Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 8 - Chapter 24

24

“NGUK…”

The sound of my own choked snore woke me up, and I opened my right eye just a tiny bit. I checked the time, confirmed I had another thirty minutes until my personal alarm went off, and closed my eyes again.

A snore was the sound of the windpipe near the throat vibrating with the passage of air from the lungs, so it seemed a bit unfair that my avatar would snore when it was only pretending to breathe actual air. It was probably just some particular fixation of Akihiko Kayaba’s, like the game’s sneezes and yawns. I bet the man had also tested out a battle system where getting slashed with a sword brought terrible pain, gouts of fresh blood, and internal organs that fell out of the cut. The reason he didn’t was probably because no one would want to challenge his death game anymore…or perhaps because it was beyond the ability of current full-dive tech to simulate.

This gruesome thought dispelled the sleepiness from my mind, so I gave up on falling back into slumber and rose to a sitting position.

The room was small, with reddish-brown stone walls. The floor was about thirteen feet to a side, which was a decent size for a real-world apartment room, but inside a tower that was over a hundred and fifty feet wide and three hundred feet tall, it was fairly cramped.

“…Are you awake, Kirito?” came a whisper.

To my left, with her back resting against the wall, the dark elf knight was smiling cryptically at me. I hunched my shoulders, thinking she heard my snoring, then crawled over to sit next to her.

“Did you even get any sleep, Kizmel?” I asked, just as quietly.

She blinked slowly in confirmation. “Yes. I just woke up a minute ago as well. Not that I slept deeply in the first place; I have never rested in a Pillar of the Heavens before…”

“I see. It’s not my first time, but I’m always nervous inside a labyrinth,” I replied. But this room was a safe shelter. No monsters would spawn within it or come inside, so the reason for my shallow sleep was something else.

After following the two Fallen Elves into Ant Tunnel Valley, we never found their hideout. We didn’t lose sight of them or get spotted ourselves. They passed straight through the valley, in fact, then the plateau after that, and walked right into the labyrinth tower at the western edge of the floor.

This was not an outcome I expected, but we had no choice other than to follow them. We set foot in the tower before the ALS and DKB and pursued the Fallen as best we could, but there was no ignoring the monsters that attacked us in the dungeon. After a few battles, we lost sight of the elves and continued to explore, trusting that their hideout was somewhere in the tower, but here we were now, close to the very top floor.

It was already late at night by that point, so we used a nearby safe room to eat and catch some sleep, which was where we were now.

It was four in the morning on January 8, the fourth morning since we started on the seventh floor—and about twelve hours until Nirrnir’s life ran out.

It hurt that we’d failed to recover the keys within the previous day, but at the very least, it seemed certain that the Fallen Elves’ base was somewhere within this tower. As long as we meticulously searched through the map, we should reach it eventually. Once we beat the floor boss and saved Nirrnir, we could put our focus on finding them.

There were only one or two floors to go to the boss chamber, so once we resumed, we should find the hideout right away. But the main brunt of the player base, the DKB and ALS, were scheduled to arrive around midday. Whether we waited here or ground some experience nearby, eight hours was a painful length of time to wait with so much on the line.

I wanted to prod and push them to move faster, but not to the point of causing a careless accident. Besides, there was no way to send or receive instant messages while inside a dungeon. The only option was to wait it out, I lamented.

On the other side of the room, Asuna, Argo, and Kio, who was cradling Nirrnir, were sharing one giant blanket, fast asleep. Kio’s consternation was painful to see once her master’s HP dropped under 20 percent last night, so I wanted to let her sleep until she awoke on her own, but once the other girls’ internal alarms woke them up, she would probably wake up, too.

At the very least, it would be nice to offer her some hot tea as she woke, I thought, and decided to get out the camping cook set from my inventory.

But just then, Kizmel leaned forward off the wall, and I soon heard it as well. Multiple sets of footsteps were approaching the safe room.

The heavy footfalls did not belong to any monster. But it was too early for the DKB and ALS to be arriving. The Fallen Elves made almost no sound when they walked, and the PKers were balanced for PvP combat and wouldn’t have the gear and skill sets to fight in the farthest part of the labyrinth tower like this.

“Wake them up, Kizmel,” I whispered to the knight, getting to my feet. There was just one entrance to the room, which was blocked by a door. If the group approaching us was hostile, I didn’t want our only escape route to get blocked. I had to go outside before they came in, whether they saw me or not.

I grabbed my sword, which I’d taken off my back and rested against the wall, and rushed to the door. After a moment of careful listening, I quietly opened the door and slipped through it into the corridor.

The hallway went both left and right, and the footsteps were coming from the left. There were already multiple lantern lights wavering through the gloom.

Even when dealing with friendly players, contact in dungeons had to be undertaken carefully. There were many stories of players instinctively drawing weapons and attacking the other party in a rush for initiative, only to realize after the fact that it was someone you knew.

In order to avoid such accidents, it was best to first confirm the color of the other side’s cursor, then make your presence known firmly and from a distance. I backed against the wall and activated the Hiding skill, then squinted down the hallway.

My eyes caught the vague figures behind the flickering lantern light, bringing up their cursors. The color was green. I exhaled with relief, then checked the name.

“Huh?” I blurted out, leaning away from the wall to stand in the middle of the corridor. The group noticed me then and came to a stop. A rich, baritone voice called out, “Hey, there. I shouldn’t be surprised that you work fast, Kirito.”

Three minutes later, I was back in the safe room, sipping tea against the back wall and grumbling about how cramped it was.

There were only four new players in the room, but they added a new level of sardine-packed pressure—because all four were large, burly men who used huge, two-handed weapons.

There was Agil, the bald, ax-wielding leader; Wolfgang, the swordsman with the wolflike long hair and beard; the hammer user Naijan, who was cool and macho; and Lowbacca, the scruffy ax wielder. SAO’s avatars were based on the appearance and build of the original player, so every time I saw the group, I was impressed that so many burly guys managed to find each other. I privately called this group the Bro Squad, and whenever they got around to making it an official guild, I hoped they took my suggestion and made it official.

The Bro Squad took up spots in the front half of the room and started a fire in a portable stove, cooked up some sausages, popped them in buns, and ate them loudly. Our group was all awake now and eating breakfast in a circle, too, but our menu was only tea and biscuits. I felt like I was as big an eater as anyone, but even I couldn’t handle hot dogs this early in the day. But maybe my lack of hunger had more to do with the pressure of the boss fight we simply had to win coming up.

I finished the dark, strong tea, then turned to Agil and asked, “You know, I didn’t see you at all in Volupta; when did you get to the labyrinth?”

The giant lifted his shoulders and an eyebrow at the same time. “Well, of course you didn’t. We took the north route.”

“What? You went on the Headwind Road?! Why?”

“Why not? If you have an easy route and a hard route, isn’t any gamer gonna go with the hard one?”

“I said I was for the easy route, for the record,” Wolfgang interjected. Naijan and Lowbacca both chimed in. “Yeah, that’s right.”

It was classic game design, of course, that if you chose a higher difficulty, there would be rewards to match. I was going to ask if they’d gotten good weapons from the trip, but Agil was a split second faster.

“So, Kirito…what’s up with that girl? She’s totally knocked out and barely has any HP left.”

I glanced at the far wall, understanding why he’d be curious. There wasn’t a single window in the seventh-floor labyrinth tower, so Kio took the light-blocked cape off of Nirrnir and had pulled back her cloak’s hood. Her face was shockingly pale in the torchlight, and there wasn’t a hint of life to her.

I rushed over to Kio to reassure her that Agil and his team were trustworthy, and she gave me permission to explain the situation to them. With her blessing secured, I returned to Agil and told them that Nirrnir was the head of a powerful house in Volupta, she’d been poisoned by a rival and her life would end by tonight, and only the blood of a dragon could neutralize the poison. The only thing I didn’t mention was that Nirrnir was a vampiric Lord of the Night, but Agil’s team didn’t seem to sense any holes in my story, and I had a feeling it was the one thing Nirrnir should have the right to explain for herself, if she chose to.

The Bro Squad looked concerned about the state of affairs. They offered Kio their condolences and reassurances.

“That sounds like a tough card to draw. We’ll help slay that dragon, of course.”

“And we’ll pound flat whoever poisoned her, you can be sure of that.”

“Just tell us if there’s anything else you need.”

“Want a hot dog?”

Kio let her wariness of the large men subside enough to reveal her shock at the offer of so much help.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I don’t need anything to eat.”

After our meal was done, we quickly packed up the stoves and utensils, then huddled in the center of the safe room.

When they were lined up this close, it was shocking just how large the Bro Squad was. In keeping with their appearance, they all focused on strength as their main stat. When combined with their imposing two-handed weapons, they easily had the best instantaneous damage potential of any group in the frontline population.

If the floor boss was a simple physical-damage-only kind of enemy, I might be tempted to try out the battle just with this group, but unfortunately, we were going to need shield-bearing tanks to counteract Aghyellr the fire dragon. It was going to blow fire breath on us, and our weapons wouldn’t be enough to block it.

“I’m guessing the boss chamber is right above this room. I’d love to go right in there now, but we don’t have enough people,” I prefaced, before checking the time. “It’s five AM now, and the ALS and DKB are scheduled to get here around noon. Which means we have to wait around this area for another seven hours. If anyone has any ideas about how to spend this time productively…”

Agil raised a large hand, so I pointed at him like a teacher would. “Yes, Agil?”

“We don’t have to wait that long.”

“…Huh?” I didn’t grasp his meaning, so I stared up at the menacing—but also quite handsome—warrior. “What do you mean?”

“We just passed them around the fifth floor. They joined together into a thirty-person team, so they’re on the slower side, but it’s not going to take them that long. They should be right along.”

“Huh?” both Asuna and I stammered. Argo, however, just grinned in silence from within her cloak’s hood. I stared at her and asked, “Was this your doing?”

“Well, don’t make it sound so sinister, Kii-boy.” The Rat smirked. She put her hands on her hips and announced, “When we took a break at the entrance to the tower, I just gave Li-chan a little itty-bitty message: We’re already at the tower, so sorry if we beat the boss first.”

No sooner had the sentence left her mouth than more sounds came from outside the door.

This time, there was no concern about groups of monsters or PK gangs. It was the sound of a stampede of footsteps—well, more than just ten or twenty.