Sword Art Online - Volume 23 - Chapter 7

7

“…I knew I should have asked…”

Sinon lifted the end of the pelt she had wrapped around her body to look outside.

What had been dry grassland just minutes ago was now a field of pure white. She reached out and scooped up some of the white stuff, letting the fine particles trickle between her fingers. It was piled-up hail pellets, not snow.

When Fikki the Ornith girl had given her this pelt cloak, she’d said, If a comes, use it. The word Sinon couldn’t make out because of her lack of language proficiency was probably something like hailstorm. Or maybe it was blizzard from hell. It certainly felt like one when it swept over. She’d dived into a little hollow beneath a boulder and wrapped herself tight in the pelt cloak, but even then, it’d taken away nearly half her HP bar.

Once she’d confirmed that the freezing Debuff icon didn’t activate when she took off the cloak, Sinon emerged from under the rock. She now stared in wonder at the world of silvery-white around her, reflecting the light of the moon.

She’d run as much as she could in the hour since leaving the Ornith village and probably covered twelve miles before the hailstorm arrived. Looking at how much hail was covering the earth all the way to the horizon, she was worried for the village. There was no turning back now, however. She didn’t know how many miles it was to the Bashin village, but if she didn’t get there tonight, she’d have to log out in the middle of the wide-open Giyoru Savanna. The current situation in Unital Ring was the biggest emergency in the VR gaming world since the SAO Incident in 2022, but Sinon wasn’t bold enough to use that as an excuse to skip school.

She sat down again at the foot of the rock, resisting the urge to go on the move again. The pelt went back into her inventory, replaced by Fikki’s hard bread. It was indeed teeth-breakingly hard, and it didn’t have much flavor, but she put up with it because she didn’t have time to start a fire. Her HP and SP slowly began to recover. Once she got her HP up to about 80 percent, she drank from her canteen. She’d used up quite a lot with all the running, so she needed to look for fresh water soon…

“…Oh! Unless…”

She scooped up some of the nearly infinite supply of hailstones and trickled them into the canteen. After a moment, the ice melted, and the level refilled a bit. After a couple repetitions, the container was full again. The temperature was rising, too, so the hail on the ground would melt soon. As long as she had a container, she could refill as much water as she wanted. But of course, there were no canteens or water jugs just lying around on the ground, and Sinon had neither the materials nor the necessary skill to make one.

Sinon examined the details of the Ornith canteen closely. It seemed to be made of waterproof leather. Though she hadn’t thought about it before, it occurred to her now that the light and sturdy canteen was probably more valuable than the life-giving water inside it. Between the muskets and the contemporary-looking buildings, the Orniths seemed to have quite an advanced civilization. Too bad she wasn’t likely to visit them again for quite a while.

For now, she drank from the freshly chilled water to refill her TP bar, then sloshed more hail into the canteen to top it off. If she ran quickly, she could probably use it up and refill it one more time before all the ice melted.

Sinon picked up the musket from the side of the boulder, slung it over her back, checked that her laser gun was still on her hip, then began sprinting across the silvery plains.

Out of the fifteen ability points she had acquired, Sinon spent ten to take the Swiftness ability and its two offshoots, Gallop and Dexterous. From Swiftness, that gave her a bonus to ranged-weapon damage, small-melee-weapon damage, and jumping distance; from Gallop, reduced rate of SP and TP decrease when running; and from Dexterous, a bonus to ranged-weapon accuracy and lock-picking change. She was curious about the offshoots of Gallop, Sprint, and Acrobat, and the offshoots of Dexterous, Vital Aim, and Adroit, but she held off for now because the third-tier abilities cost three points each. Saving five points was probably more cautious than she needed to be, but she had a feeling she’d soon want abilities from outside the Swiftness tree—particularly from the Toughness tree.

For now, the effect of the lower TP/SP cost from Gallop was huge. At just rank-2, she could already tell that they were draining slower. She couldn’t have run twelve miles in an hour without it.

Sinon ran persistently, eager to make up the time she’d lost because of the storm. Before now, she’d had to avoid monsters as well as their likely hiding places. But now that the storm had passed, it seemed as though all the creatures had burrowed underground, because she couldn’t see a single moving thing anymore as she hurried southeast. Eight inches of hail on the ground made for a crunchy surface underfoot, but unlike snow, it was tightly packed and did not slow her down.

After fifteen minutes, the ice began to thaw. It was melting as the temperature rose again. She stopped, drank from her water supply to refill her TP, then scooped up more ice. More of it was melting even as she did this, so the next time she drank, she’d need to find a new source to fill up her water. Hopefully, that’d be after she was out of the savanna.

Up ahead near the horizon, lit by dim starlight now that the clouds had blown past, she could see the dark outline of mountains…or a cliff. She’d crossed eighteen miles of the flat expanse, and up ahead it was split with a giant wall of a cliff.

Was that the end of the plains? Did that mean the Bashin village was close to the wall?

With hope in her heart, Sinon gazed at the foot of the cliff from north to south. But at no point did she see any sign of man-made light. It was a bit before nine PM, which seemed early for lights in a village to be out, but she had to have faith.

The ice was melting all around her now, returning the grassland to its regular state. The beasts and insects that had burrowed to get away from the chill would be active again soon. She reminded herself that she’d need to be wary of monsters once more, and she continued her run.

As she got closer, the scale of the cliff was far bigger than she realized.

It was easily over 150 feet tall and almost entirely vertical, so climbing it was out of the question. She couldn’t tell whether to go north or south around it because there was no way to tell which side of it ended sooner.

Sinon had never seen them for herself, but in the Underworld, there were giant barriers called the Everlasting Walls, which split the four empires into separate territories, and not even the nobles or emperors themselves could cross them. That kind of absurdity existed because it was a simulation, not a game. And because Unital Ring was a game, there had to be some way to get through this wall.

She looked around and found a large rock with a flat top, which she climbed for a better vantage. Once she was sure there were no monsters around, she opened her inventory and materialized the Hecate II.

Sinon knew it was pointless, but just to be sure, she tried to lift the heavy antimateriel gun. It would not budge. Even though Sinon was level-16, it was over her Equip Weight limit. She sighed, then got down and peered through the scope. She could pull it off the gun and use it as a mini-telescope by hand, if she wanted, but then she’d have to realign and adjust it again after reattaching it. The process was much easier in virtual reality than in the real world, from what she’d read, but you also needed to do a test fire to confirm it was right, and that was a waste.

So she painfully realigned the Hecate’s direction until she could look through the scope for a better view of the wall. The blackish surface was so smooth that it didn’t even look natural. Free-climbing that wall would be suicide. There were little trees growing here and there out of the surface, but there were not nearly enough of them to climb all the way up. Examining the northern side of the wall turned up nothing more of interest, so she slowly spun the Hecate on its bipod to point the other way, to the south, and looked through the scope again.

“Ah…”

She zoomed in on the scope. There was a slope carved into the wall at one point, like a set of stairs. Following the trail, feeling her heart beating in her throat, she saw it vanish at the top into a tunnel, its mouth black and yawning.

There was an unpleasant mixture of excitement at finding the passage through the cliff wall and anxiety about heading through a tight area, the bane of all snipers. In any case, she had no other options. The Hecate went back into her inventory. Sinon stood up; her HP was full again, thanks to the hard bread, and her TP and SP were almost 90 percent full. She wished she could put some of that perpetually full MP to practice use, but for now, she had no idea how to gain any magic skills.

She still had her Sniper Rifle Mastery skill from GGO. What if she could become not a magic swordsman—but a magic gunman? That would be cool.

With that enticing thought in mind, Sinon resumed running toward the titanic wall.