Sword Art Online - Volume 24 - Chapter 3

3

As of seven o’clock in the evening on September 29th, the general character data for me and my trusty companions was as follows:

KIRITO

1H Swords / Blacksmithing / Carpentry / Woodworking / Stoneworking / Beast-Taming, Level-16 (Brawn)

SINON

Guns / Thief / Stoneworking, Level-16 (Swiftness)

ALICE

Bastard Swords / Pottery / Weaving / Tailoring, Level-15 (Brawn)

LEAFA

Bastard Swords / Woodworking / Pottery, Level-12 (Brawn)

LISBETH

Maces / Blacksmithing / Carpentry / Weaving, Level-11 (Toughness)

SILICA

Short Swords / Beast-Taming / Weaving, Level-10 (Swiftness)

YUI

Daggers / Fire Magic / Cooking / Weaving, Level-10 (Sagacity)

ASUNA

Rapiers / Herbalist / Cooking / Woodworking / Pottery / Weaving / Tailoring / Beast-Taming, Level-9 (Sagacity)

KLEIN

Curved Swords / Woodworking / Stoneworking, Level-8 (Brawn)

AGIL

Axes / Woodworking / Stoneworking, Level-8 (Toughness)

MISHA

Thornspike cave bear, Level-6

AGA

Long-billed giant agamid, Level-5

KURO

Lapispine dark panther, Level-5

PINA

Feathery Dragon, Level-2

Klein’s and Agil’s levels were low because they’d converted only yesterday. Asuna had been logged in when Unital Ring started, but she was on the lower side because she’d been guarding the base more often, I figured. On the other hand, she had also acquired the most skills. But when it came to survival RPGs, the biggest lifeline was life itself: HP.

Sinon and I had the highest levels because we’d defeated boss monsters. I’d taken out the thornspike cave bear that spawned before Misha and defeated the Goliath Rana, while Sinon had beaten the sterocephalus. Next time, I’d have to take Asuna with me on a big hunt, so she could lift her level. Then again, the cat-eared knight at my side had been doing just as much base defense as Asuna.

I closed my friends list, which I’d been perusing while we ran along the river, and asked my companion, “Alice, when did you get your level so high?”

“During the day yesterday and today, of course. I do not attend school, after all.”

It sounded like there was a hint of petulance in her answer, and I felt guilty about that. Alice had been petitioning Rath to allow her to attend returnee school, but it was easy to imagine they weren’t going to let her do anything of the sort. All I could do was pray they’d at least allow her to pay a visit to the school before Asuna graduated next March.

“Were there good monsters for leveling-up around the house…er, town? All the ones I’ve run into are quick little critters like foxes and bats…”

“Within the forest, yes. But quick and little or not, you should know well enough that I am not enamored with the idea of killing a great number of animals for the sake of experience.”

“Oh…right, right. So what did you do?”

Alice glanced at the dark river on our right and murmured, “I’m not sure if they appear near this part of the river…but directly west of the town, there is a very deep ravine, and there are monsters within called four-eyed giant flatworms.”

“Four-eyed…? What kind of monsters are they?”

“It is more or less a giant leech, about fifteen cens wide and over two mels long,” Alice said, spreading her hands to demonstrate. She had grown accustomed to real-world measurements recently, but when we were alone, she often reverted to the cens and mels of the Underworld. She probably didn’t even realize she was doing it.

“They are a translucent gray all over, which makes it hard to see them unless it is midday, when the sunlight hits the river directly at the bottom of the ravine. As the name states, they have four eyes, and you must accurately slash the center of them to defeat them. If you slice them in the middle of the body, the second piece will grow a head of its own, then extend itself so that you face two full-grown members.”

“Eugh, sounds like a planarian…” I grimaced. Then I recalled from a middle school biology class that planarians and hammerhead worms and the like were simply different kinds of flatworms.

“Of course, a four-eyed giant flatworm is also a living creature, but I find it much easier mentally to eliminate them than foxes and rabbits. I suppose this is human…What do you call it…?”

“Ego?”

“Yes. That word is one of your strange sacred real-world words…er, English, do you call it? I find it difficult to learn them all,” Alice lamented. On her other side, bounding along in the sand, Kuro growled demonstrably. I was sure that it wasn’t arguing the fact that I regularly gave it orders to attack in both Japanese and English…probably.

“Well, I agree with you there. It’s hard to learn them…but also, it’s dangerous to hunt monsters that multiply like that on your own. If you die here, that’s it for you.”

“How is that any different from the Underworld and real world?” she shot back, which was a good point. Alice placed equal weight in every world she visited. Places where you could come back no matter how many times you died, like ALO and GGO, were the exception for her.

When you got into a casual cycle of dying and resurrecting in a VRMMO, perhaps it started to change your outlook on what life was, I started to wonder, an uncharacteristically deep bit of philosophy. Alice’s voice brought me back to reality.

“Also, because cutting the four-eyed giant flatworms makes them multiply, they’re even better for leveling-up.”

“Huh…? Ohhh, I see. So if you intentionally keep doubling it and then killing the other one, you can keep farming them without having to wait for them to respawn,” I remarked, impressed. “Huh…? The deep ravine means it’s in the water, right? You can swim, Alice?”

Instantly, she jabbed her fingers into the part of my upper arm that wasn’t protected with armor. “You have a habit of making casual statements that betray your low opinion of me. Few people in the human realm are very good at swimming, I’ll admit, but I am one of them.”

“Where’d you learn how, then? You weren’t swimming in the Rul River or Lake Norkia, were you?” I asked, referring to bodies of water in the area outside North Centoria.

Alice narrowed her eyes briefly in reminiscence, then she shook her head. “No, of course not. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten that Central Cathedral’s ninetieth floor has a forty-mel-long…”

She stopped awkwardly there. Failing to notice the Oops! expression on her face, I shouted, “Wait, you were swimming in the Great Bath?! That had to have been after you became an Integrity Knight. So the whole time that you acted so cool and composed in front of me and Eugeo, you were secretly the type of person who swims laps in the ba—Yeow!”

She jabbed me harder than before.

After that, the proud knight was too upset to speak with me, but at the very least, I’d learned how Alice had leveled-up so quickly. In my mental notebook, I jotted down the idea to take everyone there to test it out later.

There were tons of rocks all along the riverside, but along the water itself, they turned to fine, compact sand that was much easier to run on. Although monsters appeared there, the only actively aggressive types were speedy crabs called purple scuttling crabs and gross flying bugs called saw snake flies, but neither kind had any nasty special attacks; instead, they had fairly high stats. If we were in single-digit levels, they would have been tough, but at level-16 and level-15, we handled them fine, especially with Kuro, who had reached level-5 at some point. Mocri’s party two nights ago and Schulz’s raiding group last night must have both passed this riverbank.

That meant if any new enemies were heading for our town, there was the possibility that we’d run directly into them while we were here. Therefore, we couldn’t use any torches for a while, choosing to follow the faint light of the stars instead. Thankfully, the moon was out and bright here, unlike in the real world, where it was dark and raining.

We spent thirty-something minutes rushing through darkness, earning proficiency in the Night Vision skill, until the exit from the forest appeared up ahead, and I slowed down.

The dense thickets of trees along the river began to thin out, transitioning to low-lying brush that eventually gave way, too. All that was beyond was vast empty grassland, just as reminiscent of the African savanna as the name suggested. We were on the eastern end of the Giyoru Savanna. The river continued to travel south, but the compact sand was gone, replaced by elevated bluffs on either side. We would have to proceed through the grassland from here.

“If only we had a boat…,” I murmured, feeding Kuro some bison jerky.

Alice gave me a curious look. “Can’t you build one?”

“Huh? A boat?”

“Not some majestic sailboat, but surely you could manage a canoe…”

“……Good point,” I admitted.

According to what the others had said, the Stiss Ruins were along this river far to the south. A canoe wouldn’t do us much good going upriver, but if we were just coasting downstream to get there…

I opened my ring menu and checked out the crafting options for the Beginner Carpentry skill. I scrolled down past the housing-related items like Crude Wood Hut and Crude Stone Wall.

“Ah…there it is.”

Almost at the very bottom of the list, I found Crude Large Dugout Canoe, and I snapped my fingers. Even better, the icon to the right of the name was a double-square mark. If it was a hammer symbol, we’d need to carve the log manually, but a double-square was something you could make with the press of a single menu button, as long as you had the materials. There was a Crude Small Dugout Canoe just under it, but it seated only two. Kuro needed to come with us, so we’d need to make the larger version.

“Let’s see. Materials for the large dugout canoe…one sawed thick log, two sawed logs, ten thin ropes, twenty iron nails, and two bottles of linseed oil.”

“That is quite an assortment, isn’t it…?”

“Yeah, well, it can’t just be a hollowed-out tree log,” I replied, tapping each of the items in turn. The Unital Ring UI was quite excellent; if you tapped an item, it would bring up a description and tell you how many you had.

“We don’t have the logs,” I noted, “but we can just cut down some trees for that. Only got half the narrow ropes, but we can make them from grass…Ugh, three nails short. And we won’t be able to make those here.”

To make iron nails from scratch, we needed to melt iron ore into ingots in a furnace, then place them on an anvil and hit them with a hammer. Our furnace and anvil were back in the yard outside the log cabin, and there was no way we could go all the way back now.

“Urgh, and we already have three bottles of linseed oil…Alice, you wouldn’t happen to have any extra nails on you, by any chance, would you…?”

“Don’t expect too much from me,” she replied, opening her menu. She went to her item storage and quickly sorted it. “It seems…I do not…”

“I didn’t think so…”

Alice’s crafting skills were Tailoring, Pottery, and Weaving; none of them had any relation to nails. And iron nails were a precious commodity at the moment—we’d only made them to repair the cabin and build a well.

“Darn. We’ll just have to run across the plain. That was the original idea anyway.”

“Indeed,” Alice said, moving her finger to close the menu—but she stopped. “No…wait. I’m fairly certain that among the items those attackers dropped yesterday was…”

She flipped through the list, then hit the button hard. Above her window appeared…

“A chair?”

It was a small round chair. The design was very simple, with four legs fixed to the sides of the seat, and the coloring looked ancient.

“Why would the guys who came to kill us be carrying around a chair…?”

“I don’t know…Perhaps they used it for resting during a break?”

“…I mean, I guess it’s more comfortable than sitting on the ground. So…what about this chair?”

“We dismantle it, of course.”

I smacked my fist into my palm with understanding. Yes, the legs of the chair were attached to the base with metal nails. If we could recover the nails, we’d have the materials the dugout canoe needed.

“But the chances of recovering the nails without damaging them are low.”

“That’s why we need you to dismantle it, since you have the Carpentry skill. That should lift the chances of success a bit.”

“…True.”

Alice was correct, but while my numerical probability of success according to the game system might rise with my skill, I didn’t have nearly as much confidence in my actual luck. I secretly believed that all the good luck I’d been born with got expended with my survival of SAO at Asuna’s side.

I was just about to ask her to go ahead and dismantle it, when Kuro rubbed its head against my left side.

“Growr!” it grunted, and an epiphany hit my brain. It was a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck that I managed to tame Kuro yesterday, when we were moments from freezing to death. Based on power and frequency of appearance, lapispine dark panthers were very rare monsters. The chances of success at capturing such a creature without even having the Beast-Taming skill had to be close to zero.

“…Actually, you’re right…I guess I am pretty lucky.”

I scratched Kuro’s neck, then lifted the round chair. Surprised by the weight of it, I gave it a tap with my free hand, bringing up the item name of Fine Evergreen Oak Round Chair. The attackers from last night couldn’t have crafted this. They’d found it somewhere.

For an instant, I felt hesitation about destroying an item with the Fine descriptor, but the chair’s durability was almost completely gone. If I worked very hard on the Carpentry skill, I might be able to make my own Fine equipment, I told myself, and I pressed the DISMANTLE button in the menu.

It made a crunch! sound, and the round chair crumbled into pieces and vanished. The resources I recovered were set to go straight into my inventory, so I fearfully checked my window. Right at the top of the list when sorted by new items was…three Fine Iron Nails.

“Yesss!”

“You did it!” shouted Alice, who was peering over my shoulder with a rare, beaming smile. I lifted my hands toward her. She looked baffled by the gesture and eventually copied me. I gave her a double high five, then sprinted into the forest before she could get mad. Once I determined it was safe, I lit a torch. Using the light, I inspected the trees for a suitable specimen. The main ingredient the recipe needed was a sawed thick log, so that meant cutting down a tree bigger than a spiral pine.

Fortunately, in the time I had before Alice caught up, I managed to find a majestic broad-leaved tree five feet across. I tapped its smooth bark, bringing up a pop-up with a shwamm sound. It was called Aged Zelle Teak. I felt like I’d heard of trees called teak in the real world, but what could Zelle mean? It took a few moments, but I figured it out.

“Ohhh…Zelle, as in Zelletelio Forest…”

“It’s a tremendous tree,” remarked Alice, who wasn’t going to protest my forced high five after all.

“Yeah, maybe it’s a rare species. We should remember this spot.”

“Why don’t you just mark it down on your map?”

“Huh?”

You can do that? I wondered. I opened the map window and tried holding down on the spot where our marker stood. A little sub-window appeared with a variety of small icons on it. I selected one that looked like a tree. It made a little pop, and a three-dimensional icon appeared on the map.

“Oooh. That’s handy. Wish you’d told me about it earlier.”

“I think you’re the only person who didn’t figure it out already,” she noted.

“…Sorry,” I mumbled. I closed my window and reached across my body for my sword.

But Alice said, “I will do it. My sword is heavier, after all. Please hold up the light.”

“Really? There’s a particular knack to cutting down a tree with a sword.”

“I told you, I earned a living cutting down trees much larger than this one in Rulid.”

“…Oh. Yeah,” I murmured.

Alice flashed me a quick smile, then motioned for me to step back. Kuro and I retreated a few steps, and I held up the torch to light her way.

The knight pulled back her hood, looked up at the huge Zelle teak, then positioned her legs in a front-to-back stance. She gripped the hilt of her bastard sword with her right hand and drew it smoothly, lowering her center of gravity just a touch. Then she activated the sword skill Horizontal.

For just a moment, the image of Alice in her cloth white skirt and simple iron armor became Alice the Integrity Knight. Her longsword drew a blue line in the darkness, catching the trunk of the Zelle teak at the perfect angle and producing a loud, satisfying thwak! When the splash of light faded, the blade of the sword had sunk over eight inches into the heavy trunk.

“Oh…I suppose one swing wasn’t enough,” she noted.

“It’s unbelievable that you could cut that deep with a single swing to begin with,” I said with admiration. A bit louder, I called out, “Alice, I’ll make the ropes while you work on the tree!”

She gave me a thumbs-up while I stuck the torch into a nearby branch to stabilize it, then I crouched over the grass at my feet.

Five minutes later, all the materials in hand, we headed back to the river.

I opened the Beginning Carpentry skill menu again and pressed the button to create a crude large dugout canoe. Promptly, a translucent purple boat appeared on the black surface of the water. It was a ghost object, the same thing that appeared when deciding where to place a stone wall, for example.

With my right hand, I controlled the placement of the ghost. As soon as it lifted above the water, the outline turned gray; apparently, it had to be touching the water for me to create the canoe. Once the ghost was almost next to the shore, I clenched my hand shut.

The canoe parts tumbled out of thin air with pleasant sound effects and fell perfectly into place within the ghost object. It splashed down and rose again—a perfect example of a dugout canoe, over sixteen feet long and three feet wide. But this was not simply a boat carved out of a single tree trunk. There were two arms extending from the right side that ended in a long, narrow float—an outrigger. With that taken into account, the total breadth of the boat was more like six feet wide. There were also long oars resting atop the canoe and an anchor rope submerged off the stern.

“Well, well. This is rather impressive.”

“All thanks to the excellent lumber you provided for us, Alice,” I replied, hopping into the boat. It was more stable than I expected, probably due to the outrigger. I stuck the torch into a socket along the side of the vessel, then reached out to pull Alice in after me. Kuro leaped nimbly onto the fore. It was a “large” canoe for good reason; with two people and one animal, there was still plenty of room left in its sixteen-foot span.

It was currently eight o’clock at night. We’d taken about half an hour to make the canoe, but this should have allowed us to cut down on the movement time by quite a lot, compared to walking over land and fighting with monsters.

“Okay, let’s go!” I announced, pulling up the anchor. At the fore, Kuro growled magnificently.

“Grurrrr!”

Within two or three minutes of practice, I had the gist of rowing the canoe—largely because it controlled exactly the same way the gondolas on the fourth floor of Aincrad did. If you tilted the oar forward to row, it would go forward, and if you stood it upright, you would brake. Tilt it back and row, and it would pull you back. Tilt to the right to turn left, and tilt left to turn right. We were following the flow of the river, so even light rowing would send the canoe slipping forward faster and faster. After a while, I saw a message that said Ship Handling skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1. I checked it to see the effect, and it said that it would make turning faster and decrease the chances of capsizing.

Steering the ship was fun on its own, but unfortunately, due to the overhanging cliff sides, the views were nothing to write home about, compared to the fourth floor of Aincrad, even if you accounted for the fact that it was night. As I steered, I thought back fondly on my time gliding through the waterways with Asuna in our white-painted gondola, the Tilnel. Up front, Alice turned her head and pulled me out of my memories.

“So…what is it that Dr. Koujiro wanted with you?”

“Huh…?”

My mind blanked for a moment, and then I realized she was talking about the message regarding the “expensive cake shop.”

“Ah, right…Dr. Koujiro was just sending along a message from someone else, actually.”

“Aha…I had a feeling that was the case,” Alice murmured. She turned to face me directly. “It was Kikuoka who summoned you, wasn’t it?”

Based on her tone of voice and expression, I could tell that she did not have a high opinion of Seijirou Kikuoka. I couldn’t blame her—she’d hardly ever had a real conversation with him.

He’s very fishy, I’ll admit, but he has his good sides, too. Like when he pays for fancy pieces of cake.

“Did you come with me just because you wanted to ask about that?” I prompted.

“That’s not the only reason. So…what did Kikuoka say?”

I hesitated, then remembered that I was probably going to explain it all tonight anyway. I slowed the speed of the dugout canoe and put it briefly:

“Someone from somewhere infiltrated the Underworld.”

“……!”

Her blue eyes went wide, and she rose slightly from her seat.

“An intruder…?! Who was it?!”

“Total mystery. He said there’s no way to investigate from the real world.”

She froze in her half-standing position, then sighed and sat back down.

“…I wonder why Dr. Koujiro did not tell me.”

“Because she knew you’d dive-bomb right in at the first chance.”

“It is only recently that I learned your slang term dive-bomb does not necessarily refer to an aerial bombardment technique,” she remarked, which I took as a sign that she’d calmed down a bit. “Yes, I cannot deny it. I suppose I might have a tendency to bristle and lose myself in anger faster than others.”

You mean you never noticed that before?! I thought, wisely keeping it to myself.

“Look, I know how it feels to not be able to sit still in an emergency. But it’s completely impossible to find a single individual hiding in the Underworld if you don’t have a plan for it. You know that…”

“So they’re just going to be left on their own?”

“Not at all. Kikuoka called me up to ask me to dive into the Underworld, actually.”

“…! If you are going, then I would also—,” she started, rising from her seat again, until I held out a hand to stop her.

“Of course you’re coming with me. I only agreed to it on that condition. Don’t blame Dr. Koujiro for not telling you about the intruder. She’s thinking of our safety above all else.”

“…I understand. She is one of the people in the real world whom I trust the most.”

“Uh…am I one of them, too?”

“Questions like that are what lowers one’s trust in you,” she said, looking supremely annoyed. But she did add another question of her own. “Was I the only person you asked to take along?”

“No, I…uh…also asked for Asuna.”

“I had a feeling.”

I attempted to read her profile, but I did not have the required skill to decipher the emotions held there.

As we conversed, the canoe bobbed down the dark river until the distance we’d traveled beyond our forest town surpassed ten miles. The route to our destination, the Stiss Ruins, was close to twenty miles, so if nothing else delayed us, we should arrive in another thirty minutes.

Before leaving, I drank plenty of water and ate, too, but now that I looked at it, my TP bar was nearly down to half. But as long as we were in the boat, I didn’t need to worry about running out of water. I pulled a clay cup out of my inventory and scooped it into the river, then took turns with Alice drinking. I was a bit nervous sourcing in the dark, when I couldn’t actually see how clear the water was, but it didn’t taste bad, and Kuro drank from it, too, so I figured I wouldn’t get sick from it.

The river was getting wider and wider, but the sheer cliffs on either side continued endlessly. The repetitive nature of the landscape was making me sleepy. But it seemed like that moment of nodding off was exactly when monsters that looked like dragonfly nymphs and pond snails chose to leap into the canoe and start fighting, so I didn’t end up sleep-steering us into any accidents.

I kept the map open the whole time. All around us was the gray color that indicated undiscovered terrain, except for one thin line of blue for the river. My Ship Handling skill had risen to 5 already, which was making me wonder if I should change my class to sailor.

Then Alice said, “Kirito…do you hear something?” and Kuro lifted its long tail and growled, staring forward.

Enemies? Is there a field boss up ahead?

I watched and listened, my hackles raised. There seemed to be a faint but deep sound in the distance. Something like an enormous beast roaring—except the sound wasn’t changing. It was just a constant roar. And getting steadily louder.

“Kirito, stop the boat!” Alice shouted, and then I understood. It wasn’t easy to see by the light of the torch and moon, but the surface of the river up ahead was simply gone.

“…W-waterfall!” I shouted and pushed the oar backward as far as I could. But a dugout canoe moving at full speed was difficult to slow down. The sound was already deafening, drowning out our voices.

Then a floating sensation came over my body.

In fact, I was floating. The canoe had gone over the top of the falls, and I was flying through the air.

“Waaaaaah!!”

“Eeeeeeek!!”

Our screams were matched only by the sound of Kuro yowling, “Arooooo!”