon as she could move again. Despite valiantly holding her sword aloft, her shivering was apparent. Chill did no actual damage, but it was a major annoyance, causing sneezes in battle and keeping you from dodging the enemy’s attack. 
I rushed up behind her and called out, “Asuna, want h…?” 
“No!” she snapped, refusing my aid. She was not entirely going to handle it on her own, however. “Just give me a hint or something! Its HP refuses to go down!” 
“Oh…yeah, rapier thrusts are just about the worst kind of attack to use against astrals…” 
The Annoying Wraith floating up near the ceiling couldn’t have understood what I was saying, but it chose a very appropriate moment to chuckle. 
“Asuna, have you mastered any of the slicing kind of sword skills?” I asked. 
My partner’s voice was hard—surely due to her struggle to control the cold and not because she was actually mad at me—as she replied, “When I reached proficiency one hundred fifty a while back, I learned to use one called Folium.” 
“Yeah, I guess that would work. Okay, next time the wraith approaches, use Folium right at the middle of its chest.” 
“Wh…which part is the middle?” she yelled back. I didn’t have any immediate answers. Against kobolds or reptoids, I’d tell her “Where the heart is”; all humanoids, including players, had hearts (critical points) located just to the left of the center of the chest. Yet, the little nodule I felt in the wraith’s chest had been directly in the middle. There was no other way to define it. 
“Um…” 
I put the sword behind my back and looked around, then picked up a dusty dessert knife off the dining table. It had almost no value as a weapon, and I didn’t have the Throwing Knives skill, so it wasn’t going to do any real damage, but… 
“Yah!” 
I tossed the knife, concentrating only on Accuracy, and it landed in the middle of the swaying wraith’s chest, right where the little nodule would be, doing just a single pixel of damage to its HP bar before falling to the floor. A red damage effect appeared for just a few scant seconds on the tattered white dress. 
“There!” I shouted, but Asuna was already on the move. The wraith floated down from the ceiling as she approached. 
Asuna had learned the Annoying Wraith’s “path of least resistance” evasion methods from her previous experience and kept the rapier at her side, luring the enemy in as close as possible. The wraith’s arms, mostly bone, reached out to grab her again, and a lime-green light burst into being. 
The sword skill Folium was a rare slashing attack for the rapier category, but its trajectory was an unorthodox one. It curved upward from the left hip, then jutted into a sharp loop at its peak and ended at the lower right, much like a lowercase cursive l. The intention was to deflect the enemy’s attack before giving them a counter, but it wasn’t suited for hitting a specific point. 
Or so I thought. 
“Teyaa!” The Chivalric Rapier entered the wraith’s right side to perfectly pin the point I’d indicated—before doing a loop and exiting out the left flank. It must’ve broken the tiny weak point, because the third of its HP bar that remained drained all the way to the left edge. The Annoying Wraith let out a hideous wail and burst. 
My partner straightened up without a word and returned her sword to its sheath. 
I strolled up to her. “Yo, nice control. Did your Accuracy boost kick in just now? Or was that…?” 
“Pah-choo!” she answered by way of sneezing. She let go of the rapier and wrapped her body in her arms, her face pale. “I…I’m so cold.” 
“Yeah, you took a Chill effect…I think it wears off after five minutes, so you’ve just gotta…” 
“Pah-choo!” 
Her second sneeze drowned out the words tough it out. Even knowing it was essentially harmless, I couldn’t help but pity her paleness and shivering. 
At the very end of the beta, we started getting Purify Crystals that could instantly undo multiple debuffs, including this one, but here on the sixth floor, crystals were just starting to become droppable and were still very rare. The only other way to undo the effects would be the individual method for each one—antidote potions for poison, undoing a curse at the church, etc. 
Chill had its own special recovery method, of course. You could warm up by the fire, but lanterns and torches didn’t put off enough heat. On the other hand, there was that fireplace in the previous room—it occurred to me that it had been put there by design so you could undo the ghosts’ effects—but it would be a bit of a pain in the ass. No, a major pain in the ass. 
Instead, I opened my window to test out a convenient but somewhat embarrassing method. With both hands, I removed a thick blanket for camping and draped it over my back like a cape. To cover up the embarrassment of what I was about to do, I focused on thoughts like These long-haired cattle blankets sure are heavy, and I could really use a down-filled bedroll by now, and I bet that would be expensive. When I reached Asuna, who looked at me in surprise, I said, “Pardon me” and drew her closer so I could wrap us both up under the blanket. 
Instantly, her body froze like a rod between my arms, and right at my ear, her high-pitched, hoarse voice said, “Hey, wh-what are you…doi…? Pah-choo!” 
“This is the quickest way to undo the Chill effect. Just put up with it for another twenty seconds.” 
The icy chill from her body started seeping into me, making my nose itch. The chill was just a virtual skin sensation created by the NerveGear, and my real body would be in some hospital room with perfectly controlled temperature at the moment, but I couldn’t help but wonder if sneezing here was also prompting a sneeze out there… 
“L-listen, even if this is supposed to help undo the debuff, if someone sees us like this, they’re going to get the wrong fwuh…” 
Right at the moment that she trailed off with that odd sound, the chill trickling from her body into mine suddenly vanished. I’d experienced that before: When the Chill effect wore off, it left the body feeling pleasantly warm. It was like the feeling of taking off your clothes in a changing room in the winter, only to sink right into a tub full of delightfully hot water. I couldn’t blame her for letting out an odd moan. 
She stared at nothing, mind out of focus, until she snapped back to attention, eyes blinking rapidly, and ducked out of my arms. 
“Um, that wasn’t…It’s not…” she babbled, mouth working furiously, and then spun away from me. “W-well…I’m grateful to you for undoing the debuff. But next time, I’d appreciate an explanation first!” 
“I figured if I had to describe it first, it would be twice as embarrassing,” I said, putting the heavy blanket back into storage. 
To my surprise, Asuna said, “Why, that sounds like you’ve done it before.” 
“Huh?! W-well, I knew about it because I’d done it in the beta, of course…but let me be very clear that the other person was like Wolfgang from the Bro Squad but twice as hairy and super-macho, okay?” 
“…I don’t know if I wish I could’ve seen that or not,” the fencer said, a very strange and subtle smile on her lips. At least her mood had improved. She walked around the dining room, examining the table and the paintings on the wall, but found nothing. 
“Well, that made our battle against the ghosts meaningless.” 
“Hey, that’s just how quests go,” I bantered back, now that our usual mood had returned. We left the dining room and returned to the hallway. 
Between the kitchen, the study, and the bedroom, we defeated four more Annoying Wraiths but still had not found the key item. At last, we were at the final door. Asuna grabbed the doorknob, then side-eyed me. 
“Kirito, you didn’t know ahead of time that we weren’t going to find anything in the first five rooms, did you?” 
“I…I don’t know how I could have. Like I said, the item would pop in any of the six rooms at random in the beta. I’m…sure that’s what happened just now, too.” 
“You said that like an NPC,” Asuna accused, which was an odd thing to say. She opened the door, and a musty smell stung my nostrils. 
I recalled that the last door led to a storeroom. I followed Asuna inside, holding my lantern up. It was the smallest of the six rooms, full of wooden shelves lined with wooden boxes, pots, and various items of all sorts. 
“Ugh…do we have to open up all these things to search?” 
“I’d rather not do that, either,” I mumbled, passing through the maze of standing shelves to the back of the room. At the very end, there was a small writing desk along the wall, and sitting atop it, seemingly abandoned in a very meaningful way, was an object that dully reflected the glow of the lantern. 
It was a large key, sitting under ten years of dust. 
“Oh! That must be it!” Asuna exclaimed eagerly, trotting up to the desk. I tried to grab her shoulder, but my hand closed on nothing but empty air. 
“Asuna, your feet!” I shouted, right as a cracking sound went off under her foot. In the wavering light of the lantern, I saw an old, faded bone. 
Asuna froze in a very unnatural position, right as the boss encounter ghost of this haunted house quest emerged from the wall behind the desk. 
Unlike the previous wraiths, this Resentful Wraith was male. Once again, my English skill wasn’t quite up to the task of informing me what the word resentful meant. 
The tall, gaunt ghost wore a sweeping, tattered robe like the ancient Romans did, brandishing its freakishly long nails and opening its mouth wide enough that the jaw seemed dislocated so that it could scream, “Byoouuu!!” 
As I reached for the sword over my back, it occurred to me that the situation wasn’t great. 
The Resentful Wraith couldn’t take down our HP, of course, but it had a wide variety of debuffs, and if we suffered all of them at once, it would take quite some time to recover. That wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but I was also afraid of losing the progress we’d made against the wraiths in conquering Asuna’s fear of ghosts. I wanted to keep its attention focused on me, but with hardly four feet of space between the stone wall on the left and wooden shelves on the right, there was barely room to swing my sword, much less switch spots with Asuna. 
“Asuna, regroup in the hallway!” I shouted, reaching out for her shoulder again. But before I made contact, I heard her voice, much firmer than I would have expected it to be: 
“Kirito, can I break the bones on the floor?!” 
“Oh…uh, I think those are just there to be spooky.” 
“Got it!” she shouted, taking a stance that scattered the bones below. She drew her rapier and thrust a series of five jabs with tip-blurring speed at the approaching Resentful Wraith. They were all aimed at the center of its chest, and while the first four did not have much effect, the fifth one did take a good 15 percent of its HP bar down. The elven blade had scratched the weak point, which must’ve been in the same place as the earlier enemies’. 
 

“Byaaaaa!!” the spirit shrieked with rage, rising up to the ceiling. It began a bewitching technique utilizing a figure-eight motion, but without the space of the dining room, its side-to-side movement was limited. Relieved, I realized that this would make it easier for the rapier to aim at the spots where it was floating, letting us take down its HP much faster… 
“I’m sick and tired of dealing with ghosts!” 
But then Asuna jumped up onto the writing desk, nearly kicking the crucial item away as she launched herself into the air. At the top of her jump, she activated the sword skill Shooting Star. 
The silver visual effect ran from the tip to the entire weapon—even the body of its wielder—creating an invisible propulsive force. With a twinkling sound effect, Asuna’s rapier shot toward the ceiling and caught the ghost square in the chest, gouging a huge hole in its transparent body. 
Ah, I see, I thought, impressed. A charging rapier sword skill can hit a pinpoint target with much wider coverage. The Resentful Wraith issued a hideous, fractal scream and vanished…and the Chivalric Rapier’s tip smashed into the ceiling, creating a purple burst of light. 
Midair activation of sword skills was a highly technical move that, in essence, allowed you to double jump, but it also had its downsides—if you jumped higher than you intended and suffered fall damage, or if you hit an obstacle and took collision damage. Since we were in town, there was no HP loss for hitting walls or the ceiling, but it struck me as poor form to stand by and watch my partner fall clumsily to the ground. 
Therefore, I took two steps forward, estimating where the rebound from hitting the wall of code would send Asuna, and held out my arms. I wasn’t entirely confident in my strength stat or my (nonexistent) Carrying skill proficiency, but I did succeed at catching her in a bridal-style hold. When I looked down at her face, I saw hazel-brown eyes blinking back at me. 
I thought she was just a bit stunned by the impact, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Her mouth opened and closed a few times before she finally squeaked, “Thank you.” 
“You’re welcome.” 
I set her back on her feet. We both took a deep breath for some reason. It had been an experience, but the haunted house exploration quest was done for now. 
“You beat the boss, so you should get the key, Asuna,” I urged. The young woman started to approach the writing desk, but she stopped to look down at the bones she’d scattered just moments ago. She turned toward me. 
“…Hey, these bones aren’t Pithagrus’s, are they?” 
“Huh? Uh, no…they wouldn’t be. Remember, Cylon the disciple killed Pithagrus to become the lord of Stachion and buried his body in the yard behind the mansion.” 
“Then who do these bones belong to?” 
“Um…” 
I had to think about this. Because I’d already spoiled the ending, putting the order of the details and story twists together was getting rather complicated. 
“…Well, we skipped past that step, but remember how I told you about the proper order of looking up the code to the front-door lock?” I asked. 
“Oh, right…you’re supposed to go back to Stachion and then look at the painting in the lord’s chamber?” 
“That’s right. And you only know the painting is a hint when Cylon tries to hide it…which would tell you that Cylon knows the digits to that lock are hidden in the painting.” 
“Oh, I see…But does that really make sense? If he knows the number to unlock this house, why doesn’t Cylon come and investigate this place himself? And then he’d find this key. It’s the key to whatever place is hiding the golden cube, right?” 
I was impressed at the speed of Asuna’s understanding and her ability to extrapolate ahead of the information given. 
“That’s a good point. So the reason he couldn’t do that must be because Cylon knows the numbers but not where to use them. Remember? The only person who knew this was Pithagrus’s second house was the bartender he would visit—the last person we talked to in Stachion. Pithagrus kept this place a secret from everyone, including his apprentices and servants.” 
“…But why?” 
“You’ll know if you check the books in the study.” 
“Ewww.” She grimaced. 
In any fantasy RPG, books were a major presence among interior decoration elements. A house should have a bookshelf, and a bookshelf should have books, of course. 
But books are one of a game designer’s worst enemies. Unlike furniture or utensils, books are made important by their contents. And filling the vast number of in-game books with meaningful content is practically impossible. Therefore, most games either make it impossible to remove the books from the shelf, or they limit access to just a few books, with only a couple pages being viewable. 
But SAO, likely through some fixation of Akihiko Kayaba’s, bravely challenged this limitation. All the books in this world were fully functioning ones that could be taken from the shelf, and all the pages contained print. Generating all that content from scratch was apparently a bridge too far, as nearly all the books simply contained the text of classic books in the public domain as of 2024, in their original languages. So the vast majority of players could look at the books, but reading them was too difficult. I’d heard rumors that some Japanese books were floating around, too, but I’d never seen one. 
It was odd to think of books written in real-world languages being on the shelves of a world that contained elves and dwarves and such. But if you started down that road, you’d have to wonder why the NPCs were speaking Japanese, too. 
So this was why you could take a book and peruse its contents, but the thought of checking them made even Asuna groan. 
“…I feel like I’ve seen enough Cyrillic and Arabian script to last me a lifetime,” she grumbled. 
“Don’t feel bad. It’s all Greek to me…Sorry, sorry, just a joke,” I added when I saw the look she was giving me. “Most of the books in the study are what you’d expect, but a few mixed in are like manuals for puzzles. In other words, Pithagrus the puzzle king kept his secret books with the solutions to the previous lords’ puzzles and his own here in his secret home for safekeeping. It’s just that if we tried to read them, we wouldn’t make any sense of them.” 
“Ah, I see…Well, I hate to speak ill of the dead, but he sounds like a bit of a miser. Maybe if he’d allowed his apprentices to read these, rather than hogging them all to himself, he wouldn’t have wound up getting killed,” Asuna said, shaking her head sadly. Then she looked at the bones on the floor. “So…whose bones are these, then?” 
“Cylon’s henchman. Like us, he heard about the second home from the bar, and he got this far using the combination from Cylon to open the lock…but before he could return to report to his master, the wraiths got him.” 
“Wait, you mean the person who died here wasn’t the wraith we just fought…?” 
“If so, then there should have been bones in the other rooms where we found the Annoying Wraiths, right? It seems like once a house is left unattended to fall into ruin, ghosts just naturally swarm there.” 
“…If I ever buy a player home here, I’m cleaning it every single day. And you’re not allowed to leave it cluttered, either, Kirito.” 
“Yeah, yeah…” I muttered, but then I stopped in my tracks. Hmm? What sort of a situation is she envisioning in this scenario? She looked confused by the way I was pondering this, then reflected on what she’d just said, and her white skin instantly turned red. 
“No!!” 
“O…kay?” I said, startled by her sudden outburst. She grabbed my left shoulder. 
“It’s not that! It’s definitely not that!!” 
“O…kay.” 
I wasn’t sure what “that” was, but the point-blank lasers shooting from her eyes convinced me that I should indicate I understood. Asuna snorted, let go of my shoulder, and spun around to head to the desk. She snatched the key and returned in a huff. 
“This is the item, right?” 
On the left side of my vision, the quest log updated, so I told her, “Yep.” 
“And what door does this open?” 
“Dunno.” 
“You don’t know…?” 
“The only person who knows is the one who hid the golden cube and left the key on this desk.” 
“…So we have to find that person now…” she said, looking briefly crestfallen. But she quickly recovered, opening her game window and putting the key into her inventory. “Yikes, it’s after nine already. We’ll have to continue tomorrow.” 
“I agree. Or…I would, but…” I said, considering very carefully how much I ought to spoil. “Well…something’s going to happen in a bit that will surprise you, but it definitely won’t pose a danger to our lives…In other words, there’s no HP loss. So react calmly.” 
“H-huh? What do you mean…? What’s going to happen?” 
“Look, I wouldn’t want to ruin the best part of a movie for you, would I? Just think of it as a roller coaster and enjoy the ride.” 
“That does not make me anticipate a good time…” Asuna grumbled, looking around. There was no difference in the walls and shelves surrounding us. Eventually, she summoned her courage, closed her window, then grabbed my shoulders and spun me around. 
“You go first, Kirito.” 
“Got it.” 
I knew that the order we walked in wasn’t going to matter for what happened next, so I stifled my mad grin and started walking back the way we’d come. We passed through the maze of shelves and reached the doorway. Now back in the darkened hallway, I glanced over my shoulder at Asuna’s nervous expression, then proceeded toward the distant front door. 
On the left, we passed the doors of all the rooms we’d already searched. Soon, the light from the lantern in my left hand reached the entrance hall. It was practically a room of its own, so the light didn’t catch every last corner from the hallway. Even knowing that we were safe, and that this was the second time passing through this location, I couldn’t help but feel my nerves activating as I stepped into the entryway. 
Suddenly, there was a pshooo! sound, and a cloud of venomous green smoke ascended to block my vision. 
Normally, you’d stand a chance at avoiding a poison mist trap like this if you caught your breath in time, but since this was a forced event, that didn’t matter. Behind me, Asuna screamed, and I reached out to grab her hand and keep her calm. The smoke soon reached the level of our faces. The moment I sensed the acrid scent, I felt my legs go numb, and we toppled to the floor. 
In the upper left corner, our HP bars were surrounded by borders the color of the smoke. It indicated a paralysis state…but while under normal paralysis you could still use your right arm (barely), now we were completely unable to move—or even speak. Fortunately, the sense of touch was still intact, so through our skin contact, I willed Asuna not to worry. 
In thirty seconds, the gas was completely gone without a trace, and the source of it became visible in the light of the lantern, which now lay on the floor. It was a small pot, with a helpful skull symbol on the side. Then there were two sets of approaching footsteps. 
In the corner of the entrance hall appeared two men in matching hooded cloaks, large and small—only identifiable as men because I already knew who they were. Beneath their deep hoods, they wore odd leather masks that covered their entire faces. 
The large man stopped in the middle of the floor, but the smaller one approached us, then picked up the pot. He put it away in his cloak, then pulled back the hood and removed the mask, which clearly kept him safe from the gas. 
“…!!” 
I heard Asuna’s gasp. 
Visible in the orange lantern light were the sunken cheeks, balding head, and impressive beard of the lord of Stachion, Cylon. 
“Well, well…I’m quite surprised, swordsman. I did not think you’d find Pithagrus’s hideaway so soon. It took me many years to find it…because I never expected it would be in Suribus, rather than Stachion.” 
He shook his head theatrically, then glanced past me down the hallway. “I am curious about the hidden formula behind his puzzles that he kept so secret…but I’ll start with this first.” 
He walked past me, his oddly upturned shoes clacking against the floor, and reached for Asuna. Through some kind of sleight of hand—or probably just to make the story scene work—the golden key appeared in his palm, when it should have been safe in her inventory. He examined its fine details and exhaled heavily. 
“Ahhh…I’d been hoping I would find the cube itself here…but I do have an idea of where I might find the door for this key. Surely, the item I seek will be there,” he said, his dejection morphing into a pleasant smile. He tucked the key away into his cloak and stroked his long beard. 
“You did very good work for me, swordsman. Normally, this is where I would say farewell…but in fact, I have another job for you to do. Do you mind if I ask for your cooperation once more…?” 
He extended his left hand and snapped his fingers. The large masked man, who hadn’t said a word, walked over and pulled a large sack from his cloak. He knelt down and grabbed my collar with an abnormally thick fist, easily lifted me up, and tossed me into the sack. I’d experienced this before, but in the beta, I beat the quest on my own. When in a group of two, would they bring out two sacks, or just…? 
My question was answered when the mouth of the sack opened again, and my partner landed on top of me. I would’ve grunted with the impact, if I was able to use my voice yet. Surely, Asuna would not be happy about this, but she’d have to deal with it for the sake of our quest XP. 
Over her shoulder, I saw the large man peering into the bag. Then he closed the opening, and we could see nothing. 
I could feel the big man hefting us up and over his back. Our sack swayed in rhythm with each plodding footstep. There was the sound of a door opening and closing. Through the heavy burlap, I heard the faint sound of the river and the distant music from NPC musicians. 
At this hour, many players would still be eating and shopping in Suribus. And we were being abducted and carried right through all of that—a rather daring setup for a quest. The sack was big enough with the two of us in it; what would happen if it was a full six-man party…? Before I could imagine the possibilities, there was a heavy thump, and we stopped swaying. I could hear sounds of exhaust close by—a horse breathing—and then we were loaded onto a carriage bed. 
In moments, the carriage rocked again, probably as the large man and Cylon got into the box seat. There was the sound of a whip cracking, then clopping hooves and rattling wheels. The carriage was slowly making its way down the riverside path. 
The paralysis still prevented me from moving or speaking, but knowing that we were getting a free taxi back to Stachion made the experience bearable. The bigger problem was that I had no idea how Asuna—who was resting on top of me—felt about all this. Once we were free to move again, she’d probably scream at me to warn her what was going to happen first, but for now I wanted to believe that she’d understand I was just trying to save the surprise and fun of this climactic scene for her to enjoy. 
Within minutes, the carriage was out of town, and the road beneath the wheels turned from paving stone to dirt. It was a mile to Stachion, with no monsters along the way, meaning the trip would be just five minutes long. Naturally, the event would continue after reaching the town, so it would probably be another thirty minutes or so until we fully regained our freedom. At this rate, we’d be spending the night in Stachion, rather than Suribus… 
“Bree-hee-hee!!” 
The carriage came to a violent stop as the horse whinnied. I opened my eyes wide, which was about the only thing I could control, but there was no way to see what was happening outside the sack. 
“Who goes there?! I am Cylon, lord of Stachion!” he shouted. It was followed by the sound of metal striking metal. 
The horse whinnied again, and the cart tipped over. I would have shouted if I could. The sack tumbled away with us inside it and landed on a short patch of grass. The impact knocked the mouth of the sack slightly open, giving us a better view of the outside. 
On top of the carriage, Cylon and a bandit in a black hood were fighting with swords, and a short distance away, the large man in the leather mask was in combat with a similar bandit. Cylon and his assistant’s cursors were yellow, while the bandits’ were orange. 
This event had not happened in the beta. It wasn’t that unusual for the quests in the full release to be different, but it did mean that my prior knowledge wasn’t going to help anymore. We’d still have to wait for the paralysis to wear off, but once it did, we might be asked to choose between siding with Cylon or the bandits—or just to run away… 
“…!!” 
I thought I felt Asuna tense and breathe harder than usual. 
A moment later, I understood why. 
We’d fought a number of forest elves who were treated like NPCs. Their color cursors were red, just like monsters. But the black-hooded bandits fighting Cylon had orange cursors. The color of criminals. 
They weren’t NPCs. They were players. 
Just as this dawned on me, the bandit fighting in the bed of the carriage used a sword skill and mercilessly cut down Cylon. The force of the momentum pulled the attacker’s hood back, exposing his face. 
Glinting in the pale moonlight was a silver chain coif with the ends tattered and hanging—and a large, leering grin underneath. 
I knew that face. He had a sword now, but I would never mistake him for anyone else. It was the axman who challenged me to a duel on the third floor with the intent of killing me… 
It was Morte. 
Cylon’s paralyzing poison only immobilized the body and had no effect on the mind of the player—but I couldn’t think for several moments. 
At last, a question floated into my head—and then the answer. They were as fleeting as bubbles rising and popping. 
What in the world are Morte and his friend doing? 
…That should be obvious. They’re not saving me and Asuna from Cylon. Just the opposite: They’re taking advantage of our paralysis to kill us. 
Then how did they know that we would be paralyzed and passing through this spot at this exact time? 
…Did they trail us the whole way? No. Morte was a beta tester like me. He would probably know all about the “Curse of Stachion” quest, and he would know that if he staked out Pithagrus’s hideout, he would see me and Asuna show up eventually. 
So how do we escape? 
……… 
But no amount of waiting brought the answer to the third question to my mind. 
It was perfectly possible to interfere with another player’s quest if it was happening out in the open, and I’d experienced that in other games before SAO. But it never even occurred to me that something like this could have happened. 
Cylon was slumped on the floor of the carriage bed, his now-empty sword hand thrust up toward his attacker. “Killing a lord is a grave and terrible crime!” he shouted. “You will never be allowed in Stachion—or through the gates of any other town again!” 
I couldn’t tell if this line was part of one of Cylon’s dialogue patterns or something spontaneous that he came up with when faced with unexpected death. In either case, his threat had no effect on Morte. The axman took two steps forward, still grinning, transferred to a one-handed ax with the Quick Change ability, and brought it down on Cylon’s head. 
The HP bar underneath the cursor name CYLON went to zero, and the lord of Stachion slowly rocked backward, right hand still outstretched, and tumbled from the cart. His body bounced right near our feet on the ground and came to an unnatural stillness before shattering into a swarm of tiny blue shards. 
Like you might expect from a lord, he dropped a number of items among the hoards of gold and silver coins, causing them to jangle and clatter on the ground. It was the kind of profit you’d turn into an orange player to make, but Morte paid it no mind. He gazed down at us from the carriage. His eyes were hidden under the edge of the coif, but the smile on his thin lips grew wider. 
Just then, the other hooded bandit fighting the larger man on the other side of the carriage screeched, “Hey, if you’re done with the old man, help me out! This fat-ass is pretty high-level!” 
I craned my eyes as far as they could go and saw the large man, his huge fists wrapped in leather straps studded with metal, swinging at the smaller hooded player nimbly darting around. The bandit had a thin dagger in his hand, which told me he must be the one who was meeting with Morte in the underground catacombs on the fifth floor. If these two were around, then it was possible that the boss of the PK gang was nearby—the man in the black poncho who tried to kill me during the fireworks show—but I didn’t sense him yet. 
The dagger user darted around the large man’s punches and struck back deftly, but he maintained his distance and wasn’t getting close enough to do big damage. At this point, our only hope was to rely on the man who had stuck us in this sack in the first place. If he could hold out for a few minutes, even with Morte involved, Asuna and I might recover from our paralysis. 
But… 
“Sorry, I’m busy right now. If you can’t take him out, then pull him into the forest and lose him there, please,” Morte commanded, then turned back to us. His partner protested, but it seemed clear that Morte held a higher position in their gang. Instead, he yelled at the large man to follow him and raced into the thick woods on the south side of the road. The man in the leather mask issued a muffled roar and pounded after him. 
When the two pairs of footsteps had vanished, there was a deafening silence left behind. For some reason, the usual calls of the night insects and owls hooting were completely gone. 
Into that silence landed the sound of light feet. Morte had jumped from the bed of the carriage. The ax he’d used to kill Cylon rested on his shoulder, and he stepped carelessly over the scattered coins on the ground as he approached me and Asuna where we lay. 
“…Well, well, well. I’ve been awaiting you, Kirito. I had a feeling you’d accept the lord’s quest, but I wasn’t so positive that I was gonna follow you the whole way from the start. Instead, I just sat watching Py-whatsit’s hideout from an inn starting last night…Oh! Whoopsie.” 
His leer turned a bit embarrassed, and he scratched the side of his head with the back of the ax. 
“Boss always tells me I oughta watch out about talkin’ too much, but it doesn’t look like that’s ever going to change, does it? On the other hand, it’d really suck if you recovered from your paralysis while I’m just chatting on and on, so I’m afraid this is where we say good-bye.” 
He spun the ax in his fingers, twirling it audibly, then gripped it straight and began to walk again. 
Just at that moment, the green border around my and Asuna’s HP bars began to blink. Thirty seconds until the debuff wore off naturally…but five seconds was all he’d need to kill a defenseless player. 
Asuna was sprawled on her side with her back to me, so I couldn’t see her face. I couldn’t say a word to her or hold her hand. 
I let this situation come about due to my own lack of caution. I knew we’d be carried out of town in a totally helpless state, and I should have realized that this would leave us vulnerable to possible PKers. And even if I hadn’t figured it out, perhaps Asuna would have been observant enough to spot my folly, if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with my precious story surprises. 
I had to find a way to get Asuna out of this death trap, even if it required sacrificing myself. 
The boots crunched closer. 
The debuff wasn’t gone yet. 
My heart jackhammered. 
This wasn’t a virtual signal. I knew that wherever I was in the real world, my heart was racing there, too. My mind was compressed, time passing slower than it should, as my brain sped through all possible choices. 
I could see Asuna’s chestnut-brown hair, the green grass, and the navy forest in the background…as well as the assortment of items Cylon dropped upon his death. Gold coins, silver, mysterious pouches, a rather expensive-looking longsword, his leather mask, an iron key, a golden key, a small jar, and those shoes with the upturned toes. 
A possibility shot through my mind, as instantaneous as lightning. 
I couldn’t move my arms or legs at the moment. But there were two things I could do. 
One was look. The other was breathe. 
Morte came to a stop just a foot and a half behind me; I was lying on my side. While I couldn’t see him directly, his shadow was black on the ground, silently raising the ax high over his head. 
At that moment, I expelled the lungful of air I was holding through pursed lips. 
I was aiming for the small jar, which was standing upright about three feet away. It had a skull mark on the side—it was what Cylon had used to paralyze us. It must have reinitialized in its default state when it dropped, because it was stopped up closed rather than open and empty. 
The jar was only two inches tall, and exhaled breath here tended to be exaggerated—we’d been able to blow up the inner-tube fruits on the fourth floor with a single breath—but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to knock it over. To my surprise, however, another gust of air descended upon it at the same time. Asuna had come to the same conclusion and attempted the same trick. 
The little jar lurched sideways with the force of two breaths at once. It tilted back, lurched forward—and toppled. The lid, which was simply resting in place, rolled off onto the ground, and that vicious green smoke shot out with startling force. I sucked in a huge, deep breath of clean air and held it. 
Instantly, the smoke enveloped us, turning everything green. I heard the clicking of a tongue and sensed Morte scurrying away. The blinking of the green border around my HP gauge grew quicker and quicker. 
In Aincrad, raising two different kinds of stats could allow you to exhibit physical strength and speed that were impossible in real life. But there were a few scant things in a full-dive VRMMO that were still derived from your actual physical body. 
One of those things was lung capacity. If water covered your head, the game registered you in the Drowning state, but as long as you held your breath, there would be no HP loss. Since that breath was not only the avatar’s, but your physical body’s, that meant that players who had higher lung capacity in the real world could move around longer underwater. The same property applied to holding your breath against poison gas. 
I didn’t get much exercise in elementary or middle school, so my confidence in my lung capacity was low, but Cylon’s gas had only lasted for thirty seconds at the haunted house, and I knew I could at least hold it that long. The problem was whether the paralysis still had that much time left…and if Morte would stay clear for the full thirty seconds. 
It had been five…six…seven seconds since the gas started—and the HP bar border and debuff icon were gone. Instantly, feeling returned to my body, and I pushed myself up with my left hand, reaching for my sword with my right. 
That was when Morte came charging through the curtain of poison toward me. 
The gas was so thick that I could only see a vague outline of the enemy’s shape. The same was true for Morte, but the blow he hurled, cutting through the smoke, was perfectly aimed at my face. 
If I blocked the head of the ax swooping toward me with my sword alone, I would lose in terms of weight and momentum. But I also didn’t have time to slash at it from a crouched position. I had no choice but to put my left hand up behind the blade and assume a two-handed blocking pose. 
Morte’s ax smashed against the side of the Sword of Eventide, spraying sparks that were nearly blinding, even in the thick haze. The impact was so strong that I was briefly afraid my sword would break, but the Yofilis clan’s legendary blade absorbed it valiantly—the rebound buckling Morte’s stance slightly. 
“……!!” 
I bolted up with a dull roar, executing the basic martial arts skill Flash Blow with my left hand. My fist shot forward wreathed in red light, which Morte blocked with his clenched right arm—but not solidly enough to keep himself from tipping off-balance. I had a post-skill pause, too, but of all the sword skills I knew, Flash Blow had the shortest delay. When I recovered less than a second later, Morte was still reeling. 
His right side was guarded by his tough-looking ax, but his left was defenseless. The best way to strike him there would be with the longsword skill Horizontal— 
No. Wait. 
When I fought Morte at the forest elf camp on the third floor, he used Quick Change to switch his sword for his ax. But he also brought up a round shield alongside the ax. But now his left hand was empty. Did he change his style? Why—? 
To make me think his left hand was empty. 
“!!” 
I gritted my teeth and stopped myself from using the sword skill I was just about to cue up, pulling back my blade. At the same moment, Morte snapped his left wrist and threw something at my face. 
The object split the poison gas and deflected off my sword, which I barely lifted in time. Based on the loud metallic clang and the strength of impact, I could guess that it was a throwing pick—probably poisoned. 
In the time that I drew my sword back to defend, Morte had recovered, but he chose to withdraw rather than counterattack. He jumped backward, and I followed, careful for any additional throwing darts. In five seconds, I was out of the poison gas, so I expelled my breath and sucked in fresh air. 
Five yards up ahead, Morte took a breath of his own, his mouth wide with glee. 
“Ha-ha…Well done, Kirito. I can’t believe you blocked that.” 
“Say, wherever did you get that very dangerous and rare poisoned pick?” I asked him, glancing at the polished Sword of Eventide to see what was reflected in its surface from behind me. Asuna recovered at the same time I did, but she hadn’t left the green smoke yet. The debuff icon was gone from her HP bar, so I knew she hadn’t sucked in a new dose of it, but I didn’t know what reason she might have for not moving yet. 
“Well, if I told you that, you’d go and get it yourself, wouldn’t you? It’s surprising how useful these things can be,” Morte leered, reaching down to draw a fresh one from his belt. 
Poison in SAO—especially the paralyzing kind—was incredibly dangerous, as evidenced by the way he’d nearly used that paralysis event to kill us. For that reason, it was very, very hard for players to make use of it. Not only was it difficult enough to craft a high-level paralysis agent with the Mixing skill, spreading it on your weapon alone did not have any effect. The weapon itself needed to have an extremely rare Toxicity attribute, and I’d never even seen a weapon like that, much less found one. The man in the black poncho, Morte’s boss, had claimed the knife he had on my back was augmented with level-5 paralysis and level-5 poison, but I later discovered that was just a bluff. 
But the four-inch pick Morte had between his fingers was shining with oily residue under the light of the moon. He’d clearly given up on his shield and accepted the “irregular equipment” status that made him ineligible to use sword skills, all just so he could perform sneak attacks with this thing, so it had to be a poisoned weapon. Whatever solution he’d put on it, I was not going to let him hit me. 
Fortunately, picks were disposable weapons by nature, with both buyable and droppable versions coming in sets of three. The first one Morte threw went into the forest somewhere, so he had two left. If I could remove them from the equation, I had the advantage. 
Morte’s leer softened a bit. He pushed his ax forward and hid his throwing hand behind it. I set my sword up at mid-level, ready to deflect from any angle. 
The poison gas behind me was still there. It only lasted thirty seconds when Cylon had gassed us, so I assumed it would be the same here—but what if the activation period was compressed just for the event, and once it had dropped for a player, its default length was longer? If it was two minutes, or even just one, I couldn’t guarantee that Asuna’s breath would hold out. If the paralysis was gone, why wasn’t she emerging from the smoke…? 
Right as I started to get legitimately worried, I heard a screech from the far side of the smoke cloud. 
“Whew! Finally lost him! Hey, you all done over there yet?” 
The second hooded man who’d pulled the NPC into the woods returned sooner than I expected. I gnashed my teeth, while Morte’s smile returned. If Asuna was in some kind of trouble and couldn’t get free, I’d have to fight one-on-two while protecting her. In fact, her life was the top priority, so if need be, I’d have to sacrifice myself so that my partner could escape. 
In the flat of my blade, my impromptu rearview mirror, I saw a dark hooded figure skirt the poison cloud at a wide distance. 
“…Damn, he’s still alive? What’s up with this smoke anyway? We weren’t supposed to be usin’ this, right?” 
“It’s not mine. Kirito here found a way to utilize the NPC’s poison item. Aha-ha-ha,” Morte replied. 
The second hood clicked his tongue theatrically. “What a pain in the ass. On the other hand…maybe I’m lucky, now that I get to finish someone off? I still haven’t gotten over my rage at having my Cilvaric Rapier stolen from me on the fifth floor. Hey, where’s the woman?” 
“She still seems to be paralyzed inside the smoke cloud.” 
“Cool. Then let’s kill the beater over there first.” 
Hood Number Two pulled a dark, gleaming dagger from his waist. 
I maintained my silence while the other two talked on either side of me, but the instant Number Two mentioned Asuna, I felt my blood boil and nearly leaped to the attack. But I knew that the instant I turned my back to Morte, he’d throw the pick. The Coat of Midnight I’d powered up at the dark elf camp was still powerful enough to hang here on the sixth floor, despite it being the Last Attack bonus prize for beating the boss on the very first floor. The problem was that it was weak to piercing attacks, like all nonmetal armor. It was only a minor deal in Aincrad, where there were no bows and arrows, but alongside polearms like spears and lances—and one-handed weapons like estocs and stilettos—throwing picks were a perfectly serviceable kind of piercing weapon. 
I’d rush Morte as fast as I could to neutralize them, then defeat his comrade. That was the only way out of this—but could I actually overpower the axman, knowing that his dueling ability was probably sharper since the last time we fought? Even if I had the technique and statistics, could I myself cross that final line…? 
Unlike in the real world, as long as you had a single pixel of health left on your gauge, you could move and fight. So the only way to guarantee his neutralization without poison or traps was to reduce his HP to zero—to kill him. 
Because Morte and the dagger user had attacked Cylon and his assistant, their player cursors were orange, the color of criminals. As a green player, I could attack them without penalty or fear of turning orange myself, but that was only going by the rules of the system. At the present moment, SAO was an inescapable death game, and losing your HP meant the NerveGear would fry your brain with intense microwaves. If I killed Morte and his friend, I would be killing their biological bodies, wherever they were in the real world. 
Player-killing was actual murder now. Could I do that? 
Demonic intuition saw right through me in that moment of indecision. 
“Shah!” 
Morte hissed into movement. I jumped to my left to get out of the way and to keep the dagger user in sight. But Morte read that all the way and turned the same direction with me, swiping sideways with his ax. 
As long as he was holding the poison needle in his left hand, he’d be registered as dual-wielding—and unable to use sword skills. But Morte’s one-handed ax had a power that couldn’t be overlooked, even using just ordinary attacks. Unlike the Anneal Blade and its excellent weight and toughness, the Sword of Eventide was sharp but light, and it might not stand up to tough attacks if my guarding technique wasn’t thorough. 
When I landed, I swayed backward, and the thick blade of the ax roared directly where my neck had been. The swing was so heavy that Morte ended up exposing his back to me. Despite my stance, I could’ve attacked him from that position, but Hood Number Two was bearing down on me with his dagger. If they trapped me front and back in the open, I’d get hit by that poison pick eventually. I needed to lure them to the woods on the north side of the road so that I could fight with my back against a tree. 
I bent my knees, ready to jump again. 
Just then, the green cloud of smoke behind Number Two split down the middle. 
It was a fencer, dark red hooded cape flapping behind her, silver rapier in her hand. Her face was hidden behind a monstrous leather mask—the gas mask Cylon used in Pithagrus’s hideaway and dropped upon his death. Asuna had been lurking in the midst of the gas for over a minute because she’d been wearing it. 
Both Morte, who was trying to pull his ax momentum back toward me, and the onrushing Hood Number Two, failed to notice her. She could take the advantage by using a sword skill against the second one’s defenseless back. 
But the question was: Could Asuna, who’d never experienced a duel as a form of truly mortal combat, actually do this? If she hesitated for even an instant during activation, the skill would fumble, and she’d be frozen in place, open to a devastating counter. 
All through this moment of breath-stopping apprehension, I kept my focus on Morte’s ax. If my expression caused Number Two to realize the back attack, Asuna’s patience and trickery would be lost. I had to believe in my partner. 
“Shhu!” 
Morte swung the ax again. I stepped backward only as little as I needed to avoid it, keeping my eyes on his left hand. He was looking for me to block the ax, giving him an opening to throw his pick, so I had to keep out of the way with swaying and quickstepping. 
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Asuna racing at incredible speed to close the gap, pulling back her rapier to strike. Her target was rapidly slowing, perhaps noticing the footsteps behind him. 
The fierce point of her weapon shone a brilliant red. Asuna’s right arm and sword melted into the flow of light. As I prepared for Morte’s third strike, I sent a silent message to my partner. 
Go, Asuna!! 
There was a series of heavy impacts. Her sword skill Triangular hit the man right in the back, knocking off over a third of his health. 
“Aaah…crap!” he grunted in pain and fury, doing a roll and a half over the ground with his back bleeding a huge damage visual effect, but he did bounce up onto his feet rather than enter a fallen state. 
“She ain’t paralyzed! That was a dirty trick!” he yelled. 
Asuna recovered from her post-skill delay and, ignoring his hypocritical protest, pulled off her leather mask and tossed it to the grass. In the pale moonlight, her beautiful features were fierce with an anger—the likes of which I’d never seen. It was enough to shut up the screeching man, that was for sure. 
“Leave this one to me. You get Morte, Kirito.” 
Her quiet voice arrived loud and clear at a distance of over thirty feet. I gave her cold, glowing eyes the briefest of nods, then turned to the axman. 
The cruel mouth visible beneath his coif did not contain the slightest hint of a smile any longer. “Oh, my,” he growled. “Our fun has turned into a real predicament, very quickly.” 
“You thought you were going to have an easy time killing some immobilized people? Think again.” 
“Now, now, it’s not settled yet. I still have two poison…picks!” he shouted, flipping the ax in his right hand up vertically. I leaned back on instinct as the darkened blade rushed toward my nose. 
It hurt not to be able to guard, but Morte’s Harsh Hatchet was upgraded with +6 to Heaviness, which was enough to weigh down the avatar’s center of gravity at the start of the swing. It was a very minor tell, but if you were watching for it, you could notice. 
While Morte and I were locked in combat, Asuna and Hood Number Two were going at it with quite spectacular results. 
Both were speed types—the dagger and rapier flashing with dizzying speed, lighting up the night with a shower of sparks. In terms of pure speed, none of the frontline players could surpass Asuna—if anyone could do it, Argo’s extreme AGI build might do the trick. But in a player-on-player fight with no rules, her style was just a little too straightforward. Against an opponent well versed in feints and tricks, she was likely to meet stiff competition. 
But after she’d fallen onto her seat in simple practice bouts against me, the fact that she was putting her all into a fight against a true PKer was a sign of huge progress. I had to match her example. I couldn’t stay on the defensive this whole time. 
Morte continued swinging furiously at me, trying to force me to block his ax—or just knock me off-balance so he could stab me with the needle directly. In the real world, he would be out of breath by now, but as long as you didn’t perform actions beyond your strength variable, the hidden “fatigue quotient” would not be a problem here. 
The forest at night offered poor visibility and uneven footing, so if I kept dodging, I was bound to trip over a root or stone eventually. I had to break out of this situation before that happened. 
“Sh…shwaa!” 
I evaded Morte’s consecutive swipes, sideways then vertical, with quick, narrow footwork. Then I gambled: I pretended to trip on something, slumping forward. 
Morte pounced. “Haaaa!” he hissed, swinging the Harsh Hatchet from above. He was stepping in quite far, since I’d been pulling back with all of my evasion. 
Axes were powerful whether equipped in one hand or two, but if you got close enough—and you used all your boldness and bravery—you could take advantage of their structural weakness. 
“Argh!” I shouted, tensing my bent, “tripping” left leg and launching myself forward off it. That pushed me inside of the falling ax head’s path, where I could reach up with my left forearm and brace it against the ax handle. 
A fierce shock ran through my arm and shoulder, and I lost about 5 percent of my HP. But at the same time, I activated the sword skill Slant with my other hand. The glowing blue blade struck Morte’s left arm as he was pulling his wrist back to flick the poisoned projectile. 
I figured that if I could get him to drop the pick, great. But my dark elf masterpiece showed even greater ability in answering my risky gamble. The sword silently sliced Morte’s arm off below the elbow. His forearm burst into tiny crystal pieces, and the pick he was holding fell to the grass. 
I’d caused part-loss damage. He couldn’t throw his picks with his left hand for at least three minutes, when he would recover from this effect. 
“Ha-ha!” Morte chuckled, either as a bluff or a sign that he still had tricks up his sleeve. He jumped backward, vivid red particles spilling from his severed arm like blood. 
I wasn’t the type to pursue further attacks in a duel after I’d already struck home. Throwing together sword skills in pursuit of maximum damage also maximized your own vulnerability, and it was very easy to suffer devastating consequences when caught up in the moment. 
But in this one instance, as soon as my skill delay was over, I rushed forward, chasing after Morte as he withdrew. It seemed I was angrier than I realized at the PKers for going after Asuna…and at myself, for not recognizing the danger of the paralysis event. 
“Raaahh!!” I bellowed from deep in my gut, thrusting the sword with a twist of my wrists. Multiple traces of pale blue light shot from its tip, and an invisible force pushed me from behind. It was the low thrusting skill, Rage Spike. 
This sword skill, which unlocked at a one-handed sword’s proficiency of 50, was one of the basic skills after Slant, Vertical, and Horizontal. So it had low power, but unlike Sonic Leap, which involved jumping high and striking downward, it thrust in a straight line along the ground, making it more accurate and harder to defend against. 
With his left hand gone and no longer wielding weapons in both hands, Morte was now free to use sword skills with his ax, but seeing me bent over and racing along the ground, he instantly abandoned the idea of countering. He flipped the ax over and held it before him to guard. 
The ax’s handle was essentially just a round stick, though some could have spikes or little blades of their own. But because of that structure, it was the weapon’s weak point during attack—though unlike swords, an ax’s shaft was much less likely to be destroyed when defending, no matter how it was struck. And with Morte’s skill, he wouldn’t have too much trouble guarding my thrust with the handle, even one less than an inch thick. 
However, a thrust when blocked could still knock back the target. Now was the time to put everything into this strike without fear of reprisal—to let him know what he was dealing with. 
“Yaaa!” I bellowed, unleashing my sword straight for his chest. 
“Sshheh!” Morte hissed, brandishing the ax handle in the path of the pale blue line. The tip of my sword rushed forward, ready to split that steel pole. 
And then. 
As though the sword moved on its own, the tip swayed just a tiny bit to the right. The perfectly hard, implacable Sword of Eventide, in this single moment, took on a living suppleness, twisting itself to evade its obstacle…or so it seemed to me. 
It grazed the edge of the Harsh Hatchet just enough to create sparks, then regained its usual hardness, striking an inch to the right of Morte’s center—directly into his heart, a critical point—with terrifying accuracy. 
The axman’s slim-fitting, dark gray scale armor was wetly semi-reflective, suggesting that it was made not of metal, but some monster-hide material. It looked easy to move in and quiet, ideal for PKing, but its ability to deflect piercing and thrusting attacks was no different from my long coat’s. 

So the Sword of Eventide, rather than stopping as it would against some thick metal plate, sliced through the gaps between scales and sank deeper and deeper… 
Kadaaamm!! I’d used this skill more times than I could count, and even I’d never heard it produce that kind of blast. It vibrated through my palm hard enough to shake my very skull. The lighting effect the impact produced was two or three times brighter than usual, making my vision go hazy and blue. 
Sound, light, feedback. This was a true critical hit. And a weak-point crit, too. 
When the flash subsided, over half my sword was embedded in Morte’s chest. 
The HP bar in the middle of the orange cursor floating over the axman’s head began to dwindle. It seemed to move slower than usual, perhaps because I was in a state of heightened alert, but it showed no signs of stopping. From a nearly full position, it dropped to 70, then 60, then 50 percent and lower, into the yellow warning zone. 
I was certain it would stop soon, but the yellow line continued narrowing at the same steady pace. It was down to 40 percent, then 35…and 30. Now into the red warning zone, the bar headed ever closer to the left end of the gauge. 
When he’d challenged me to the half-finish duel on the third floor, Morte softened me down to just over half my HP so he could destroy the remainder in one final blow—a duel PK. But ultimately, that fight ended with both HP bars at just over 50 percent. 
25…23…it kept going. Was it possible to completely eradicate all of a high-level player’s HP in a single blow, even with a true crit against a weak point? Glowing red light spilled from where the elven sword stuck into Morte’s chest, pulsing like blood. Through the palm of my right hand, I felt a trembling like a heartbeat. Neither I nor Morte budged an inch. 
A number of times in the past, I’d suffered so much damage at once that I couldn’t even breathe, much less move, while my HP bar dropped. That was hard enough in the beta, but now the consequences of death were permanent. If it didn’t stop, then Morte…the guy lying on some bed somewhere in Japan…would be put to death by his NerveGear. 
Without realizing it, I glanced from his red HP bar to the face under his chain coif. The red light pouring from his heart cast a faint glow on the upper half of his face, which was consistently sunken in shadow otherwise. 
My first glance at the PKer showed me an ordinary young man, maybe a few years older than me but still a teenager. His gaping eyes stared at the space over my right shoulder…at the HP bar of mine that only he could see. He wore no true expression, but his lips, which were normally curled into a sneer, now parted slightly, as if mouthing disbelief. 
My mouth was open, too, and I wanted to ask him, even if just through the movement of my lips, why he would ever choose to PK in a world like this one… 
…when a voice in an extremely grating, high-pitched register pierced my eardrums from behind. 
“Mamoru! Pull the sword ouuuut!!” 
In an instant, I finally understood. 
Morte’s HP hadn’t dropped this far just from the combined critical hit. He was suffering continuous piercing damage. With my sword still stuck in him, his HP continued to bleed out of him. 
When he realized this, too, Morte let out an uncharacteristic, panicked wail. He dropped the Harsh Hatchet and grabbed the Sword of Eventide’s blade with his right hand. 
If I clutched the handle of the sword with both hands and pushed it toward the hilt, I could kill him in less than five seconds. 
And I probably ought to. He tried to use the paralysis event to kill Asuna and me. If he survived this, he would probably try something similar again. I didn’t want to die, and I especially didn’t want Asuna to die. She was going to grow into a far greater warrior than me, lead the game’s population to victory, and save thousands of lives. 
Nothing was more important than Asuna’s life. 
So it was utterly crucial that I took this step now, to? 
“Aaaah! Aaaaaaah!!” 
There was a scream behind me—a sound not even human. Footsteps rushed toward me. 
On instinct, I put my left hand on Morte’s chest and pulled the Sword of Eventide free. Red particles scattered from the blade as I swung it, right as Black Hood Number Two leaped at me with his dagger drawn. 
Asuna was in pursuit behind him, but the man’s foot speed was formidable, and she wouldn’t reach him in time. I stepped to the right and held up my sword, preparing to meet the dagger even as I kept an eye on Morte, in case he decided to throw his third pick with his one good hand. 
But Morte stayed down and immobile, and Black Hood Number Two engaged in some unexpected strategy. He hurled his dagger at me without so much as pausing to aim it. 
A single swing of my sword knocked the spinning dagger aside. Then Number Two threw something with his other hand. 
It wasn’t a weapon, but a small sphere slightly over an inch in size. I’d just seen the same object less than thirty hours earlier, so I ran toward Asuna and shouted, “Stop! It’s a smoke bomb!” 
There was a soft, deep boomf! behind me. I turned back as I reached her and saw a curtain of smoke darker than night rising to cover the PKers. 
Even still, I could see the dagger man grabbing Morte’s right hand and helping him up. Then thick smoke covered their silhouettes, and I heard only faint footsteps racing toward the forest to the north and out of earshot. The two orange cursors blinked out at the same time. 
I already knew the smoke screen didn’t confer any system debuffs. So if I chased after them, there was a high possibility I could take them both out for good—or at least the gravely wounded Morte. 
But my feet felt so heavy that my knees sank into the grass, and Asuna made no move after them, either. 
The cold night breeze swished through the trees, finally dispersing the green poison gas and the fresh, dark smoke screen. When the air had cleared, Asuna dropped her Chivalric Rapier into the sheath at her side and muttered, “What did he mean, ‘Mamoru’? If he hadn’t said that, I wouldn’t have hesitated about chasing them.” 
While Morte had been suffering that continuous damage, Black Hood Number Two had called him Mamoru. It was either a nickname between comrades, or…I had to stop myself from continuing that thought—and put my sword back where I normally kept it. 
“I was almost there, but I wasn’t able to go through with killing him. When I drew my sword, I was so certain I would never let him do the same thing again…” 
“…I wonder if they’ll come back,” Asuna murmured. 
I thought it over for a bit. “They probably will. And they’ll have some new kind of PK scheme that we could never see coming…” 
After I said that, I realized there was something else I should’ve said right away. I turned to Asuna, looked into her curious eyes for a third of a second, then looked away and bowed my head to her. 
“I’m sorry, Asuna. I knew the abduction event was going to take us out of town in a paralyzed state, so I should’ve realized this could happen…and because I wasn’t thinking straight, I exposed you to danger. I’m really, truly sorry.” 
Upon further reflection, I’d earned Asuna’s anger on numerous occasions since our partnership began on the first floor. I couldn’t even recall the exact number of times she’d thrown a pillow or jabbed me in the side on this floor alone. 
But this mistake was on a different level. If I hadn’t given her my careless guarantee, backed by beta experience, that it was “absolutely safe”—or if I’d just told her exactly what would happen in the event—Asuna’s perspective without prior influence might have noticed the danger of PKing it harbored. 
The peril we just survived was clearly a situation that came about because I was a beater. And I couldn’t guarantee that it would be the last time. 
“…I feel like I probably don’t have the right to continue being your par…” I started to say until something soft brushed the sides of my lowered head. 
I realized they were Asuna’s hands. She pulled me upward, forcing me to stand straight. The young woman glared right at my face, not removing her grip. 
“I’m going to tell you one thing I really, truly hate.” 
“Y…yes?” 
“It’s when two people know what each other are thinking, but they decide to continue using vague, imprecise words to keep everything at a distance and play oblique mind games. Yes, softening things is valuable sometimes, but the really important things ought to be said cleanly and clearly…don’t you agree?” 
“Um…Wh-what are we talking about…?” 
I understood the point Asuna was making, I just didn’t know how it connected to the present situation. But with her holding my head tight in both hands, I couldn’t even put a finger to my cheek to ponder this. 
“My question is,” Asuna said, sucking in a deep breath, “are you saying you want to break up our partnership?” 
With no escape from this direct fastball of a question, I had little choice but to answer honestly. “If it’s a matter of wanting to or not wanting to…I don’t want us to split up.” 
“Okay. Well, neither do I…so that should be our conclusion. Right?” 
“………” 
She is such a stud, I thought bizarrely. Asuna ruffled her hands wildly over my head before letting go. 
“Now that that’s settled, there are plenty of things we need to talk over…What do you think we should do first?” 
“Um…ummmmm…” 
I sucked in a lungful of the cold, refreshing, midwinter air that shrouded the forest to reset my mind and glanced around us. 
We’d moved farther than I thought during the battle. The packed dirt path was about twenty-five feet to the south of us. The riderless carriage and horse were still on the road. It seemed like we should do something about that, but I had no idea what. Plenty of glittering objects littered the ground around the carriage, too. Thousand-col gold coins, hundred-col silvers, and a wide variety of items. All had belonged to Lord Cylon of Stachion before Morte killed him. 
“…How about we figure out what to do later but grab the stuff Cylon dropped fir…” I started to say, before I realized something. 
There was one item we needed to grab right away. I tore my gaze away from the carriage and back to the grass. “Asuna, find the ax and dagger they dropped!” I shouted. 
Then I ran a few yards and leaned into the thick undergrowth. It was around here, I was certain. I needed the spot where I’d cut off Morte’s left arm; he’d had the poisoned pick in that hand when it happened. And the moment his severed hand vanished, the pick had… 
“…Aha!” 
I reached into the grass and carefully hefted a black piece of metal stuck into the ground. It was a little less than four inches long—and three-tenths of an inch at the thickest point—with six sides that curved gently, prompting me to think of a type of drill bit. From the middle to the needle-like point at the end, an oily liquid seemed to be oozing from the inside of the spiral grooves. 
I was curious to check its item properties, but the ownership and equipment status of this pick were still with Morte, and I had to do whatever it took to steal it from him. If they got to a safe location and used the Materialize All Items command, the pick would instantly vanish. And in fact, Morte might not even need to bother with such a thing. 
“I got them, Kirito,” said Asuna, trotting over with an ax in her right hand and a dagger in her left. I consulted my mental list of the various monsters one could encounter in the fields of the sixth floor. 
I knew there was one. One of those detestable creatures with the same habits as the ratmen lurking in the catacombs of the fifth floor. It was called… 
“…Asuna, go and look in the surrounding forest to see if there’s a monster called a Muriqui Snatcher.” 
“Moo-reekee…? That’s a weird name. How do you spell it?” 
“Uh, it’s tricky…M-u-r-i-q-u-i, I think.” 
“Hmm…” 
Even Asuna, whose knowledge sometimes seemed encyclopedic, didn’t recognize that word. It occurred to me that I should’ve looked it up in the two months between the end of the beta test and the launch of the game. I scanned the woods on the north side of the path but didn’t see any shapes that looked like the monster in question. 
Monsters weren’t designed to populate the areas right around roads, even in the danger of the wilderness, but that only applied when players were quiet and minding their own business. I’d been worried that the screeching of the dagger user trying to save Morte might have brought the monsters down upon us, but fortunately—or in this case, unfortunately—there hadn’t been any in range of his shouting. 
That meant we’d have to go into the forest to find one, but would it be in time? Morte and his group were already criminals, so they couldn’t go into any town or village, making it difficult to find a safe harbor—but they would’ve been aware of that when devising this plan. If they had an evacuation area somewhere nearby, it would come down to whether they reached it first—or we found a Muriqui Snatcher… 
“—rito. Hey, Kirito.” 
The mention of my name caused me to snap to attention. My partner was pointing not to the north, but behind me to the south. I turned and looked to the darkened woods. 
“Ooh…oo-ooh!” 
The sound of calls vaguely humanoid and animalistic came into hearing range, and I noticed a number of small silhouettes among the tree branches. Above their heads, reddish cursors that identified them as monsters sprang into being. There were ten—no more than fifteen of them. 
“Look! They’re all muriquis!” Asuna pointed out. Indeed, all of their displayed names began with MURIQUI, but this was no situation for celebration. 
I was level 19 at the moment, and Asuna was at 18. This was considerably higher than the needed level at the start of the sixth floor, so all the cursors were only a pale pink color, but they were numerous. And there weren’t just the Snatchers that I wanted, but others like Muriqui Brawlers and Muriqui Nut Throwers were in the mix as well. It turned out the man’s screech was quite effective after all; he’d called down an entire pack of muriquis that normally stayed deep in the woods. 
All players in SAO were capable of producing the same vocal volume, but because it sampled the actual voice of the player for use in the environment, the tenor of your voice made a difference in how well it carried. The dagger user had a hideous, shrieking voice that refused to blend into the natural ambience and was bound to carry farther, even in the noisy night forest. Being able to gather a wide range of monsters just by screaming was an effective ability for a PKer—not that I thought that was why he chose to engage in the activity. 
“So…what now?” Asuna asked. 
It was directed at me, of course, but a number of the muriquis descended from the tree branches down vines and trunks as though answering that query. Hoo-hoo, they called, approaching the abandoned carriage. Once out from under the tree canopy, the moonlight illuminated their forms. 
“Oh…they’re monkeys,” Asuna remarked. Indeed, the muriquis were monkey-type monsters with furry coats, tails, and long arms. They were much smaller than the apes that appeared in higher floors and only four feet tall when upright, but they were also very quick, and they made use of the trees to leap about in three dimensions in aggravating ways. 
Four of them had gone to the ground—three of which were Snatchers with kangaroo-like pouches on their bellies, and the last was a Brawler with a club-like stick in its hand. Asuna and I could eliminate these four in an instant with sword skills, but attacking would probably bring the other dozen down on us from the trees. We’d been training and completing quests nonstop since this morning, and just after this fight to the death against Morte and his friend, I was sure that Asuna was more exhausted than she let on. In order to permanently seize the mysterious poisoned needle and their melee weapons, battle against the muriquis would be unavoidable. The only question was how hard to push ourselves. 
As I mulled this quandary over, the trio of Snatchers approached the rear of the carriage and began picking up the coins and stuffing them into their stomach pouches. Asuna seemed a bit perturbed by this. 
“H-hey, they’re picking up Cylon’s things!” 
“Yeah, that’s the idea,” I muttered. She glared at me skeptically. 
Just then, the heavy ax dangling from her grip vanished with a shwim! sound effect. 
We were too late, I lamented—but then I realized that the dagger and poisoned pick in my hands were still there. That meant the two PKers hadn’t gotten to an evacuation point and used Materialize All Items; Morte had just used Quick Change to retrieve his main weapon, the one-handed ax. 
Since the same thing hadn’t happened to these items, that meant the dagger user didn’t have the Quick Change mod yet. Still, the all-crucial poisoned pick was likely to vanish within the next minute. All Morte had to do was switch the item registered to the Quick Change icon from the ax to the pick, then use the skill again. 
Better to let a monster pick it up than just have it taken away, so I hurled it at the feet of the Muriqui Snatchers. I commanded my partner, “Throw the dagger in the same spot!” 
“O-okay.” 
Asuna tossed the black dagger. One of the Snatchers approached, hooting, and quickly scooped both the pick and dagger into its pouch. They had the Robbing skill, so ownership of the items instantly transferred, and neither Quick Change nor Materialize All Items could remotely recover them. Once the pack of muriquis finished taking all the items, they’d retreat deep into the forest, so the odds were nearly zero that Morte and his friend would find the right monkeys to defeat them and take their weapons back. 
I told myself that this course of action was for the best…and turned to Asuna so that I could suggest we head back to town. But before I could, she murmured, “I see. I finally understand…You wanted to do the same method as when you got my rapier back on the fifth floor.” 
“Wha—?” 
“Let’s beat them before they get away! You get the one with the stick, Kirito!” 
She is such a bundle of energy, I couldn’t help but marvel, before I snapped out of it and hurried after my partner. 
Once it was all over, I realized the pack of sixteen muriquis hadn’t been as dangerous as I’d feared. 
Because we fought them near the road rather than in the woods, they couldn’t use their nimble simian evasion techniques through the trees. The worst part ended up being the Muriqui Nut Throwers tossing hard shells at us from behind, but once you got used to them, it was pretty easy to swat the projectiles out of the air. Also, the Snatchers usually ran as soon as you attacked them when alone, but in a pack, they would stand their ground to the end. This made it quite easy to ensure we got back all the items the trio of Snatchers took. 
If anything, the biggest problem for us was after the battle with the monkeys, when Cylon’s large assistant plodded back out of the trees. I’d completely forgotten about him, but now that the second attacker had left him behind in the woods, he’d faithfully returned to his carriage. 
I was worried it would turn into another fight, but the man in the gas mask simply plodded up to the box of the horse cart and drove it down the road to Stachion without a glance at us. I wasn’t sure if he even registered that his master was dead or not. 
With all traces of the night’s events gone from the forest, Asuna and I made our way back to Suribus, which was a closer trip than Stachion at this point. 
“……So sleepy……so tired……so hungry……” 
As soon as we passed through the town gates, and the text reading SAFE HAVEN vanished, Asuna slumped against the pillar of the gate. Then she looked up at me and frowned. 
“…What kind of an expression is that?” 
“Oh…just that you said the kind of thing that I’d normally say first,” I replied. 
She looked at me for a few moments, aghast, then slumped even farther. “You know…I can’t even bring myself to deny that slander. Let’s just go to the inn…” 
“Good idea,” I said, checking out the main street, which was much quieter now. 
If we’d proceeded through the abduction event as it was meant to go, without Morte’s interference, we’d have been released in Stachion after a brief scuffle and stayed at the inn over there. Now that we were unexpectedly back in Suribus, we had to deal with the issue of the overbooked inn rooms that Argo warned us about. 
“Uh…well…I don’t think we’re going to find two single rooms side by side…” I suggested warily. 
Asuna blinked blearily at me and mumbled, “A two-bedroom suite is fine…That was the original idea, remember?” 
That was, indeed, what we discussed, but it was mostly to protect against PK attacks, and now that Morte’s group wasn’t likely to strike again for a while, it didn’t seem necessary for the next day or two. On the other hand, the man in the black poncho who was their ringleader didn’t make an appearance this time, and the only lasting damage we did to them was mental and material, so there was no guarantee they wouldn’t come back as soon as tonight. 
“Got it. In that case…I think there was a good spot on the left bank of the river. Let’s try that one,” I suggested. Asuna mumbled an affirmative and stood up unsteadily. She reached out toward me, causing me brief panic when I thought she wanted to hold my hand. Instead, she grabbed the end of my belt, which stuck out of my coat. 
So with Asuna on autopilot and allowing me to chauffer her around, I took us to a four-story building close to the north gate. It was an above-average inn for Suribus, and on top of it, all the rooms had balconies facing the river, giving it the best view in town. 
The Jade and Kingfisher was about 80 percent full, probably because of its unassuming signage, and if we didn’t care about being adjacent, we could’ve taken two single rooms. But Asuna, who was still clutching my belt, ordered the deluxe suite room without a moment of deliberation. 
My partner seemed to be completely out of batteries. I pushed her up the stairs and opened the puzzle-free door to our room. A huge window straight ahead showed us the night view of Suribus. If we went on the balcony, we’d see the lights of the town reflecting on the river below, but Asuna just staggered into the center of the living room and glanced at the bedroom doors on opposite walls. 
“…I’ll take this one. Good night…” she said, yawning, and vanished into the room on the left. I heard the sound of her equipment being removed—and then silence. 
I snuck up to the open door and saw Asuna, still in her regular clothes, facedown on the spacious bed. After a few seconds of hesitation, I entered the room and grabbed the edge of the sheet cover beneath her. 
I very carefully pulled it to roll Asuna over—she was already fast asleep—so that she was faceup atop the sheets and pillows. Then I laid the blanket back over her, whispered “Good night,” and left the room. After a moment, I decided to leave her door open. 
Back in the living room, I exhaled. 
It was, indeed, a deluxe accommodation. There was a very fancy set of furniture in the middle of the room, with a basket of fruit on the table between the sofas. I picked up a fruit that had the shape of a kiwi and color of a strawberry and took a bite. It had the texture of a banana, with a pineapple flavor. 
As I ate, I reflected on the past. 
When we stayed at a deluxe room in Zumfut on the third floor, there was a fruit basket there, too. I recalled Asuna hurling a fruit that tasted like a mix of apple, pear, and lychee at me—but even though it was only two weeks ago, I couldn’t remember why she had done it. 
And yet, I could distinctly recall the conversation we’d had there. 
If I’m ever more of a hindrance than a help, you’d better tell me, Asuna had said as we were lying down on adjacent beds. Her reason for leaving the Town of Beginnings was so that she could be herself…not so she could have me protect her. 
Since that day, Asuna had worked tirelessly to continue proving that statement true. She absorbed a massive amount of information about how the game worked, she got better at fighting, and she even got over her fear of dueling other players. All I taught her at the dark elf camp this morning were a few technical pointers and some tips about mind-set, and tonight she’d held her own against Morte’s partner. If I was going to beat her in a duel at this point, I couldn’t win with fundamental abilities alone. I’d need to use some kind of higher-level trick. 
So worrying endlessly about exposing Asuna to danger was, in a way, an insult to her. But this knowledge didn’t help me stop blaming myself. 
I finished the fruit and opened up my inventory, scrolling through the items in order of acquisition until I spotted the name NAMNEPENTH’S POISON JAR (0). This was the little container of poison gas that had paralyzed Asuna and me, as well as saved us from danger, though it was now empty. I tapped the name and moved it to the head of my item list, fixing its location through a submenu. This way, I’d see the name every time I opened my inventory and be reminded of my bitter mistake. 
In Aincrad, poison—especially the paralyzing kind—was an incredibly powerful weapon. Monster paralysis attacks could be avoided with knowledge and experience, but it was almost impossible to perfectly defend oneself against a malicious and clever player armed with it. If we continued fighting against this PK gang, they’d almost certainly put us in danger with paralyzing poison again. But at the very least, I wasn’t going to let Asuna be exposed to that danger a second time. Never again. 
I closed my window and started to reach for the button to remove all my equipment, but I thought better of it and physically removed my sword and sheath from my back. I drew the sword slowly to avoid making any noise and let the lamplight hit the flat of the blade. Despite the furious battle against Morte and the following slaughter of the muriquis, the thin Sword of Eventide shone as brilliant and clear as a mirror. 
When I had executed Rage Spike at the center of Morte’s chest, the sword had curled and twisted like a living object to pierce his heart—his critical point. 
My two upgrades to Accuracy at the dark elf camp had kicked in and auto-aimed it…that was all. But in that moment, and the moment when it hit the core of the Annoying Wraith, the correction process felt very much like the will of the weapon itself. It wasn’t that the sword was adjusting its path toward the weak point I was trying to hit, it was like the sword itself had spotted the point of least resistance and wanted to slice that exact target. 
…I’m overthinking this. It only feels weird because I’ve never used a weapon with an Accuracy upgrade on it before. Plus, it was a good thing it hit Morte in the heart and put the fear of a one-hit kill in him. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have picked up and run away like that. 
I ran my fingers along the flat of the blade, then returned it to its sheath. This time, I hit the UNEQUIP button, and it vanished into my inventory, along with the coat. 
Now that I was lighter, I glanced back at Asuna’s room, thought for a moment, then entered the bedroom on the right. I pulled the top blanket off the bed and returned to the living room. I lay down on the sofa, which was slightly hard, and wrapped myself in the blanket. If I slept there, that put me in a slightly better position, just in case someone found a way to slip through the system and get into our room. 
Asuna and I were equal partners, so acting like it was my duty to provide all the protection was pure arrogance. Still, if there was something I could do, I wanted to do it. I was sure that Asuna was watching over me in the same way, in some form I didn’t even realize. 
I tapped the table to bring up the room menu and turned out the lights. Closing my eyes, I thought I heard faint breathing from the other room through the blue-black darkness. 
I whispered good night to her and felt my mind sinking somewhere very, very deep.