Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 7 - Chapter 7

7

WE TOOK THE STAIRS DOWN TO THE FIRST FLOOR AND were heading out of the casino when I remembered something, so I called out to Asuna and Argo.

“Ah, hang on. Can I go and see what happened with the ALS’s and DKB’s bets?”

The two girls were staring coldly at me before the words were all the way out of my mouth, so I quickly shook my head to reassure them.

“No, no, not because I’m jealous. I’m just saying: What if there’s some weird reason that they’ve been winning big?”

“Well…I guess I can’t rule that out. But I don’t think they’ve hit the final match yet,” Argo pointed out. I glanced at the clock readout. It felt like we’d been talking for a long time in Nirrnir’s room, but it was only ten minutes after ten PM.

If memory served, the matches of the night schedule happened at nine, nine-twenty, nine-forty, ten, and ten thirty. That meant the fourth match had probably just wrapped up. If both guilds were still on a winning streak, they would both be in an absolute frenzy right now.

“I’m only going to see!” I claimed, hurrying down the basement stairs. The moment I passed through the doors to the Battle Arena, the excitement of the gamblers washed over me.

If they hadn’t lost in the second or third match, the DKB and ALS would still be at their dining tables. I slipped through the milling NPCs in search of a spot with a clear view of the bars, when…

“Huh? Kirito?”

I twitched, coming to a panicked stop.

To my right was a woman wearing a baggy half-sleeve shirt and baggy three-quarter pants. Her orange-ish hair was cut neatly over her thick eyebrows, and below that, her eyes and nose were cute and childish. It felt like I might’ve seen that face somewhere before…

“…Who are you, again?” I asked awkwardly. The girl looked up at me sullenly, then pointed above her own head. Floating along with her color cursor was the name LITEN.

“Oh! Ohhh, Liten!” I shouted, right as Asuna caught up with me and slapped me on the back.

“You forgot what she looked like? That’s really rude, Kirito!”

“I—I didn’t forget who she was. It’s just that she’s not wearing her usual plate armor.”

“That’s another way of sayin’ you forgot what she looks like,” Argo helpfully pointed out.

“But I’ve barely ever seen her actual face!”

“Then you should be lookin’ at her cursor.”

“If I look at her cursor, it’s going to make it obvious I don’t remember her name,” I argued.

Liten’s pout suddenly exploded into laughter. “Ah-ha-ha-ha…You folks haven’t changed a bit.”

Liten was known as the plate armor girl of ALS. Not only was she one of the few women in the frontline group but she was also a crucial tank with top-class physical defense. We’d been on friendly terms with her ever since she’d helped us out during the ALS’s shortcut-taking incident on the fifth floor, but as an awkward teen, I wasn’t always very comfortable in her presence. That was because Liten had a partner, the track-and-field member from DKB, Shivata. I had no idea how to act around a “girl with a boyfriend”—how friendly were you allowed to be?

So I chose to keep myself about three feet away and was careful not to get too casual when speaking to her.

“Umm…So where were you going just now, Liten? The fifth match is about to start, isn’t it?”

“Ah, that…” she said, glancing behind her at the buffet bar. “I got too nervous and sweaty, so I decided I’d rather not watch the fifth match in person.”

“No! What a waste!” I yelled.

Asuna pushed me out of the way. “I know how you feel. I’m not a fan of this kind of weird tension, either.”

“Exactly. Even the floor boss fights are better. At least there I’m doing something.”

“Where were you going to wait for the results to come back, Liten?”

“I don’t know; I was just going to wander around the first floor, I suppose…”

“Then why not come with us and have some tea?”

“Oh, that sounds lovely! But all the places around the casino are so expensive…”

“The bar counters in the first-floor casino room have normal prices.”

“Let’s go there, then.”

It was such a quick and efficient conversation that it might as well have come out of a script. The two women started walking toward the exit. I made eye contact with Argo, then followed their lead. This was unexpected, but getting to hear the story straight from Liten would be huge.

We went up the stairs to the playroom. The bar counters were on the left and right sides of that center pillar, so we went to the left one, which was less busy. You could pay with col here, rather than chips, so Argo and I ordered ale, while Asuna and Liten ordered the sangria—which was red wine steeped with fruits and spices, apparently.

Our drinks came out in three seconds, so we shared a quick toast. It was nice and cool inside the casino, but even still, the ale had a pleasant chilling effect that refreshed my entire body. I would have preferred it to be nearly freezing, but ice was a luxury in Aincrad. I almost asked Argo about having another Snow Tree Bud, but it had a bit of a minty taste, which would clash with the ale.

I downed half the mug at once and exhaled with delight, as did Argo. Back on the first floor, I thought this stuff was just bitterly sour liquid, but at some point, I’d lost my resistance to the flavor and usually ordered it whenever it was available. I was going to have beer cravings if I ever got back to the real world.

Asuna and Liten downed their sangria, gulping noisily. The red wine with chopped fruit floating in it would normally have at least 10 percent alcohol content, but in this virtual world, you could drink an entire barrel of the stuff without suffering any kind of alcohol poisoning.

It was 10:20, ten minutes before the fifth and final match began. Hopefully we could learn what we wanted to hear by then.

I figured the best way to start would be to ask Liten, who was sitting across from Asuna on my right, what she thought of Volupta so far. But Argo, who was on Asuna’s right, spoke up first.

“Hey, Li-chan, what’s up with Kibaou and Lind getting so hooked on the monster battles? Neither of them’s the type to put all their cash into gambling.”

Why are you asking her right off the bat?! I thought in a panic, but Liten was not suspicious of the question in the slightest.

“That’s right; I agree. But they’re not just gambling recklessly without any kind of plan.”

“Meaning?”

“The DKB came to the main town yesterday, as did we. Er, today? At one in the morning. We took inn rooms and met up at seven, ate breakfast, and went to the square, where there are two gates out of town. That’s when an NPC came to talk to us.”

“An NPC…? Was there supposed to be an event…?” wondered Argo. Asuna and I were confused as well. Presumably Liten was talking about where the statues of the man with the staff and the man with the goblet stood, but no NPCs came to speak with us there.

“Maybe that was a first-come, first-served event, then. It was a rather plain-looking man who asked us if we wanted to buy a cheat sheet for the Volupta monster coliseum.”

“Cheat sheet?!” I blurted out, unable to believe what I was hearing. “He was totally ripping you off…”

“I thought so, too, and so did everyone else, I bet,” Liten said, grimacing. She turned to Argo and continued, “The cheat sheet only cost a hundred col. That was all it cost for a list of every monster appearing in today’s daytime and nighttime events, including their names, features, and even chances of winning. Plus a map to Volupta, a primer on the monsters on the way, even a guide to the town…”

“That sounds like quite a welcoming guide. This guy’s gonna put me outta business. I was assuming there was another player out there who knew all about the casino. Instead, it’s an NPC!” Argo wailed.

“Some of us thought it was suspicious that it cost so little, but Kiba said it was worth a shot fer a pricey meal’s cost…We bought the cheat sheet and headed down the Tailwind Road. The map was accurate and so was the information on the monsters; we were in Volupta in no time. So we decided to try out the monster battle. We converted a thousand col into ten chips and put them all on the monster that the cheat sheet gave two circles for best chances. And we won. So we turned ten thousand col into a hundred chips for the next one and won again…”

Liten paused there to drink more sangria. Argo was deep in thought and decided to sound out what was on her mind. “Meanin’ Kibaou and his pals kept betting on the better odds from the cheat sheet and winning big. Very nice for them.”

“I suppose that NPC knows not to sell his cheat sheet to especially greedy players,” needled Asuna.

I smiled at her and shot back, “That would mean you were included in that assessment.”

“……”

I figured she was going to give me one of her usual rib jabs, but instead, she just beamed at me. “As evidence of my generosity, I’ll give you this.”

Then she picked up a big piece of citrus fruit from her glass of sangria and dropped it into my mug of ale.

“Hey, what was that for?!”

“Maybe it will make your drink taste better.”

“No way…”

I lifted the mug to my lips, imagining spraying a poison mist attack in Asuna’s face if it turned out to taste nasty—something that would mean my instant death. Instead, I swished it around for flavor.

“…Huh. It’s not bad.”

“See? I’m pretty sure there’s a cocktail called a Bitter Orange, which is beer with orange juice added.”

“You just thought of that off the top of your head,” I accused.

On the other side of the table, Liten laughed. “Ah-ha-ha-ha. You really do make a good team.”

“Oh, I w-wouldn’t say that,” Asuna claimed, clearing her throat and changing the subject. “Anyway…I’m guessing both the ALS and DKB were contacted by this man with the cheat sheet.”

“Ah yes. When I saw him earlier tonight, Shiba said so,” she mentioned, casually dropping the nickname for her boyfriend. Asuna was momentarily taken aback, losing the thread of the conversation, but she recovered quickly.

“Um…how many chips did you win through the previous match?”

“I think it was just over fifty thousand?”

That was a bit less than I expected, but it was probably because the cheat sheet didn’t always recommend the monster with the higher odds.

“Meaning, if they bet on a monster with a double payout in the final match, they’ll reach a hundred thousand chips,” said Asuna.

Liten nodded. “That’s right…but the group is arguing over which one to bet on. In the fifth match, the sheet placed a circle on the monster with the better chance and a triangle on the one that’s less likely. But the odds are about double for the triangle, and only one and a half for the circle…”

“And you’ve always been betting on the one with the better symbol?”

“Yes, yes. Some of the members lobbied for the less likely symbol up until about the third match during the day, but since all the results turned out like the cheat sheet said, they’ve been going strictly by the text tonight.”

“Doesn’t this seem…a bit too convenient?” I interjected. The gambler in me might have been annoyed, but my gamer senses were telling me something was suspicious about this. “Is it possible that a cheat sheet that costs a hundred col could be a hundred percent accurate about its picks…? Knowing how game events usually work, it could easily turn out that the very last match is the one where the other monster wins, and you lose everything you built up.”

“Oh, Schinken said the same thing,” Liten noted. I had to think for a moment before I realized she was talking about Schinkenspeck. According to Asuna, that was a type of ham made in Austria—not that it explained why he would have chosen that for a character name.

“Schinken said the last match might be a trap…and if we bet on the triangle mark that’s worth twice as much, we’d have over a hundred thousand chips and be able to buy that sword with the incredible qualities. Ikura and Wälder agreed with Schinken…and that’s when I left, so I don’t know who they put our money on…”

“Um, who is Wälder?” I asked. I remembered Hokkai Ikura, but the other name was a new one, so I was curious.

Liten exhaled and took a deep breath. “Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, officially. Another tank in our guild—and a longstanding member, too. It’s only recently that Wälder really got the hang of the role and made it up to the first team.”

“I see…”

Numerical aspects of the game like HP and skill proficiency would always rise if you kept working on them, but innate player skill was a different thing. And in a full-dive game, that kind of skill was even more important than in classic RPGs. The amount of time and effort one put into a single sword skill varied by the individual. Knowing what to do in a group fight required even more expertise—and being able to deal with a monster in your face—while tracking the state of your party members, guild members, and the battle as a whole was something that required knowledge, experience, and natural talent.

I’d always been a solo attacker focused on damage, so my player skill wasn’t so great that I could speak as an authority on group battles. I was grateful to players like Wälder, who did their best to become first-rate warriors who could stand among the best. It was a very difficult name to remember, but that was a minor problem in the grand scheme of things.

I glanced down and to the right. The clock said 10:25, just five minutes until the fifth match. The ALS and DKB would have finished buying their ticket by now. In just moments, they would either seize glory or plunge into despair.

To be perfectly honest, I wanted to see that in real time, but it was a bit ghoulish of me. There was something else important we needed to ask Liten about.

“Thank you, Liten. That catches us up on the big competition between Lind and Kibaou. Hoping for the best for both of them. But I do have another question,” I said.

Liten’s face tightened up, and she nodded. “You must be referring to Buxum.”

The three of us bobbed our heads. Buxum was a member of the PK gang and had been infiltrating the DKB. As an ALS member, Liten might not have ever met him, but in the meeting between the two guilds last night, Lind would surely have explained whatever he knew.

She drained the last of her sangria, took a deep breath, and said, “The DKB has more of a quality-over-quantity philosophy than us, but they’re still openly recruiting new members. They’re not scouting out anyone who will join like us, but they are handing out papers in the big towns on lower floors, and now and then they hold a membership assessment drive in the Town of Beginnings.”

“Uh…huh…”

I’d never heard someone refer to the handouts as papers, rather than leaflets or flyers, but that wasn’t important now.

“Assessment drive? What are they assessing?”

“That’s what I asked Shiba. He said level, stats, and skill makeup on the first test, a demonstration of sword skills on the second test, and a duel with a guild member on the third test.”

“Third test…” I muttered, the corner of my mouth twitching tensely.

“Are they even going to get anyone to apply?” asked Asuna, the skepticism wafting from her tone.

But Liten actually nodded. “There are more and more midrank players lately, and they want to break into the frontline group. They get twenty or thirty applicants each time, he said. A big part of that is that the DKB is the guild carrying on Diavel’s dream. I haven’t had the chance to talk to them myself, but apparently he’s like a legendary hero to the players in the middle floors. Though Kibaou is a good leader, too.”

The mention of his name caused me to remember Diavel the knight as I knew him. He perished in the battle against the first-floor boss on December 4, and today was January 5. It was impossible to believe it’d only been a month, but that was certainly enough time for him to become a legend among the midlevel players, I supposed.

Liten’s voice broke the brief silence. “Buxum took part in an assessment drive at the end of December and fought Hafner to a duel in the third round of the test. That’s when they decided to let him join the guild.”

“End of December…” I repeated, constructing a mental time-table of our progress through Aincrad. The impromptu raid party of Asuna, Argo, Liten, and me beat the fifth-floor boss on the night of December 31. At the end of the year, nobody had any information about the quest series on the sixth floor. Beta testers were another story, but even in the test, the golden cube in the “Curse of Stachion” quest didn’t have paralyzing powers.

So if Buxum was joining the DKB with the intent of stealing the golden cube from the start, the PK gang led by the man in the black poncho had to have gained information from some route other than a beta tester’s knowledge.

“…Buxum, Morte, the dagger user in the black mask, and the man in the black poncho,” Asuna said, counting them off on her fingers, which she clenched into a fist. “I wonder how many people are in that PK gang, total.”

“I’m tryin’ to get to the bottom of that myself, but I can’t even find out where they gather…” Argo noted with frustration.

“Don’t do anything too risky, Argo,” Asuna told her. “They’re dangerous and crafty. You have no idea where they could be lurking in wait.”

She was right. We suspected that the PKer Asuna called the dagger user in the black mask might actually have been a senior member of the ALS named Joe, but we unfortunately had no hard evidence yet. I wanted to ask Liten about Joe, but if she realized we suspected him of foul play and confronted him directly, there was a possibility she could be singled out next.

“…What’s wrong with them?” Liten grumbled, holding her empty glass with both hands. “PKing in the situation we’re in. Interfering with our ability to beat the game is only prolonging our release from SAO…”

I couldn’t answer that for her. Asuna and I had been tormented by the same question ever since we learned of their existence.

There just wasn’t any logic behind the actions of the black poncho and his friends. But in a sense, that was one of their greatest advantages. The sheer irrationality of intentionally ruining a deadly game made it much harder to anticipate their actions.

I had to take a swig of orange-flavored ale to wash the bitterness from my mouth. From the right end of the table, I heard Argo say, “Do you know what the Bartle Test is?”

The other three of us shook our heads. The term was unfamiliar.

“It’s something a game researcher created a long time ago. Basically, the idea is that you can classify all gamers into one of four types.”

“Four types?” Liten repeated.

Argo held up a finger. “The first is Achievers. That’s the type of player who tries to reach a goal set up within the game. Maxing out your level, getting all the best gear, finishing every quest, getting all the trophies.”

I was never much for getting all the trophies, I thought, but I couldn’t say it out loud before she held up a second finger.

“The second is Explorers, the folks who get excited fer exploring the unknown and finding out things on their own. Walking across every part of the world map, charging into dungeons and bosses you’ve never seen before, stubbornly trying to jump or climb up every wall and slope.”

Ohhh, that might be me, I thought, but again I did not have time to say it out loud.

“The third is Socializers. These are the people who play games to socialize with others. They love playing cooperatively, running guilds, and just standing around on the map and chatting for hours.”

This time, Asuna spoke up before I could even think of a comment. “That’s the exact opposite of whatever Kirito is.”

Liten made a bizarre ffmrff sound. Her head was pointed at the ground, so I could only assume she was holding back laughter. Argo briefly paused to smirk, then continued her lecture.

“And the fourth group is Killers. Those who derive enjoyment from killing other players.”

The smiles vanished from Asuna’s and Liten’s faces. They froze, so I asked Argo, “Meaning…the PK gang is made of these Killers?”

“Well, I don’t think it’s meant to be that simple. I don’t take the Bartle Test all that seriously, myself…but I think that out of all the players trapped in SAO, some of ’em are gonna have a real high resistance to PKing, and some are gonna have a lower resistance. The kind of folks who might just hop over that hurdle if the right thing gets whispered into their ear…”

Her voice was soft enough that I could just barely hear it at the other end of the table. Argo drained the rest of her mug, which was still half full.

Like Asuna and Liten, I was having trouble knowing what to say. If you needed to hear the right whispers in your ear, like Argo said…then how did the whisperer get over that hurdle in the first place? Unless it was the kind of person who had no resistance to killing someone else from the start.

It’s showtiiiime.

The words replayed in my mind without my say-so, and my body tensed. Asuna must have sensed my chills, because she said very calmly, “This has been very useful information, Argo.” Then she shrugged and smirked mischievously. “But I don’t think I fit into any of the types.”

I agreed with that. I mean, could you even define Asuna as a gamer?

But Argo just smiled and hissed through her teeth with laughter. “In that case, I propose a fifth category for you, A-chan. How about Progressors?”

“““Progressors?””” the three of us said in unison.

“So…I’m making progress? Where am I going?”

“Wherever you should be progressing,” said Argo, an evasive nonanswer to the question. From somewhere below, there was the distant sound of cheering. It seemed the fifth match had just begun.

“Are you heading back, Liten?” asked Asuna.

Liten considered this, then replied, “No…If they win, they’ll come up here to exchange the chips for their prize, so I’ll wait for them.”

“Okay. Well, I think we’ll move on, then.”

“Don’t you want to know the results?”

“If Kirito has to watch them claim that hundred-thousand-chip sword, he’s going to weep with jealousy,” Asuna said smugly, eliciting giggles and grins from Liten and Argo.

“I—I wouldn’t weep!” I protested. “If anything, I’d just throw a little fit.”

“That’s plenty pathetic,” Asuna said, rolling her eyes. I got to my feet along with her, but Argo stayed seated with Liten.

“I’ll wait ta see the results. You two go back to the suite first.”

“Okay, see you later, then. Thanks for talking with us, Liten.”

“My pleasure. It was fun.”

Asuna beamed and waved at them, and I held up my hand and closed it once as I left the counter. The cheers from the floor below rolled up like a wave at the shore. It seemed that the final bout was quite a showstopper.

“…If you really want to watch, I’ll join you,” Asuna said, walking toward the door. I grimaced.

“No, I’m fine. After what Nirrnir told us, I don’t think I could enjoy watching the competition.”

“That’s true. By the way, Kirito, do you think she’s…?”

She trailed off. I looked over, but Asuna just shook her head and said, “No, never mind.”

Forty minutes later, when Argo returned to the Ambermoon Inn, we heard from her that both the ALS and DKB had lost their bets on the last match, and along with it, all of the fifty-thousand-plus chips they had won prior to it.