Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 8 - Chapter 26

26

THE SOUND OF THE WAVES EBBED AND FLOWED.

Sea breezes carried the scent of flowers with it.

Fine white sand caressed my bare feet.

At last, our relaxing vacation time on the beach had arrived. We were only missing one thing: skin-burning sunshine pouring down out of the blue sky.

But I couldn’t have that, or else I would burn up into ash.

It was nine PM on January 8.

I was standing in the simple kitchen on the private beach owned by the Volupta Grand Casino, peeling fruit with a knife.

The large basket on the work table was piled high with various kinds of fruit. I grabbed one, stuck in the knife at a suitable angle, and spun the fruit along it at a suitable speed. The peel slipped right off in a highly satisfying manner.

I handed the fruit to Kio, who deftly cubed it with a kitchen knife and tossed the pieces into a tremendous crystal bowl. The bowl was already full of a one-to-one mix of sweet sparkling wine and red wine. With each handful of fruit pieces tossed inside, the mixture wafted out more sweet, floral scents.

The only light to guide us was the lamp hanging from the ceiling and the moon’s rays coming through the doorless entryway, but it wasn’t a problem for me at all; I just focused on a place, and my eyesight would adjust in brightness automatically. The Search skill gave me fairly decent night vision already, but the vampiric version of it was on a different level entirely. The drawback, of course, was that just the sight of daylight through the window would make me scream and clutch at my eyes.

It wasn’t just my night vision that was strengthened, however. I could feel that the proficiency level of various skills I hadn’t learned yet had already been raised without my effort. Ordinarily, peeling this fruit wouldn’t be as easy as it was proving to be without some levels in the Cooking skill and Daggers skill.

That made me curious about what other skills might be boosted by the effect, but I couldn’t get carried away. With every great power comes…well, you know. Things I hadn’t had to worry about before—mainly, sunlight and silver—were now a fatal weakness to me. In terms of everyday problems, the most frequent issue would be hundred-col silver coins, which would fizzle and burn my skin just by touching them.

Asuna, ever diligent, suggested we go through all our belongings and throw away anything made of silver, but I didn’t think we needed to go that far…Though, maybe we should. If I turned to ash from silver weapons or sunlight, my biological brain was going to be fried by the NerveGear’s powerful microwaves.

What to do, what to do, I wondered, rapidly peeling the fruit. Shwik-shwik-toss, shwik-shwik-toss.

Suddenly, Kio stopped slicing fruit and asked quietly, “Do you feel like rethinking this yet?”

“Huh? Oh…you mean that.”

I stopped peeling and looked straight ahead. It was difficult for me to stare directly at Kio because she was no longer wearing her usual armored maid outfit—but a black one-piece swimsuit with a white apron over it. And she still had the estoc equipped.

Instead, I stared down at the mango-like fruit in my hand and cleared my throat. “Well…Asuna and I are adventurers. We have to go to the very top of Aincrad…”

“What will you find there?”

“I—I don’t know…I couldn’t say…” I mumbled, but the truth was that I did know.

On the first day of SAO’s official launch, Akihiko Kayaba took the form of game master in a red robe and told us, “There is only one condition through which you can be freed from this game. Simply reach the hundredth floor at the pinnacle of Aincrad and defeat the final boss that awaits you there. In that instant, all surviving players will be able to safely log out once again.”

I couldn’t imagine that boss’s name or what it looked like, but one thing was certain: There was a final boss waiting for us on the top floor. If we beat it, all surviving players would be freed from this death game and wake up in the real world—and most likely, Aincrad and all the NPCs who lived inside it would disappear.

She sensed the sudden spike of pain in my chest. “Why do you pursue something that may not exist?” she asked, staring at the half-cut fruit on the board. “I have built a lifelong debt not just to my master but to you as well. In Volupta, you can lead a pleasant life without exposing yourself to the sun. There are plenty of medicines and tools for the people of the night, and we now have a full stock of dragon’s blood, so you can survive without needing human blood. You should have accepted Lady Nirrnir’s offer. Stay and live here with Asuna.”

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider it—if just for a brief instant.

But I couldn’t take that option. If I gave up on beating this deadly game here, I would be betraying all the players who died up to this point, all the players waiting on the first floor for the game to be finished, all my fellow players advancing our progress, and of course, Argo and Asuna.

“…I have to go. I have to,” I said simply, resuming peeling.

After a while, the sound of the knife chopping continued. Muffled by the sound, I heard her murmur, “I see.”

We continued our work in silence, and in three minutes, all the fruit had been peeled and chopped into the bowl. I lifted the large fruit punch container and left the simple kitchen in the corner of the beach, which consisted of not much more than a water faucet and a prep table.

Immediately, I was met by a sight that could only be described as stunning.

The white sands covered an area that was easily five hundred yards across. Beyond that, the sea was a deep, dark blue, with the light of the moon shining brilliantly off its surface. There were dozens of torches standing along the beach at equal intervals, providing a perfect orange contrast to the blue of the night sky and water.

And at the water’s edge, frolicking and laughing, were four women.

“It’s all ready!” I called out as the two of us walked over. The four of them looked our way and waved.

Asuna, Argo, Kizmel, and Nirrnir were all wearing swimsuits Asuna had crafted with the Tailoring skill. It was a difficult sight for a middle-school boy like me to stare at, but I managed to keep my gaze steady by claiming to myself “I’m a vampire now!” as if that explained anything.

Just before the water’s edge was a white table lined with ten beach chairs painted the same white color. I placed the crystal bowl on the table while Kio pulled out large glasses from the basket she carried in her other hand, setting them in a line.

Asuna and Argo left footprints in the wet sand as they ran over and exclaimed with wonder at the massive, fanciful presentation of fruit punch. Kizmel added an impressed “Oooh,” and Nirrnir opined, “A very impressive display.”

I was doing my best not to stare directly at their swimsuits with my keen night vision when a baritone voice said, “Wow, look at that!”

Four burly men were standing up from the seats on the left side of the table. Agil, Wolfgang, Naijan, and Lowbacca chose not to take the spiral staircase to the eighth floor, escorting us back to Volupta from the labyrinth tower. As thanks, Nirrnir invited them to enjoy the beach with us.

That was all fine and good, but why had they all chosen not to wear ordinary swim trunks like me, but revealing thong swimsuits instead? Their musculature was already bursting outward when they were fully geared up; now all that physical pressure had nothing to contain it.

Fortunately, neither Nirrnir, Kio, nor Kizmel seemed to mind. The fact that Asuna and Argo both seemed to be avoiding looking at them told me that, somewhat to my surprise, the Rat was still modest on the inside.

I was picking up the crystal ladle to start serving punch when Argo said “Not so fast” and opened her window. She removed five pale blue orbs: Snow Tree Buds. This was after she’d handed out buds to nearly fifty raid members. I asked her, “How many of those things do you have?” but Argo just smirked and tossed the five buds into the bowl.

“That’s all of ’em. I’ll hafta go pick more,” she said. The buds were all cracking and opening, revealing petals that looked just like ice crystals. Nirrnir, who’d been sleeping during the exhibition before the boss battle, exclaimed, “Wowww…” with a look of innocent wonder that suited her features.

At the end of the early-morning battle against the floor boss, after I’d unleashed that cross-shaped slash from the Doleful Nocturne that defeated Aghyellr the fire dragon, and its huge form burst into a million shards like all the other bosses, there was one thought on my mind that precluded any celebration: “He blew up! What about the dragon blood?!”

I momentarily panicked, wondering if we were supposed to capture the dragon without killing it and use some kind of tool to extract the blood. Thankfully, SAO was not that cruel. Among the gobs of items that the boss dropped, there were seventeen jars of Fire Dragon Blood.

Asuna and Argo got close to ten jars themselves, but the Bro Squad didn’t get any, which suggested to me that only players who’d been involved in Nirrnir’s quest were set up to receive them. I tossed the sword into my inventory, materialized one of the jars, and rushed over to Nirrnir’s side.

Close to 30 percent of her health had returned from drinking my blood, but the silver poisoning wasn’t gone. Kio came to again and dipped her finger into the jar of blood, allowing Nirrnir to feed that way. By the fifth dripping, the debuff icon for silver poisoning went away. The relief that I felt in that moment rivaled the way I felt on the fifth floor, when I reunited with Asuna after she fell through the trapdoor in the catacombs.

Leaving Kio and Asuna to tend to Nirrnir, I turned to engage in other post-battle wrap-ups. This time, I couldn’t sit back and watch the ALS and DKB lock horns. I needed to decide which of the two “helped out more” and offer that guild either the guild flag or the Sword of Volupta (Doleful Nocturne).

Or so I’d thought.

While I’d been busy, Kibaou and Lind had already spoken about the matter, apparently. The spiky-haired Kibaou scowled and said, “You can decide which guild ya wanna sell the flag or sword to at the next boss.”

My mouth fell open. Lind shrugged and added, “After the sorry mess we made of things this time, it seems more than impertinent to argue that either of us really ‘helped.’”

The guilds went to the staircase that appeared in the back of the chamber and ascended to the eighth floor.

Honestly, this came partially as a major relief to me; I didn’t think I could have picked a winner between the ALS and DKB. But it was only kicking the can down the road a little. I hadn’t yet explained to them about the terrible cost of using the Doleful Nocturne: its experience point drain.

If the draining effect absorbed one’s accumulated experience but nothing more than that, it was something you might work around. But if it drained until you hit zero and leveled your avatar down, nobody was going to want to use it. The only solution was to become a vampire like I did, but that presented a new problem.

According to Nirrnir, when a Dominus Nocte sucked your blood, you didn’t get all the power of your new master. Your actual title would be Civis Nocte, or Citizen of the Night, and your battle power was inferior across the board—although, with the increase I’d gotten, I couldn’t begin to imagine how powerful a Lord of the Night would be—and the biggest difference was that you couldn’t create followers of your own. I had fangs, so I could suck blood, and sucking human blood would restore some HP, but whatever player or NPC I feasted upon would not become a Citizen of the Night.

In other words, if anyone in the DKB or ALS wanted to become a vampire to use the Doleful Nocturne without penalty, they would have to be preyed upon by the Lord of the Night, Nirrnir, and she was very unlikely to say yes. She had gone for at least ten years—probably much longer—without once drinking human blood, and even as her life was hanging in the balance, she resisted drinking from me for so long.

In any case…

The big decision had been delayed until the eighth floor, and I returned to the others still holding both “broken” items. My partner looked like she had several things to say about what I’d done, but for now, she let me off with nothing more than a pat on the shoulder.

I wanted to return to Volupta at once, but we couldn’t rush out into the outdoors with the light of the morning blazing all around. Over ten hours remained until sundown, which presented a decision to make. To my surprise, however, Nirrnir suggested we continue exploring the unmapped parts of the tower to search for the Fallen Elf hideout.

None of us protested, and the Bro Squad even offered to help out, so we continued filling out the map with a huge party of ten, slicing and dicing monsters as we went. After about three hours of this, Nirrnir’s accentuated Lord of the Night senses kicked in, and she spotted a hidden door at the end of a cramped side hallway that even Argo couldn’t spot.

This is it! I thought. Once everyone was fully ready for battle, we opened the secret door, but the small room beyond it was empty, containing nothing more than what looked like an old-fashioned altar. Neither Asuna, Argo, nor even Kizmel knew what it was, but after a careful examination, Nirrnir had the answer.

“This is an ancient teleportation device,” she said.

As I reclined in the beach chair, enjoying a glass of fruit punch chilled with icy snow tree flowers, I gazed up at the night sky to the west. With the aid of my night vision, I could even see the faint outline of the distant labyrinth tower.

If we could figure out how to use that teleportation device, we should be able to reach the Fallen Elf hideout, once and for all. But most likely, that hideout was on the eighth floor, not the seventh. There was no other reason for them to place the device all the way at the top of the tower.

Nirrnir said she would look up how to use the device in some old books, once we got back to the hotel. After we received that information, we’d probably leave this floor behind.

On the eighth floor, I’d be forced to only move around at night. Asuna was the type of person who liked to get her sleep at night, so our activity time would no longer be aligned. If she brought that up as a reason for us to split up, I certainly couldn’t blame her.

If I could turn from a Citizen of the Night back into a human, that would be best, but even Nirrnir didn’t know how to do that, sadly. Maybe the king of the forest elves or the queen of the dark elves would know, she suggested, but if we set foot in the forest elf capital on the eighth floor, the guards would probably attack us en masse.

After running through various ideas in my head, I found my gaze drawn back to the distant tower.

This time, I noticed my temporary partner, sitting in the beach chair just to my right. She had her own glass of fruit punch in hand and was staring out at the sea with clouded eyes. She was wearing a simple white swimsuit, but combined with her clear skin and long brown hair under the moonlight, it seemed like her entire body was glowing. That couldn’t all be due to my increased night vision.

The guys chugged their punch before returning to the inn, and Argo had simply fallen asleep in her chair, so there was no one left to tease me. I took advantage of the opportunity to gaze at my partner for at least a good ten seconds.

“…How long are you going to stare?” she said, which caught me so much by surprise that I nearly toppled out of my chair onto the sand. Thankfully, I recovered my balance and stammered, “I—I was j-just thinking that you look beautiful…”

Oh, shoot. That was just adding fuel to the fire. Or rubbing salt in the wound. Or whatever other idioms there are…

But my careless comment had an unexpected effect on Asuna. She was briefly stunned, then recovered and hissed, “A-are you really that stupid?” Then she turned in the other direction.

On her right side was Nirrnir, followed by Kio, Kizmel, and the sleeping Argo, but none of them seemed to have heard us. On second glance, the three who were awake might have been smirking to some degree, but I could pretend I didn’t see that.

Asuna was silent for a while after that. Eventually, she said to Nirrnir, “Listen, Lady Nirr. If I wanted to be a Lord of the…er, a Citizen of the Night, would you drink my blood?”

“…!”

I sucked in a sharp breath and opened my mouth, intending to speak.

But Nirrnir just shook her head. “Don’t bother. You are traveling with Kirito, aren’t you? If both of you are Citizens of the Night, who will protect you during the day?”

“…But…”

Nirrnir held up a hand to silence Asuna. She sat up in the beach chair. Her slender body was clad in a two-piece black swimsuit of Asuna’s design. Her luxurious blond hair shone like platinum in the pale moonlight.

She held up her right hand, exposing the skin around the wrist to the reflected rays of the moon. There were two very faint marks there: the wound from where the Argent Serpent bit her.

“There are more than a few who would dare to capture or kill a Lord of the Night. To most humans, we are closer to monsters than other people.”

She lowered her hand and picked up her fruit punch from the table at her side, taking a sip. The ruby-colored liquid caught the moonlight and swayed with the movement of the glass.

“My grandfather, Falhari, was also a Lord of the Night. He defeated the water dragon, Zariegha, not to save the girl who was meant to be sacrificed but in order to gain the dragon’s blood that would give him greater strength. You’ve come from the lower floors, I presume; did you not think it was strange you never ran across any dragons?”

Both Asuna and I nodded. Nirrnir did the same, then glanced over at us.

“That is because Falhari hunted them all down. He was living in a large town on the first floor but was banished for some reason I’m not aware of, then went up to the second and then third floor, slaying dragons as he went. Here on the seventh floor, he slew Zariegha the water dragon and was going to continue on his way, as he always did. Only the people whose village he saved hailed him as a hero, even knowing he was a Lord of the Night. I suppose he must have found that pleasing, because Falhari stayed in the village, wed the girl who was offered as a sacrifice to the dragon, and they had twin sons.”

That much matched the story we heard from Kio earlier. I swallowed and listened, rapt, to the girl’s story of the distant past.

“…But when a child is born to a Lord of the Night and a human, their chances of becoming another Lord of the Night are very low. Falhari’s blood rose to the surface in me, his granddaughter, but my father and his elder twin brother were both human. After decades, their mother grew old and died, but Falhari didn’t seem to age at all. When his sons began to grow old, too, they feared and despised their father. They couldn’t accept that they might die before him, without ever receiving an inheritance. They became bitter, not like the bright and dandy young men of their youth…So one sunny day, they snuck into their father’s bedroom. The elder brother tore down the nailed shutters over the windows, and the younger brother drove a silver blade through Falhari’s chest. They killed him with the dual powers of sunlight and silver.”

“What?!” I gasped, unable to stop myself. Asuna and Kio were wide-eyed with surprise. Even the longtime servant of the Nachtoy clan hadn’t heard this part of the story.

“B…but then…that whole story about Falhari in his old age, pitting the rival sons against each other in a series of five monster battles to determine the true heir…”

“They made it up.”

“Wha……?”

I was speechless.

From the farthest beach chair came the voice of Argo, whom I’d assumed was still fast asleep.

“Uh-huh. So the ‘secret art of commanding monsters’ that Falhari supposedly learned was a special ability of a Dominus Nocte, eh? His sons were human, but they did inherit that ability at least, I suppose.”

“That is correct, Argo. The direct descendants of the Korloy and Nachtoy clans, even if born as humans, can at the very least use the art of Employment. So his sons used that ability to control monsters that would fight in their stead, in a competition to see who would inherit the hero’s fortune. And the townsfolk, unaware that Falhari had been murdered, enjoyed the fights. Everything after that is as you know already.”

“……”

I had an intuition from the moment I held the Dominus Nocturne that Falhari was a Lord of the Night, too, but I had no idea that such a gruesome, bloody secret was at the center of the Grand Casino’s fanciful backstory.

With some hesitation, I asked her in hushed tones, “Is that the same reason that Bardun Korloy is trying to kill you? Because he resents that you will live longer than him…?”

The girl pondered this and took another sip of her punch. “You might say that, but it’s not the only reason. For a long time, the Grand Casino has been operated by the Nachtoy and Korloy families together, but in a sense, it is only that way because I wish it to be.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s very simple. As the head of the Nachtoy clan, I do not perish, but the Korloy head changes every few decades. Bardun was late to have children, and his only heir is just ten. He cannot yet use the art of Employment well, so if Bardun dies, I will be in charge of the Korloys’ monsters for a time. It would be very easy for me to effectively control the Grand Casino all on my own at that point. Bardun is afraid of that outcome.”

“B-but,” Asuna protested, sitting upright, “if you are gone, the coliseum itself will no longer function, will it? Surely Bardun understands that.”

“Maybe he’s thinking that if Nachtoy is going to control the whole thing after his death, it might as well crumble to dust altogether,” Nirrnir said, shaking her head. She had recovered all of her beauty prior to the silver poisoning, but there was something in her manner that seemed exhausted, hollowed out. It caused me to hold my breath.

Bardun Korloy was likely to continue keeping Nirrnir in his sights. He would use whatever means he could to assassinate her, for as long as he lived. There was no guarantee he wouldn’t have another trap as clever as the Argent Serpent that would ensnare her.

“Hey…Nirrnir,” I said, leaning over the side of the beach chair to speak directly to the Lord of the Night—to my lord, in fact. “Would you and Kio come with us? I’m sure you’ll have your hands full with the casino for a while, and it’ll be difficult to avoid the sunlight, but there won’t be constant attempts made on your life. There might be easier places to live on the floors above, and you might meet other Dominus Nocte…Besides, traveling is fun. The world is full of things you’ve never seen, beautiful things and wondrous sights.”

She did not answer for quite a while. Kizmel and Argo just smirked with exasperation, and Kio was simply agape. Asuna had her back to me, so I couldn’t see her face, but I knew that she would approve of the idea.

“Ha…ha…ha-ha-ha…”

Eventually, Nirrnir’s tiny shoulders began to shake with mirth. It developed into open, delighted laughter, even more forceful than the way she reacted to the sight of me breaking narsos fruit with my bare hands.

“Ah-ha-ha-ha, ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…”

She continued to laugh, spilling bits of punch at times. At last, the moment subsided, and she exhaled. Then she looked up at Asuna and me.

“Thank you. I’m sure it’s the most tempting offer I’ve received in all my life…But I cannot go with you.”

She didn’t explain why, but I had a feeling I shouldn’t press her.

“…Okay,” I said, leaning back against the chair. There was a bit of fruit punch left, so I finished it off and chewed the mystery fruit at the bottom.

A slightly chilly night breeze blew past, whipping the beachside torches into action, one after the other. The ebb and flow of the waves mingled with the distant bustle of Volupta.

Just then, an animal howled, over to the west. Awooooooo…

I turned and saw, on top of a boulder at the very edge of the beach, a small silhouette. The skinny body and roundish ears identified it as a canine-type monster, but it was too far away for its cursor to appear for me. On a closer look, however, I could see a short chain hanging from a metal ring around its neck.

The monster lifted its snout toward the bottom of the floor above us and bayed proudly once again.

Another, slightly smaller monster of the same kind appeared, sitting down next to it. The moonlight coming from outside the edge of Aincrad lit the two, creating a dazzling silver sheen around their fur.

We said nothing but merely watched the two creatures until they left the top of the rock for a destination unknown.

(The End)