Sword Art Online - Volume 24 - Chapter 5

5

While we hadn’t counted on that extra fight, I nevertheless met up with Argo just as we planned on the train earlier in the day. My initial idea was to head straight back to the Great Zelletelio Forest.

But Argo said that she wanted to go back into the Stiss Ruins. There were two reasons.

One was to find out what happened with the Ancient Spirit’s Curse quest.

The other was to infiltrate a group meetup of strategic-minded players that was supposed to take place at the center of the ruins at ten o’clock.

“…Look, I’m intrigued, too…but is this little get-together open to outsiders, too?” I asked.

We were walking toward the north gate of the Stiss Ruins. Argo curled her finger through her hair as she replied, “Oh, just fine. There should be close to a hundred folks there. Though we’ll probably wanna tweak our appearances a bit.”

“True…this obviously isn’t starter gear, and it doesn’t look like it came over from ALO, either,” I said, looking down at the simple metal armor I was wearing. Then something occurred to me. “Actually, we can just take off the armor, but what about Kuro? It’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

On my right, Kuro padded along elegantly, a majestic beat easily over seven feet long from head to tip of the tail. I would assume that hardly any players had pets of their own, so a panther was bound to draw attention.

“Ah, good point…There are a bunch of empty houses, so maybe you can leave it there to wait for us?”

“I suppose that would be an option…”

While I was at school, Kuro played with the other tamed animals, patrolled the town, and took naps on its own, apparently. Over eight hours away from its owner didn’t undo the beast-taming effect, so I figured that thirty minutes or so apart should be fine, but I couldn’t help but be nervous about it, here in an unfamiliar territory, with plenty of other players wandering around.

“In that case, I will stay with Kuro,” Alice announced from my left.

I turned to her. “Are you sure?”

“I do not enjoy being in the midst of crowds. In return, you can handle Sinon’s shopping request for me,” she said, holding out the leather sack and coin. I stuck them in the pouch I had on my belt.

“Sure, of course I can do that…but I feel like we’re not going to find any bullets or gunpowder.”

“If it’s not there, it’s not there. Just do not embezzle that money and spend it on food.”

“I’m not a child,” I argued. Argo snickered to herself.

I put all my metal armor back into storage and donned a cloak of rough linen over my clothes instead. That made me look like a low-level player who’d lost his cool inherited gear after the grace period ended. Alice had been wearing her hooded cloak all along anyway, so she didn’t look much different with her armor off. We kept our swords equipped because it was too nerve-racking without them, but the cloaks kept them mostly hidden anyway.

“Awww, man, I want one of those hooded cloaks, too. Just doesn’t feel right ta have my face out in the open all the time,” Argo complained as we approached the north gate of the Stiss Ruins. The ground around us was packed and hard. There were almost no plants.

“You should’ve mentioned it earlier. We could make fabric like this in a place with lots of grass to pick loose.”

“Really? That’s made outta grass?”

“Not just any kind of grass, though.”

“Then gimme that one.”

“N-no!” I protested.

Alice opened her ring menu. “I’m sure I have some fabric left over. I can make you a hooded cloak of your own.”

“Really? You sure, Alicchi?”

“C’mon, don’t give her that lazy nickname.”

“Hee-hee, I don’t mind. It is fun to have a special nickname,” said Alice magnanimously. She went to her Tailoring crafting menu and hit a few buttons, and just like that, a gray hooded cloak appeared over her floating window.

“Wow, with the tap of a button, huh? Nice and easy,” said Argo, impressed.

“It’s only simple items like this one that can be made from the menu,” Alice warned, handing her the cloak. “This is for you, Argo.”

“Thanks, Alicchi. I won’t forget this favor I owe ya,” Argo finished, then dropped the cloak over the leather armor she must have brought over from ALO. When the hood was up, she looked just like the old Rat from SAO—except that her cheeks were missing those three drawn-on whiskers.

I was just thinking about how I’d hold her down and draw them on if I only had a permanent marker when she promptly glared at me.

“Kiri-boy, ya shouldn’t stare at a lady like that.”

“S-sorry,” I mumbled and faced forward.

Up close, the Stiss Ruins were larger than I’d ever imagined. The outer walls alone had to be a hundred feet tall. Each stone block that made up the structure was over three feet to a side, but I couldn’t begin to guess how they’d stacked them in the first place—or how they’d been destroyed.

The decorations on the gate were ornate and suggested that, before its destruction, this city must have been as beautiful as it was massive. But now there were no civilians or merchants passing through the gate.

To my surprise, I didn’t see any players, either. At least five thousand players must have been converted into Unital Ring from ALO, and nearly all of them had to still be active around the ruins. It was after nine o’clock at night, which was prime time for VRMMO players. I would have expected to see players going out to hunt in the wilderness and returning to refuel on supplies.

When I brought this up, Argo had a very simple answer.

“Oh, that’s because the north gate ain’t so popular.”

“Huh? Popular?”

“According to that same wiki, at least. The pathways are too complex, so it doesn’t offer easy access to the city center, plus the mobs don’t show up very much north of the ruins. That’s why I chose it as our meetup point, actually.”

“Aha…but even still, not a single person…?”

“Listen, Kiri-boy. Not every ALO player—or player from any other Seed game—is still playin’ this thing. In my mind, it’s less than half…maybe a third. Everyone else is just bidin’ their time, waiting for this situation to resolve itself. That includes the fairy leaders in ALO.”

“……”

Now that she said it, that did seem like the more practical response. The UR incident was just that—an incident. Given that players were paying a monthly fee to the various companies running their VRMMOs, it was practically criminal in nature. Only someone truly addicted to online gaming could be optimistic or egotistic enough to actually follow the announcement about the “land revealed by the heavenly light” when you didn’t know if it was true or not.

Meaning that the people we were attempting to infiltrate were the ones with that mindset. People like Mocri and Schulz. People who took things too seriously.

At some point, I had stopped walking, and I looked up to see that Alice, Argo, and Kuro were farther ahead, waiting for me.

“Oh…sorry,” I murmured, picking up the pace.

After passing through the half-collapsed gate, I felt like my body temperature dropped. The wide stone path lasted for only a few dozen yards before hitting another wall and splitting left and right.

“There was a useful empty house around here, I think,” Argo said, taking the lead. We followed her without complaint.

The homes inside the Stiss Ruins were built as if stuck to the inside of the many layers of castle walls. It was a terrible way to get sunlight, if you asked me, but that couldn’t have been the reason the city fell into ruin.

The buildings were grand stone apartments that seemed reminiscent of some of the great, ancient cities of Europe, but nearly all of them were falling apart, just like the walls. We rushed past them because it appeared that insect and vermin monsters had taken up residence in most of them.

The home Argo led us to had a huge hole in the ceiling, but its front door and inside stairs were intact, leaving one room on the second floor that was usable. Argo and I left Alice and Kuro there, then headed to the center of the ruins.

The complex series of right and left turns through the streets left me totally disoriented, but Argo must have had some kind of special sense for these things, because she kept us moving without a second thought. After we’d walked for what felt like a third of a mile, a waterway appeared. It served as a boundary line of a kind; as soon as we timidly crossed the crumbling bridge, the area immediately looked different.

Here, there were cast-iron torch holders at regular intervals, their flames flickering and orange. Farther beyond them, little roadside shops appeared here and there, and more NPCs and players came into view. Unlike in SAO, in Unital Ring you couldn’t call up a target cursor just by staring at someone, but the NPCs all had deathly pale skin and wore Roman-style tunics, so it was easy to tell them apart. All the shops sold low-quality materials, and there were no bullets or ammunition.

“The Bashin looked so hale and hearty, but all the NPCs here are really pale…,” I murmured.

Argo shrugged. “I mean, I get it. Yer bound to get pale, livin’ in a place like this.”

“Honestly, they seem like a different race altogether. What race are the NPCs here?”

“Dunno…It’s almost impossible to tell what any of the NPCs are sayin’. Talk to ’em, and you’ll see. The only exceptions are the shopkeepers.”

“Ahhh, I see…”

That was the same as the Bashin and Patter, then. According to Sinon, the NPCs you could speak to would teach you some vocabulary words, and repeating the pronunciation enough would help you learn those language skills.

It would be nice to eventually command all the different tribal languages, but how much time would that take? I was considering this thought when the street stalls began to transition into small interior shops: items, medicines, and weapons.

“Do you mind if we go into that weapons shop?” I asked.

“Already looked in there. No bullets, no powder, and of course, no guns.”

“…No surprise, either.”

That meant we’d have to go to the Giyoru Savanna to get the ingredients for gunpowder. Here, the little commercial district ended after about fifty yards, as a magnificent arch came into view.

After passing through it, we came to the center of the Stiss Ruins.

The circular space was surrounded by large buildings such as castle manors and churches, with a massive stone structure like the Colosseum of Rome in the center. Numerous arches lined its outer wall, which was half-collapsed like all the rest of the ruins, but we could sense the presence of many people inside it.

“…Is that the place for this so-called friendly meetup?”

“That’s it,” Argo confirmed. She leaned closer to my ear and whispered, “Listen, if anyone asks ya what team you’re with, just say Announcer Fan Club. That’s the loosest group of ’em all, and they barely keep track of membership, so it’s the least likely ta get us exposed.”

“Aha…And just so I’m clear, the announcer in question is the voice that spoke to everyone on the first day when the grace period ended, right? The ‘all shall be given’ person?”

“Well, I didn’t hear it.”

“Oh, right…”

But that was the only time a voice like a system announcement had shown itself in Unital Ring, so that had to be the reference. It was a very alluring voice, I had to admit. Still…

“These guys gotta be down bad if they’re making a fan club for a voice. We don’t even know if the voice belongs to a human or a god or a devil, or if it’s even in a humanoid shape or not.”

“That’s probably what they like about it. If I had ta guess,” Argo said without any evidence. She started trekking toward the stadium, crossing the worn-down stones to the main gate. After walking through the darkened tunnel beyond it, we emerged not in the stands but in the arena itself.

In the space, 160 feet across, there were nearly a hundred players hanging out, as Argo’s tip had said. Most of them had cloth gear, but I could see some leather armor and chain mail, too. Based on their designs, these were inherited gear from ALO, not freshly crafted. If these were the top players out of the converted ALO playerbase, none of them had reached the Iron Age yet.

On the north end of the arena was a stone stage with many decorative fires atop it. Whoever had set this up was probably going to show up there. Argo and I took a spot on the far wall to wait for things to start. Fortunately, the other players were too busy exchanging information to pay much attention to us.

“…Argo, you okay on SP and TP?” I asked, just in case. The info dealer’s head swung up and to the left.

“Hmm. I’ve still got water from that well, but I’m not so sure about my food stock.”

“Here.”

I took out two pieces of bison jerky and gave one to her.

“Aw, thanks,” she said, accepting it, but she did not put it in her mouth. “Even with you, though, I don’t feel good about takin’ something for free.”

“Well, get used to it. You can’t be one of us if you get hung up on little things like who owes what. You can easily die of hunger and thirst in this place…so water and food are like shared resources, in my opinion.”

“‘One of us,’ huh? Heh…the phrase makes my ears feel all prickly,” she said, which I took to be a combination of prickly and ticklish. On that mysterious note, Argo went ahead and bit into the jerky, and I joined her. The flavor of the bison meat I’d harvested from the Giyoru Savanna was similar enough to beef. It wasn’t as gamy as the thornspike cave bear, and it was easier to eat.

Argo was apparently much hungrier than she let on, because she finished her jerky in no time. Then she pulled something that looked like a long, narrow fruit out of her waist sack. She twisted off the cylindrical stem, then lifted it to her lips. There was some kind of liquid inside—water?

“Wh-what is that?” I asked once she’d finished drinking. Argo stuck the stem back on to cap it and replied, “There’s a well a bit to the south of this center square, and there’s a tree growin’ next to it. The NPC who manages the well gives one fruit to each player, which you can use as a canteen…Doesn’t hold a lot, though.”

“Huh! Well…it’s true that even getting containers for water isn’t easy,” I remarked, impressed. I materialized the ceramic water jug Asuna had made and drank some water from it. The jug held three times as much as that fruit, but it was heavy and fragile, so I couldn’t just leave it within arm’s reach on my person. I wanted to get a leather skin that was lighter and tougher, but there were too many higher priorities at the moment.

In the meanwhile, it was approaching ten o’clock, and murmurs arose at the front of the crowd. I glanced up and saw four people climbing the steps on the right of the stage.

The first was a tall man with studded armor and a one-handed sword. The second bore scale armor and a scimitar. The third had cloth armor but a huge two-handed sword on his back, while the fourth was slender, with a white hood…a woman, perhaps. They were almost 150 feet away, so I couldn’t make out the details of their faces.

“Hey, let’s go up closer,” I whispered to Argo and started to lean off the wall, but she held me back.

“All we need is to hear their voices. Don’t do anything to make yerself more visible.”

“………Yes, ma’am.”

When an info dealer with expertise in infiltration gave you advice like that, you followed it. I trained my ears on the speakers, intending to catch every word.

“Hey, guys, we’re gonna get started!” said the first man to take the stage, the one in the studded armor. His voice was loud and clear. “I’m the person who set this informal event up. I’m Holgar, and I run a group called the Absolute Survivor Squad! Many, many thanks to you all for coming together!”

I didn’t recognize his name, but I felt a wave of familiar nostalgia, and I recognized the source at once.

In the town of Tolbana on the north side of the first floor of Aincrad, there was a similar circular stage, if much smaller than this one, and that was where the very first boss strategy meeting had been held. A swordsman named Diavel had led the way, and he’d introduced himself with a loud and cheerful style.

My name’s Diavel, and I like to think of myself as playing a knight!

Someone in the crowd had yelled back, I bet you wish you could say you’re playing a hero! and gotten a laugh from the audience. One simple comment from Diavel had helped to warm up the crowd, and I keenly remember feeling his charisma in that moment.

And now that I thought about it, Argo had first come to me as a proxy for him. She had said that he wanted to buy my Anneal Blade +6. He ultimately offered close to 30,000 col, a massive sum, but I refused all the offers.

Sometimes I thought back on that event. If I had gone through with selling my sword, would Diavel not have taken such a huge risk trying to get the Last Attack bonus on the floor boss and not have died as a result…?

I brushed aside that momentary bit of sentiment and listened to Holgar continue.

“Let me introduce these other nice guys who helped set up this gathering! First of all, the leader of the Weed Eaters, Dikkos!”

The man with the scimitar raised his hands, and a cheer arose.

“Next, the leader of the Announcer Fan Club, Tsuburo!”

Applause for the greatsword-user was more reserved, but the voices and cheers were deeper and manlier.

“Lastly, the leader of the Virtual Study Society, Mutasina!”

A rustle ran through the crowd as a collective Who? But that confusion lasted only until Mutasina pulled back her hood, exposing long black hair and pure-white skin. Even from this distance, I could tell from her air and the reaction that she was a considerable beauty.

Over 90 percent of the gathering was male, and they erupted into the loudest cheers and whistles yet. Mutasina waved her hands cheerily, working them up into a frenzy.

When the crowd calmed down, Holgar stepped forward again. “We’re going to be leading the discussion today! Unfortunately, they’re saying Team Fawkes got wiped out last night, so they’re not here!”

Murmurs rippled through the arena. I hadn’t heard of that group. I looked toward Argo, but she just averted her eyes and said nothing.

Voices from the crowd demanded an explanation, but the answer Holgar gave was unhelpful.

“Unfortunately, I don’t know the details, either. Apparently, the people in Fawkes invited some others to leave the ruins with them last night, and it seems like they got into a group battle somewhere to the north and lost.”

Some players closer to us discussed this news among themselves.

“North, like, against the Bashin?”

“Those guys are dangerous…There were people who challenged the Bashin during the grace period, when they still had their inherited gear to use and their best skills, and they all got their asses kicked.”

“There’s no way Fawkes wouldn’t know about that. Why would they engage in such a dangerous gamble…?”

As I eavesdropped on the conversation, a sense of foreboding came over me, but I pushed it down and ignored it, trying to focus on the stage. Holgar stepped forward, the light of the flames reflecting off his armor’s studs.

“At any rate!” he shouted. “All I can tell you for now is that Unital Ring isn’t going to be simple or easy! This is the third night since the incident started, and there still isn’t any sign of restoring the game, according to Ymir! So let’s reach the land revealed by the heavenly light, us ALO folks, and solve this thing from the inside!”

Cheers of excitement and agreement issued from the crowd, filling the vast arena.

My friends and I (including Argo) were technically part of the “ALO folks,” which made our goal the same as everyone else’s here. We weren’t trying to sneak ahead of anyone, like Mocri’s group on the first day, and if we had the chance to cooperate with others, we ought to do so. The reason we’d built a town in the forest was so that the ALO players leaving here would view us as the first checkpoint on their way—as long as we could protect against a third attack.

And yet…

I waited for Holgar’s next statement, unable to dispel the sense of foreboding, even as I kept it in check.

When the fervor died down, the tall swordsman returned to his previous light and amicable tone. “The intent of tonight’s friendly meeting is to deepen the ties and information sharing between our four teams, who have decided to play cooperatively! We’ve got food and drink, too, so charge up your TP and SP all you like! As long as you like rabbit meat and the local grasses and fruit!”

There was another cheer from the crowd. A number of wooden wagons, which had clearly been built with the Carpentry skill, rolled out of the tunnels on either side of the stage. The ingredients that Holgar humbly disparaged had been properly cooked, though, and the large pots and dishes steamed with fragrant, alluring seasonings.

“…Where are they getting those spices?” I asked.

“They’re selling ’em at the markets outside,” Argo replied. I made a mental note to buy some before we left. The only cash I was carrying came from Sinon, but I was sure I could get enough to buy spices by selling off some of the materials in my inventory.

While I was very curious about the food, sneaking free grub while I was supposed to be infiltrating a meeting was the very height of poor manners. For now, I’d seen the general attitude and capabilities of the converted ALO players who were taking the game seriously. That was enough of a reward.

“Sure ya don’t wanna eat before we go?” Argo smirked.

I gave her a stern look. “I’m not interested in giving you evidence for your ‘Kirito is a glutton in the virtual world’ theory. C’mon, let’s get outta here while they’re carrying on.”

“Got it. We can stock up on food at the stalls, anyhow. I bet Alicchi and Kurocchi are starving right about now.”

“Yeah, let’s do that,” I said, severing my longing for the dishes and turning back toward the tunnel we’d come through.

But just then, bluish-purple light lit the stones at my feet.

“Wha—?!”

“What’s that?!”

Argo and I turned back in alarm. But none of the hundred heard us—they were screaming on their own. This was not a predetermined part of the night’s events.

I stood up on my toes and watched the ground carefully. It was not the stones themselves that were glowing but a complicated texture floating over the stone itself. It consisted of many rings, patterns, and symbols, just like…

“A magic circle…?” I murmured, following the lines with my eyes to the middle of the arena. There was a huge crest there, shining brighter than the rest of it—the center of the circle. There was a 150-foot magic circle completely filling the circular arena, in other words. In ALO, this would be considered a major spell, above the category of regular magic. Or perhaps even beyond that, a grand spell.

The symbol in the center abruptly began to move on its own. It wriggled, rippled, and swirled. In moments, it grew to a pillar of light over thirty feet tall, then split apart and collapsed, forming a bizarre new silhouette.

A narrow head covered in endless thorns. Long hair, tangled and tortured. Four arms with two joints each. The upper body of a skinny woman and a lower half of writhing feelers.

It was a monster that could be described only as some dark, deviant god. It lifted its four arms high overhead and bellowed something in some inhuman language. Blue-black orbs grew from its open palms.

Magic? What? Who? Why? Where?

Questions burst through my mind like sparks. This was clearly some malicious act of magic. The best method of dealing with it would be to attack the caster and interrupt the spell, but identifying them in this crowd would be difficult.

“Kiri-boy, we gotta go!” Argo shouted, and she began to run for the north exit. But my instincts told me she wouldn’t make it in time, so I grabbed the collar of her hood and held her back, drawing my sword.

“Stay hidden!” I shouted, right as a huge number of light projectiles shot from the deviant god’s palms.

They made a hideous greeeeee! squeal as they shot forth, each on its own complex trajectory. They struck players of all sorts—those still with shock, those in abject terror, and those who tried to evade. It was extremely high-level homing magic. Those who were hit didn’t drop immediately, but they were surely hit with some kind of Debuff or delayed damage effect.

I had no desire to find out what those effects were myself. I held up my sword, tracking two shots that came my way. It was impossible to dodge them, and no armor would block them, either.

But if the magic here worked on the same logic as in ALO, there was a way to deal with it: the special nonsystem skill I developed while playing in Alfheim, spell-blasting.

Magic in ALO—accumulations of light fired from a spellcaster—had no physical form as a general rule, so it was impossible to block with sword or shield. But in the very center of the spell, there was a hurtbox no larger than a pixel width, which, if struck by nonphysical damage, could shatter the spell…sometimes.

For some reason, SAO’s sword skills existed in Unital Ring, but I hadn’t confirmed yet whether they held ALO’s elemental damage effects. For the moment, I just had to trust they would.

Watching the light rounds hurtle down at me from an angle, I prepared to unleash the two-part sword skill Vertical Arc. But they did not follow simple parabolas; they wobbled and curved like knuckleballs. It would be nearly impossible to destroy both with a two-part sword skill. The better choice would be to give up on one and focus on destroying the other instead.

With that split-second decision made, I switched to Sonic Leap, jumping toward one of the projectiles raining down on me. In ALO, this sword skill added wind damage to its physical effect. Trusting that it would do the same in Unital Ring, I aimed for the center of the light.

“Grahhh!” I bellowed, slicing.

It felt like crushing an extremely small but tough kernel. The blue-black spot of light split in midair like a viscous liquid. The other projectile, however, did a sharp turn in midair and struck the base of my neck.

An extremely strange sensation, neither heat nor chill, gripped my throat. It was like being strangled by some transparent demon’s claw. I gritted my teeth and landed from my jump, then turned around.

“Argo, you okay?!” I asked.

She was backed away against the wall, staring at me with huge eyes. She squeaked, “I’m fine, Kiri-boy…but…you…”

“We’ll talk later! Let’s get to a spot where we can escape at a moment’s notice! If the caster notices I spell-blasted that one, we’re in trouble!”

“……Got it,” Argo replied. We crouched and rushed out of the way, stopping next to the exit tunnel so we could monitor the situation.

At that moment, the menacing god looming over the center of the arena melted into the night. The magic circle on the ground contracted as it rotated, then vanished. Between the toppled wagons and food littered over the ground, the players stood around in shock and horror.

Eventually, someone said, “Hey, your neck…”

At that, everyone observed below the chin of the nearest player, or they felt at their own necks. Without thinking, I looked at the neck of the man standing closest to me and saw something that looked like a black ring lodged around it—but that wasn’t right. It was a ring pattern, drawn directly on the skin.

I tried to look down at my own chest, but I obviously couldn’t see my neck, and I didn’t have a mirror. When I glanced at Argo instead, she just nodded back at me nervously. Apparently, the ring was on my neck, too. But for now, I hadn’t lost any HP, MP, TP, or SP, and I didn’t feel any sensations with my avatar. What kind of Debuff was it? And how was it possible to use such a massive spell at this early point in the game?

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” someone yelled from the stage. Holgar, Dikkos, and Tsuburo had their swords drawn and pointed at Mutasina, the one woman of the group.

“Mutasina, you told us you were gonna put on a huge Buff to pump up the crowd! This is obviously some kind of Debuff! That ain’t funny! Not even as a joke!” Holgar roared, but Mutasina was not intimidated in the least. She slumped against her long staff and replied with calm intensity.

“It is not a joke, of course. All of this was planned.”

“Planned…?! Then you accepted the offer to have this get-together just so you could cast this magic on all of us?!”

“That’s what I told you. There’s no other reason I’d have chosen to take part in such a pointless gathering, is there?”

That statement was met with howls of fury from here and there in the crowd.

“Screw you! Take this stupid magic off us!”

“You think you can beat a hundred of us together?!”

Spurred on by their anger, Holgar took a step forward. “You heard them. Undo the Debuff. Or else we’ll solve this problem in a different way.”

Clearly, this “different way” meant killing the person who cast the spell. On Holgar’s cue, Dikkos and Tsuburo surrounded Mutasina from the sides. The people in the arena crowded closer to the stage.

This put a thought into my head. Elsewhere in the arena should be other members of Mutasina’s group…the Virtual Study Society, was it? Had she placed that Debuff on them, too? Or did she get all of her fellow members to evacuate before she’d started the magic…?

I wasn’t about to get the answer to that. Whatever effect this Debuff had, it was going to be impossible for her to avoid simultaneous attacks while surrounded like this. Mutasina probably expected to be killed here, quitting Unital Ring forever and leaving only this mystery unanswered.

“…Fine, then. We’ll take matters into our own hands!” Holgar shouted, and he pulled back his sword. At the same time, Tsuburo’s two-handed sword and Dikkos’s scimitar began to glow with sword skills.

Mutasina simply stood there, lifted her long staff with one hand—then slammed it down against the ground. The bottom tip made a high-pitched kraaack!

Instantly, I was unable to breathe, and I fell to my knees.

It was like something sticky had blocked my windpipe. I pressed my hands to my throat, desperately trying to breathe, but I couldn’t force air inward or outward. Through my sudden panic, I could see that the aggressors onstage, and nearly a hundred players around the arena, were all struggling on the ground in agony. There was a slight blue glow over the group, the dim light of all the rings shining at once. My neck was probably doing the same. On my HP bar, there was no ongoing damage, but I could see a Debuff icon on the right side that looked like hands wrapped around a throat.

“Kiri-boy!”

Argo leaped to my side and smacked me on the back, but it did not dislodge the sense of something blocking my throat. Ten seconds, twenty…I could feel the panic growing larger and darker within me. The sense of suffocation was truly real—I felt like my body in real life wasn’t breathing, either. But was that possible? If it was possible to stop a player’s respiration despite the many layers of protection built into the AmuSphere, this was SAO all over again.

I swung my right hand, trying to open my ring menu. The only way to escape this agony had to be logging out. After a few failed attempts, I finally got it open, and I looked for the system icon out of the eight in the ring.

Then there was another loud kraaaack!

Just like that, my airway was clear again. I was drowning in air, sucking it into my avatar’s lungs, with my hands pressed to the ground.

Several seconds later, when I was finally emerging from my state of panic, Argo grabbed my shoulder and pulled me upright.

“You all right, Kiri-boy?!”

“Y…yeah, I’m okay,” I responded weakly. Before looking toward the stage again, I checked to confirm the Debuff icon was gone.

Holgar, Dikkos, and Tsuburo were all frozen, hunched over on all fours. Standing regally above them, Mutasina reminded me a bit—just a tiny bit—of Administrator, who ruled over the human realm of the Underworld as the head of the Axiom Church. Despite having just stopped the breathing of a hundred, she was neither gloating nor afraid of what she’d done. Her only outward display was a pale smile. It took an iron will to do something like that.

“Do you understand now?” she asked coolly, waving her left hand. “The spell I placed upon everyone here is called the Noose of the Accursed. You just experienced its effects for yourself…and once it has been successfully cast, its area of effect and length of time are infinite.”

The other players in the arena murmured with horror. The words “No way…” escaped my throat.

Infinite? Endless? So every time Mutasina hit the ground with the butt of her staff, every player here would be unable to breathe, no matter where in the world they were?

The murmuring grew louder and louder until Mutasina lifted her staff, silencing them all.

“But have no fear. I did not cast this magic upon you all to torment you. Just like you, I want to beat this game…I’m simply following the most effective path to achieving that.”

“…Most effective?” snarled Tsuburo boldly, getting unsteadily to his feet. “The most effective path is to threaten your fellow players with sadistic magic? There are other members of your Virtual Study Society here, aren’t there?”

“Members…?” Mutasina repeated, then chuckled. “The reason you chose to meet in this place was because of a temporary alignment of goals, wasn’t it? Let me be clear: You might cooperate now, but the closer the goal becomes, the more our teams will compete with one another. In the end, even the players within a team will fight and kill one another. But as long as my magic is active upon you, we can avoid that situation. Do you see…? This is the best and most effective means of getting to the finish line, isn’t it?”

It almost sounded playful, coming from her lips. Tsuburo was at a loss for what to say. Instead, Dikkos spoke up from the seat of his pants.

“Of course that ain’t true! We trust each other…me and Holgar and Tsuburo are in it together! If it turns into a race at the end, we’d never betray or kill each other! We’ll help each other out until the last moment, then line up to race the very last length and congratulate the winner…Isn’t that how VRMMOs work?!”

“Ha-ha…ha-ha-ha-ha.”

Her slender shoulders shook with laughter.

“Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha…I’m sorry, it’s just…that’s so ridiculous. Trust? Congratulate? Do you really think those things happen here…in this virtual world?”

Where her voice was lighthearted before, it suddenly turned as cold as though encased in ice.

“Of course they don’t.”

Her black eyes glared at the players in the arena.

“In the virtual world…at least, in The Seed’s VRMMOs, things like trust, love, and salvation are nothing more than illusions. The only things that are real are hatred, betrayal, deceit, and despair. After all, the origin of all full-dive virtual worlds is Sword Art Online. A pure hell that took four thousand lives with it, kicking and screaming.”

I had to grit my teeth to keep from shouting, What would you know?!

A vast number of players had lost their lives in Aincrad. In terms of victims of a single person’s actions, it was undoubtedly one of the greatest atrocities ever committed in human history. But hatred and despair weren’t the only things that had existed in that world. If that were true, then I wouldn’t still be with Asuna, Silica, Liz, Klein, Agil, and Argo…all players whom I’d met in Aincrad.

But Mutasina’s cold voice held nothing but mockery for my thoughts. “The darkness SAO gave birth to has only spread throughout The Seed Nexus and multiplied. Now those infinite worlds have coalesced into one. In Unital Ring, the darkness will be compressed again, and when its density surpasses its peak, something new will result…something even darker and deeper. And I want to see that.”

Then, as though remembering something, she added, “Of course…there are members of the Virtual Study Society here, too. They agreed to be exposed to the Noose of the Accursed. It might seem contradictory, but there is an unshakable connection of trust among us. And that is why I am certain you will be able to find that trust, too.”

A heavy silence that lasted for a good ten seconds or more settled over the scene.

It was Holgar, sitting flat on the stage, who broke it at last. “What is it…that you want us to do?”

“Haven’t we all been saying it? I want us to pool our strength and work together toward the goal of the game…the land revealed by the heavenly light,” Mutasina said like the captain of a sports team. She laughed. “But of course, a tangible road map will be necessary. Don’t worry—our first goal is already clear.”

“Goal…?”

“Holgar, in your introductory speech, you said that the team called Fawkes was wiped out last night. It was neither a boss monster nor the Bashin who killed them. In a large forest, east of these ruins and far upstream from the Maruba River, they attacked a stronghold built by another team and were defeated.”

As the players rumbled and murmured again, I felt the foreboding from before, and I realized what I feared was true.

The team they called Fawkes was clearly the one led by Schulz that attacked the log cabin last night. And Mutasina bringing up this topic now could mean only one thing.

“The first thing you will do is destroy that team.”

“…Why would we do that?” Dikkos protested. “Just use your magic on them and make them your slaves, too, why don’t ya?”

Mutasina just shrugged it off. “It is not easy to succeed at casting Noose of the Accursed. The motions are lengthy, and the magic circle is impossible to miss. It will not work this effectively without the right situation and audience, such as a group of people who would believe an easy lie about casting a grand Buff spell on an entire gathering.”

Holgar and the others were stunned silent. The black-haired witch continued gently, “Don’t give me those looks. It’s not that you were especially stupid. It’s that the foe we’re going to face is especially powerful. You see, based in those woods to the north, the Great Zelletelio Forest, is none other than the team of Kirito the Black Swordsman.”