Sword Art Online - Volume 23 - Chapter 9.2

I straightened and looked at the enemy players around me. “Your leader is dead! We won’t pursue if you run for your lives now!”

When fighting the pack of goblins in the cave near Rulid in the Underworld, that was enough to make the goblins split immediately, but the players in my vicinity only gave me suspicious looks.

“Shut up! We can’t turn tail and run now!” shouted one of them. He charged with a short spear, which I hastily blocked. That attitude made sense, so I switched to battle mode, pushed back, and blew him off his feet with Vertical.

From that point on, it was an all-out melee, with no tactics or teamwork or planning, just chaos.

Half the enemy fighters were dealing with the thornspike cave bear, so I made sure not to get too close to them, and I focused on cutting down the other half of their group. Sinon’s musket and Yui’s fire magic were a huge help, and they identified each player who tried to unleash a major sword skill to counter me, and took them out. That let me focus on only the opponent I was facing at each moment. Of course, the enemy wasn’t stupid, either, so some of them tried to neutralize Sinon and Yui, but Kuro and the group of Patter helped prevent that.

What really decided the course of battle was Asuna and Alice, who determined that no one was going after the cabin anymore and jumped down from the wall to join the fight. They took out their frustration over the long defensive battle against the enemy and, in less than five minutes, eliminated the eight members of the rear guard.

When we finally got a moment to breathe, I turned to the two of them and said, “Good job keeping things under control. Sorry we’re so…”

“Groaaagh!!”

A roar at a higher volume and ferocity than before cut me off. I looked to my left and saw the eight remaining attackers and, beyond them, the thornspike cave bear with its front legs open wide. We’d seen that movement last night. And it meant the bear’s next attack was…

“Uh-oh…Everyone, hit the deck!!” I shouted, throwing myself to the ground. Half a second later, my friends did the same.

The next moment, the lightning pattern in the bear’s chest flashed.

A blizzard of needles sprayed outward, blasting the eight enemy combatants.

Even wearing her plate mail from the old game last night, Alice was brought half to death by the attack. But I wasn’t able to see its effects on the players. I had to keep my face pressed to the ground because a stray quill grazed the top of my head.

I could hear the metallic needles striking the dirt, trees, and rocks all around us. Thankfully, I could still see the party’s HP bars with my face in the dirt, so I prayed that no one would die before the attack was over.

Someone off to the side behind me shrieked “Yeow!” and Klein’s HP bar took a big hit. Agil suffered some damage next, and then one quill pierced my left shoulder. If you couldn’t even avoid the quills while flat on the ground, then the only ways to avoid them were to burrow underground or fly in the air. It seemed like a game-breaking design…but then again, a lot of this was our fault for being in a place over fifteen miles away from the starting point. I prayed to myself, Okay, okay, we shouldn’t be here. Just give us the chance to gain levels like we should!

With one last jab in the dirt just inches from my nose, the storm of needles finally ceased.

I looked up carefully to see the thornspike cave bear lower its front legs to the ground and the eight players closer to us standing in a huddle. The four tanks were in a row, shields raised, with the four damage dealers hiding behind them. They had seemingly blocked the hail of spikes up close, an admirable bit of bold strategy and defensive power…

But then the sharp spindles in the middle of the ring cursors over their heads shot downward together. Eight avatars unraveled as one, sending millions of ribbons flying up into the night sky.

When the ribbons were gone, a group of black bags containing their belongings fell to the ground with a thud, but now was not the time to be distracted. From my stomach, I groaned, “No way…”

The thornspike cave bear grunted. Its shining red eyes glared at us. The bear was clearly targeting us, but I couldn’t decide on a moment’s notice if we should run or fight yet.

I’d taken one of the needles to my shoulder, so I could see the bear’s cursor. It was at a bit above 60 percent health. The attackers had put up a good fight against the bear, but as I feared, it was still in quite good condition. With our group, I knew we had a better than zero chance of winning, but I couldn’t be sure we’d triumph without fatalities.

No, wait a second. We weren’t talking about fighting the bear…

That was when, emerging from the back and leaping past me, Klein, and Agil, a small figure made its appearance. It was Silica, Pina on her right shoulder and her hands empty. She approached the cave bear.

“H-hey, Silica!” I called out, getting up off my stomach.

She didn’t turn back. “Let me handle this!” she hissed.

I understood, of course, that she wasn’t talking about killing the bear but taming it. But that honestly seemed even harder than beating it. It was practically a miracle that I’d tamed Kuro the lapispine dark panther, but that happened when the both of us were taking shelter from the hailstorm, and it might have been a factor in my success.

On the other hand, the thornspike cave bear was in an enraged state after suffering many attacks over a long period, and even after slaughtering its eight attackers in an instant, it showed no signs of being satisfied. This was the reverse of the situation with Kuro, and it just didn’t seem like a beast that Silica could conquer without inheriting her Beast-Taming skill.

But she approached the bear without fear, despite its bared fangs and menacing growl. In its paw, it was clutching a large blob of something. It was a piece of frog meat, well-done from the flames.

Instantly, I realized what I should be doing.

“Klein, Agil, go find the meat from the woods.”

“G-got it.”

“Sure thing.”

We moved carefully, staying low and keeping Silica in our sights so as not to aggravate the bear. The fire had finished burning through all the spiral pines around the log cabin and was mostly out by now. We looked around the blackened ground, picking up hunks of sizzling frog meat and placing them back in our virtual item storage.

Silica, meanwhile, was within six feet of the growling thornspike cave bear, and she carefully tossed a chunk of meat. “Dinnertime, Mr. Bear,” she said.

“Grrgroaaah!” it roared in response.

The thornspike cave bear stood up on its rear legs and brandished a menacing paw with knifelike claws. Upright, it was easily ten feet tall, and Silica was the smallest of our group after Yui. The difference in size couldn’t have been starker, but physical size did not correspond to avatar strength in a VRMMO. Even still, I could practically see one vicious swipe of its paws disintegrating Silica the way it just did to those other players.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, the bear lowered its paws and returned to all fours. It snuffled at the frog meat in front of it, then took the chunk into its mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed it.

“…”

I stopped collecting meat for a moment to watch the face-off between Silica and the bear. She was probably already seeing a circular beast-taming meter for her target. She waited for the right timing, then offered it more meat from her other hand. The bear took it right away.

When she opened her inventory, hands empty, I quickly hissed to Agil and Klein, “Trade me all the meat you’ve picked up.”

It wasn’t just Agil and Klein; I received trade windows from Leafa, Asuna, and Alice as well. I smacked the YES buttons in quick succession, then snuck within eight feet of Silica, the maximum distance for a trade request. She accepted my trade as soon as it went through, meaning Silica had all of the cooked frog meat in her inventory now.

The only thing left for us to do was pray.

Silica took cues from a meter that only she could see, tossing the pieces of frog meat one after the other. The bear bit and swallowed them in succession, with no sign of growing tired. There were over thirty pieces of meat I’d traded to Silica, but at the current rate, they were going to be gone within three minutes. If that wasn’t enough to successfully tame the beast, we were back to the question of whether to fight or run.

Over her shoulder, I could see the inventory display of Seared Goliath Rana Meat dwindling. Ten pieces went down to five, then three, two, one…zero.

After tossing the final piece of meat, Silica whispered tensely, “The meter’s been stuck at ninety-nine percent for a little while.”

“…Okay, I’m sure there’s one more piece of meat we missed. We’ll go find it,” I said, turning back to the forest.

But Silica shook her head. “No, another piece of the same meat isn’t going to make up that one percent. I’m going to try taming it in this state.”

There was already a long rope in her left hand. If she looped it around the thornspike cave bear’s neck and tied it tight, the beast-taming attempt was successful, but I couldn’t help but feel that the missing 1 percent was going to be the deciding factor.

“Wait, maybe there’s some other food…”

I opened my inventory, scrolling through it in a hurry. I had a ton of random materials in there, considering that we’d only been in this virtual world for a day and a half, but almost no food ingredients. Hyena meat, salamander tail, bat wings…None of them seemed like foods a bear would like. What did a bear like to eat anyway? Salmon? Apples? Bamboo shoots? I hadn’t seen any of them yet.

I was about to give up on the idea of getting the meter past 99 percent when a voice said, “Silica, here.”

Sinon had snuck up behind me and offered a blue pot the size of a fist. I couldn’t begin to guess what was inside. But Sinon had started in a different location and crossed the vast Giyoru Savanna on her own. I could only put my faith in her.

Silica accepted the jar, stuck her hand directly inside, and scooped out the contents. It was a whitish semisolid blob. She couldn’t throw it because it was soft, so she carefully approached the bear instead.

“Here, it’s yummy,” she whispered, extending her hand. The thornspike cave bear eyed it warily.

“Gruh…,” it grunted, sniffing. But it didn’t seem to have any further reaction. Sinon muttered “I guess it’s not good enough in a raw state…”

That made sense to me. The thornspike cave bear might not have been a boss monster, but it was definitely a rare type, and it might require all of its food lures to be properly cooked or treated in some way. But how would you prepare that white blob?

A small shadow darted between me and Sinon. Out of the corner of my eye, it looked to be Yui’s size, but it wasn’t her. The figure had brown fur and a long, narrow tail—one of the Patter. The leader of the group, if I recalled.

The Patter rushed with true rodent speed toward Silica and tilted the yellow jar she held over Silica’s hand. A viscous golden liquid dolloped over the white object. Once that was done, the Patter raced back to the rear just as fast.

“……?”

Sinon and I stared, mouths agape. And then—the thornspike cave bear sniffed the object again and licked up the bizarre glob resting on Silica’s hand in one slobbery go.

Her other hand moved immediately, draping the long rope around the bear’s thick neck and forming a loop that she tugged shut. The thornspike cave bear’s body flashed—and the crimson ring cursor turned green.

In the silence that followed, Silica slumped to the ground.

“Hrar!” the bear barked and licked her cheek with a massive tongue.

Behind me, I heard a voice ask, “Was it…a success?”

It was Alice. Even at night, the sapphire blue of her eyes lost none of its brilliance, though her eyes looked skeptical now. I couldn’t necessarily believe it myself, but the cursor had undeniably gone from red to green.

“I think…it was.”

“I did not believe this would work. Perhaps Silica has the skill to tame a wild dragon from the western empire.”

“We’ll have to take her to the Underworld one day to test that idea out,” I replied before looking to Sinon. “So, uh…what was that white thing?”

“Butter.”

“B-butter?! Where did you get that?!”

“An Ornith child gave it to me.”

“……Oh…”

I shook away the confusion and glanced over my shoulder at the Patter.

“…And what did that mouse kid put on the butter?”

“Dunno.” Sinon shrugged.

It was Yui who answered, approaching with her hand in Asuna’s. “I think that’s honey, Papa.”

“H-honey?! Where did they…?”

“Long, long ago, the Patter collected honey from the Giyoru Savanna. Apparently, that honey is a treasure that was handed down in their clan for hundreds of years.”

“Really? That was honey with a vintage of centuries? Why did they give us something so valuable…?” I asked, glancing back at the Patter again.

Yui said, “I didn’t ask them. Should I?”

“It’s probably best not to do that,” Asuna said with a smile before I could answer. “You wouldn’t want people asking you why you saved someone, would you?”

“Well…I suppose that’s a good point…”

Though usually I’m the one getting saved, I thought. Kuro rubbed its head against my hip and yowled in a way that sounded suspiciously like a knowing chuckle.

“Well, if that was the case, I can see how it helped us tame that bear!” Leafa said.

Lisbeth gave her a funny look. “Why do you say that?”

“I mean, it’s honey and butter! It’s an irresistible combination!”

“Maybe for you,” I murmured, except my stomach chose that very moment to gurgle loudly. Agil and Klein burst out laughing, and the girls all joined in.

In the end, we never got the chance to find out why Schulz’s group was attacking the log cabin.

But if it happened twice, it was bound to happen three times. And we all agreed that the third time was likely to be much bigger than the first two.

So we only briefly celebrated reuniting with Sinon, Agil, and Klein and sat around a campfire in the front yard of the cabin to discuss the topic of defense.

At the southwestern end of the walled yard, the thornspike cave bear, Misha (named by Silica), was slumbering on its side with Kuro and Aga fast asleep on its luxurious-looking stomach fur. It was such a peaceful sight that it was hard to believe there’d just been a devastating battle on the other side of the wall. If we somehow lost our tamed status on Misha due to lack of food, that hellish scene would repeat itself, so once our meeting was over, we needed to leave at once to look for some food a bear would like.

The twenty Patter were resting in the living room of the log cabin. But we needed to be in a safe location to log out safely, too, so we’d have to build a new structure for them at some point. As usual, there were tons of things to do. But for now…

“Gotta beef up this wall, right?” Klein said, spreading his arms. “And make it twice as tall.”

Alice nodded. “That last group scaled the wall without fear. We’ll need one tall enough to cause serious damage if they fall off. And we’ll also want to flatten out all the divots and lumps on the outside surface.”

I had to fight to resist grinning, realizing that she was thinking of the ideal defensive structure: the chalk-white walls of Central Cathedral. Even then, I couldn’t hide from the knight’s sharp senses, and she fixed me with a piercing stare.

“You haven’t said anything yet, Kirito. Don’t you have an opinion?”

“Sorry, sorry. Just thinking,” I murmured, bobbing my head and clearing my throat. “Well…I have no objection to strengthening our defenses, but I think there’s going to be an eventual limit to what we can do in that regard. We can make the wall taller, but then they’ll use ladders. And as players get to a higher level, they’ll gain more kinds of ranged offense…”

“So how do you expect to defend this place, then?” Lisbeth snapped impatiently. I decided to offer the idea I’d been mulling over since the Patter asked to join our traveling party.

“Does it seem to you like the reason we keep getting attacked is because we’re just one little player house isolated in the wilderness?”

“Huh? You want to build more houses?”

“Yeah. But not one or two. We’ll build a town here.”

“……”

Nine pairs of eyes stared at me in stunned silence.

Asuna was the first to speak. “Just constructing a lot of buildings doesn’t make a town, Kirito. You need people to live in them.”

“Well, the Patter are going to need homes, aren’t they? If we build five or six for them, that should make it more town-like, right?”

“So you want to use them as a shield?” Sinon asked sharply.

I shook my head. “No, no, we’ll keep them safe, too. It just means we might be using them to help puff ourselves up and make this location harder for other players to attack…”

I could see that my argument wasn’t convincing my friends, whose expressions grew harder as I went on.

“After crossing half the Giyoru Savanna, I realized that we’re blessed by lots of natural resources in this location. There’s a nearly unlimited amount of stone and lumber for building houses here. Iron ore was our biggest problem, but now that Silica’s tamed the thornspike cave bear, that solves the major difficulty there.”

Leafa jumped in to ask, “Wait…the bear’s not going to respawn?”

“It will if we defeat it, but not if we tame it, I bet. Because then it would mean we could harvest an unlimited army of unstoppable monsters. We could have ten giant bears fighting for us.”

“I don’t want to try that one again,” protested Silica, shivering. Atop her head, Pina opened one eye and squeaked as though to say “Agreed.” We chuckled at that one.

“We can visit the cave again later to see if it’s true about the respawning…but for now, I don’t think it’ll be too difficult for us to make more buildings. But the Patter alone won’t be enough to fill out a whole town, so we’ll need to scout out some more NPCs.”

“The Bashin would be very reassuring to have on our side!” chirped Yui. Lisbeth nodded firmly. Convincing NPCs to move homes was unthinkable in any other VRMMO, but here, it felt like it was just a successful negotiation away. The Bashin would be great to recruit, but I was hoping for the Ornith birdpeople Sinon met on the western side of the Giyoru Savanna. Having a group of people skilled with muskets would make our defenses so much more formidable…

“But, Kirito,” Agil said, causing me to spin around, “you’re playing this game to beat it, right? If we’re heading for the ‘land revealed by the heavenly light,’ we’re going to have to leave this forest eventually.”

To my embarrassment, I’d completely forgotten about that announcement until he pointed it out. I blinked a few times, then nodded quickly.

“Er…yeah…good point. But there’s a big difference between leaving from a secure base of operations and just striking out from nothing. For one thing, we’re all lugging around incredibly heavy inherited gear. If it has to stay in our inventory all the time, it’s just cramping our carrying space. And if we’re going to keep it in our home storage, we’ll want to make sure that it’s as secure as possible…”

The others considered this suggestion gravely. Sinon’s Hecate II was the most significant of these, of course, but everyone’s inherited weapons and armor were important to them. Sadly, I’d had to sacrifice my beloved Blárkveld to create our metal weapons, but I still had Excalibur, which had to be protected at all costs. I knew the others felt the same way about theirs.

“Well, I’m in agreement with Kirito’s idea to build a town. What do the rest of you think?” Alice announced. The others all murmured their assent. With that established, she looked to me. “But if we’re starting from the planning stage, it’s going to be a major project. It could take a week, or even an entire month. What if there is a third attack before we’re finished?”

“No!” I bounced to my feet and clenched my fist, causing my iron gauntlet to clank loudly. “It won’t even take a week! It’s eleven o’clock right now, so I’ll have the basic plan for the town built by three o’clock! That’s four hours!”

Alice squawked, “Huh?! Four hours?!”

Asuna smirked. “We’re going to be short on sleep again.”

Yui cheered, “Let’s give it our all!”