Sword Art Online - Volume 23 - Chapter 10

10

It was 1:35 PM the next day, Tuesday, September 29th.

I stood on the Seibu Shinjuku express train, fighting off the sandman.

If possible, I would have loved to make good use of this time to zonk out and catch up on some sleep, but that wasn’t possible—because sitting next to me was the mysterious new transfer student Tomo Hosaka, aka Argo the Rat. If I fell asleep and leaned on her shoulder or, even worse, drooled on her, I’d never live it down for years to come.

So instead, I was desperately fighting back against the power that compelled my eyelids to shut. A mirthful voice said, “You seem sleepy, Kiri-boy. Want some eye drops?”

“N-no, I’m good. And what is it with you and wanting to give people eye drops?”

“Not just anyone.”

“Oh, okay…Well, why are you following me, then?”

“Hey, that’s kinda cruel to say to the person who taught you the secret life hack to gettin’ out of school without ditching, huh?”

“Hrmm…”

Well, she had me there.

To make the arrangement to be in Ginza by three o’clock—a task that was nigh impossible for a high schooler—I was planning, despite my reservations, to ditch fifth and sixth periods. But when I mentioned that to Argo before the start of school, she informed me that I could get out of afternoon classes by applying for a workplace visit with the school.

Of course, I’d need an electronic signature from the business to be visited, but I had the man who was summoning me whip up something for that. The school accepted the application, so I wasn’t branded with being delinquent from class, although it didn’t change the fact that I was missing lessons. If this ended up being a waste of time, I was going to make full use of it by stuffing myself to the gills with expensive cake.

“I hear ya had a hell of a time last night, huh? Your base got attacked by a huge raid party?” Argo asked me out of nowhere.

“………How did you know that?” I asked after a healthy pause.

“A player who was takin’ part in it was tweetin’ all kinds of details out. The account was private, but that means nothin’ to the great Argo.”

“No way…”

I was muttering about the player tweeting out details, of course, not about Argo’s information-collecting ability. It wouldn’t be long before every former ALO player still alive in Unital Ring knew about our base.

I stifled the urge to sigh and replied, “Yeah, it was a hell of a thing. They were intending to wipe out our base from the very start. We managed to make it through because they didn’t have magic, but if they had two or three mages, we would have lost.” I paused, then considered what I had just said. “In fact…how did they have so many players, and none of them with magic? There should have been a bunch of players who inherited magic skills at the start of the game…”

“Ya can’t use magic skills just by inheriting them into the game.”

“Huh? Really?”

“The skill will show up in yer list of acquired skills, but it’s inactive. Ya gotta use a magicrystal to unlock it. Once people figured that out, they went crazy looking for monsters that drop magicrystals around the Stiss Ruins starter area.”

“Uh…uh-huh,” I replied awkwardly. Then I hastily added, “But isn’t that putting a huge handicap on magic classes? You might as well be beginning without any skill head start at all.”

“I agree with ya. But if they didn’t put any limitations, the magic skills woulda been way overpowered, I bet. It’d mean that in those first four hours before the grace period wore off, you’d have all the top-class devastating magic spells at your disposal, ya know? They could power-level on tough mobs and waste all the other players.”

“Ahhh…Yeah, I get that…”

The MP recovery probably wouldn’t allow for unlimited magic blasting, but if you gained enough levels, that wouldn’t matter anymore. Like Argo said, if they hadn’t placed those limitations, Unital Ring would likely be a mage-centric battleground by now. But even still, having to find and eat a magicrystal after your skill proficiency was lowered to 100 seemed a bit too restrictive to me.

The express train arrived at Kami-Shakujii Station, dropped off just a few passengers, then began moving again. Knowing the morning and evening rush hours, I had trouble imagining how these cars could be so empty. The afternoon sunlight shone through the windows and created a lattice pattern on the floor. Relaxing on the bench seating was making me sleepy again.

Ultimately, I stuck around until five last night—er, this morning. I did my best to live up to my promise to create the town in four hours, but it took one hour to gather the materials for the well, then another hour to find the plants to make our crop fields, and that just delayed the rest of the plans further.

But we worked hard together and managed to create something that resembled a town—at least, by video game standards.

We’d cut down parts of the forest outside the fifty-foot walled perimeter (which was easy because most of those trees had burned in the attack) and created another circular wall, dividing the interior into four separate areas. The eastern area was the living quarters for the Patter, the western area would be for future NPC settlers, the southern area was for commerce, and the northern area would be fields and pet stables. The western area was just a stone foundation for now, and there wasn’t a single shop in the southern area yet, but it was looking much more like a town already. It wasn’t until Alice pointed it out that I realized the circular four-quarter construction was exactly the same structure as Centoria in the Underworld—though our town was only two hundred feet across, smaller than a single district in the city of North Centoria.

Even still, in a single night, we managed to whip up an erstwhile town that was much better than I’d envisioned, much of which was thanks to Silica’s new partner, Misha. Asuna used her Tailoring and Woodworking skills to fashion a large beast pack for Misha, giving it a seemingly infinite carrying ability for all the stone and logs we needed. Of course, the harder you worked a pet, the more its SP bar drained, so acquiring enough food to keep it going was an issue. But thanks to a fishing net that Asuna made and some additional proficiency in the Net-Casting skill, the river to the south actually started turning up some good-sized fish. Aga and Kuro loved the grilled fish, too, so that was a good solution to the problem of feeding our pets for now.

After that, the only question was whether this would create a sense of aversion and intimidation among the players who were likely to try attacking us in the future again. I certainly wouldn’t ever want to do something like that, but some people might only find it a more enticing target this way, so we would just have to wait and find out. Perhaps there were new attackers sneaking toward our town at this very moment, while I was being rocked to sleep by the train.

The problem is this Sensei character…

I rested my head against the pole at the end of the seat, thinking about the player who might be behind the string of invasions. The evocation of a teacher of PvP (PK) tactics made me think first of PoH, leader of Laughing Coffin, the murderous guild in Aincrad. But his fluctlight had been irrevocably damaged in the Underworld, so it was hard to imagine him showing up in Unital Ring and getting involved with PKing for fun. Plus, the whole mental instruction about “grasp the whole, not just one part” was not PoH’s style. What he taught was how to lie and mislead people and give them poisoned water to drink.

So who was this Sensei…?

“Hey, Argo,” I said. Her head was resting on my left shoulder, and it rose with a grunted “Nwuh? Wh-what…?”

“That locked account you saw. Did they say anything about why they attacked our base?”

“Hmm? No reason…I think the most he wrote was that a salamander friend of his invited him.”

“Uh-huh…”

The salamander in question had to be Schulz. Which meant that he might have been the only person in contact with this Sensei.

Kirito…you’re…really…

Those were Schulz’s last words before he left the game for good. It had been an entire night since he said them, but I still had no idea what was supposed to come after “really.” Of course, Schulz wasn’t really dead, so it was possible I could use real-world means to make contact and hear what he meant to say…

“Hey, Argo.”

“I’m gonna start charging you for my services.”

“I’ll buy you an expensive piece of cake in Ginza. Anyway…you have any idea what player in ALO might go by the title Sensei?”

“Yep.”

I was stunned. The last thing I expected her to do was say yes.

“A-are you serious?” I asked, staring between those curls at her face.

“Yep. Though they usually call you the Black Swordsman, instead.”

“……”

I snorted. It was certainly an answer but not the one I wanted.

“Forget that guy. Anyone else come to mind?”

“Hmm,” she murmured but eventually shook her head. “Nope. Can’t think of one. Seems like a number of ALO players who converted into UR have formed new teams of their own, so it could be the leader of one of ’em. I’d have to look into it to find out.”

“When you say ‘teams,’ you mean like a guild?”

“A bit looser than that. More like groups based around sharing intel. They make up silly names, like the Absolute Survivor Squad, or the Announcer Fan Club, or the Weed Eaters, or the Virtual Study Society…”

“Yeah, those are pretty goofy…Anyway, can you look up who’s leading those groups?”

“That’s gonna cost ya more than a single piece of cake.” Argo pouted, though her cheeks looked strange without the characteristic whiskers painted on.

“Hang on, Argo. At the meeting yesterday, you said you hadn’t logged in to Unital Ring yet. How do you know so much about what’s going on inside?” I asked.

“If you’re thorough about collecting all the information being traded online, you can figure out most things. Back in the SAO days, I had ta walk around and collect all of that myself. Nowadays it’s so much easier, I’m back to gaining weight,” she joked, but it was clear to see beneath her jacket and uniform that her torso was just as skinny as it had been in SAO. I wanted to call her bluff and tickle her stomach but had to remind myself that she wasn’t just the androgynous Rat anymore but a young woman one year above me in high school.

“Buuut,” she drawled, “I’ll admit that I’m thinkin’ of loggin’ in at last. Will you offer me an armed escort from the start point to your base, Kiri-boy?”

“Well…I did want to check out what the Stiss Ruins look like, so I guess that’s fine…”

“Great! Tonight, then!”

It seemed like today’s adventure was going to be another long one, I realized, looking up at the information panel over the train doorway. We’d just left Saginomiya Station.

We got off at Takadanobaba Station, changed lines, then finally reached Ginza, where the streets were bustling, despite its being a weekday. There were rich ladies in fine clothing and foreign tourists all over, which made me feel the slightest bit out of place in my school uniform.

We marched down the main street, its sides bristling with flagship stores of expensive luxury brands, and entered a distinctive red building at an intersection on the seventh block. The place we were heading was on the third floor. When we got off the elevator, the classical music playing made it immediately clear what a fancy place we were visiting, but I used my Incarnation power to dispel its intimidation before walking through the door.

“Welcome. Table for two?” asked a waiter, bowing deeply. I told him we were meeting someone and glanced around the spacious café.

From a window-side table in the back came a loud, impolite voice. “Hey! Kirito! Over here!”

I wanted to grab him and demand, Are you doing this on purpose?! Instead, I quietly hurried across the floor toward the source of the voice.

It was still five minutes to three o’clock, but the man with the dark-brown suit, flashy striped tie, and black-framed glasses was already half-finished with his fruit sandwich.

The first time I’d met Seijirou Kikuoka, he was a member of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; the next time, he was a lieutenant colonel of the Self-Defense Force; and now, I had no idea what he was, besides being the sketchiest person I knew by far. He grinned and raised a hand in greeting—but when he saw Argo standing next to me, his grin vanished, and he blinked in surprise.

“Hmm…Well, take a seat for now.”

We sat across from him while the waiter set down glasses of cold water for us. Kikuoka exhaled, grumbling.

“So if this isn’t Asuna or Suguha or Shino…who is this young lady, Kirito?”

But before I could open my mouth, Argo smirked and replied, “I believe you already know me quite well. At last we meet, Chrysheight.”

(To be continued)