Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 6 - Chapter 8

8 

WHEN WE OPENED THE DOOR TO OUR GUEST ROOM on the third floor of the west wing, intent on changing clothes before we visited Kizmel’s chamber, both Asuna and I exclaimed with surprise. The slender elf knight was already sitting on the sofa in our room. 

“What are you doing here, Kizmel?” asked Asuna, trotting over to her. 

The knight lifted a narrow glass in her right hand. “I was waiting for you, of course. Have you finished talking with the new visitors?” 

“Huh? You knew we were meeting with other play…I mean, other human warriors?” I asked, which brought a little curl of a smile to her lips. 

“But of course. I kept my distance, not wanting to interfere.” 

“You wouldn’t have been a bother at all…” 

Despite my reassurance, however, it was indeed a good thing for us that Kizmel had been considerate. Kizmel was far more human in her mannerisms and intelligence than other dark elves—and certainly more than the generic Dark Elf Scout accompanying Qusack. I couldn’t imagine how they might react to her, and it wasn’t clear what effect it would have on her to interact with players who might speak openly about the fact that this world was just a VR game. 

In the online RPGs I played before SAO, I was not good at actual role-playing. But somehow, it had become natural for me to assume the role of a “human swordsman traveling across Aincrad” when interacting with the dark elves—a development that filled me with a mild wonder. 

Kizmel waved at us to sit. “Did you finish speaking with the new visitors?” 

“Yes, they said they were going to visit with the master of the castle,” Asuna explained. The knight placed a new glass before her and poured a pale-golden liquid from the bottle on the table. When she did the same for me, I noticed a refreshing, familiar scent wafting up. It must have been that moontear wine that her sister Tilnel loved. 

We shared a toast, and I took a sip of the rather strong alcohol—that couldn’t actually get you drunk—before saying, “I think those four will be leaving the castle in the morning to go to the shrine in the south, so we won’t see them until the evening. It’s your valuable day off tomorrow, so we should find our own useful task to—” 

Softly and suddenly, Asuna jabbed me with her elbow. I looked at her in bewilderment before I realized what I’d just done. 

The four members of Qusack were going south tomorrow to retrieve the Agate Key from the shrine. The same key that we’d just brought back today. 

This set of six hidden keys that would open the mysterious Sanctuary device, which the dark elf legends held would destroy Aincrad, and which the forest elves believed would return it to the earth, would not exist in duplicate. As far as Kizmel knew, we had gone from the third to the sixth floor and, through great trials, had managed to collect four of these precious, one-of-a-kind keys. 

But within the game system, there were as many secret keys as there were players undertaking the “Elf War” questline. At this moment, Qusack was receiving a request from Count Galeyon to recover the Agate Key. What if they left tomorrow and returned after finishing the quest—and Kizmel witnessed them carrying a new copy of the key? It could very well happen. 

What if she asked us why the four of them were going to that very same shrine? If NPCs in this game had such advanced AI, shouldn’t they be programmed with the ability to integrate that information and take it all in stride? 

“I see…It is much to ask of you humans, I know,” Kizmel murmured. She drank down the last of her wine. I picked up the bottle automatically and reached out to pour her another glass, then cautiously asked, “Uh…do you know the reason they’re going to the shrine, Kizmel?” 

“To retrieve the hidden key, of course.” 

“…” 

Asuna and I stared at the dark elf, who seemed unbothered by the knowledge. When she noticed us staring, she looked a bit curious, then smiled. “Ah…so you did not know, then.” 

“D-didn’t know what?” Asuna asked quietly. 

Kizmel’s smile turned a bit apologetic. “The commanding officer of the vanguard force explained that he was using knights to confuse and mislead the forest elves, did he not? We are arranging a similar thing for the duty of retrieving the keys.” 

“Wh…what does that mean?” 

“Even after we recovered the keys from the shrines, other knights and scouts have headed to the same shrines, carrying false keys mocked up by our priests to our camps and fortresses. If any humans pledge assistance along the way, we accept it. This is all to mislead the forest elves, remember…” 

“…” 

Asuna and I had no words. The existence of fake keys itself was a surprise, but even more than that… 

“But then…wouldn’t that expose those decoy knights and soldiers to danger…?” I asked, stunned. 

Kizmel looked down. “That is correct. More than a few knights have been attacked by the forest elves, and I understand some have lost their lives.” 

“But…why do you need to go to such lengths?!” Asuna demanded, leaning forward. The knight placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. 

“Because that is how serious a duty it is to retrieve the sealed keys, and the mentality one needs to undertake the mission. Failure is unacceptable. Now the history and knowledge of the collected peoples of Lyusula, Kales’Oh, humankind, and dwarfkind are contained within this floating castle, and should it collapse, all will be lost…along with many, many lives. We cannot allow ruin to come to the things that the priestess of yore gave her precious life to protect. I believe that Her Majesty the queen wants the six keys so she can keep the Sanctuary door shut forever…” 

Kizmel stopped there, but my mind was half-occupied with other things. After Asuna and I interfered in the battle between Kizmel and the Forest Elven Hallowed Knight back on the third floor, the duels between dark and forest elves had continued without end. This was only natural, as it was the event that entered a player into the “Elf War” campaign quest, but if Kizmel’s explanation was taken at face value, it suggested that the elves undertook even this unavoidable matter of the story’s convenience at the risk of their own lives. 

But had the designer of this quest, some writer at Argus, really considered this angle when designing it? It was common sense that in an MMORPG, the same events occurred for each player; anything less wouldn’t be fair. When seen from inside the game world, it would look like the same character was dying and coming back to life, over and over, but no player was going to complain about this being illogical. That little girl from my Anneal Blade quest, for example, spent an eternity getting sick and being cured, back and forth. 

Was it really the game’s designers who created these secondary elements like fake keys and decoy knights, in order to protect the integrity of the worldview and the game mechanics under the hood? Or was it something else, like the very world itself…? 

“What is it, Kirito?” 

I looked up when I heard my name and met eyes with Kizmel, who had been equally lost in thought. 

“N-nothing…just thinking about things…” 

“I understand how you feel. Sometimes even I wonder if the four keys we are carrying around are the real thing or not.” 

“Uh…for real?” I asked, accidentally slipping into some real-world slang, but that saying had clearly been absorbed into Kizmel’s vocabulary at this point, and she paid it no mind. 

“Yes, for real. It would have been real because we took it from the shrine, but once it has been placed in the vault of a fortress or castle, there is no telling if the priests might have switched it out…” 

“Ah, I see…” 

So it’s potentially true that both our keys and Qusack’s keys are fakes…Or maybe the story holds that they’re both real…? I wondered, once again lost in questions that had no answer. 

Next to me, Asuna asked, “If you’re going to the length of creating false keys to distract the forest elves, wouldn’t it be a bad thing to have the keys, real or fake, collected in the same place? I mean, Yofel Castle got attacked…” 

“Yes, there is a logic to what you say,” agreed Kizmel, who looked up at the ceiling. 

The guest chamber at Yofel Castle had huge windows that afforded a view of the outside, but Castle Galey was carved right into the rock, so the windows were only on the hallway side. They compensated with plenty of interior lights; in addition to the wall-hanging lamps that the inns in Stachion and Suribus had, there was an elaborate candelabra hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier, its little fires flickering. 

“We assumed that Yofel Castle would never be attacked. The forest elves on the fourth floor had only a few small boats, and we couldn’t have imagined they would team up with the fallen elves…If you had not warned us, we would not have prepared for the attack in time. Even with Viscount Yofilis’s power, the castle might have been lost. But…” 

Kizmel looked back at us and gave a reassuring smile. “Even with the wicked cleverness of the Fallen, it is impossible for them to attack Castle Galey with a huge army. As you saw for yourselves, I could not take ten steps outside of this place without the Greenleaf Cape. The forest elves will have some kind of similar cloak, but surely in only small numbers…And that cape was sewn from the leaves of the Holy Tree; there shall never be another of its kind. Even the boar warriors of the forest elves would not dream of attacking this castle with no more than ten, at risk of losing all the treasures handed down since the Great Separation.” 

“What about the fallen elves? Is it possible that they have something similar?” Asuna persisted, but Kizmel again shook her head. 

“Have you forgotten? The Fallen were cursed by the Holy Tree. If they should put on the cape made of its leaves, they would be burned to ash…or something similar, if not to such an extreme. The pain and scarring would be intense, regardless.” 

“Oh…y-you’re right,” Asuna said, sticking out her tongue to show how forgetful she was. Kizmel chuckled back, but her mirth did not last for very long. She folded her arms in a thinking pose. 

“But as Asuna says…keeping the keys in one place for too long is only inviting needless risk, perhaps. There is a spirit tree here at the castle, so I suppose I shall have to give up my day of rest and continue as soon as the morning arrives…” 

Whaaat? I was going to shout, but Asuna was quicker. 

“No!” She practically flew over the low table to Kizmel’s side and grabbed the knight’s hands in her own. “I’m sorry that I caused you to worry. I understand now that this castle is safe. Just stay with us tomorrow! I’ve been thinking about what we would do!” 

Kizmel’s dark-purple eyes blinked several times, and then—how many times had I seen this by now?—gave the gentle smile of an older girl to her younger sister. 

“All right. Then I will leave in two days, as originally planned. What shall we do tomorrow?” 

“It’s still a secret. I’ll announce it in the morning, so look forward to the surprise,” Asuna said with a grin. I, however, felt a bit unnerved by that. 

Minutes later, the slender wine bottle was empty, and Kizmel slumped against the back of the sofa. “Whew…I believe I am a bit intoxicated.” 

I examined her face, but the coffee-brown skin was not any different from usual, and I couldn’t anticipate what would happen to an AI if it got drunk. Asuna looked worried, however, and asked, “Are you all right? Can you get back to your room?” 

“Ha-ha, I am not so drunk that I cannot stand. But…” she said, pausing to look at us in turn, “the room I’ve been given is too large for one person. Do you mind if I sleep on this long couch tonight?” 

“Wha—?!” I yelped out of reflex, but in fact, Asuna and I had no reason to refuse her. I was going to tell her it was perfectly all right, of course, until I realized something: In a situation with two women and one man, it seemed clear which one of the three should take the sofa. 

“Uh, in that case, you can sleep in the bedroom with Asuna, Kizmel. I’ll sleep on the sofa instead.” 

But the knight arched her back and shook her head. “No. This is your room…I cannot force you out of your bedchamber, Kirito. I would rather return to my room, in that case.” 

She started to get to her feet, but Asuna grabbed the end of her thin tunic. Asuna was still in her sulky begging mood. She grumbled and glanced at the bedroom door. “That bed…can fit three people, right?” 

“Huh?!” I yelped again, unable to help myself. 

But Kizmel was very rational about it. “Oh, I do believe you are right.” 

“B-but that only leaves about half a meter of space between each person…” I argued, before wondering if dark elves understood the measurement systems of the real world. 

Kizmel just shrugged her shoulders. “It is not much different from when the three of us shared that tent at the camp on the third floor. Or do you not want to sleep in the same bed as me, Kirito?” 

“Th-that’s not what I’m saying.” It was the only answer I could give to that question. The knight grinned mischievously. 

“Then, there is no problem.” 

We still had to figure out the issue of how we would arrange ourselves in the bed, and the consensus was that Kizmel would take the middle, with Asuna on the left and me on the right. I’d been worried about the space, but Asuna and Kizmel huddled closer, leaving me with a bit less than a meter of space to work with. 

I got into the bed after them and kept my body as straight as an arrow, just far enough from the edge that I wouldn’t fall over. With our arrangement, at least I wouldn’t repeat the catastrophe from this morning, but there was still the possibility that I would wake up clinging to Kizmel somehow. And I was pretty sure that the anti-harassment code for inappropriate contact with an NPC skipped over the stage where the victim hit the button on a pop-up window and simply auto-transported the offender when the warning period ran out. I didn’t want to wake up in a cell, so it didn’t hurt to keep as far away as I could… 

“If you sleep on the edge like that, you’ll fall out of the bed, Kirito,” said a whisper in the deep darkness. A hand wriggled through the blanket and grabbed my right arm. I reluctantly scooted a bit closer, at which point my fingertips brushed some part of Kizmel. 

“You will be warmer if you snuggle closer.” 

“N-no, I think I’m fine right here.” 

“You should not be at an age where you are bashful about this sort of thing…” 

Does she mean I’m too grown up? Or I’m too much of a child? I wondered, but Kizmel did not elaborate. If Asuna wasn’t interrupting this whispered conversation, then it was a sure sign she was already asleep. 

On the other hand, it was true that the temperature improved quite a bit from just that much movement, and I felt very drowsy. I closed my eyes and let out a long, slow breath. 

When I was a child, I found it very difficult to sleep anywhere but my own bed. I had trouble falling asleep on the outdoor school field trips in elementary school and even on family vacations. 

It had been the same when I first came to this world. More than a few times, I ended up farming a single spot overnight because I couldn’t get to sleep anyway. But at some point, it just stopped happening. Regardless of the fact that I slept in a different place virtually every night, I could be fast asleep within ten minutes of getting under the covers. 

I wondered idly if it was because I’d gotten used to the experience of sleeping in a virtual world, but then I realized that wasn’t true. I hadn’t found it easy to fall asleep until I started working with Asuna. There was more trouble in my life this way than when I was solo, I thought, which made this strange…Or perhaps it was that in exchange for all the extra troubles and considerations, I was receiving something else that counterbalanced all that. 

As I drifted off into into slumber, I hoped that it was the same way for Asuna and Kizmel. 

The night of January 3 passed in silence… 

…or so I thought. 

A forceful alarm woke me, stabbing deep into my brain. Without opening my eyes, I felt for my game window and turned off the alarm that only I could hear. 

My eyelids rose to see that the room was still dark. Before I entered the bedroom, I had set an alarm for two o’clock, so of course it was dark, but now I felt like I shouldn’t have bothered. I focused on the sounds of the room and heard only peaceful slumber from Kizmel and Asuna, which made me want to go back into that pleasant warmth, too. It was willpower alone that forced my eyes to stay open. 

Once I had maintained thirty continuous seconds of wakefulness, the temptation of sleep subsided. Careful not to wake the two women, I snuck out of bed and into the living room. 

It occurred to me as I crept along that, to a dark elf, an alarm that only I could hear would fall under their category of “human charms.” Still, I carefully opened the door and went out into the hallway. I was 50 percent certain that Kizmel at least would detect my movement, but it seemed that I had pulled it off. I opened my window again and equipped my long coat and sword. 

There were no humanoid figures on either side of the curving hallway. No guard was likely to scold me if they spotted me, but just in case, I stayed quiet as I headed to the staircase in the center of the west wing. 

When the bell rang early in the evening, I had plunged down these stairs, but this time, I was slow and deliberate in climbing them. As I remembered from the beta, the stairs continued past the fourth floor, which was the highest in the castle. Eventually, they ended in a small door. I turned the knob and pushed it open. Fresh, chilly air instantly surrounded me. 

The doorway led out onto the roof of the castle’s west wing. There was no man-made light here, but the moonlight coming from the outer aperture of Aincrad was just enough to keep the dark at bay. 

Then again, the exterior of the staircase corridor itself was about the only feature of note on the vast roof anyway. In a single-player RPG, you’d expect to find a chest or two in a secluded location like this, but here, there wasn’t even so much as a pebble to pick up. 

Unlike the polished castle walls, the surface here was rough and pockmarked. I walked along the exterior that bordered the courtyard. There were parapets barely a third of a meter tall, but they weren’t going to prevent anyone from falling. It was a good twenty meters down to the paving stones below, so a headfirst fall could prove fatal. 

I made sure I was alone, just in case, then leaned over to stare into the courtyard at scenery that was the polar opposite of its daytime setting. Countless little torch lights cast the huge spirit tree in alternating navy blue and orange, and the dew that hung and dripped from its leaves and branches shone like liquid fire. Pairs of guards marched slowly around it, like a vision from some fantastical dream. 

After a moment of entranced viewing, I snapped back to attention and examined every part of the courtyard I could see—nothing was amiss. The bells hadn’t rung, so that meant no one had entered the castle, NPC or player, but I still had to check to make sure, before I allowed myself to step back from the edge. 

When I turned around, I looked at the exterior of the castle instead. 

Galey was a castle that had been carved into the walls of a previously extant circular stone hollow, so the outer edges were surrounded by sheer natural cliffs. Even from the roof, it was nearly ten meters to get to the top, so despite the Sword of Eventide’s agility bonus, I couldn’t quite race up the cliff. 

But since the beta, I’d always wondered what exactly might be found beyond this rock face. I was sure that the castle gates on the south side were impregnable, but until I saw it for myself, I had trouble ruling out intruders coming from atop the cliffs. I needed to make sure the possibility of a forest elf invasion was no more than zero. 

I pulled my gaze away from the cliff wall and began walking to the right. Up ahead loomed the three-part gabled roof of the castle’s center building, which was one floor taller than either of the wings. The angle was steep but not vertical like the cliffs. 

The peak of the roof reached the edge of the cliff, so my thinking back in the beta was that I could just climb that structure instead. But no matter how I tried back then, I always slipped and fell back down after about three meters. However, my stats were better now, and my boots were higher quality, with good grip. I came to a stop about twenty meters from the gabled roof, envisioned the course I would take, and began to sprint. 

With about five meters to go, I hit max speed. Under the roof was the forbidden fifth floor of the central building, which probably included the count’s private chambers, so there was a possibility I could get myself in major trouble, but that was something to worry about later. A massive jump got me to the midsection of the roof, and from there, I began to Wall-Run diagonally up the seventy-degree slope. I felt my soles slipping at the fifth step, and they gave way a few centimeters by the seventh, but I managed two more steps before jumping again. 

If I grunted with effort, it might wake up Count Galeyon just under the roof, so I had to make do with silent emphasis, stretching as far as I could reach. My fingertips grasped the lip of the cliff, and I let the momentum boost me and scrabbled for all I was worth. 

I was prepared to be met by an invisible purple barrier set up by the system itself, but it did not happen. I managed to pull myself up the wall and rolled over onto my back, panting for several long moments. What I’d just done didn’t—as far as I knew—expend a single calorie of energy from my actual physical body, but when you worked your avatar to its physical limit, there was always a period of heavy breathing afterward. 

But in just a matter of seconds, the feeling passed, and I slowly sat up. 

All that I saw before me was flat. I doubted the designers had cut corners here, but the only thing ahead was rough, flat rock, with hardly any features or change in elevation. I stood up and kicked the ground. It was very tough—at the very least, it seemed like I didn’t have to worry about slipping through some polygonal crack and clipping into another dimension. 

In other words, it could support the weight of hundreds of soldiers. Kizmel claimed that the elves couldn’t move through the dusty canyon outside of Castle Galey without capes made of leaves from the Holy Tree, but there was no guarantee that this held true for the top of this cliff, too. I needed to ascertain if there was any other way up here aside from the roof of the castle. 

After a brief survey, I started walking directly north. There wasn’t a single monster or even a cactus on top of the flat mountain, so I used the massive pillar supporting the next floor of Aincrad in the far distance as a landmark, utilizing nothing but moonlight for illumination. 

Asuna liked high places, and I figured she would enjoy the barren terrain, but there was a good reason for not bringing her. Truth be told, I still didn’t entirely trust the members of Qusack. It was true that if you beat all the many, many quests so far, you would earn as much XP as if you were efficiently farming monsters, and you would get high-spec gear as quest rewards. With a powerful, ever-present dark elf soldier around as a bodyguard, it wasn’t unthinkable that the four would reach this castle, even without much battle experience. 

But it still didn’t answer the question of why they would do this. 

Their claimed reason for leaving the safe haven was to earn money for food and lodging—in other words, to make their waiting time in the Town of Beginnings as pleasant as possible. Apparently, they were surprised to learn how strong they were and temporarily hoped they could reach the advancing group, but that dream ended after the disaster with the Swamp Kobold Trapper. 

So that led to being quest-centric, forming a guild based around “making sacks with quests”…That all made sense. What bothered me was the timing of their arrival here at the frontier of player progress. 

At present, the only people farther ahead than us were the ALS and DKB, proceeding on the counterclockwise route around the floor toward its end, with the Bro Squad and Argo the info broker accompanying them. There was no good intel out yet on the monsters and tricky terrain of this slice of the sixth floor, and even with a powerful NPC accompanying them, the risk of death was greater than zero. If I were in their position, I would stay one floor down from the front-line group at a minimum and only engage in quests when I had plenty of help from Argo’s strategy guides. The “Elf War” campaign quest wasn’t some race to be first anyway. 

So there had to be some other reason for their rush to reach Castle Galey. Perhaps someone had hired them to do something. Perhaps someone who wished to do us harm. In other words, I couldn’t rule out the suspicion that Qusack had some connection to Morte’s PK gang. 

There was a 99 percent chance I was overthinking it, but coming right on the heels of that paralysis-attack incident, I swore never to be caught unawares again. If Qusack was connected to or manipulated by Morte, they would search for alternate routes into the castle. And the first thing to come to mind would be crossing the cliff that formed the back half of the castle. As the historical battles of Ichi-no-Tani and Itsukushima had shown, the best traditional means of ambush was to come down a cliff…or maybe I was just being dramatic. 

I strode across the desolate rock, my eyes carefully combing the area for information. Still, no people or monsters to be seen. If I did a full perimeter lap and encountered no one, I’d have to give the members of Qusack a silent apology the next time I saw them. 

“Wha—? Yow!” 

The next moment, I let out an actual yelp and struggled to pull back the leg I had extended. My balance rocked, and I windmilled my arms, trying to catch air. There was no ground beneath my extended foot. Blended perfectly in color between the rocky ground and the background was an abrupt cliff, as sharp and clean as if cut by a knife. The drop was over thirty meters, it looked like. 

With the help of the air expelled from my lungs, I managed to pull my center of gravity backward and plopped onto my butt. 

When my heart stopped pounding, I crawled forward and timidly peered over the edge. The cliff was so sheer it was practically an overhang that continued all the way to the ground below. No player or forest elf could climb that surface. It was impossible. 

I backed up, still on all fours, and only stood once I was a safe distance from the cliff. I opened my window and checked the map to find that the distance between my present location and the outer aperture of Aincrad was not much more than two hundred meters. This was the northern tip of the rocky mountain. 

It was nearly three in the morning now, but I had to find out how far this cliff went. I took a bottle of water out of my inventory for a quick swig, then started walking east. Though I was keeping a safe distance from the edge, in the darkness of predawn night, it was very hard to tell where the line was. I wished I had a lantern for light, but if any other players were on top of the mountain, they would certainly see it—there was no cover at all on the plateau’s surface. 

The trudging continued, with maximum care given to the ground around me. Occasionally, I approached the edge and peered over but never saw any change in the angle. I started to wonder if I was just overthinking things with regard to a forest elf ambush or a sinister Qusack angle—until about fifteen minutes later, when— 

I saw something I absolutely did not expect to see. 

It was not a protrusion from the rock floor, but a hollow. A descending staircase, cut right down into the stone without any structure overhead, like something from an early RPG. There was faint flickering of firelight coming from farther down the stairs. 

“…” 

I stopped for two seconds before my brain started running again, and then I silently got down on one knee. A little touch on the edge of the stairs told me that, like the castle itself, they were carved straight down into the rock. The chisel-mark texture was very similar to the castle’s, but I couldn’t yet be sure that it was also done by dark elves. 

If there just so happened to be someone hostile down there, and they were dangerous enough that I died in the fight, there was no way I could ever apologize to Asuna and Kizmel for my foolishness. For both figurative and literal reasons, of course. 

Sadly, I knew I ought to avoid danger for now and go back to speak with the women. But when I stood up to leave, I sensed an olfactory input that was out of place. 

It wasn’t a nasty smell. Just the opposite, in fact. It smelled like spices, onion, and fatty meat cooking. There was nothing else I could compare it to—it smelled like a good old hamburg steak. 

“………” 

For three seconds, my mind went haywire. My stomach curled up, and saliva flooded my mouth. Only when it threatened to drool out of my lips did I come to my senses. 

There on my knees, I considered the situation: If what awaited at the bottom of the stairs was some kind of ogre that lured prey with the smell of a steak so that it could kill and eat them, then going down there to my death would make me a world-class idiot. But…but what if there was some tiny chance that this staircase was an invitation from the hamburg steak fairy, who only appeared one time a year? After all, there were cacti that only fruited for thirty minutes out of an entire year, so couldn’t this miracle happen as well? 

I clenched my fists for about ten seconds and finally came to a decision. 

Asuna, Kizmel, I’m sorry. Even knowing this might be a trap…I believe that I was meant to walk down these stairs. 

Then I got to my feet and took a step down into the narrow stairway. The opening was a square barely over half a meter to a side, so just from taking three steps down, my stomach hit the ceiling side of the opening. It seemed like the opening to a stairway should be a rectangle, I thought, grumbling, and leaned backward so I could essentially slide down the steps. Only when I was about twenty steps down did it finally end in a hallway tall enough for me to stand—and even then, my head nearly touched the ceiling, and I was not particularly tall. 

This space, too, was narrow enough that it was almost impossible for two people to squeeze past each other, so at least I knew I wasn’t going to get attacked by an ogre or giant in here. There was no light source in the passage, but the red flicker of flame reflected from the curve about ten meters ahead, and the smell of cooking meat was getting stronger. I stepped lightly and slowly onward. 

When I reached the right turn, I stuck to the corner and peered around for just a moment before pulling my head back. 

“……?” 

I played back the still image in my mind like I’d caught it on film, but it was confusing. 

At the end of the hallway was a room about three meters to a side. In the middle was a small table and chair. The right wall was wooden shelves, and the left wall featured a small door. On the far wall was a black cylinder that looked like a heating stove, in front of which stood someone in a black robe who was peering into the frying pan on top. The pan, clearly, was the source of the sizzling sound and tempting smell, but sadly, I couldn’t make out the contents. 

The black-robed figure had its back to me, so I couldn’t tell if it was human, elf, or some other demihuman monster like a goblin or orc. At the very least, it was shorter than me, so it couldn’t be some man-eating ogre. I peered around the corner again, this time looking long enough that the figure’s color cursor came into focus. 

Surprisingly, the black robe seemed made of a very fine material like velvet. Unruly curls of gray, almost white hair ran down their back, and on their head, there was a pointed hat of the same material as the robe. The cursor floating above it was yellow: an NPC. The figure’s name was BOUHROUM: DARK ELVEN ANECDOTIST. I couldn’t make out how to say their name, and I had no idea what an anecdotist was, but I could definitely tell they were a dark elf. So they weren’t going to just attack me out of the blue…probably. 

I steeled my nerves and rounded the corner, passing through the open hallway and into the room. 

“…G-good evening,” I called out, and the robed dark elf instantly leaped over a third of a meter into the air, its curly hair flying upward as it spun around to face me. 

“Wh…wh-wh-who goes there?!” demanded the elf, who was revealed to be, in human terms, an elderly man of at least eighty years, with his skinny, wrinkled face framed by a small pair of rounded spectacles. But of course, there were those characteristic long, pointy elf ears protruding from the curls, so in fact, he could be hundreds of years old. There was a silver beard that hung from his chin nearly down to the floor. 

Of all the people I’d met in Aincrad, this was clearly the closest to the classic visual representation of a wizard. But it also struck me for another reason—a slight feeling of déjà vu…like I had met this fellow somewhere before, perhaps. But I would never forget someone so distinctive. 

At the very least, the old fellow did not recognize me. His tiny eyes bulged behind the glasses, and his lengthy beard quivered as he shouted, “B…boy! You’re a human, aren’t you?! How did you get into my secret chamber?!” 

“How…? Th-the normal way, down the stairs…” I said, pointing to the hallway I’d just walked down. The old man raised a fist. 

“You fool, that is not an entrance!” 

“Huh? Then…what is it?” 

“It is my chimney vent! And besides, that is the bald mountain top up there, where even birds do not dare to cross! How did you climb up there?!” 

“W-well…” I stammered, thinking I would probably be in trouble if I told him the truth. Then again, I was clearly already in trouble with him, so what was the difference? “I climbed up the roof of the central castle building…” 

“……” 

Now both the man’s eyes and his bearded mouth hung round and open, an expression that lasted for over three seconds before he finally emitted a strange burst of noise. 

“Ka-hya! Ka-hya-hya-hya…You are telling me…that a young human boy climbed his way…up the roof of little Melan’s bedchamber…?” 

Apparently, the ka-hya sound was his laughter. He lowered his raised fist and stroked his beard with the other hand. In a softer voice, the old man continued, “I see, I see. So the human swordsman who’s been helping with the key collection must be you. I understand now that you are not a thief, but what would bring you to climb the mountain in the dead of night like this?” 

“Well, uh…I was out for a night stroll, you know…a little night mountain climbing…and I wondered what the top of the cliff was like. I wandered around until I found your stairs—er, your vent—and smelled something nice coming out of it…” 

“Hwaaaaa!” the old man screamed, and now it was my turn to jump. But he wasn’t angry, and his AI hadn’t just gone haywire, apparently. He spun back around with tremendous speed and grabbed the handle of the frying pan barehanded. “Yeowwww!” 

He transferred the hot pan to the table and blew on his now-reddened palm. It was all so sudden and alarming that I didn’t know what to do—until I saw what was sizzling in the middle of the pan. 

It was an elliptical slab of minced meat, about fifteen centimeters long and seared to a beautiful brown. This was a perfect hamburg steak, the likes of which I’d never seen in Aincrad before. 

The old man noticed my gaze and ceased blowing on his hand so he could exclaim, “Wh-what do you want? It’s not for you! This is my one delight a month, and I haven’t many left to enjoy! Why, you nearly caused me to char it black.” 

“………Hrng…” 

If the food was one of the whitefish or chicken dishes that the elves so often served in their camps and castles, I would have won my saving roll against temptation and claimed “I didn’t say I wanted to eat it.” 

But this was hamburg steak. It wasn’t my number-one favorite dish in the world, but without curry or ramen in Aincrad, the sheer impact of that smell and appearance was nothing short of explosive. The mental image of a knife sinking into it and producing a rush of meat juice from inside crowded out every other thought in my brain. 

If only there was some way to get this stubborn old man to give up half his steak…even a third! My mind was working as fast as when Morte attacked, when I was struck by a humble inspiration. I sucked in a sharp breath. 

The old man used what looked like a wooden spatula to transfer the hamburg steak to a metal plate. As calmly as I possibly could, given the circumstances, I asked, “Are you…just having that?” 

“…What do you mean?” asked the old man suspiciously, moving the plate away from me. 

“Oh, the human custom would state that such a delicious meat dish cannot be eaten simply on its own. Only with a side of bread or mixed vegetables can the flavor of the meat be truly appreciated.” 

“Hah!” the old man mocked, waving his free hand. “I grew tired of vegetables over a hundred years ago. It’s bad enough that the cooks at this castle try to feed me leafy greens and fruit every day, because ‘it’ll make you live longer’…To put that rubbish on my plate would be to ruin my precious fricatelle.” 

Fr-fricatelle? 

I just barely contained my impulse to ask him how that differed from a hamburg steak. As long as it looked and tasted like one, it didn’t matter what the elves called it. Instead, I waved my hand to call up my game window. The old man clearly hadn’t seen much of the human Art of Mystic Scribing, as he reacted with curiosity, but I promptly found what I was looking for and pulled it out of my inventory. 

“Then…what about this?” 

In my fingers I held a long, elliptical vivid-purple object. It was the last of the sweet potatoes dropped by those half-fish monsters. A regular potato was the best match for this hamburg steak, but I didn’t have any, and this would do fine anyway. 

“…What is that?” asked the dark elf elder, who had apparently lived centuries without seeing such a thing. His gray brows drooped in concentration. I rounded the table to show him. 

“It’s a sweet potato you can find on the fourth floor. If you crisp this up in that frying pan, it’ll go great with your hamb…your fricatelle, I bet.” 

If Asuna were here, she’d use her ample vocabulary and knack for lyrical expression to charm—er, convince—more than a few stubborn old men to try it out, but it had been my decision not to wake her up first. The man still looked suspicious, and he lifted his spectacles to get a better look. 

“A sweet potato, you say? It has a strange color…” 

“Th-the inside will be the proper shade. It’ll be hot and sweet and creamy,” I said, like I was some kind of pitchman for a roasted sweet potato cart. The old man glanced back and forth between my face and the potato and, at last, cleared his throat. 

“Ahem-hem…Well, I suppose I can try it out. If it is as good as you say, I will even give you half of my fricatelle. The potato will go entirely to me, however.” 

That seemed like an abuse of privilege, but I’d eaten a number of Ichthyoid Potatoes, so I could let it slide this time. 

The old man took the potato, then placed the frying pan back on the stove, still slick with the juice and fat of the meat. In the right corner was a tiny kitchen area, and he went there to slice the sweet potato into pieces less than two centimeters wide. Then he dropped the pieces into the pan, which had begun crackling again. Soon, a sweet scent filled the air. 

He peered into the pan, murmuring and exclaiming to himself, and I watched with more than a little consternation. You didn’t need the Cooking skill to employ primitive methods like thrusting them into an open fire, but it seemed like frying one up in a pan with oil required some amount of expertise. Assuming he had made the steaming hamburg meat out of ingredient items, it appeared he would have to possess the Cooking skill. 

A minute later, the old man lifted his plate and used a long meat fork to transfer the potatoes one by one. The circles of sweet potato, fried and golden, looked perfectly cooked. 

“H-how is it?” I asked eagerly, forgetting my manners. He glared at me out of the corner of his eye. 

“I would tell you, if I had eaten a bite yet. Now, then…” 

He switched to a normal fork and popped one of the smaller pieces of sweet potato into his mouth. He chewed it for a good long time, swallowed, and groaned. 

“Ooooohhhh.” 

“H-how is it?” I repeated. 

This time, the old fellow looked me straight in the eye and said, “It’s not bad.” 

“Not…bad…” 

It seemed like the deal was off, but if so, I felt that I now had the right to eat all the sweet potato he rejected. Until he said— 

“But it would really be terrific with a dab of butter on top.” 

“B-butter…?” 

At first, I was surprised. There’s butter in Aincrad? But before my eyes, the old man pulled a small jar off the shelf on the right. He placed it heavily on the table and said, “Well, don’t just stand there like an idiot. Sit down, human boy.” 

“Uh…y-yes sir.” I sat down on the other little stool at the table, and the old man set another metal plate in front of me. 

“You win, boy. Enjoy half the fricatelle…and, out of my great magnanimity, these two pieces of potato.” 

Before I could say a word, he sliced the jumbo steak in two and transferred one half, juices flowing outward, onto my plate. Then he set two pieces of sweet potato next to it, dumped the rest onto his own plate, and sat across from me. After that, he pulled the jar closer and stuck a small knife inside, scooping out a heap of a creamy white substance that he dropped on the potato slices. I did the same when he passed the jar to me. 

The metal plates must have had some kind of heat-retaining magic on them. I didn’t have the vocabulary to express the devastating sight of rapidly melting butter on top of fried sweet potato, right next to a hot, juicy hamburg steak. It was time to turn off my brain and indulge. I lifted my knife in one hand and fork in the other and declared, “Let’s dig in!” 

Across the table, the old man had cut a large piece of meat loose and was lifting it to his mouth. He chewed a few times, popped in a piece of buttered potato, chewed some more, then put on an expression of bliss and moaned, “Hwhoaaaa…” 

Instantly, I had another blast of déjà vu. 

I had definitely seen this old man before. It wasn’t in the last two months trapped in Aincrad, but before that…Yet, that was obviously impossible. I didn’t know any ancient dark elves in real life. So where…? 

“Ah…aaaah!” I shouted, rising out of my seat. It earned me a suspicious look from the man. 

“What is it, boy? Why aren’t you eating?” 

“I will, I will—but before that…Sir, are you the master of Meditation…?” 

“Hrmm?” the old man grunted, raising just one eyebrow and glaring at me. “Boy, you know who I am? Yes, I am the greatest storyteller of Lyusula and a master in the art of meditation, Bouhroum the great sage. Have we met before?” 

We have! In the beta test! I exclaimed in my head. My mouth flapped pointlessly. 

Over the month-long beta test, the only Extra Skill we found was Meditation. It was a hidden skill that only appeared as a choice when certain conditions were fulfilled, much like the martial arts skill earned through the rock-breaking lessons on the second floor. In fact, Argo the info dealer found martial arts in the beta, too, but it was right as the test was ending, so the info didn’t get around. 

Therefore, Meditation was the only hidden skill I earned in the beta, but I remember it being so finicky that I didn’t have much use for it. The appearance, voice, and speaking style of the NPC with the Meditation training quest were identical to this steak-cooking old man. Only his clothes and long ears were different. 

The Meditation NPC in the beta was a human elder in a simple brown tunic. He did not live in a cave near Castle Galey but in a little shack deep in the swampy western area of the sixth floor. His attitude was mostly grumpy, and I did not recall him having any special love of hamburg steak. 

But right during the moment I unlocked the Meditation skill, the old man gave me a satisfied smile that was absolutely identical to the smile I saw on the dark elf elder as he savored the marriage of steak and buttered sweet potato. That was what kicked open the door to my memory. Yes…this Bouhroum (who pronounced it Booh-room) was the same figure as the Meditation NPC from the beta, just placed within a different setting and context. I had to choose my words carefully now. 

“…No, I haven’t met you, but I’ve heard the rumors…” 

“Aha. So word of my skill and fame has reached even the human towns? Ka-hya-hya-hya…” he cackled, then stuck another piece of meat in his mouth, looking positively intoxicated. I realized that I needed to eat my portion, too, and stuck my knife into the end of the half of steak on my plate. The seared surface was resilient, but the inside was light and perfectly cooked. The moment I cut through it, meaty juices oozed out, exuding a spicy scent. 

Anticipation caused the muscles on the inside of my mouth to tighten, and I lifted my first bite of hamburg steak in over two months to my mouth. I gave Asuna a silent apology, swore that I would take her here when we got the chance, and opened my mouth wide. 

Just then, the man said, “I should ask just in case, boy. Do you wish to understand the meditative arts?” 

“Huh…?” I stared, mouth open wide. To my surprise, there was a golden ? over his head. The symbol of a new quest, though Bouhroum himself could not see it. 

“Uh, w-well…” I stammered, despite the bite of meat two centimeters away from my mouth occupying the majority of my thoughts. 

If I answered no, I would probably never get another chance to earn the Meditation skill. By coincidence, I’d reached level 20 just two days ago, and I had an open skill slot. But the Meditation skill was of questionable benefit—you had to assume a funky, Zen-like pose for a certain time to receive a continual healing buff and a negative status resistance buff. The shared opinion among beta testers was that there were better skills you could use a valuable skill slot on. 

It was possible that the effects of Meditation had been buffed for the official launch, so I could just go ahead and take it, then remove it from the skill slot if it didn’t work out. But remembering how long and arduous the martial arts training period was kept me from saying yes. 

“Uh, ah, hmm,” I groaned, hoping to delay my answer so I could at least eat my steak. This was admittedly rather optimistic of me. 

“If you wish to train in it, boy, you must not eat that fricatelle.” 

“Huh? Wh…why not?” 

“Because that is your training—in the arts of Awakening, the special Meditation technique.” 

“A…Awakening…?” 

I’d never heard the term before. For a moment, I actually forgot about the meat on my fork. 

A straightforward interpretation of what he meant was that in the advancement tree for the Meditation skill, there was a higher ability called Awakening. But the Meditation NPC in the beta made no mention of it. I had no idea what it did. Besides… 

“Isn’t that something you can’t train unless you already have the ski…the art of Meditation?” I asked. 

Bouhroum took a third bite of his hamburg sleak and smiled. “A very intuitive youth, you are. That is correct, of course…but the conditions to train in the art of Awakening involve solving a mystery in the castle library and discovering the existence of this little room. You managed to find me here—although it was through the ceiling vent—so you have fulfilled the requirements.” 

“…” 

My eyes traveled from Bouhroum’s face to the small door on the left wall. “You mean…on the other side of that door is the library of Castle Galey?” 

“Correct.” 

I suppose I could just leave that way, then, I thought, trying to avoid facing the challenge before me: the juicy hunk of meat hanging on the end of my fork. 

If I accepted old Bouhroum’s words at face value, the moment I stuck this hamburg into my mouth, I would no longer be able to acquire the mysterious Awakening skill. A rational player would find a single dish of food to be far outweighed by the opportunity to gain an ultrarare skill, which probably even Argo didn’t know about yet. But in reality, the allure of that meat just centimeters away from my mouth, its appearance, smell, and supposed flavor—it was just too much to resist. This might be my only chance at getting the Awakening skill, but I’d also gotten this hamburg steak after some tricky negotiation, and I might not ever get to eat this again, either. 

What should I do…? What should I do? 

I clenched my jaw. My fork hand trembled. I was trapped in a tug-of-war between my brain and my stomach. Across the table, Bouhroum was stuffing hot meat and buttered sweet potatoes into his mouth and muttering provocations like “Ooooh, ahhh—it’s so good.” I stared at my hamburg steak again and, with all the willpower I possessed, lowered my right hand. 

When I’d first started to lift it to my mouth, I had given a silent promise to the sleeping Asuna that I would bring her here one day. That was a promise dependent on having more opportunities to eat this food. I couldn’t make a choice that would permanently take that option off the table. 

Over five-plus agonizing seconds, I lowered my fork to the plate, breathing heavily, and asked the old man, “Before I train in the art of Awakening…can I at least eat the potatoes?” 

“You may not,” he said mercilessly, then scooped the last bits of hamburg steak and buttered sweet potatoes into his mouth. His face went slack, and he moaned, “Ohhh, it’s the best…” 

I waited for him to chew and swallow before I said, “Old man…I mean, Mr. Bouhroum, please teach me the ways of Awakening.” 

Abruptly, the ? symbol floating over his head turned to !, indicating that I had accepted the quest. Bouhroum pulled a handkerchief out of his robe and carefully wiped his beard before stating imperiously, “Very well. But the training will not be easy. I have lived a very long life, but I can count the number of people who passed the trials and mastered Awakening on my two hands…and none were human.” 

“T…trials? Not a training period?” 

If it was something like Go to this place and defeat so-and-so monster, that would actually be preferable. In fact, I prayed he would say as much. 

The old man stroked his silver whiskers into place and said cryptically, “It is training, and it is a trial. First, straighten your back.” 

“Huh? Uh…okay.” I sat up atop the round stool. This time, his robe produced a short staff, which he used to tap the metal plate before me. 

There was indeed magic upon that plate, because the cooling meat suddenly began to sizzle again. The scent of fat, spices, and butter wafted up, rich and thick, attempting to reawaken the appetite I was keeping at bay. 

“What you must do, for the next three hours…is cast aside your distractions and maintain the tranquility of your heart. If you can do this, boy, then you will stand at the entrance to the path of Awakening.” 

“…Tr-tranquility of my heart…?” 

Faced with a baffling trial, I glanced back and forth from the steak-loving old man to the old man’s beloved steak. 

It did sound like an appropriate training method for a meditative skill, but how was he supposed to determine whether or not my mind was filled with worldly thoughts and distractions? It wasn’t really that hard to avoid moving your body or facial muscles in Aincrad. You could maintain the same avatar posture for hours on end without getting dead leg or a sore back, and unless you found a truly bizarre position, the hidden Fatigue stat rarely ever came into play. I’d never intentionally frozen in place for three hours, but I felt like I could do it, if need be. 

Whatever the actual effect on the skill was, the unlocking conditions for an advanced Extra Skill couldn’t be easier than martial arts. I had to assume that Bouhroum had some means of detecting if I was distracted by something. Or more accurately, that the SAO system itself, through Bouhroum, had that ability. 

At that point, I realized something. 

The NerveGear over my head in the real world was monitoring my brain’s electrical activity in close detail at all times. So my brain waves should be radically different between periods of intense concentration and periods of lazy distraction, and the system—and thus Bouhroum—could tell the difference that way. If I wanted to earn the Awakening skill, I couldn’t just hold my avatar still. I needed to exhibit true mental concentration. For three whole hours. With a sizzling steak under my nose. 

The Awakening skill was intriguing, to be sure, but as a teenager more interested in food than the opposite sex, I couldn’t imagine myself keeping focus for that long… 

No, wait. 

Couldn’t I just use the situation to my advantage and focus on nothing but the hamburg steak instead? The NerveGear might be cutting-edge technology, but it couldn’t actually tell the content of my thoughts. Think about nothing but a steak for three hours straight? I could do that. 

“…All right. Begin the clock whenever you want.” 

It was after three o’clock in the morning. By the time I finished my training, it would be after six, but if I sprinted, I could get back to the room before Asuna and Kizmel woke up. 

As I prepared by taking a deep breath, the old man removed a new item from his robe and set it on the table. It was a large hourglass with a wooden frame. It looked essentially the same as the real-world item, except that all the sand was contained in the upper chamber, and not a single grain was falling. 

“Very good. Then we will now begin your training in the arts of Awakening. Begin!” 

Bouhroum tapped the hourglass with his staff, causing mysterious green sand to silently spill into the lower chamber. I began to stare voraciously at the hamburg steak. It was perpetually heated by the magical plate, but its juiciness hadn’t dried up in the least. The meat along the cut shone brilliantly, and the juice flowing out of it mixed with the melted butter on the sliced potatoes, forming a bewitching marbled puddle on the plate. I wanted to set aside the knife and just stab the whole thing with my fork in one go. I could see myself slicing a roll in half and turning it into a hamburger, too. In that case, I would throw on some barbecue sauce, or even better, spicy-sweet teriyaki mixed with mayo. Oh, how I wanted it, wanted it, wanted it…… 

“Kaaaaah!” Bouhroum suddenly screamed, smacking me hard on the shoulder with the short staff. “You fool!! You’ve gone and drowned yourself in impure thoughts!! Start over!!” 

“Huh…? You could tell what I was thinking…?” 

“Do not mock the great sage Bouhroum! Your head was full of crass, greedy desire for the fricatelle!” 

“Urgh…O-okay, you got me…” I said, drooping my head. The old man snorted. 

“Will you give up, then?” 

“No…I’ll keep going.” 

“Aha. Very well.” He tapped the hourglass again, and the small amount of sand instantly returned to the upper chamber. “And now, once again…begin!” 

With a third swing of the staff, I closed my eyes. 

So Bouhroum, as an extension of the SAO system and the NerveGear, had better perception than I counted on. If my plan to think only of hamburg steak wasn’t going to work, that made the difficulty much higher, but I still had to challenge the task of extreme meditation. 

I would shut out all sensory information and relax my mind. Fortunately, spacing out was a skill of mine. I let my mind expand in the darkness, thinking nothing, but not sleeping, just becoming empty, empty…What a wonderful smell, though…and the tempting sizzling sound. I could use this sound as a morning alarm…Oh, what a smell…How I could go for a teri-mayo burger right about now…… 

“Kaaaaah!” 

Whap! He hit my shoulder a bit harder than before. I yelped. “Ow!” 

“That was exactly the same as the last time, boy!” I opened my eyes to see Bouhroum with his staff raised overhead. “Your first attempt was ten seconds, and your second was twenty! You will never reach three straight hours at this rate!” 

“Hmmmm…” 

Naturally, even with my eyes closed, I could not shut out the sound and smell of the steak. If anything, they were even stronger. My hunger was rising, too—it was not going to be easy at all to maintain an empty mind. 

“Will you continue?” the old man asked, his look dismissive. I grumbled. 

I knew the moment my hamburg-focused plan failed that my chances were slim, but I hated the idea of giving up now. Upon fresh consideration, the act of continuing a perfect lack of thought for three whole hours was impossibly hard for a video-game quest. Perhaps there was some strategy here, a trick that could be employed to make it easier. 

Bouhroum had said to “…cast aside your distractions and maintain the tranquility of your heart.” I felt like the key was in the interpretation of tranquility. Keeping your thoughts focused was not tranquil if the content of that focus was wanting to eat hamburg steak. So if I could fix my mind on a target that did not involve desire or agitation, perhaps I would clear the requirements. 

Something I could imagine in detail but that brought peace rather than agitation. 

The first thing that came to mind was my sword. Its appearance, texture, and weight were already etched into my mind. A sword was a tool of combat, of course, but when I was feeling down or worried, clutching the entire scabbard relaxed me for some strange reason, and when I was ready to stand and fight again, the vitality to do so came flooding upward. All the players trapped in this world who hoped to beat the game felt the same way to a greater or lesser extent: One’s weapon offered mental support. 

But I wasn’t sure if I could really maintain a state of tranquility for three straight hours, just thinking about my sword. The worst would be if I hung in there for an hour or two, then lost my grip. If I had to start over with a three-hour countdown, I definitely wouldn’t be able to get through it, and I could easily imagine Asuna waking up and sending me messages. 

It had to be something with a stronger attachment than just my sword—and with more vivid memories attached. For one thing, it had been a while since I had one of my lonely nights against an inn wall or tree trunk, clutching my sword with both arms to keep the anxiety away. That was because… 

“Ah…” I gasped. 

However Bouhroum interpreted that, he then taunted, “What do you say? Are you giving up? If you do, you may eat that fricatelle.” 

“No…I’m doing this,” I announced, telling myself that this would be the final attempt. 

“Very good. Now…begin!” 

He tapped the hourglass with the staff, and the recharged green sand began to fall again in silence. I closed my eyes, tilted my head just a bit downward, and opened the door to my memories. 

A silver meteor split the darkness of the screen that was my mind. 

It wasn’t a real meteor. It was the shining light of a sword skill finishing off a dangerous Ruin Kobold Trooper deep in the first-floor labyrinth. The basic rapier thrust, Linear…executed by a fencer whose name at the time I didn’t even know. 

The first thing I had said to the fencer, who slumped back against the wall after defeating the heavily armed kobold, was A little bit overkill, if you ask me. Not the most elegant or poetic of sentiments. When she failed to understand my meaning, I explained the concept of overkilling, and the fencer replied brusquely Is there a problem with doing too much damage? 

That was how I had first met Asuna, my current ongoing game partner. 

At the time, Asuna kept her hood on all the time, even when eating. She held her conversation to a minimum, and she never smiled. The first time she showed me anything resembling a smile was…yes, it was when we had beaten Illfang the Kobold Lord, boss of the first floor. I had left the boss chamber first to go activate the second-floor teleport gate, and she came chasing after me. 

She said that for the first time, she’d found something she wanted to do in this world. When I asked her what that was, she just smiled and said it was a secret. That had been on December 4…and today was January 4. A full month had passed, but that smile was still the same, burned into my memory. 

Somehow, I’d forgotten all about the sound and smell of the hamburg…and moreover, that I was in the midst of a trial for the Awakening skill. Instead, I simply relived the route that Asuna and I had traveled together since then in minute detail. 

On the second floor, Asuna’s Wind Fleuret got swept into a weapon-upgrading scam, which took a lot of work to unravel. On the third floor, we met Kizmel and went on an adventure for a secret key. On the fourth floor, we engaged in water battles riding a canoe we dubbed the Tilnel. On the fifth floor, we tackled the boss in a tiny group so as to avoid all-out war between the ALS and DKB. Throughout all that time, both Asuna and I had found many more occasions to smile than before, it seemed to me. 

Nothing had changed about this deadly place, where “game over” was forever, and it was hard to hold much hope for the future when we’d only reached the sixth floor out of a hundred total, but nevertheless, the two of us—and sometimes three, with Kizmel—worked our hardest to survive each day. 

We nearly died many times. I’d trembled with rage, been devastated by despair…but I kept walking forward through it all, and that had to be thanks to Asuna’s presence. 

I knew that this arrangement, our partnership, was not meant to last forever. We met in extreme circumstances, and we must have sensed something in each other that made us choose to fight together. If we had never gotten involved in SAO and passed each other on the street somewhere, neither Asuna nor I would have stopped or given it a second thought. 

For now, I didn’t know how our temporary partnership was going to end. But that moment would come, whether we broke up our duo or not. Either our HP would reach zero, and the NerveGear would fry our brains, or we’d beat the deadly game and be returned to the real world…So as long as we kept fighting at the front line, one of those endings would inevitably come. 

So I didn’t want to give a name to whatever emotion I felt toward the player named Asuna. My role as a former beta tester was to tell her everything I could and keep fighting by her side when that was no longer necessary. Asuna had much, much greater ability and potential than I did. She could be a true leader, more so than the DKB’s Lind, the ALS’s Kibaou, and even Diavel the Knight himself. Perhaps the entire meaning of my presence here in this prison world was to ensure Asuna survived until that grand moment. 

On the other hand, I didn’t think of myself as a simple shield or disposable pawn. I had received many things from Asuna in return. Every last thing I saw with my eyes closed like this—even her puffed-up sulking face, and the feeling of an elbow in my ribs—was a brilliant entry into my memory and gave me the strength to continue living. 

Until I became trapped in here—really, until I met Asuna—I thought that dealing with other people was nothing but a bother. I didn’t try to make friends at school; I put up walls between myself and my parents and sister; and I only sought out a trifling substitute for human interaction online. 

But the truth was, I’d been built up as a person by the parents who raised me for fourteen years, the sister who looked up to me despite my disdain, and all the other people I’d met in life. Every human being gave something to others and received something in return. Even Morte and his friends, in the act of trying to kill Asuna and me, were no exception. 

I didn’t know what reason they had for going after us. Morte, the dagger user I suspected was Joe from the ALS, and the man in the black poncho who was their leader…They might have their own motives, their own sympathies, even their own kind of justice. 

But when I had decided to use Rage Spike on Morte, that choice of mine was to kill him in order to protect Asuna. Technically, the Sword of Eventide’s accuracy bonus kicked in and struck his heart, and even knowing that the continual piercing damage would kill Morte within seconds, I did not attempt to pull it loose. 

I only had two hands, and I could not save every last player. Whatever the PK gang’s reason for trying to kill Asuna, I would strike back as many times as necessary. I would do anything to protect that gentle smile I saw on the back of my eyelids, pointed at me… 

“…Very well. That is enough,” said a voice, but I could not open my eyes right in that moment. 

But when I recognized whose voice it was and recalled the situation, I lifted my downcast face. It didn’t seem like three hours had passed at all, but the green sand of the hourglass was entirely filling the bottom chamber. 

“Is…the training over?” I asked, my throat hoarse, as I looked to the robed old man across the table. 

“Hmph…I am willing to lower my requirements and admit that you have passed the hurdle to learn the Awakening arts. I suppose, for a human boy, there is only one thing more precious than a fresh-cooked fricatelle.” 

He made it sound as if he could tell exactly what I was thinking, but I stopped myself from asking to confirm this suspicion. It would be beyond uncomfortable to hear him spell out my innermost thoughts in detail. 

Later, I realized that when I restated my desire to fight against Morte’s gang, my mental state had been drifting further and further away from tranquility. So perhaps the fact that the old man did not yell “Kaaaah!” was a sign that he really was observing my thoughts. 

But at this point, the rebound of having thought exclusively about one thing for three hours meant my mind was half-unresponsive. I watched dully as the golden ! above the old man’s head vanished, but as I started to get up from the stool, I realized that the hamburg steak on the metal plate was still hot. 

“Um…since the training is over, can I—?” 

But before I could say “eat this,” Bouhroum quickly yanked the plate back and snapped, “No! If you eat this now, your training will be for naught!” 

“Whaaat…? Really?” 

Extra Skills were still a part of the game system, so once you had it in your skill tree, there shouldn’t be any way that eating a steak would cause it to disappear. But after how forcefully the old wise man stated it, I couldn’t really argue. 

I stood up, vowing to myself that sometime in the future, I would bring Asuna here and eat that damn hamburg. As I stood, Bouhroum sat, sticking his knife into the plate of meat he’d just taken from me. “Now, get going! And if you ever want to visit again, use the proper entrance, rather than my ceiling vent!” 

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled, looking at the door on the left wall, which I assumed was the “proper entrance” he was talking about. Going through that door should put me in Castle Galey’s library. It was probably a shorter trip back to the room that way, but I still had business to conduct on the top of the rocky mountain. 

“Well, I guess I’ll come back sometime. Thanks for everything, Bouhroum,” I said. 

The sage sent me along with a warm “And next time, bring three of those sweet potatoes—no, four.” 

I left the little room, headed up the cramped stairs—er, vent—in the southern hallway, and returned to the flat mountaintop. According to my game window, the time was six fifteen in the morning. The sky through the aperture of Aincrad was violet now, with red rays arriving from the east. I sucked in a deep breath of chilly air, hoping to kick-start my fuzzy mind. 

It really was an odd experience. Like it had all been a strange fairy tale…but when I turned back to look, that square entrance was still there on the rusty-red rock face. 

I shook my head slowly, then switched my window to the skill tab. On the left side, it indicated five skill slots, four of which were occupied by one-handed swords, martial arts, Search, and Hiding. Their proficiency, in that order, was 168, 97, 142, and 117. Martial arts was lowest because I used it only in a complementary way, but Hiding was the next lowest because, thanks to my partner, the number of times I needed to use it was lower than on my own. 

Briefly, I considered removing it from the slot but didn’t go through with it. Just moments ago when unlocking the Awakening skill, I had reminded myself that my partnership with Asuna wouldn’t last forever. When I returned to being a solo player, I was going to need that Hiding skill. 

My first line of business was to check out what that unlocked higher Extra Skill actually did. Asuna and Kizmel could awaken at any time. I needed to wrap this up and rush back into the castle, but surely I could just do this first. I sorted my list of skills by unlock date. 

As soon as I saw the skill at the top of the list, I let out a yelping “Fwah…?” 

What I found there was not Awakening, as Bouhroum had mentioned so many times, but the old skill from the beta, Meditation, which I…hadn’t really used all that much. 

“Wh-what’s going on here…?” 

I felt like crawling back down the vent to ask the great sage to his face, but sadly, I didn’t have the time. I craned my neck back and forth, debating whether to slot it or not, and eventually went ahead and dragged the Meditation icon to the left. When I dropped it in the fifth slot, I gasped again. 

“Hngwah…?!” 

There should have been the number 0 next to the skill to indicate proficiency, but it was rising with incredible speed instead. In a blink, it was over 100, then 200, without slowing down. 300, 400…and only at 450 did its pace begin to slow, with the tens and single digits still rotating, until it at last came to a stop exactly at 500. 

After three seconds of no thought at all, I rubbed the number with my fingertip, just in case. It did not magically vanish, of course. 

Proficiency, 500. 

I’d been using one-handed swords every single day for hours on end over two months straight, and it was only at 168. And unlike weapon skills, which rolled a small chance for ticking upward with each attack, the Meditation skill only received proficiency when you assumed a Zen pose for close to a minute until the buff kicked in. I couldn’t even imagine how much Zen meditation you needed to do to get it to a preposterous number like 500. 

I forced my stiff finger to tap the skill name for a detailed pop-up. It was in the mod screen that I found the source of this strange phenomenon. In the oddly simplistic mod tree, there was a small AWAKENING note next to where it said PROFICIENCY: 500. 

“…So Awakening wasn’t the name of a different skill, it was just a mod for the Meditation skill…?” I muttered, looking toward the vent. Only in my imagination did old Bouhroum actually pop his head out of the opening and yell, “That’s right!” 

A mod—short for “skill modifier”—was a special effect that applied once a skill’s proficiency reached a certain level. There were other terms for this concept in other games, like perk or extension, but they all meant the same thing. It was a major feature, as the decision of which mod to use could have a drastically different effect on how the skill worked for the player. 

For example, when I reached proficiency 50 with the one-handed sword skill, I chose Shorten Sword Skill Cooldown I, and at 100, I picked Quick Change. I hadn’t used my 150 choice yet, but I was probably leaning toward Increase Critical Hit Chance I. But one of those “crittlers” who obsessed over landing critical hits would probably use up all three mod selections on Increase Critical Hit Chance I, Increase Critical Hit Chance II, and Increase Critical Hit Chance III. In this sense, skill mods could encourage vastly different playstyles, even among players using the same type of weapon. 

Pretty much all the other skills had mod selections at proficiency 50, too. Martial arts, which was classified as an Extra Skill, was no exception. I powered it up right after gaining it during a period of collecting upgrade materials and selected Relax Equipment Conditions, a crucial mod that gave me the ability to activate martial arts skills with an open hand or legs, even when I had a weapon equipped in my dominant hand. 

But according to the skill tree, there was no mod selection option for Meditation until you reached proficiency 500. In other words, because I passed Bouhroum’s trial and earned the Awakening mod right off the bat, the game system most likely ensured this was possible by instantly raising my Meditation proficiency to 500. 

It seemed ridiculous, but there was no other interpretation. Wondering what sort of effect a mod that required such a high proficiency would offer, I tapped the Awakening label and read the explanatory text that appeared. 

Focuses concentration to the extreme and draws out hidden strength. 

“What the hell is this?!” I shouted, all alone on the empty rock. 

It said nothing about the actual concrete effect. I figured I would just go ahead and use the skill, but there was no USE button. That meant it wasn’t an active mod like Quick Change but a passive one that conferred its effect just by having it unlocked. The problem was that not only did I not know what that effect was, there wasn’t even a new buff icon next to my HP bar that might tell me. All I knew was that now I couldn’t take Meditation out of my fifth skill slot. It wasn’t locked there by the system, of course, but I had a feeling that as soon as I took it out, that 500 proficiency would go back to 0, and I would lose the Awakening mod, too. 

Perhaps if I sat down to meditate and activated the Meditation skill, the effect of the Awakening mod would kick in automatically, but I didn’t have the time to sit around messing with that. Instead, I closed the window, trying to suppress my irritation. It was around the time that Asuna might send me a message, but I had to finish the job I’d been doing before I returned to the castle. 

I glanced around the mountaintop, which was much brighter now, confirmed that there were no other figures or monsters in the vicinity, and started running along the sheer cliff just to the west. 

Since I didn’t have to worry about where I stepped like I had in the middle of the night, I was able to sprint at full speed. After a minute, the ground vanished up ahead of me. I put on the brakes so I could look straight down the cliff. All I saw were the grand carved castle gates. That meant Castle Galey was surrounded on all sides by sheer vertical cliffs that even a mountain goat couldn’t climb, and it was impossible to get inside except through the gates. It seemed impossible for the forest elves to come over the mountain in a sneak attack. 

With that concern ruled out, I exhaled in relief. That hadn’t eliminated the possibility that Qusack might be aligned somehow with Morte’s gang, but if they could only get in through the front gate, then as long as I heard the bell first, there was no worry about waking up to find an intruder with a knife over my bed. We’d probably see the group of four again in the dining hall, so the next time we met, I could get them to clear up the issue of why they came to the frontier so early. 

Just as I stretched and began to ponder how I should get back to the room, a breezy sound effect and its icon alerted me to an incoming instant message. I hunched my shoulder guiltily and tapped the icon, bringing up a simple question from my current partner: WHERE ARE YOU? 

A second later, I replied MORNING WALK, BE RIGHT BACK. A glance around showed that I was currently atop the mountain connected to the east side of Castle Galey’s gate. But our guest room was in the west wing, so there was no direct route back. I’d have to circle around the cylindrical mountain, go back down the triangular roof of the center building, and onto the rooftops again… 

As I pondered this, my eyes traveled down the sheer cliffside again. Atop the thick gate was a walkway with parapets, which a single dark elf guard was patrolling now. The drop from where I stood to the walkway was about six meters, impossible to scale barehanded—but a jump I could handle with my current stats. 

Of course, if a sudden gust caught me, and I missed my landing, I could plummet to the ground far below to my instant death. Pointless challenges like this were verboten now in a game where death was real, but for some reason, I got the feeling that it was a good idea to test whether or not you could get from the mountain to the gate walkway while I had the chance. I lined myself up just right for the attempt. 

When the guard was heading farther in the other direction, I jumped. The walkway was close to two meters wide, so outside of an emergency, I didn’t think my judgment would be off. I kept my arms wide to maintain balance and landed smack in the middle of it. 

I didn’t suffer any damage, but I couldn’t prevent the sound, and the guard heading the other way whirled around. He raced over, long spear at the ready, so I quickly held up my left hand with the sigil ring on it. 

I wasn’t sure if that was going to do anything, but at any rate, the guard lowered the spear and asked suspiciously, “What are you doing here?” 

“I’m, uh…on a walk,” I said, repeating my excuse to Asuna, and the guard seemed to buy it. 

“I see. You are free to walk about the castle, but do not impede our official duties. This gate is the key to Castle Galey’s defense, and we cannot allow the tiniest mouse to sneak in under our noses.” 

“I—I understand, of course,” I said, then asked, “Um…has any foe ever attacked the castle before?” 

“If by foe you mean the forest elves, never. The elves shrivel and weaken when traveling across those dried sands,” the guard said, pointing south of the gate. I saw how the canyon, bordered by cliffs much lower than the one I’d just been atop, continued along for hundreds of meters, with a bridge of stone that crossed the piles of white sand on the canyon floor. A new question suddenly occurred to me. 

I turned to the guard and asked, “In that case…who lined up those stone platforms? Wouldn’t the dark elves who constructed this castle in the distant past have trouble working in the canyon, too?” 

“Ah, you are correct,” he said, turning around to look at the huge spirit tree that loomed over the inner courtyard of the castle. “Human swordsman, do you know why that spirit tree has been living for centuries upon centuries?” 

“Because it’s sucking up the hot water bubbling up from the earth, right?” 

“So you have done your homework,” the guard noted with satisfaction, his shining black helmet bobbing. He pointed at the spring around the roots of the tree. “In the distant past, there was a project to create an aqueduct from the spring that would travel out of the castle so that more trees could be planted. The idea was that if trees could take root in that dusty canyon, we might be able to venture outside the castle. But after just a hundred meters of a channel from the castle, the spring appeared ready to dry up, and the project was hastily canceled. The stone looks like a pathway, but as a matter of fact, it is the remnant of that ancient aqueduct.” 

“Ohhh…I had no idea…” I said, noting to myself that though the hamburg steak had become a “fricatelle,” they still used real-world distance units. “Thank you for teaching me all these things.” 

“It is no matter. In return, I ask only that you offer your protection to your knight.” 

“Well, of course,” I said, leaving his side. I descended the stairs on the west side of the walkway—this entrance being properly rectangular, thankfully—and proceeded to the courtyard, where I raced for the door to the west wing. 

I dashed up the nearest staircase and flew into the third-floor guest room, where I met the gaze of the two women sitting on the sofa. The moment I smelled the fragrant scent of tea wafting up from the cups on the table, my stomach grumbled a complaint over the lack of hamburg steak in it. But now was not the time for that. 

“H-hey…good morning, Asuna, Kizmel,” I said with an utterly natural and pleasant smile. The fencer glared up at me. In a tone of voice notably cooler than usual, she asked, “Did you enjoy your morning walk?” 

“Uh, it was…cold. And I got hungry.” 

“I’m not surprised. It’s January.” 

I could tell she was quite displeased. Fortunately for me, the dark elf knight threw me a bone. 

“Hee-hee…Don’t be so cross, Asuna. It’s in the nature of boys his age to simply get up and wander off.” 

Boys seemed like a mean word to use, but when I considered that I’d turned fourteen only two months earlier, I might as well be a baby to the long-lived elves. And from that perspective, my partner didn’t seem to be that different in age, still a child herself. But she turned to Kizmel with the smuggest look I’d ever seen and said, “If he was going on a walk, he could have at least left a note. He’s not a child.” 

“Gosh, I’m really sorry about this,” I said, bowing with my hands pressed together. At last, Asuna’s expression softened. She turned to me and looked me square in the face this time. 

“When I woke up and realized you weren’t in the room, I was worried. You haven’t forgotten that we’re outside the safe zone, right?” 

The fact that she used the video-game term safe zone in front of Kizmel and didn’t even realize she did it told me that her concern was real. I put on a serious look and told her the truth—if only half of it. 

“Sorry, but I was really curious about something, so I went inspecting the mountain around the castle.” 

“Oh…?” Kizmel murmured, more interested in what I had to say than in the safe-zone term. She lowered her teacup to the table. “You climbed the outer ring of the castle? How?” 

“Um…I raced from the roof here up over the lord’s bedroom…” 

Kizmel’s reaction was much the same as Bouhroum’s. Her eyes bulged briefly, then she chuckled in a way that I rarely ever heard from her. 

“I see…then you are a more mischievous lad than I took you for, Kirito. Even Tilnel the tomboy never carried out such a bold plan, even if she had thought of it.” 

“No, really, it wasn’t that special…” 

“I don’t think she was complimenting you,” Asuna snapped. My eyes swiveled back to Kizmel, who was composing herself after all the chuckles. 

“And…what were you looking for on the outer ring?” 

“I wasn’t looking for anything specifically…” 

I decided that I wasn’t going to tell them what I did find, the storyteller’s secret hideout, and stuck to my original mission. “I was just wondering…if the forest elves might climb over that mountain to attack the castle.” 

“Ahhh…I see. I had never considered that possibility…” 

“Well, it ended up being wasted effort. The mountain, that ‘outer ring,’ has a drop of over thirty meters straight down, and no human or elf could possibly climb it. So I think we can rest easy with that knowledge today,” I announced. 

Asuna blinked several times. “Kirito…you went up there to inspect the mountain, just for today’s sake?” 

“Well, I guess that’s true…” 

“I see,” she murmured, then smiled. “Well, in that case, I forgive your unapproved leave of absence. Now, let’s go get some breakfast.” 

“Yes, I agree. And you are the one deciding what we shall do today, Asuna?” Kizmel confirmed, getting to her feet. 

Asuna patted her on the back. “Of course! Look forward to it!” 

All I could hope as I followed them out of the room was that we weren’t going to spend the day doing a full tour of various baths. 

We enjoyed a healthy but fulfilling breakfast of green salad made with basil-like plants from the courtyard, an omelet mixed with crushed nuts, a yogurt-y substance with sliced fruit inside, and thin, crispy toast. But Asuna did not unveil her schedule for the day as we ate. She really wanted to draw out the suspense until right before we left. 

After the meal, we had tea and went back and forth about ideas (“I bet we’re doing such and such over at blah-blah-blah.” “Bzzt, wrong again.”) until, eventually, the four members of Qusack appeared in the dining hall. They were plodding sleepily along. 

When they noticed us and shuffled over, I was inwardly alarmed. Unlike last night, this time, we had Kizmel at the table. But it would be unnatural to get up and leave, and we couldn’t simply shoo them away. 

As I waited, praying they wouldn’t start talking about in-game systems, Gindo’s group sat down right at the table next to us. After a few moments, I said good morning and introduced Kizmel as “the dark elf knight adventuring with us.” 

Fortunately, Temuo, who seemed the most likely to flip out over this situation, was half-asleep at the moment, and the introductions went by without extra comment. Kizmel had told us about the decoys and fake keys last night, so I thought we’d be safe if the topic of today’s quest came up in conversation, but just in case, I decided to bring up a different topic to start things off. 

To kill two birds with one stone, I asked Qusack why they came up to the front-line region so suddenly, when there was very little information surrounding it at this point. 

Highston’s answer didn’t sound fishy in the least, but it stunned Asuna and me nonetheless. 

“Well, the truth is, we expected to take another three days or so on Stachion’s series of quests. But we had to call that off for an unexpected reason…” 

“What happened?” 

“Wait, you guys don’t know? The central figure of the quest, Lord Cylon, just up and vanished. It was the night of the first, I think…Ask any servant at the mansion, and none know where he went, and there’s no hint about it in the quest log. We just didn’t know what else to do but move on.”