Sword Art Online - Volume 23 - Chapter 4.2

I glanced at my sister, then back to the center of the yard.

It was true that Alice was receiving and blocking Yui’s attacks, but she wasn’t striking back at all. In fact, with each blow, she seemed to be giving small bits of advice.

“See? It’s fine,” Suguha said.

“Y-yeah…,” I agreed, although I couldn’t remember ever seeing Yui holding a weapon…except for the one time she’d used a GM weapon against the ultrapowerful boss monster the Fatal Scythe in the underground labyrinth of the first floor of Aincrad. But now Yui was treated like a player and had an HP bar like the rest of us. Alice didn’t even need to fight back; she could potentially hurt herself with her own sword. I was in a state of near panic as I watched the scene unfold.

Yui finished listening intently to Alice’s advice, then took her distance again. She held up her short sword, which had some rather exotic decoration on it, in a basic mid-level stance…

“Yaaaa!”

Despite her young age, she cried out fiercely as she charged. I couldn’t help but make a note of surprise.

When beginners to VRMMOs attacked with a sword, they tended to perform a two-stage action: pull back, then swing down. There were situations where that was exactly the right move to do, but in almost any case, condensing the start and finish of the swing into one motion provided better speed and power. Yui’s slash was firmly in line with this theory, and in fact, Alice had to pull back her left foot half a step to defend it.

Another clear, high clash of metal on metal filled the yard. The two came to a stop, then separated again.

“That was a very good one, Yui,” Alice assessed. I clapped in admiration, drawing their attention. Alice seemed a little bashful, while Yui just flashed a huge smile.

“Papa! Welcome back!” she cried and started trotting toward me, still brandishing the short sword.

I had to hold out my hand. “Whoa, whoa, put that thing away first.”

“Oh! Of course!”

She screeched to a halt, then slid the weapon into the sheath on her left side. Now she was free to leap into my arms, where I lifted her high overhead before nestling her in my left elbow.

“Thanks, Yui,” I said. “So…why are you practicing with a sword…?”

“To fight, of course! My proficiency with One-Handed Sword skills just reached 7!”

“Oh yeah? You’ve been working hard,” I encouraged, stroking her head. Yui giggled delightedly.

My One-Handed Sword skill, which I brought over from ALO, was at the maximum value of 1,000, but all the other new skills I’d gained were only at 2 or 3. For a single day’s work, getting her skill up to 7 was a lot of dedication.

“If you’re up that high, maybe you can use a sword skill by now,” I suggested.

“Ummm…”

Yui opened her ring menu and moved to the skill window to check.

“Oh! It says I can use Vertical and Horizontal and Slant!”

“There you go. Those three are the foundation of all sword skills. Once your proficiency gets higher, I can teach you about the cooler ones, like Vorpal Strike and Howling Octave.”

“Yay!” Yui exclaimed.

“About that, Kirito,” said another voice, drawing my attention away. It was Alice, coming closer in her white dress, looking somewhat upset.

“Hey, Alice. Thanks for watching the house and tutoring Yui. So…what did you want to say?”

“Take a look at your skill window.”

“Huh? Uh…okay…”

I drew a circle in the air with my finger. The ring menu appeared with a jingling sound, and I picked the SKILLS icon. The window that appeared had a list of acquired skills, arranged by proficiency, so of course at the top was the One-Handed Sword category…

“…Huh?”

I stared at the proficiency number in shock. When I checked this screen yesterday, it was definitely at the maximum of 1,000, but now that number was missing a zero.

“A…a hundred?! Why…?”

“Apparently, last night, when the grace period ended, the proficiency of whatever skills we brought over was lowered as well. Along with that, it made all the advanced sword skills impossible to use.”

“No way…” I groaned. Leafa checked her own window and exclaimed “Oh no! Me too!” We hung our heads together, brother and sister, but I forced myself to rally.

“W-wait just a second…We fought those PKers last night after the grace period finished, right? I’m pretty sure I used Vorpal Strike at the time. That’s supposed to be a pretty advanced skill.”

“Look at your list of sword skills,” Alice stated.

At her suggestion, I tapped on ONE-HANDED SWORD SKILLS. The sub-window it loaded showed the sword skills I could currently use. At the top were the basic single-attack skills: Vertical, Horizontal, and Slant; below them were the two-part Vertical Arc and Horizontal Arc. Then there was the low charging skill Rage Spike; the high-jumping skill Sonic Leap; the three-part Sharp Nail…and that was the last of them that was lit up. Below that, Vertical Square was grayed out, and tapping it opened a pop-up that said Required proficiency: 150. The numbers being different from SAO and ALO was understandable, but this didn’t explain why I was able to use the advanced skill Vorpal Strike earlier.

I scrolled through the list and found Vorpal Strike a considerable way down, grayed out. The required proficiency was…700. That was miles above my current number of 100.

“What does that mean…? Was I simply recreating the movement on my own…?” I muttered.

But from my arm, Yui replied, “When you used Savage Fulcrum and Vorpal Strike in the battle yesterday, they had proper visual effects. That means you didn’t simply mimic the motions.”

“That’s what I figured,” I agreed, then handed Yui over to Leafa and took a position in the center of the yard. I drew my fine iron longsword, which was simply made but had a satisfying weight, and dropped my center of gravity. I extended my left hand forward and pulled the sword back in my right until it was over my shoulder—but the pre-effect of the sword skill did not arrive.

“Uryaa!” I shouted stubbornly, whipping the sword forward, but it merely ended in a thrust. There was no bloodred Vorpal Strike flash, nor even a hint of that giant jet-engine roar. I tried it again…and again. The result was the same.

“Kirito, this is really pathetic,” Alice groaned.

“Y-yeah, I know that!” I snapped back childishly. I gave it a fourth try for good measure.

Shwoaaaaa-shakiiiing!!

“Wh-whaaaa—?!”

Blazing crimson, the sword shot forward, dragging me behind it. I flew ten feet through the air, then landed right on my chest. “Gwurf!”

In the upper left corner, my HP bar decreased the tiniest bit. I groaned, limbs splayed out like a frog, until Alice rushed over and offered her hand.

“A-are you all right?!”

“Yeah…somehow…”

Once she’d helped me to my feet, I stared at the sword in my hand. Then I looked to her and murmured, “That was it just now, right? Vorstrike…”

“I must say, I do not much approve of your real-worlder customs of abbreviating everything,” she said crossly. I gave her a hasty “My b,” which made her glare turn even icier.

“It did activate…I’ll admit that,” she said. “I wonder what it means…”

“You try it, too, Alice!” said Yui from Leafa’s arms. Alice glanced over at her, murmured her assent, then drew the sword from her waist. It had the same design as my sword, so it had to have been Liz’s work again.

I backed away until I was standing next to Leafa. Then Alice took a stance with the blade held upright in front of her face.

Back in the Underworld, where she was born, the sword skills imported into the system from SAO existed as “special techniques.” That made her capable of using a great variety of moves right away in ALO. But she seemed to prefer the one-hit-kill types, rather than speedy combo skills. It seemed like she was going to attempt the advanced One-Handed Sword skill Gelid Blade.

Her left foot stepped forward, and her sword jutted behind her to the right. Normally, performing this action would cause bluish-purple effects to surround the sword, but nothing happened.

Undaunted, Alice shouted, “Yaaaa!” and thrust the sword forward. It was a tremendous slash, but no Gelid Blade resulted. She pulled the sword back and traced that exact motion once again. Two, three, four times she attempted it, to no avail. I was starting to wonder if the Vorpal Strike I pulled off was more a bug in the system.

But then, around the seventh or eighth thrust, a light like blue fire burst through Alice’s sword. She stepped forward and slashed. A tremendous cracking like the breaking of a glacier filled the air, and a bluish-purple path flickered in the air. That was the effect of Gelid Blade.

“Huh? It worked!” exclaimed Leafa. I nodded eagerly. I couldn’t tell if it was a bug or a feature yet, but this suggested that if you stubbornly tried often enough, you could execute advanced sword skills even if you didn’t have the required proficiency. The chances of success seemed no higher than 10 or 20 percent, however. That was too risky to try in a real battle, and I felt bad not understanding why it was happening.

First I looked to Yui over in Leafa’s arms—but she was just another player now, with no special system access. I’d have to actually use my own smarts to figure this out for once.

Then Yui suggested, “Papa, perhaps the cause of this anomaly is not the player or item but the place.”

I pointed at my feet and asked, “P-place? You mean this clearing has some special properties or something?”

“No, not the clearing…”

Her eyes moved, and I followed them to the site of the repaired log cabin, lit by the bronzed rays of the setting sun. I picked up on what she was suggesting and trotted over to the building so I could tap the wall. The first line of the properties window that appeared was Cypress Log Cabin, followed by the names of me and Asuna, its owners, then a colored bar indicating durability. It should have been fully restored this morning, but the numbers under the bar right now read 12,433/12,500, suggesting that buildings in the world of Unital Ring naturally degraded over time. That was unfortunate, but the pace seemed to be around 120 points per day, so it should last for a hundred days even if we did nothing to help it.

At the bottom of the window were four buttons, reading INFO, TRANSACTION, REPAIR, and BREAK DOWN. I was certain I would never press either the TRANSACTION or BREAK DOWN buttons, so I tried INFO. Alice, Leafa, and Yui leaned over my shoulders to watch.

The sub-window that sprang to life displayed a brief description of the house, including numerical values like floor and storage space and defensive strength against various properties. At the bottom was a field labeled SPECIAL EFFECTS.

That had to be it, I decided. There was just one item listed there. It read as follows: Level-1 / Protection of the Forest: Within a radius of 100 feet of the center of the building, the owner and any friends or party members have a small chance of executing attack skills whose requirements are not yet met.

“Ahhh…that explains it,” I murmured and rubbed Yui’s little head. “Your guess was exactly correct. Did this Protection of the Forest thing exist in ALO, too…?”

“No, this system did not exist in ALO,” she said, shaking her head.

Leafa interjected, “Hey, see how it says ‘level-1’? Does that mean there are special effects that are level-2 and level-3?”

“I would…assume so. But I can’t imagine how you would unlock those effects,” I said.

Alice glanced over and suggested, “Couldn’t we build them into being? The way we are building up ourselves.”

“Like…raising the house’s stats? How?”

“By increasing the rooms or fortifying the structure. When I built the cabin in the woods near Rulid, I started with just a simple shack with walls and a roof and built it larger from there.”

“O-oh yeah? Interesting…”

My response was more than a little awkward, but I couldn’t help that. Alice spent months in that cabin taking care of me while I was in a catatonic state, from what I was told. I didn’t remember that time, except for the vaguest memories of being fed with a spoon and being tucked into bed. The topic filled me with a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment.

“A-anyway, this is clearly the cause of the advanced sword skills working. I must have been really lucky that I used that Vorpal Strike and got it to work the very first time last night.”

“And that gives us one more thing to do,” said Leafa to my confusion. She saw the look on my face and explained, “Leveling-up the house! I’m so curious what special effects are at level-2 and level-3!”

“Oh…right. Sure, that makes sense,” I agreed, although I felt some resistance to the idea of expanding the log cabin. I knew better than anyone else how much love and work Asuna had put into this house, ever since the SAO days.

But Yui could see right through my hesitation. She stated, “It’s fine, Papa! Mama doesn’t get hung up on appearances. So as long as the true nature of the house remains, I don’t think she’ll be bothered at all!”

“What’s its…true nature?”

“That’s obvious! Being a place where you and Mama, and me, and Leafa, Liz, Silica, and Sinon can relax and be at peace!”

“…Uh-huh. That’s true,” I agreed, nodding slowly. I rubbed Yui’s head one more time. “But…I think any expansion is going to be a long way ahead of us. First we need to focus more on defending the whole lot…”

I took a wide view of the clearing, a space fifty feet across, smack in the middle of deep, dense forest. The eastern half of the clearing was taken up by the log cabin, and the western half was filled with large crafting stations like a smelting furnace, a casting table, and a bisque firing kiln. These stations were easy to create as long as you had the materials, but getting those materials was a different matter. So I wanted to protect the entire clearing, if possible. While we were at school today, Yui, Alice, and Asuna’s pet, Aga, the long-billed giant agamid, watched over the cabin. But if another disaster like the thornspike cave bear or the pack of hostile players attacked, the three of them would not have been successful.

The proud lady knight knew that as well and looked around the clearing with me before opining, “First we’ll want a wall around the outer edge of the clearing. Preferably stone, not wood.”

“True…but who knows how much stone that’ll take, if we’re talking about the whole rim. If only we had the glorious Administrator here. She could build us a wall of thick steel with the snap of her fingers, I bet…”

Mentioning the name of the living god who created the Everlasting Walls, which split the human realm—all thousand miles or so—into four equal parts using nothing but sacred arts earned me a chilly glare from Alice.

“Go ahead. Ask the pontifex to perform a menial task like that. She’ll turn you into a cricket.”

“You sure? I feel like she’d help us out if we offered her a delicious piece of cake or three.”

Isn’t that right, Eugeo? I thought.

With a pang, I shook my head to dispel the image of my late friend. Alice brought us a message from Dr. Koujiro of Rath yesterday, a coded message saying The twenty-ninth, at fifteen o’clock. The expensive cake shop. But the true sender of that message was almost certainly not Dr. Koujiro. To learn the truth of what she meant, I would have to go to a fancy café in Ginza at three in the afternoon tomorrow. It occurred to me now that tomorrow was a school day. To get from school in West Tokyo to Ginza Station, I’d have to take the Seibu Shinjuku Line to Takadanobaba, switch to the Tozai Line subway, then transfer to the Ginza Line at Nihonbashi. That was an eighty-minute trip, so I couldn’t possibly make it unless I ditched my afternoon classes.

Why would you pick that specific time? I wanted to yell. But that was for tomorrow. For now, not having the almighty superpowers of the godlike pontifex, I would have to collect the materials for our wall the slow and boring way.

Fortunately, we already knew that you didn’t have to stack rocks one at a time to build a wall. Within the crafting menu for the Beginner Carpentry skill was a listing for Crude Stone Wall. The adjective crude wasn’t exactly appealing, but we’d have to deal with it until the skill proficiency got higher.

“So…shall we go to the riverbed to look for rocks?” I suggested, closing the cabin’s properties window. Alice, Leafa, and Yui agreed to join me.

“While we’re gone, we’ll leave Aga to guard…Wait. Where did he go?”

I glanced around the clearing, but there was no sight of Aga, the long-billed giant agamid. At first, I was afraid that his taming period had worn off, and he’d gone wild again. Asuna would be furious! But just at that moment, there was a characteristic “Quack!” from behind me. I spun around and saw Aga on the southern path to the river, hopping along with Silica and Lisbeth in tow.

When the pair noticed me and Leafa, they trotted over to us.

“Kirito, what took you so long?! Did you stop somewhere to eat on the way home?!” Liz snapped, fixing me with a glare.

Silica, meanwhile, smiled awkwardly. “Kirito has a lengthy commute. That’s just how long it takes him to get home.”

Aga opened its bill and quacked. On its head was Pina, who squeaked, though it was hard to tell which one of the two girls they were agreeing with. In any sense, Aga was still clearly tamed and friendly.

“Where were you two just now?” I asked.

Liz rubbed Aga’s neck and replied, “This little guy loses HP if he doesn’t get a couple dunks in the water throughout the day. So we went to the river and collected some rocks while we were there.”

“Oh, that’s great. For being a lizard, this thing’s pretty needy, huh…?”

“Papa, there are plenty of half-aquatic lizards in the real world, too. Like the Mertens’ water monitor or the Sulawesi crocodile skink,” Yui noted promptly. I murmured with surprise, but then I recalled that the first time we encountered Aga, it was coming out of the river. And that duck-like bill was evidence that it was aquatic in nature.

“Well, we need to dig a well pretty soon, then. There’s so much to do!”

I shook my head and checked the clock in the lower right. It was 5:50 PM. I couldn’t stay in this dive all the way to dawn this time, so if I logged off at midnight or at two in the morning that would give me a bit over eight hours. I was almost feeling a little wistful for the days of SAO, when I could spend my entire day tackling the challenges of the game.

A deep breath helped me dispel that thought. I was going to head to the river for those stones when Leafa stepped in front of me, still carrying Yui.

“Big Brother, shouldn’t we prioritize meeting up with Sinon instead? In the long run, more hands will make the work go faster, and more fighting power will be reassuring.”

“Hmm. You’re not wrong…,” I said reluctantly.

At the after-school meeting, Sinon delivered several pieces of stunning news. Numerous players from her home game of Gun Gale Online were converted into Unital Ring as well. That wasn’t particularly surprising, but the fact that they were able to bring in guns was.

Of course, we ALO players brought our swords and spears in, so it stood to reason that GGO players could have their weapons. That was only fair—but theirs were guns. And in GGO, there weren’t just gunpowder-based guns but also optical guns that shot lasers. How did the mysterious mastermind of this incident expect to manage the logical integrity of combining such wildly different worlds?

But that wasn’t something we needed to worry about for now. Sinon’s Hecate II was an ultrapowerful gun that was the equivalent of a top-tier thirty-word attack spell in ALO. Apparently, she’d lost almost all her ammo, but if you could have a gun here, there had to be a way to replenish them, and if we could meet up with her, she’d be a huge benefit to our mutual defense.

But the biggest problem was…

“We don’t even know which direction to find this village of birdpeople where Sinon is…,” I lamented, shoulders dropping.

“She said she didn’t even notice the sound or shock wave of New Aincrad falling,” said Silica worriedly. “That would suggest the GGO players started somewhere very distant from our initial location.”

“Hmm…”

Meanwhile, Lisbeth opened her ring menu and tapped the MAP icon in the lower left. The map it displayed was colored in with a much wider range than mine or Leafa’s.

“Let’s see,” she said. “This is the ruins where the ALO players started, right? And New Aincrad’s crash landing was here. The village of the Bashin is north of that, and way to the northeast is this cabin…Silica and I walked here from the village, but we didn’t see any giant dinosaurs or centipede monsters like Sinon described.”

Silica nodded, then noticed something and ran her finger over the map. “But when we were walking from the Bashin village, it started as wasteland and gradually turned into grassland, and then forest once we crossed the river. Sinon said her area was a desert with no water anywhere, so it seems like a higher probability that she’s in the opposite direction of the forest.”

“Uh-huh…,” murmured Leafa, Alice, and I. Silica had a good point, but even if she was right about the direction, we couldn’t go searching blindly without knowing a rough distance. There were stamina points and thirst points to manage here, in addition to HP, and that meant we needed plenty of food and water to complete the trip.

No sooner had the thought entered my mind than I felt slightly conscious of my empty stomach and dry throat. Thankfully, the game preserved the points’ status while we were offline, so my bars were down only about 20 percent for SP and 30 percent for TP, but they would go quickly once we started working. We had a nearby river for water and plenty of bear meat left for food, but we needed a more stable source of that soon.

“We’ll need to chop down some trees and till a field…assuming we can actually do that in this game,” I muttered.

“I’ll add it to the list of things to do,” Yui noted studiously.

“Th-thanks…Uh, so how’s that list looking now?”

“I haven’t put them in any priority, but it’s currently looking like: build a defensive wall, expand the log cabin, make weapons and armor for everyone, raise levels, tame stronger monsters, dig a well, cultivate a field, meet up with Sinon, and reach the land revealed by the heavenly light!”

“………”

The group shared a silent look. The last one on that list would indeed have to be saved for last, but everything else was a high priority right now.

“…Let’s start with the defensive wall,” I said, recovering my initiative.

Lisbeth nodded. “That’s what we figured and why we brought lots of stones back with us. I’ll try to make a wall and see what happens.”

“Thanks, that’d be great.”

Liz shot me a thumbs-up, then closed her map and opened the skill window instead. From the list of craftable items under the Beginner Carpentry skill, she chose Stacked Rock Wall, bringing up a translucent light-purple ghost object. Awkwardly, she slid the ghost along until it stopped at the boundary between the clearing and forest.

“Can I make it here?” she asked.

“Hang on,” I said, then walked up next to the see-through stone wall, checking the placement and angle carefully. “Can you push it, like, six inches back…and rotate a teensy bit to the right?”

“L-like this?” Liz angled her fingers slightly, and the ghost crawled forward. When it was in just the right spot, I shouted “There!”

Liz squeezed her hand shut, and a number of gray rocks tumbled out of thin air and landed perfectly in the place of the ghost wall. The actual wall that resulted was about five feet tall and long and one foot thick. The rocks of various sizes were packed without any gaps, so it didn’t feel as slapdash as I was afraid it would. Just to test, I gave it a push, but it didn’t jar any rocks loose.

“This actually looks like it can help protect against monsters somewhat,” I stated, patting the wall.

Alice looked a bit conflicted. “True…but I doubt it will stop the charge of a thornspike cave bear, and any player will be able to climb over.”

“We’ll just have to pray we don’t have any teddy bears wandering our way for a while. But as for the players…” I said, turning to Lisbeth. “How many of your stones did you use for this block of wall, Liz?”

“Hmm. I used thirty favillite rocks—that’s the most common one at the river—and five pieces of rough gray clay.”

“And how much do you have left of both of those?”

“A hundred twenty-something rocks and twenty clay,” she replied.

Silica raised her hand. “I’ve got a hundred stones and fifteen clay, too!”

“Thanks, Silica. So that means we can make another seven blocks of wall with what you two have on hand. Liz, test to see if you can put another section of wall on top of this one.”

“Okeydoke,” Lisbeth replied and opened the window again. When she slid the second ghost wall over toward the first, it snapped into place, initially latching onto its right edge. When she tried to push it to the left, the ghost popped over and stacked itself atop the first.

“Oh, I think it works.”

“Awesome. Do that.”

Da-doom! With another heavy rumble, the new wall fell on top of the first one. Now it was ten feet tall. It wasn’t perfectly impervious, but it would cause all but the most nimble players to think twice before climbing.

Of course, in its current state, it was less of a wall than a very flat pillar. The clearing was fifty feet in diameter, which made its circumference close to 160 feet. To circle the entire space, we’d want thirty-two blocks, then, which would be sixty-four when double-stacked. I didn’t even want to calculate how much favillite we’d need for that…

That was when the door of the log cabin burst open, and Asuna leaped through, wearing a white dress.

“Sorry, everyone! I didn’t mean to be late!”

“No, Asuna, you’ve got good timing! What’s sixty-four times thirty?!” I asked promptly.

Asuna looked confused at first but immediately answered, “One thousand nine hundred and twenty.” Then she narrowed her eyes with suspicion and asked, “Why…?”

“That’s how many rocks we’ll need to build that wall around the entire clearing.”

I pointed out the gray wall standing near the smelting furnace.

“Ohhh,” she exclaimed, catching on.

“Big Brother, are you really not able to do that calculation in your head?” murmured Leafa with concern.

We headed for the riverbed as a group and collected as much favillite and clay by the light of the setting sun as we could. After returning to the cabin, Liz and I spent an hour using our Beginner Carpentry skill to make sections of wall, one after another. By the time we had finished placing a wall ten feet high around the entire clearing, the sun had set all the way.

As a matter of fact, the wooden gates we built on the northern and southern ends meant that the number of stones we used was a bit below Asuna’s calculated sum—but it was still a mammoth task. But the satisfaction of finishing the wall was tremendous, and we celebrated with plenty of high fives, even from Alice.

“It really feels so much more secure with a wall!” commented Silica once we’d settled down a little.

“That’s right,” I agreed. “I wonder if the ancient Greeks felt like this when they completed a wall around their cities.”

“It’s not quite as large as Athens or Corinth,” snarked Asuna, but I just flashed a grin back at her.

“You don’t know that. We’ll keep building and building until, eventually, it’s a city the size of Athens—or even Centoria.”

Now it was Alice’s turn to join the fun. “Oh? A bold claim. I am looking forward to seeing it.”

“I…I’ve got it under control,” I boasted, thumping my chest, before quickly changing the topic. “Anyway, that’s one item off our list of tasks. Next up is…”

“Ooh! Ooh, ooh, ooh!” hollered Leafa, waving her arm. “I want a sword and armor, too!”

“…Yeah, good point…”

With myself decked out in full iron armor, it wouldn’t be fair to deny her that request. Liz and Silica had leather armor and metal weapons they’d received from the Bashin, but poor Leafa and Asuna were still wearing ubiquigrass dresses and wielding a stone ax and a stone knife, respectively.

Fortunately, we had Liz, who’d inherited her Blacksmithing skill from ALO, so the technical aspect was taken care of. The problem was all the ore we’d need to smelt. We’d found a lot of ore in the thornspike cave bear’s lair last night and recovered some iron equipment from the PKers, but virtually all of it had gone to repairing the cabin. We’d have to return to the bear’s cave to get more ore, but the owner had surely respawned by now, and it’d taken a desperate gambit of dropping tons of logs onto it from the roof of the cabin to kill the first one. That wouldn’t work twice, I knew.

“Yui, did the Bashin mention where they got their ore?” I asked.

The AI was the only one of us able to understand the mysterious NPC language, but she just shook her head. “I’m sorry, Papa. I wasn’t able to learn that information…”

“You don’t have to apologize. It’s my fault for forgetting to ask where to find ore when they were showing us the source of silica and flax. We’ll figure it out.”

“That’s right, Yui. Kirito will figure it out,” Asuna said, picking up Yui and giving her a nurturing smile.

Yui smiled back, but she still looked worried. “What exactly are you going to do, Papa?”

“Beat the thornspike cave bear the orthodox way, of course…Though, hold on.” I turned to look at Silica, who was sitting to my right with Pina on her head. “The best outcome would be to tame it, rather than kill it. That would probably stop it from repopulating each time.”

“What?! Tame a bear?!” she exclaimed, pulling back.

I grinned. “Asuna doesn’t even have the Beast-Taming skill, and she turned that duck-dino into a pet. You inherited the skill from back in ALO, so a bear should be easy-peasy for you…”

“Unfortunately, Kirito, the skill I inherited was Daggers.”

“What? Really? Your proficiency was higher in the Daggers skill?” I exclaimed, surprised.

Silica pouted, pursing her lips. “Kirito, raising the Beast-Taming skill to a proficiency of 1,000 is incredibly hard. From what I know, the only person in ALO to max it out is Alicia, the master of the cait siths.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for my ignorance…So that means Asuna actually has a higher Beast-Taming skill at this point…”

I looked at her, but she just blinked and shook her head. “N-no, don’t look at me! I can’t tame that horrible bear,” she protested.

Even so, I was busy thinking of how to trick—er, convince—her to achieve that feat when Silica announced, “I-if you’re just going to force Asuna to attempt something dangerous, I’ll do it!”

Either she was feeling bold, thanks to the armor from the Bashin, or I’d wounded her beast-tamer’s pride. Asuna tried to say something, but Silica held out her hands to push her back down. “No, Asuna, it’s fine. I didn’t see this bear, but in terms of beast-taming, it’s got to be a lower difficulty than bug-types or demon-types. I’ll work up my Beast-Taming skill again and bend that beast to my will!”

It’s probably not the kind of bear you’re imagining, I thought. Asuna and Leafa and Alice were probably thinking the same thing. Before anyone could say anything contrary, I stepped forward and grasped Silica by the shoulders.

“Yes! That’s the Silica I know—the idol of all beast-tamers in SAO! It’s a huge relief to hear you guarantee that!”

“Heh-heh-heh…I’ll do my best,” she replied, laughing self-consciously. Over Silica’s shoulder, I could see Asuna sighing, but I wasn’t going to slow down now.

“Asuna, can you teach Silica how to get the Beast-Taming skill? There was that fox monster in the woods when we were on the way back from the river, so that’s probably a good practice target. Me, Liz, Alice, and Leafa will dig up a well before we run out of TP again.”

“That sounds good…but are you sure we can just dig wherever we want in this game?” Lisbeth asked.

That gave me pause. In most VRMMOs, including ALO, it was impossible to change the landscape of the wilderness. It would invalidate the map design, after all, and players would be digging giant holes all over the place just to mess with one another.

Unital Ring wasn’t a normal game in many respects, but I had a hard time imagining you could alter the terrain here…and I’d been thinking about this yesterday, too. But on the other hand, in the Beginner Carpentry skill’s production menu was…

“Look…a well,” I said, pointing at the opened menu for the others to see. Just as I remembered from the list, there was an entry that said Small Stacked Rock Well.

“Doesn’t that mean it’s like the smelting furnace, where if you place it, you can have a well wherever you want?” asked Leafa, but I wasn’t buying it.

“You really think it’s that simple? If you can create a well anytime you want, as long as you have the materials, that totally invalidates the point of the TP bar.”

“Don’t complain to me—I didn’t invent it. Anyway, why don’t you just test it out?”

That was a good point. I checked the type and number of materials needed for the well: three hundred stones, twenty sawed logs, ten clay, fifty iron nails, one iron chain.

“Ugh, we don’t have anywhere near what we need. It’s easy enough to get the stones and the logs, but the iron…”

“It’s not going to be easy,” said Alice, shrugging. She glanced at the furnace. “No matter what, we’re going to need iron. It’s going to take time for Silica’s beast-taming project to come through. Will we have to fight another thornspike cave bear?”

“Hmm…In a normal game, I’d just go for broke and try to fight it anyway, but now…”

I hemmed and hawed, and Alice and the others frowned.

In Unital Ring, dying meant you could never log in again. But it wouldn’t spit you back out in ALO, either. The VRMMO worlds stuck in the incident were overwritten on the server side and effectively shut down to the public. Devs attempted to roll back a few of the games, but even if the Seed program were reinstalled, they wouldn’t function, according to Argo. Under these circumstances, even I, the triple-crown winner of insane, reckless gambles, was not up to fighting the ultrapowerful thornspike cave bear.

“Iron…ironnnn…”

I folded my arms and stared up at the night sky. In SAO and ALO, iron weapons and tools were in ready supply in even the earliest towns, so it never felt that valuable. Monsters would drop tons of iron items, so I regularly threw away whatever I couldn’t carry. Now I wished I could go back in time to pick up all that excess supply.

If I searched hard enough in the area nearby, I could probably find some iron ore in a location aside from the bear cave. But considering the general rules of game difficulty, it seemed that the rarity of iron ore was set to “strong enough to defeat a thornspike cave bear with relative ease.” I shouldn’t expect a steady supply of ore on the open sides of hills. The true Iron Age was not going to arrive unless we could deal with that bear somehow.

“…Let’s look for Sinon,” I murmured. Alice, Leafa, and Liz glanced at me; in the distance, Asuna, Silica, and Yui stopped talking about beast-taming to look my way, too.

In the tense silence that followed, Asuna’s voice was crystal clear. “I want to meet up with Shino-non, too…but we don’t know where she is or even what direction to search. How will we search for her?”

“The Bashin people they came across might know something about the birdpeople Sinon’s with. We want info on ore anyway, so let’s go to the Bashin village and ask them,” I said, looking at the rest of the group in order. “Asuna, Silica, Alice, you stay here and protect the cabin. I’ll go with Leafa, Liz, and Yui to the village…How does that sound?”

“I understand that Asuna and Silica have the Beast-Taming skill to discuss, but why are you leaving me here?” demanded Alice, sounding disgruntled.

“Because if you’re here watching the house, I feel confident it’s safe,” I said honestly.

“…In that case…I cannot argue. Very well…but I will insist on taking part in the next expedition,” she announced, turning on her heel and lining up with Asuna and Silica.

Asuna put her hand on Alice’s back, and in a crisp, clear voice that reminded me of when she was the vice commander of the Knights of the Blood, she said, “We will keep our home safe, so make sure you return home safe, too. That’s a promise.”

“…It is,” I agreed. Liz added, “We’ll bring Sinon back with us!” and Yui rushed over to hug Asuna. While that was happening, I opened my inventory to test something I’d been thinking about.

I brought out the longsword Blárkveld, which I’d transferred over from our home storage. My special sword from ALO was still too costly to equip; even at level-13, I couldn’t use it yet. With my window open, I walked toward Lisbeth.

“Liz…I hate to ask this after you made it for me, but could you melt down this sword?”

“What?” the forger of Blárkveld exclaimed, stunned. “W-well, you’re the owner, so you can do what you want with it…but there’s no guarantee I can make you a sword of the same rank now that we’re stuck in this world.”

“I know that. But I think I’ll need to get to level-40 or level-50 to use this thing. If it’s just going to waste away in storage, I’d rather melt it down and put it to good use for the group.”

“…Hmm. All right.” She grinned, then reached for the black sword resting atop the window.

“Oh, hold on! Remember, if you touch it, it’ll fall to the ground, and then you can’t move it.”

“Ah, right.”

“Hang on—I’ll put it directly into the furnace.”

With my inventory still open, I walked over to the western side of the clearing, opened the operating window of the smelting furnace, and dropped Blárkveld inside. The sword floating in the air vanished, scattering motes of light. Then I set firewood in the furnace’s combustion chamber and let Lisbeth take over from there.

The blacksmith briefly placed her hands together to pray for the sword she forged herself, then used a flintstone to light the logs. Soon there were flickering red flames inside, and a roaring sound escaped the furnace as they burned furiously.

Last night, the iron ore began to melt in just a few dozen seconds after I set the logs in the furnace, but Blárkveld resisted the flames for nearly two minutes. But at last, molten metal shining white escaped the spigot and filled the ingot mold. When it was full, the metal flashed and vanished so that the mold could fill again.

It was only a one-handed sword in there, so I figured that getting ten ingots out of it would be a success, but in Unital Ring, it seemed that high-ranked gear also increased the number of materials you could salvage from it. The molten iron flowed and flowed and only stopped after I had given up keeping track of the count.

“…It’s over,” Lisbeth murmured, opening the furnace’s window. “Let’s see. We got…sixty-two premium steel ingots, eighteen fine silver ingots, nine fine meteoric iron ingots, six mythril ingots, and two black dragon steel ingots.”

“Wowww…Some of those sound really rare,” Leafa whispered with great reverence. If Blárkveld gave us this much stuff, what would happen if I melted down the Holy Sword, Excalibur, the other weapon I brought over from ALO? Not that melting down the legendary weapon that I went through such trouble to gain was anything but a last resort, of course.

Instead, I asked Liz, “Can you make equipment for Alice, Asuna, and Leafa with this stuff?”

“Hmm…Remember, my Blacksmithing skill went down to 100, too. I might not be able to use the fancier metal,” she muttered with consternation, moving the ingots to her own inventory, then sitting at the little chair in front of the anvil. She dropped a premium steel ingot on the anvil’s window and opened the crafting menu.

“Oh, looks like I can just barely do steel weapons. So I’ll make Alice’s sword first. Will a bastard sword do?”

“Yes, Liz. Thank you.”

“You got it.”

Lisbeth flashed the knight a thumbs-up and grabbed her smithing hammer, then smacked the silvery-brown ingot that appeared atop the anvil.

As the hammer clanged against the metal, loud and crisp, I prayed that the new swords about to be born turned out as sturdy and faithful as my lost Blárkveld.