Sword Art Online - Volume 24 - Chapter 4

4

“Well, it’s a river. There are going to be falls,” I commented, water dripping from every part of my body.

Alice muttered lifelessly, “I wish you had thought about that five minutes earlier.”

“Hey, even if we knew it was coming, there are cliffs on either side, so our only options would have been to jump over the edge or try to paddle all the way upstream…”

“If we had looked, there might have been a place to climb.”

Kuro added, “Grau!” in agreement, then shook violently to spray off the excess water. Most of the droplets struck me, but all that did was take me from soaking to drenched, which wasn’t much of a distinction.

“…Anyway, at least it didn’t turn into a total disaster. Nobody drowned, and the boat capsized, but it didn’t get wrecked.”

“Both of those things are miracles—that was a fall of thirty mels. You should thank Stacia we are still alive.”

“Okay…”

The truth was, that would be hard to do. To me, the Underworld’s Goddess of Creation, Stacia, was none other than Asuna. In her head, Alice managed to hold on to separate concepts of the Stacia she’d always believed in and Super-Account 01 Stacia. But whenever I closed my eyes and thought of Stacia, the face that popped into my mind was Asuna’s.

At any rate, I said a silent prayer to Asuna-Stacia, then examined the situation.

After going over the falls, Alice, Kuro, and I drifted a few hundred yards down the river, clinging to the overturned boat, until we finally managed to get up onto the shore. Downstream from the falls, the sides of the river were proper banks again, but if it had stayed cliffs, we might have washed all the way to the mouth of the river. Assuming there was sea somewhere near all this land.

The silver lining was that the place where we washed up on the shore was not that far from where we initially meant to disembark. Our destination, the Stiss Ruins, was still about three miles away from this spot, it seemed. Under the light of the moon, the terrain ahead was flat grassland that reminded me of the space around the Town of Beginnings on the first floor of Aincrad. If we sprinted, we could get there in fifteen minutes. That put the expected arrival time at eight forty-five PM. My initial plan was to get there by nine, or nine thirty at the latest, so the canoe had saved us a good amount of time.

With some difficulty, Alice and I turned the boat back over and anchored it on the riverside behind us. It wouldn’t go into my inventory, so we had to leave it here. I’d hoped to take it back the way we came, but the waterfall made that impossible.

Alice must have been thinking the same thing, because she glanced back and said, “If needed, we’ll just have to tear it down for the materials again.”

“That’s true…though I’m guessing we won’t get the Zelle teak wood back.”

“Because it was carved out of the log. I can cut another one, if needed. That’s why we marked the map.”

But I knew that she didn’t really want to break it down. We didn’t name the canoe like we did the Tilnel, but a boat was always something more than a simple item.

“We’ll think about a better way to deal with it. But for now…let’s get going,” I said. Our equipment had dried in the meantime, so Alice and I set off.

The rabbit and snail monsters that appeared in the grassland were noticeably weaker than the ones in the forest. They could each be defeated with a single sword skill, more or less, but they gave almost no experience, and the dropped items were uninspiring.

But every mountain starts as a molehill, as they say, and during our run, each of us gained a level: level-17 for me, level-16 for Alice, and level-6 for Kuro. That put my stock of ability points at six, so I decided to open my menu and spend one.

For the moment, I’d raised Brawn to rank-8, and its advanced ability Bonebreaker to rank-1. As a second-tier ability, Bonebreaker needed two points for a single rank, so I decided to just go ahead and bump Brawn to rank-10. I was about to hit the button to accept but paused to check on Alice first.

“What abilities did you take again?”

“I have Brawn at rank-10, Bonebreaker at rank-1, Assault at rank-1, and Ironbreaker at rank-2.”

“I-Ironbreaker?” I repeated. That name didn’t sound familiar to me, but then I realized why. “W-wait…is that a tier-4 ability? And you gave it two levels? You spent eight points on it?!”

In contrast to my shock, Alice’s response was quite matter-of-fact. “I liked the effect.”

“Wh-what effect is that?”

“Increased damage to enemy armor when attacking. After all, an Integrity Knight’s sword is meant to break through any shield or armor with a single swing.”

“…Ah, good point…”

In the Cloudtop Garden on the eightieth floor of Central Cathedral, I’d exchanged blows with Alice Synthesis Thirty. I remembered thinking that if I threw a combo of sword skills at her, I’d have a chance of victory, but Alice’s Osmanthus Blade was so powerful I couldn’t even block it, and she had me trapped against the wall in no time.

The gamer in me wanted to say that taking higher abilities at a low overall level was an inefficient use of resources, but that wasn’t my business to say, really. Unital Ring wasn’t just a game, but it was still something you played. The best way to build your character was by following that voice inside you.

“Well, I’ll know who to turn to when we face a heavily armored foe.”

“And I’ll allow you to take care of the slimes and worms. I am tired of slippery, squirmy things for now.”

“You got it,” I said, wondering just how many four-eyed giant flatworms she’d killed. I pressed the ACCEPT button on my Brawn purchase.

We didn’t run across any monsters worth mentioning after that, but we did end up taking a few detours for unexpected reasons. The closer we got to our destination, the more we started to see groups of players leveling-up with torches in hand. If we came running up on them in the darkness, they could very well mistake us for PKers.

We put out the torch and headed southwest, wary of running into others. Our destination came into view just as we crested a small hill.

It was a gigantic walled city that loomed over the flat plains like a small mountain. There were several concentric walls that curved gently, forming a shape like an upside-down top. The moonlit city seemed to be about two-thirds of a mile across and six hundred feet tall. In scale alone, it was larger than the Town of Beginnings.

But upon closer examination, the walls were collapsed in places, and there were almost no lights to be seen. There was a faint orange haze over the center, but overall it looked more like a dungeon than a town.

“…So those are the Stiss Ruins,” said Alice from the top of the hill. She lifted the edge of her hood. “That wall doesn’t look like a natural collapse. It’s as though there was a great battle there.”

“Now that you mention it, yeah…There’s that huge hole in the middle, too. Those walls look like they’re six feet thick. You’d need a cannon to do that kind of damage, right?”

“Perhaps that’s what it was. Or an equivalent kind of sacred art…I mean, magic.”

If this world had flintlock muskets, then perhaps they had equivalent cannons, like smoothbore muzzleloaders. Could some army in the distant past have lined up their artillery on the plain and bombarded the city? Or was Alice right, and it was some kind of powerful magic…?

“So…where in the ruins are we meeting her?”

“Oh, right,” I said, recalling the actual reason we’d come all this way. My eyes rolled over the right side of the city. “Ummm…underneath a large willow tree five hundred yards directly north of the ruins at nine o’clock.”

“Then you only have five minutes left.”

“If we were gonna be late, I’d send her a message in real life, but I think we’ll get there just in time. Kuro, you hungry?”

I had no idea how much of my speech the panther, sitting politely to the side, understood, but it yowled “Gau!” and stood up.

I figured that finding the actual tree in question would be tough in the dark, but after eyeing the proper direction and running south-southwest, I soon spotted a silhouette that seemed to fit the bill. Even in the dark, it was hard to mistake those long, dangling willow branches. It seemed like the perfect place for some astral-type monsters to appear, but I trusted that Argo wouldn’t pick a haunted location as a meetup spot.

As we approached the gnarled old tree, I called out, “Hey, Argo, are you there?” at what I thought was a reasonably quiet volume.

“Kirito!” Alice immediately shouted.

“Grurrrr!” growled Kuro.

And lastly, an eerie voice called out, “Byohhhh!”

I grabbed my sword hilt on instinct and scanned our surroundings. There was what looked like a broken gravestone at the foot of the huge willow—and some kind of fuzzy light. No sooner had I seen it than a pale shape slipped straight up out of the ground. It wore a tattered, old-fashioned dress and had long hair that covered its face and extended arms like dead branches. Every part of it was translucent.

“There is a ghost!!” I shouted, drawing my sword. Alice readied her bastard sword, and Kuro entered its leaping stance.

“Byohhhh!” the ghost roared again, cold, pale light issuing from the eyes behind those hanging bangs. It had targeted only me so far, but there was already a red spindle cursor over its head. The name below its HP bar was Vengeful Wraith.

English, huh? I noticed. The names of all the other monsters we’d encountered were descriptive Japanese. The only other exception to this pattern was the fire-breathing frog in the giant wall, the Goliath Rana. If there was a rule that all boss-type monsters had their names in English, then I couldn’t take this spirit lightly.

It was the wraith that ended our staredown.

“Byohhh!” it wailed, sliding to the side in the air before charging me. A hand with long, sharp nails swiped at my neck.

I reacted swiftly, lifting my sword and jumping backward. I chose to put distance between us, just because I wasn’t sure if I could block its attack. That premonition was immediately proven correct, because the wraith’s hand hit my sword, slowed briefly, then proceeded straight through it with a smokelike effect.

“Whoa…!”

I lurched backward in midair. The sharp claws missed just an inch from my throat, leaving five pale lines that hung in the air.

As soon as my feet hit the ground, I delivered a counterthrust. The tip of my fine iron longsword caught the wraith’s side, but this, too, produced the same puff of smoke effect and had no physical feedback. A few pixels fell off its HP bar, nothing more.

“Alice, physical attacks do almost nothing to it!” I warned, backing away again.

“That’s how ghosts work!” she replied.

Ghosts didn’t exist in the Underworld—though I once encountered something like a living spirit—so she must have learned that from ALO. Hopefully, it wasn’t from real-world experience…

Either way, there were two general methods for dealing with astral-type enemies that physical attacks didn’t harm. Either you used attack spells, like fire or light magic, or you used a weapon that had been enchanted somehow. Neither was an option here. I was certain that the Holy Sword, Excalibur, could banish this ghost in a single hit, but it was back at the cabin, and I couldn’t even lift it with my current stats.

“Byohhhh…”

The wraith’s torn mouth hung open in a mocking smile. But that image gave me an idea.

What happened to the person we were meeting at this willow tree, Argo the Rat? She was nowhere to be seen. Argo was speedy, but she wouldn’t stand a chance against this nasty wraith as a freshly converted level-1 character. Had Argo already died before we’d gotten here? Had she been forever banished from the world of Unital Ring?

My worst fears caused me to freeze for a moment, and the wraith did not miss its chance.

“Byoaaa!”

It sank down into the ground up to its waist, then lunged from that height. I reacted late but managed to cross its left arm with my sword; however, the upward claw swipe coming from the ground passed through my blade and gauntlet, gouging my forearm deeply.

I felt a numbing shock and an intense chill. More than 10 percent of my HP bar dropped, and a Debuff icon that resembled an ice crystal appeared. It was the sign for continuous freezing damage, the effect that happened to us during the ice storm on the savanna.

“Dammit!” I swore. Alice grabbed my shoulder and yanked me backward so she could take my place.

“Yaaaa!” she cried, her bastard sword shining in her hands.

It was a brilliant, heavy horizontal slash that reminded me of her old Integrity Knight days. The bastard sword, which was two or three inches longer than mine, caught the wraith’s torso, but it only split it like smoke and did hardly any damage.

Next, Kuro leaped on the wraith, digging its huge fangs into the creature’s shoulder. The bodily attack had more of an effect than the iron swords, taking away 3 percent or so of its HP, but the wraith wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

“Byohhh!” it howled with rage, jabbing both sets of nails into Kuro’s back.

“Gyipe!” the panther yelped, red damage effects spilling as it jumped away. It lost over 10 percent, too, and suffered the same freezing Debuff.

I tried to ignore the bone-chilling sensation as I rushed over and wrapped my left arm over Kuro’s arched back. I didn’t think of myself as a real beast-tamer, and my successful beast-taming yesterday had been a true stroke of luck, but the thought of losing my brand-new pet after just a day terrified me so much that my legs quaked.

We didn’t stand a chance at this rate. Should we retreat for now? Was it even possible to get away from a foe that moved so quickly through the air?

And for that matter, was it right for such a dangerous enemy to be located just five hundred yards from the starting spawn point? We were frontline fighters at level-16 and level-17 with a combat-focused pet, and we were fighting for our lives. Any brand-new characters just out of the town would have no chance. What was the point of placing this wraith here…?

I was torn, unable to decide whether to keep fighting or give up, when I heard a voice from behind me:

“Kiri-boy! It’s weak against fire!”

Something shiny came flying toward me. It was a ring of fire—no, a spinning torch. I barely managed to catch the spark-spraying projectile with my free hand.

“Alice, I need five seconds!” I shouted.

“I’ll give you ten!” came her bold response.

I dropped my sword and opened my menu as fast as I could. In my inventory, there was a single bottle of linseed oil left. I brought it out, popped the cork with my thumb, and poured the contents onto my sword. Once the oil coated both sides of the blade, I tossed the bottle away and stood back up.

Alice had just brushed off the wraith with her bastard sword. It had barely lost any HP, as usual, but the swing did actually knock the wraith back a bit, rather than simply passing through it. Upon a closer look, I noticed that Alice was holding her sword upright and bashing the base of the flat side inside of slicing.

Very interesting, I thought, then gave the command. “Alice, switch!”

The knight promptly jumped out of the way as I held the torch up toward my sword.

With a fwoom, the oil caught fire, covering the blade with glowing red flames. It was the quickest and easiest way to give my sword a fire aspect, but the effective time would be much shorter than a magical enchantment, and if I swung it too wildly, I could blow out the fire.

“Byuueee!” groaned the vengeful wraith, raising its hands and backing away from the torch and flaming sword. But this was my chance. Don’t go out! I urged my weapon, holding up the improvisational fire sword. The red of the flame and the yellow-green of my skill effect mingled.

“Hah!” I jumped with a cry. Sonic Leap kicked in, and I shot through the darkness, slashing as I went.

“Byohhh!!”

The wraith thrust out its right hand. A complex sigil appeared, and shining needles shot forth from its five fingers. A magical attack…but if I tried to switch to defense, it would cause the sword skill to fumble. Trusting in Lisbeth’s armor to do its job, I ignored the needles and continued the charge.

“Raaah!”

I could feel three needles hit my body in different places as I swung the sword. My flaming weapon withstood the boosted speed of Sonic Leap and sliced through the ghostly body from its left shoulder to its right flank.

“Byaaaaah!” screeched the wraith, pulling back. Its HP bar plunged downward. All of its hardy stubbornness was a thing of the past, as it instantly went below halfway to 40 percent…30…and stopped at 25.

White smoke issued from the place where I’d severed the wraith’s upper half in two, connecting the parts back together like glue. I wanted to deliver the finisher, but my sword’s flame was guttering, and I couldn’t move yet after using the sword skill.

That was when someone grabbed the torch from my left hand and stuck it into the closing gap in the wraith’s midriff. Immediately after that, the two halves closed for good. But the torch stuck in between them was still aflame and growing larger as it burned away at the wraith’s insides.

“Byohhhhhhhh!” screamed the spectral foe, writhing in agony, until even its screech turned to flame. Fire burst from its eyes. The HP bar continued to drop, and this time went to zero.

The white astral substance and red flames created a marbling effect as they swelled into an explosion that shook the ground beneath my feet. There was no way some random nobody monster would have a death effect that spectacular. For one last instant, I thought, So why did they put a freakin’ boss here?! and then it was gone from my mind. There was a small blue light in the spot where the wraith had exploded. It slowly began to rise, approaching the branches of the willow tree.

“W-wait!” I called out, scrambling frantically up the tree’s gnarled trunk. Once I’d reached the part where it split in two, I leaned back and jumped as hard as I could. My outstretched fingers just barely brushed the blue light. It expanded and burst like a bubble, and I did a double backflip before landing on the ground.

With a sigh of relief, I turned to the player who’d finished off the vengeful wraith with that torch stunt.

Simple sandy-brown leather armor. Small dagger on the left hip. Short, unruly hair the color of straw. Big light-brown eyes.

“Hey, Ar—”

I had to stop myself mid-sentence. The small avatar’s feet were enveloped by glowing blue rings of light—the sign of a level-up. Three rings, four, five, six…At last, they stopped appearing after seven.

“Welp, thank ya for the assist up ta level-8. Didn’t expect to get that much.”

“Well, sure you did. It was a maneuver worthy of that kind of reward…but that’s not what I wanted to say.”

I glanced back to see that Alice and Kuro were all right before I continued, “Argo, why did you tell us to meet in such a dangerous spot? You had me thinking that wraith killed you.”

“I assumed it was a trap meant to kill us,” Alice declared as she walked closer.

Argo grimaced. “Well, I suppose I can’t blame ya for bein’ suspicious,” she said, hopping forward so she could look up at Alice, who was half a head taller than her.

At last, I realized that Argo’s avatar was noticeably younger than her real-life appearance. Somehow, it felt more familiar to me than strange or off-putting. After all, it was the exact same avatar Argo had in SAO. But yesterday, she’d said…

“Wait, didn’t you say that you never copied your SAO character data over to ALO?”

“Yep, I did say that. I made an entirely new character from scratch to meet up with Chrysheight. I coulda taken that account here…but if I was gonna go on adventures with you and A-chan, I figured this look was best.”

“Meaning…you moved your SAO character to ALO for the first time today and logged in here with it…? Which fairy race did you select?” I asked, examining her head and skin in detail.

“Don’t stare at me so hard,” she complained, grimacing. “I didn’t get a chance to select a race. I tried to go into ALO, and it just shot me straight here. I woke up dressed like this.”

“Ohhh…so I guess you’re just human. Or at least, human by Aincrad terms…I gotta imagine Ymir is in total chaos, having ALO ripped out of their control like this. I’m surprised it allowed you to move your data at all.”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “I put my SAO ID and password into Ymir’s website, and as soon as I hit the button, they sent a new ID. No person was handling that process manually.”

“Huh…they used to do it that way before. I guess they automated the process at some point,” I murmured, surprised. I shrugged, figuring it wasn’t that important. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my initial question.”

“Ah, the reason I chose this spot ta meet up?” Argo said, glancing at the huge willow tree. She made a face. “I guess I didn’t do my homework for once. One of those UR wikis folks are workin’ on had a map of this area uploaded, and there was a willow tree marked on it, along with a helpful caption like safe here, no monsters appear.”

“Huh?! How was that safe…?! Any low-level player wouldn’t stand a chance!” I protested. Alice nodded, and even Kuro growled in agreement.

Argo eyed Kuro and said, “That’s a cool panther ya got there. Whose pet is it?”

“It’s mine. For being the Rat, how is it that you’re afraid of dogs but fine with cats?”

“I’m surprised ya remember. Just so ya know, dogs hunt rats, too. There’s literally a breed called rat terrier.”

“Oh, wow…but who cares about that? I’m talking about the wraith! Was that strategy wiki you checked just wrong about it?”

“Doesn’t seem like it to me. Check it out.”

Argo opened her ring menu and switched to the quest window. There were three quests there already. Their titles were Protecting Rabbits (Rec. Level-1), Lost Item in the Sewer (Rec. Level-3), and The Ancient Spirit’s Curse (Rec. Level-20).

“Wait, is that it?! That wraith was a quest boss?!”

“Seems like it. It won’t show up unless you’ve got the quest and ya meet the requirements.”

“But neither Kirito nor I have taken this quest,” pointed out Alice. I nodded. Just in case, I checked my own quest list. It was empty.

We looked at Argo. The info dealer seemed apologetic. “I’m guessin’ it was just a combined coincidence.”

“Huh…?”

“I came by here about ten minutes before our meetin’ time of nine o’clock. That grave at the foot of the willow tree started glowing, and then…”

She pointed at the mossy little grave marker, lit by the moon above. Nothing about it seemed wrong for now, but I seemed to recall that it’d had a pale glow of its own when we first arrived.

“…All it did was light up, no monsters or anything, but I got a real bad feelin’ about it. I thought about lettin’ ya know and changing our spot, but I didn’t wanna just log out here, so I tried to go back to the ruins. Then I heard some horrible sounds behind me and turned back to see…this.”

“Aha…so having the quest meant you activated the grave, and we must have fulfilled some requirement for the wraith to appear. What was the criteria?”

“Apparently, it was that you had to have a silver item materialized on your person.”

“Huh? Silver…?”

I closed my window and checked the few items I had in my pockets and pouches.

“…There’s nothing like that on me.”

When I melted down my Blárkveld from ALO, I got a couple of fine silver ingots, but I gave them all to Lisbeth, and even if I still had them, I had no reason to hold them as physical items.

“Oh…perhaps it is me,” said Alice, realizing something. She checked in the cloth pouch at her waist. Out of it, she pulled a small, clinking leather sack, inside of which was a small flat circle. She dropped the shining silver object onto my palm.

“A silver coin…?”

It was old and faded, but I had to assume it wasn’t aluminum or nickel. In size and thickness, it reminded me of a 100-yen coin. And in fact, on one side was the number 100, and on the other, a design of two trees. I tapped it, and the properties window said 100-el Silver Coin, Currency, Weight: 0.1.

“…A hundred el…You know, this is the first coin I’ve seen here…”

Nearly all the monsters we’d killed so far were animal types, and they dropped materials like fangs and hides but no money. I looked up and returned the coin to Alice.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“Sinon gave it to me before we left Kirito Town. She said, ‘If there’s an NPC shop in the Stiss Ruins, buy me all the musket ammunition and gunpowder this money can buy.’”

“Ahhh, I see…”

We could recover our swords’ durability by sharpening them, but if Sinon ran out of musket rounds and gunpowder, that was it. The Orniths who gave her the gun also taught her how to make the ammo and powder, but she said that one of the materials could only be harvested deep in the Giyoru Savanna. Sinon’s gun was a valuable weapon in battle, so I’d hoped to help her get more bullets before she ran out, but if we could just buy some at a shop, that would be best. However…

“Hmm, I don’t remember any spot that had bullets and gunpowder,” Argo said to my dismay. “Most of the place is an actual ruin, with monsters an’ all, but there’s a proper town right in the middle. Couple o’ NPC shops, too. But all they sell are simple tools and food. That and starter gear.”

“Uh…food? Like what?” I asked, knowing that we’d need to recover our SP soon.

Argo just shook her head. “Well, that’s one part o’ you that’s no different between the real world and virtual world.”

Alice giggled. “It reminds me of the time when you pulled that steamed bun out of your pocket…Anyway, Kirito, would you introduce us?”

“Huh…? Oh! Right, you haven’t met before.”

I cleared my throat awkwardly, wondering how I should describe them to each other. It was not easy.