Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 8 - Chapter 23

23

IT WAS EIGHT IN THE MORNING ON JANUARY 7, NINE hours after our great gamble at the Grand Casino.

Asuna, Argo, Kizmel, Kio, Nirrnir, and I made up a party of six, heading quickly across the Field of Bones on the west side of the seventh floor of Aincrad.

While it was a six-person party, only four of us could really fight. Nirrnir was still in a coma, wrapped in a heavy cloak and a cape to shut out the sunlight, and Kio had her master secured tightly to her back with leather straps.

The Field of Bones, meanwhile, was a desolate wasteland, with dead trees that stuck out of the ground like bones; there was virtually no green plant life to be seen. As an elf, Kizmel would normally be hit with a weakness debuff in less than a minute here, but fortunately for us, she still had the Greenleaf Cape she’d borrowed from the treasury of Castle Galey, which kept her from suffering in the arid landscape.

According to her, when leaving Castle Galey for Harin Tree Palace, she’d been given the treasured cape to use by Bouhroum, the older man in charge of the treasury at the castle. Surely he hadn’t anticipated that Kizmel would need it after escaping prison and going off to reclaim the keys, but the ancient steak eater was a man of many mysteries. One day I wanted to return to the castle to grill him about the Meditation skill—and maybe get a chance to eat the hamburg steak I missed out on (what had he called it, a fricatelle?), too. But we couldn’t even approach the dark elf territories until we recovered the stolen keys.

Frankly, it had felt like we were grasping at straws in the quest to get the keys back, but now we had finally found the thread we could follow to victory. And it was leading us toward two small figures flickering on the far end of the bleached wasteland.

Seven hours ago, Asuna and I returned to the third-floor hotel room after negotiating with the two guilds. We gave our report to the group and decided at last to make use of the item for contacting the Fallen Elves: the map of Scyia.

The location we indicated was a pair of aspen trees that stood on the path from Volupta to Looserock Forest. The time was three o’clock in the morning.

I accepted the job of dripping the blood. Kizmel was very insistent that she should do it, but Bardun was a human being, and if elf blood just so happened to cause a different reaction in the map, the Fallen would know it was a trap.

Somehow, I managed to convince Kizmel of this, and so she stood back while I attempted to prick my finger with a thin knife from Kio. This was when Asuna, Argo, and I belatedly realized a major problem. Nirrnir’s room—and the rest of Volupta, of course—was inside the anti-criminal code zone, where players could not harm other players. That included oneself, of course. Jabbing at my finger with a knife just brought up a purple system wall in the air.

Kizmel rolled her eyes at the overprotective nature of “humankind’s magic” and tried to take the knife from me, but Argo fortunately came up with a solution. There was one way to temporarily cancel the safety code within the safe zone of town: with the dueling system.

I challenged Asuna to a first-strike duel, which she accepted with a suspicious look, making a huge countdown window appear over the table. The sixty seconds passed as agonizingly slowly as I remembered them doing before, and once the duel had begun, I was able to prick the tip of my finger with the knife.

The blood in this case was not realistic liquid but shining red bits of light. I dripped the first one over the aspen trees on the map. Next, I added a second drop over the mark on the edge of the map corresponding to three in the morning. A sharp little needle of red light extended about two inches from that spot and began to tick down each second. In a minute, the light was gone, and there was nothing to do but trust in the map and wait.

Three minutes later, a blue pillar appeared over the map this time. It was not indicating the same place and time, however.

The location was an especially large, dead tree standing in the middle of the Field of Bones, far to the northwest of Volupta. And the time was seven in the morning.

Clearly, the Fallen Elves had indicated a new time and place, as though to say, “We’re not following your instructions.” We couldn’t just spurn this counteroffer, so I was going to approve when I came up short. Where was I supposed to drip the blood to indicate acceptance?

The group erupted into suggestions and arguments, until Kio spotted two oddly shaped letters for Y and N in the corner of the map. Two minutes had already passed since the Fallen’s response by then, so I quickly added a new drop on the Y. We waited five more minutes, just in case, but another pillar of light did not appear, so we allowed the duel to end as a draw.

We left the map out on the table and took a late dinner with some light food Asuna bought out in town. It was a waste of time to travel back to the Ambermoon Inn, so we just chose to sleep in the hotel. Then we got up at four o’clock, took thirty minutes to get ready, left the casino through that hidden passage again, and exited the town from the north gate, hurrying northwest. There were monsters along the way, of course, but we had Kizmel the elite-level NPC.

In the town, she kept her broken saber on hand, but out in the wilderness, Kizmel had to give up and switch to the Elven Stout Sword I gave her. The utter power she exhibited made it clear that unfamiliarity with the weapon was no issue. After how helpless Kizmel had been against Kysarah the Ransacker, thinking about the eventual second confrontation with that foe made my legs turn to jelly. At least Kysarah wasn’t going to gain any levels in the meantime, though. We just had to make the most of our time to power up before then.

With this thought and more passing through my mind, I gained a level on the trip, as did Asuna, putting us at 23 and 22, respectively. Argo had been busy leveling up on her own time, but as usual, she declined to tell us her number or skill selection. Her claw attacks were even faster than Kizmel’s, and although the damage itself was low, she wreaked havoc on the monsters and kept them distracted while we unleashed big attacks.

And even with Nirrnir strapped to her back, unable to move in any violent fashion, Kio managed to shatter many foes with precise, high-powered thrusts from her estoc, if they were foolish enough to stand in her way. The party crossed the grassland that surrounded Volupta without stopping, Looserock Forest distant on the right-hand side as we continued northwest, until the sky began to grow light just as we reached the Field of Bones.

As the most dangerous outdoor region on the seventh floor, the monsters were definitely a rank higher than elsewhere, but not enough to give us serious trouble. The only struggle was against a pack of Rusty Lykaons—real ones this time. Kio sprinkled a strange-smelling liquid, however, which dulled the movement of the lykaons and made it much easier to defeat them.

It was occurring to me now that between the Rubrabium Flower Dye that started this whole incident, the lobelia flower poison we used to put Nirrnir to sleep and slow the silver poison in her veins, the kerumila incense used to create the spotlight debuff, and the strange liquid Kio used on the pack of Rusty Lykaons, there was certainly a lot of poison and powder going around right now. That was probably because the Korloys and Nachtoys were adept with medicines and mixtures. But perhaps there was some connection to the fact that Nirrnir was a vampire—er, a Lord of the Night.

In the meantime, we crossed the Field of Bones and arrived at a hill with a good view of the huge dead tree—the Dragon Bone—thirty minutes before the meeting time the elves demanded.

There were a number of perfectly serviceable rocks atop the hill that offered us a hiding spot. We took turns watching the huge tree and took the time to rest and refuel. The morning sun was already shining through the outer aperture of Aincrad, which made me worry that Nirrnir would start taking damage despite the cloak and cape, but according to Kio, she would be fine during her coma as long as she was not exposed to direct sunlight. I thought back on her walk through the setting sun before the stables and recalled that she had weakened but not lost any HP.

Still, the silver poisoning was bringing Nirrnir closer to death, bit by bit. Our time limit was tomorrow evening. We had to find the Fallen Elf hideout and defeat the floor boss before then; there wasn’t a moment to waste. I watched and waited impatiently, and around 6:55, Argo spotted two figures approaching from the opposite side of the wasteland.

Our hiding spot was over three hundred yards from the Dragon Bone, so the figures were just black dots in the distance. But that was all Kizmel needed to say: “They’re Fallen.”

The Fallen Elves were still elves, so ordinarily they wouldn’t be able to cross the Field of Bones without using something akin to the Greenleaf Cape. But like the soldiers who attacked Castle Galey on the sixth floor, they were surely equipped with the taboo branches. Perhaps they had selected the Field of Bones assuming that no dark elves from Harin Tree Palace could get anywhere close.

I watched the two Fallen Elves reach the Dragon Bone. Of course, we couldn’t leave our hiding spot. If we snuck up from the opposite side of the tree and performed an ambush, we could probably beat them, assuming they weren’t Kysarah and General N’ltzahh. But they weren’t going to give up the location of their hideout even under torture, and more importantly, Asuna wouldn’t approve of that.

So we stayed crouched behind the rocks, prepared to wait as long as it took for the Fallen to move—or so we thought. But as soon as it turned 7:05, the pair began walking in the direction they’d come. For a brief moment, I thought, You wanted people to meet you in the middle of the wasteland, you gotta give ’em a bit longer than that! But then I remembered we were the ones who’d called them, not Bardun Korloy, and the sooner they went back home, the better for us.

So now it was eight o’clock, and we were hurrying to follow the Fallen Elves as they presumably returned to their hideout. I was worried because there were few objects we could hide behind, but we had the sun at our backs, so the light shining off the bleached ground offered a kind of natural camouflage, I hoped.

Either because we were in the midst of a special event or because the Fallen had used some kind of magical charm several hundred yards ahead, there were no monster attacks, despite the fact that we’d been walking for an hour since leaving the Dragon Bone behind. At some point, the sharp mountain peaks beyond the wasteland and the labyrinth tower looming behind them had become much clearer.

I adjusted my walking speed so I lined up with Kio, who was behind me.

“You’ve been carrying Lady Nirr this whole time. Are you okay? I’ll switch with you if you’re getting tired,” I whispered.

The ever-loyal battle maid gave me an exquisite glare. “It is not a problem. I am not so weak that I would become ‘tired’ by carrying Lady Nirrnir on my own.”

“Oh. Of course. Sorry,” I said quickly. Her expression softened a bit.

“…But I thank you for thinking of me. I must not forget that the job I hired you to do ended with the investigation of the stable. There is no way for me to express my gratitude that you have done so much to save Lady Nirrnir’s life, beyond the point your mission was done.”

“Uh, gosh…”

I scratched behind my ear awkwardly, then cast a glance at Nirrnir, who was strapped to Kio’s back. Her face was hidden by the hood of her cloak, plus the cape over it, but there was a golden ? rotating slowly over her head. It was the indicator that Nirrnir was my current questgiver and would not disappear until I finished, failed, or abandoned the quest. I wasn’t going to choose the third option, that was for sure.

“…Asuna and I didn’t come to the casino to gamble. We came to Volupta to enjoy the beach,” I said, looking back at Kio. For a moment, Asuna looked over her shoulder from where she walked with Kizmel ahead of us. She wasn’t scolding me for talking about it, so I continued the story.

“To get into the beach, you have to win thirty thousand chips at the casino per person and get a pass, right? We’d never make that much playing normally at the card tables, roulette wheels…or the monster coliseum, of course. But we won a hundred and forty thousand yesterday, enough for me, Asuna, Argo, and Kizmel to get our own passes, and that was only because Lady Nirr hired us to do that job…”

At some point, I started losing track of what I was trying to say. A subtle smirk crossed Kio’s lips.

“If you had simply asked, we could have arranged beach passes at any moment.”

“Huh? R-really?”

“The staircase pass we lent to Argo has essentially the same privileges. They can be given indefinitely to anyone hired by the hotel owners.”

“Oh…I didn’t know…”

In that case, theoretically, we could have borrowed the pass directly after meeting Nirrnir, then gone straight to the beach, gotten our fill of sun and sand, and abandoned the quest before heading right to the next town.

But that would have left Argo to continue the quest on her own, so Nirrnir would presumably have been bitten by the Argent Serpent anyway. In that sense, I was glad that we hadn’t gotten any unscrupulous ideas—but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to express that to her.

“Even if my brother, Huazo, and I serve Lady Nirrnir for all our lives,” Kio continued quietly, “we could never make up the debt we owe her. Do you recall that I said this before?”

“Y-yes, of course.”

I’d been wondering what she meant by that. Up ahead, Asuna and Kizmel were listening in careful silence, as was Argo behind us.

“Our father was a swordsman originally in the Korloy family’s employ.”

It took all my willpower to stop myself from screaming, What?! I managed to hold it to a simple nod, prompting Kio to continue.

“He worked in dangerous conditions every day on their monster-capturing team. But when I was six, and Huazo was four, the team was ordered to capture a monster in the northern mountains called an Amphicyon…They were successful at their mission, but there was one casualty: our father.”

“……”

Amphicyon was the name of an extinct type of large carnivore that lived twenty million years ago in the real world, and they were some of the toughest monsters on the seventh-floor map. It was tough enough just to kill them; capturing them had to be significantly more dangerous. I wanted to close my eyes and offer a silent prayer to his memory, but I couldn’t lose track of the shifting figures on the horizon. So I just nodded again.

“At the time, our mother had already died of a plague, so the family was just the three of us. Now our father was dead, and because we lived in the Korloys’ quarters, Huazo and I were driven out with nothing but the clothes on our backs.”

I didn’t fail to notice the way Asuna’s hands balled into fists. I felt a flare of anger in my gut, too, but held it back and focused on the horizon.

Kio gently adjusted Nirrnir on her back and resumed quietly, “We had nowhere to go and nothing to eat—my brother and I would have surely joined our parents soon if we were left on the street. But Lady Nirrnir was aware of our plight, and she sought us out in the backstreets of Volupta and took us under the Nachtoy family’s wing. Although she was much taller than I was when we first met, I eventually outgrew her…But for the thirteen years since, I have never wavered in my loyalty and gratitude to her. No matter what happens, I must always do everything I can to save her.”

She let her left hand drop to the pommel of her estoc, then lifted it up to hold the straps again.

It was a struggle to hold down the smoldering anger toward Bardun Korloy that rested in the pit of my stomach. But there was a question I’d repeated to myself many times that was rising to my mind once again.

Were the events Kio described actual things that happened thirteen years ago in this world—before SAO’s official launch? Or were they all just story points that had been programmed into her memory to serve as background?

But this was a pointless question. Asuna, Argo, and I were real human beings who were born and raised in the real world, and I knew we’d all been trapped in Aincrad due to Akihiko Kayaba’s sick criminal scheme, but there was no evidence that any of this was the truth. It could be that we were AIs just like Kio, Kizmel, and Nirrnir—and that I was only being convinced that I was a player in a game by the name of Kirito or Kazuto Kirigaya.

“Thanks for telling us,” said Asuna, the first to break the silence. Despite the fact that she was facing forward and speaking quietly, her voice carried strangely clear back to Kio. “I love Lady Nirrnir, too. I don’t want to have to say good-bye to her. Just let us help you defeat this dragon.”

It was clear that Asuna was delivering her answer to Kio’s earlier statement: “Nothing can express my gratitude that you have already done so much to save Lady Nirrnir’s life.”

If I was, in fact, an AI, that would make Asuna one, too. But even in that case, the love she felt for the people of this world was still deep and true. It was with this thought in mind that I opened my mouth to say, “I’ll help, too.”

“Ya got me on yer side as well,” added Argo.

“And me, of course,” Kizmel finished.

Kio fell silent for a while. Eventually, she spoke, her voice very quiet.

“……Thank you.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard her say those words—no, the second, after Asuna tried to use the healing crystal. But it was this thank-you that reached deep into my heart, resonating with me and leaving a lasting glow.

Whatever happens, we have to defeat Aghyellr and get that dragon’s blood, I told myself. This, however, was not something we could achieve on our own, no matter how well we played. Defeating the game’s first dragon-type floor boss would never happen without the help of the two big guilds.

Speaking of the DKB and ALS, they were traveling along the road south of the Field of Bones toward Pramio, the final town of the seventh floor. It always took more time when traveling in a big group, but they’d surely reach the town by this evening. They would stay the night, then head toward the labyrinth tower early in the morning. If they could reach the boss chamber before noon somehow, we could defeat the boss before Nirrnir’s HP was gone for good.

That was an extreme pace compared to the usual speed, but as a matter of fact, we’d finished the fifth and sixth floors on a similar schedule, and both guilds had to have high motivation at the moment. That was because, last night, I’d offered Kibaou and Lind not just the Sword of Volupta as a reward, which they’d been desperate to acquire at the casino, but the equally broken Flag of Valor, the wildly valuable guild flag.

After we beat the fifth-floor boss, and I had earned the flag, I had relayed to the ALS two possible conditions under which I would give them the flag.

One was if another floor boss ahead dropped the same item. If that happened, I would ensure that both the ALS and DKB each had one flag.

The other condition was if the ALS and DKB merged. In that situation, I would immediately give their unified guild the flag.

These conditions were necessary to ensure that the power balance between the guilds wasn’t broken, throwing the state of our best group of players into chaos, but even I knew that either of these conditions was going to prove very unlikely. Now we had another item, not the same as the guild flag, but a weapon with specs and potential on par with it.

The Flag of Valor had tremendous support ability but almost no attack value as a weapon; the Sword of Volupta had no benefit to allies but offered overwhelming strength to the equipper. If I was forced to choose between the two, it would definitely take me hours.

I told Lind and Kibaou that whichever guild helped more in the fight against the seventh-floor boss would be given the right to buy either the flag or the sword at a price of a hundred thousand col. Of course, the item that wasn’t chosen would be offered to the other guild for the same price. Both men listened in stunned silence, surely because they couldn’t believe the bargain they were getting.

If we sold both flag and sword at a hundred thousand each, then we’d be getting back the two hundred thousand col that Asuna, Argo, Kio, and I put in. But considering that Lind offered three hundred thousand for the guild flag on the sixth floor, I knew that either of them would have paid that much. Still, considering how we got the items, I didn’t want to use them as a moneymaking scheme, and there was that matter of Kio, claiming that there was something she needed to explain to us about the Sword of Volupta…

I was about to ask Kio what she’d meant by that, but an instant sooner, Kizmel muttered tensely, “The Fallen have entered the valley.”

Up ahead, the two figures had left the edge of the Field of Bones, walking into a canyon area beyond it. It was a place called Ant Tunnel Valley, with cramped ravines and tunnels in a complex three-dimensional arrangement that would get you lost, even with the help of a map.

And like the name said, there were monstrous ants living there, each one not too difficult but very quick to summon more of their kind. If you weren’t careful, you’d find yourself surrounded by a huge swarm without an escape route.

“I’m guessin’ their hideout’s in that valley somewhere,” Argo murmured ominously.

My brow furrowed. “There are tons of dead-end tunnels in there, too. It’s the perfect place for a secret hideout. And it’s dry, if not as dry as out here, so no dark elves or forest elves would ever waste their time there…”

“Even the monster-capturing teams at the Grand Casino hardly ever venture into the valley to capture ants,” Kio commented. This was starting to feel as ominous as the commute to school late on a Monday morning.

But Asuna, who knew no fear as long as there weren’t ghosts in the area, said crisply, “It’s almost showtime. Let’s get ready to rumble.”

She was right: This wasn’t the time to be feeling sorry for myself. There was no guarantee the four sacred keys would be at the Fallen Elves’ hideout, but even if that was true, we’d surely find a clue. For Kizmel and for Nirrnir, I had to give this challenge my very best.

“Let’s try to get closer without drawing attention. The ground is soft in the valley, so we should be able to follow their tracks, but if we lose sight of them, it could be a disaster for us.”

Asuna, Kizmel, Kio, and Argo nodded with determination.

As soon as the two figures reached the entrance to the valley far ahead, we began to run, keeping our footsteps light.