Sword Art Online - Volume 25 - Chapter 2

2

“…So I guess insect people eat the same things we do…”

I replied to Leafa’s whisper with a quick, surreptitious nod.

We were seated in a giant circle of over sixty people—players and NPCs—in the empty space bordering the pet stables in the northern part of Ruis na Ríg. The fan-shaped empty lot was planned to be a large farm in the future, measuring thirty yards side to side and fifteen yards front to back, so we still had plenty of room, but even still, the sight of all the former ALO players (plus one from GGO), the former Insectsite players, the Bashin, and the Patter all mingled together around a roaring bonfire was truly something to behold.

The Insectsite players, in particular, had not been anthropomorphized much, if at all; their faces were still those of grasshoppers and mantises and stag beetles, which made them rather frightening to look at. Despite the fact that they should realistically be licking tree sap and eating plants, those grotesque jaws were busy chowing down on fresh-cooked meat, which looked like something out of a horror movie.

“I wonder what the inside of their mouths are like,” muttered Alice, who was seated on my left.

To Leafa’s right, Agil was drinking something resembling beer. He replied, “I could see it during battle. They looked just like human mouths inside.”

Alice made a rather strange face, and I couldn’t help but grunt, “Freaky!”

That was probably because creating an oral structure that was too different from reality would be difficult for a player to process. Back in ALO, I once transformed into a demon with an elongated, wolflike muzzle and tried to eat another player, and I could remember how difficult it was to actually get them into my mouth.

Fortunately, there were no children crying at the sight of a giant grasshopper chomping on meat. It was currently 9:20 PM on September 30th, so the five Patter children were asleep in their dwellings in the east area of town, and the ten Bashin who had moved here were all adults.

But if Yui’s conjecture that NPCs in the world of Unital Ring were adjusted to match the capacity of their dwellings was accurate, the Bashin might soon have children of their own. The problem was that this place was going to be a battlefield tomorrow night, so I hoped they could put off their childbirth until later. We had to concoct a plan to evacuate the Patter children if necessary. The more time went on, the more I needed those Bashin and Patter language skills…

Just then, Yzelma the Bashin chief came striding over to me, holding a massive platter in both hands. She had been drinking heavily, a cheerful smile plastered on her reddened face. She slammed the plate down in front of me, sat, and belted out “  !”—not that I knew what that meant.

There was a sizzling, thick-cut steak on her platter, which was at least two and a half feet in diameter. It was a simple dish, just a huge chunk of meat that had been seared over the fire, but it had a mysterious new seasoned smell, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in this world before, probably due to some Bashin spices she’d brought from home.

“  !” she bellowed again, motioning with the plate. I decided that she was telling me to eat, so I stabbed the steak with my wooden fork. I lifted the cut of meat, a foot long and an inch thick; globs of fat and juices dripped off it.

It looked and smelled delicious—but there was a mental hurdle that kept me from chomping down on it: in a word, because it was the flesh of the gigantic man-faced centipede field boss, the Life Harvester.

Just thirty minutes earlier, we were launching into an all-out raid on the Life Harvester as it went into a frenzied state. The beast had lifted its twin scythes and tail spear high as dozens of sword skills flashed around it. The key that overwrote the possibility of a party-destroying counterattack was my jumping three-part Sharp Nail skill. The third hit split the Life Harvester’s solar plexus, and when its third and final HP bar disappeared, the adrenaline was so intense that I could have set off the AmuSphere’s safety shutoff.

As befitting an ultra-tough enemy, the Life Harvester dropped a ton of experience and items, but the most numerous of those were meat, shell, and bone. There was so much meat, in fact, that we couldn’t carry it all, even after stuffing everyone’s capacity full. It was Yzelma’s suggestion of a celebratory feast that finally gave us something to do with all that meat.

The Bashin grabbed the piles of meat stacked by the bonfire and sliced them up, skewered them, and spiced them before roasting. The Insectsite players, the Patter, and Klein were all delighted to chow down, but I found it difficult not to recall the grotesque image of the Life Harvester, and I was hoping to pass on it—or at least wait to try the stew that Asuna and Yui were using their Cooking skill to flavor—when Yzelma came over.

I glanced to my right, but Leafa looked away. I turned to the left, and Alice averted her eyes. The only person who would face me was Yzelma, directly in front of me. She beamed. There was no escape.

The Life Harvester had a centipede-like design, but to be a true insect, it would need to have a boneless, monocoque structure. So if it had a skeletal structure inside of flesh, that made it a vertebrate animal, closer in biological terms to a cow than a bug.

Or so I told myself, carefully ignoring the knowledge that there were no vertebrates with more than four legs. I took a big bite of the thick steak.

Despite the charred burns on the surface, the inside was appropriately soft. It seemed a bit closer to mutton than beef in flavor, but the Bashin spices made the gamey part of the meat more fragrant. In all honesty, it tasted a rank or two above the thornspike cave bear and Giyoru bison meat—as long as you didn’t let the horrid visage of the Life Harvester cross your mind.

I chewed the meat until it vanished into the void within my avatar and shouted, “It’s good!”

But Yzelma just looked stunned, so I looked to my companions for help. “Um, what’s the Bashin word for delicious?”

Leafa and Alice seemed confused by the question. Silica, who was feeding Pina nuts nearby, glanced over and said, “It’s jeemeh.”

Setting aside the question of how she had learned Bashin, I turned to Yzelma and said, “Jeemeh!”

The warrior’s expression did not change.

“Jeemeh! This is super jeemeh! Crazy jeemeh!”

The other girls couldn’t hold back their giggles. I kept repeating the word—jeemeh, jeemeh—changing the intonation slightly each time, until around the tenth attempt, when Yzelma’s broad face broke into a smile.

“  ! Jeemeh!”

She pounded my right shoulder with a powerful hand and distributed more steaks from the platter to Leafa, then Agil and his friends, and returned to the fire. A familiar message window appeared over the sight of her retreating back.

Bashin skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

Once the window disappeared, I asked Silica, “About how high do you have to get your language skill proficiency before you can use it?”

“Hmmm. To be able to hold even the most basic kind of communication, you’ll need a proficiency of around ten. I’m still only at fifteen, so I can’t act like much of an expert, though…”

“Ten…,” I repeated, thinking it wouldn’t actually be that bad.

Then Silica grinned and added, “By the way, to get to ten, you only need to master about thirty words. Good luck!”

“…Ah…I see…”

So if I wanted to get both Bashin and Patter language skills up to a proficiency of 10, I’d need to memorize and perfectly pronounce sixty vocabulary words that would have zero use in the real world. And I’m sure that the effort would squeeze at least two or three English words out of my brain in exchange.

I have no idea who created this game, but I have to wonder why they made it so damn complicated, I swore to myself, taking another big bite of Life Harvester meat, which I chose to shorten to “harve.”

Every single person at the feast ate until they were full to bursting, but we didn’t consume even 10 percent of the total weight of Life Harvester meat we’d received.

If this were the Underworld, the life of the meat would run out very quickly if the remainder wasn’t dried or frozen or salted, but fortunately, the durability of materials did not decrease in Unital Ring, as long as they were stored in your inventory. In other words, for the moment, we’d solved the issue of Ruis na Ríg’s burgeoning population’s food needs. Eating steak for every meal was going to get boring, but Asuna and Yui’s herbal stew was delicious and a bit gentler in flavor, and there would be plenty of other ways to cook it. On top of that, Misha the bear, Kuro the panther, and Asuna’s pet lizard, Aga, all seemed to love their new harve diet.

The feast lasted until ten at night, when the Patter and the Bashin returned to their dwellings. That left our group and the twenty former Insectsite players in the empty lot by the stable. We took the opportunity to introduce ourselves once again.

The leader of the insects was Agil’s wife, Hyme the orchid mantis. Her senior officers were Zarion the Actaeon rhinoceros beetle and Beeming the Cantharolethrus steinheili stag beetle. After the handshakes concluded, I finally got around to asking the question I’d been wondering about Argo the Rat.

“So…Argo, why were you with them?”

The diminutive info dealer drained the mug of beer in her hand before answering, “Welp, I said I’d do everything I could last night, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did say that.”

“Truth is: I’ve known Hyme for a little while…”

“Oh…from Agil’s route?” I asked, then realized that couldn’t be correct. Argo showed up just two days ago, and she’d been effectively missing before then. If she had been in contact with Agil, he wouldn’t have been so shocked when I introduced her last night.

“Nope. Different route,” Argo replied, as I suspected she would. She glanced at the insects. “I’ve been researchin’ the globalization of the Seed Nexus for the past year or so. Insectsite’s one o’ the bigger Seed games in America, but almost no one in Japan plays it…So when I finally found someone who was, it turned out to be Hyme.”

“Whoa…It’s that big in America?” I asked, more than a little stunned by the revelation.

It wasn’t Argo who replied, however, but Asuna: “Yes, I was only aware of the name of the game because of Yuuki. She said the Sleeping Knights played it for just a little bit before they came to ALO.”

“Ohhh…”

Even though I hadn’t been as close with Yuuki the Absolute Sword, I still felt my chest tighten at the mention of her name. Asuna was smiling, but I couldn’t help but see the light in her eyes wavering.

I reached out without thinking and brushed Asuna’s hand before looking back to Argo. “All right, I know how you know Hyme…but why were you being chased by the Life Harvester with them?”

“Well, ah…”

Argo glanced around, then picked up a long stick off the ground. She used it to draw a circle in the dirt about three feet across.

“It’s probably more complicated than this, but let’s just assume this is the Unital Ring world map, m’kay?”

“Got it.” We nodded. Sinon, Alice, and several of the Insectsite players came over to surround the map.

Unbothered, Argo continued her explanation. “If north is this way, then where we are is right about here.” She jabbed the end of the stick at a spot in the southwest part of the map, quite close to the edge, in fact.

“How do you know we’re there?” Sinon asked.

Argo flipped the branch upward and pointed at the night sky, where trails of rain clouds still remained. “You remember the direction the aurora ran on the first night, Sinocchi?”

Apparently, Argo was content to continue the pattern that began with Alice as Alicchi. Sinon blinked twice with surprise, then bobbed her shoulders. “Yes, I think it was northeast.”

“Meanin’ in this direction.” Argo pointed the branch toward the Ruis na Ríg spot again but stopped herself. “Or was it a little more north than that?”

“Huh? Oh…yeah, I guess,” Sinon agreed. She crouched down and poked a new hole in the dirt with her finger, a few inches northwest of Ruis na Ríg. “There was an aurora in the sky, and when I heard the announcement, I was on the other side of the Giyoru Savanna…around here, I think. If I’m right about what you’re saying, Argo, the aurora I saw would have been pointing a slightly different direction than the one Kirito saw.”

She drew a line to the northeast from her point—toward the center of the circular map. Argo grinned at her and drew a line to the same point from Ruis na Ríg. It also went toward the center, which would mean that, as Sinon had said, they were at slightly different angles.

“Meaning,” rumbled Agil, who had joined the circle at some point. He turned to the praying mantis avatar standing next to him and asked in English, “Hyme, which direction did the aurora flow for you?”

Hyme’s razor-like jaw moved, emitting a smooth, mature woman’s voice. “Almost exactly north.”

She extended her right arm, using the point on the end to draw a line directly north, about four inches west from Ruis na Ríg’s location. Based on the three lines on the map, Argo’s point was clear.

“You’re saying that the aurora appeared all over Unital Ring’s world in a big…radial pattern…?” I murmured.

Argo nodded and drew a few more lines from the east and north side of the map toward the center. “That’s exactly it. Gatherin’ info on the net, I found stories of the aurora travelin’ west—and south, too. I’m guessing that all the Seed game players who got converted into UR were placed in a big ring along the outer edge of the map. And from there, it was On your mark, get set…”

Alice picked up where Argo left off. “Aim for the land revealed by the heavenly light, in the center of the world. In that sense, it was good fortune that Sinon’s GGO players were placed right next to the ALO players…”

“I wouldn’t say we were right next to each other,” Sinon remarked dryly. The others who made the journey to the Giyoru Savanna nodded. As a matter of fact, the wall dungeon where they met Sinon was in the middle of the savanna, and that was already nearly twenty miles from Ruis na Ríg. Sinon had apparently traveled about the same distance before she met up with us, so that meant the ruins for the GGO players were close to forty miles away—farther than the distance between the sylph city of Swilvane and the World Tree at the center of Alfheim.

Leafa was picking up on the same thing. She stared at the map on the ground and murmured, “Argo, just how long is the radius of this world…?”

“Hmmmm,” Argo grunted. She used the tip of the stick to tap three points: the GGO players’ starting point, Ruis na Ríg, and the Insectsite players’ starting point. “I only drew these three spots based on a hunch, y’see. But if the scale here is accurate, the distance from these points to the center of the map would be…somewhere between three hundred seventy-five and four hundred twenty-five miles?”

“Four hundred?!” Leafa shrieked. Lisbeth and Silica groaned “Oh nooo…,” and I could even hear, belatedly, the English-speaking insects exclaiming “No way!” and “Are you kidding me?!”

I couldn’t blame them. If that was just the radius, that meant the diameter was twice that length—over 850 miles. Alfheim alone had a diameter of sixty miles, and that felt nearly endless. Even locked in the death game of SAO, a single floor of Aincrad being six miles across seemed utterly huge. Eight hundred miles was simply impossible to understand. It was nearly the length from Hokkaido in the north down to Kyushu in the southwest. And in terms of the Underworld…

“……!”

Suddenly, I bolted upright, my body trembling.

I looked up and met eyes with Alice, who was directly across from me. The cat-eared knight’s blue eyes were just as wide as mine.

I had a feeling she had come to the same conclusion: What if Argo’s rough estimate was just slightly larger? Say, a radius of 450 miles instead of four hundred…

Then it would perfectly match the radius of the human realm that was surrounded by the End Mountains.

But even if the numbers do match, that’s just a coincidence, I thought, which Alice seemed to sense. She nodded silently.

Aside from the use of the Seed package, there was no connection between the Underworld and Unital Ring. And the Underworld wasn’t connected to the Seed Nexus, which made any possibility of a link exceedingly remote. It was better to focus on the situation around us, rather than trying to look for meaning in coincidences, I told myself.

The murmuring of the group around me died down, too. I cleared my throat and got back to the original topic. “So we have a broad understanding of the structure of the world map. But how does that connect to the reason you were together with Hyme’s group?”

“Oh yeah! I was explaining that, wasn’t I?” Argo joked. She shot a glance at the line of insect soldiers before continuing, “It’s simple, really. Ever since this whole thing started, I’ve been gettin’ feedback from Hyme about their situation. The Insectsite folks said things were real fishy with them, so they asked if I wanted to help ’em out.”

“Fishy…?” I repeated.

From ahead and on my left, someone said, “Kiri, how much do you know about Insectsite?”

It was coming from the praying mantis with a white exterior and pink highlights: Hyme. I was taken aback by her fluent Japanese and nickname for me. I shook my head and mumbled, “Um…h-hardly anything…”

“That’s natural. In Insectsite, players are all arthropods, and there’s a faction war happening between hexapods—six-legged insects—and others like Chelicerata and myriapods. Chelicerata include spiders and scorpions, while myriapods are centipedes and millipedes and the like.”

“…Wouldn’t most players side with the insects?” I asked.

The mantis’s triangular head bobbed. “Ex-zactly. The Chelicerata and myriapods—based on the number of legs, we call them Eight-or-Mores, or more commonly, Eighmores—have always been overwhelmed by the insect side—and consistently losing territory. So there’s been some rebalancing lately, so that Eighmores have way stronger stats and skills now. The Eighmores were starting a furious counterattack to tilt the scales when this whole incident happened.”

“So, um…I’m guessing that the Insectsite players showed up in the same place, both insects and Eighmores?”

“Yeah.”

“Wouldn’t that lead to absolute chaos?”

“It did,” Hyme confirmed. Zarion and Beeming, who were receiving interpretation from Agil, snarled in their own language. Once they were done expressing their frustration, Hyme resumed her story.

“With the first few hours of being forced to convert to this game, nearly all the Sixes—that’s us, the insects—were killed by Eighmores. It was inside the grace period, so we revived, but we lost all our inherited equipment to them and had no way to come back from behind. Most of the Sixes didn’t leave the starting ruins regardless, but our troop had a feeling that the grace period was going to end, and we escaped.”

“Troop…? Is that what they call guilds in your game?”

“Yeah…In fact, we were one of the top-ten troops in Insectsite. But it was really hard to advance without gear, and the grace period ended at some point, plus the Eighmores started rushing out of the ruins to chase us down. There was no way out for us…How do you say that in Japanese, again?”

“Um…we’d say nicchi mo sacchi mo ikanai, I suppose…”

“Okay, so we were all nicchi-sacchi, and that’s when I got the message from Argo.”

I exhaled, relieved to see where the story was going at last.

The bonfire in the center of the clearing was nearly dead now, just the last little flickers of flames remaining, around which Misha, Kuro, and Aga slept soundly. And now that I looked closer, even Pina had left Silica’s head to curl up atop Kuro’s back. While Aga hadn’t taken part in the battle, a worse outcome against the Life Harvester could have spelled disaster for Misha or Kuro—or perhaps both of them.

Each of these pets had been tamed through a confluence of circumstances, but even in the few days we’d had them, I had to admit that I was surprisingly attached. I didn’t want to imagine losing them, but that just meant I needed to think long and hard about how to use them in battle to minimize risk.

I turned away from the animals to Argo again. “So today, you were traveling to the Insectsite area to meet up with Hyme and her friends. If you’d just said the word, we could have sent someone with you…”

“Nah, I was hiding and sneaking past all the monsters along the way. Safer for me to go alone.”

“Oh yeah, hide-and-seek master?” I needled good-naturedly. “How’d you end up getting chased by that huge monster, then?”

The Rat made a bitter face. While she’d traveled to meet them alone, she was returning in a huge party of twenty-one, so that was an unfair question. I felt a bit bad about asking it.

“That was my mistake,” she admitted.

“Wait…really?”

“The info agent part o’ me got greedy. Listen, Kiri-boy, Unital Ring’s got some unnatural features.”

“Oh…?”

Asuna and the other girls leaned in closer with interest. The center of attention again, Argo resumed poking at the map with her stick.

To the southwest of Ruis na Ríg’s dot, in the lower right of Giyoru Savanna, she drew a small circle, rather than a dot. Then she added another, far to the northwest.

“Here and there around the world, there are perfectly circular basins. At the biggest, they’re about six miles across, and even the smaller ones are still two or three miles. The forests and rivers are all perfectly natural in design, so you gotta figure there’s a particular reason these basins are so circular, huh?” she stated. I murmured and stared, lost in thought.

“Oh…That’s the basin where the Bashin village is!” Lisbeth cried, pointing at the circle closer to Ruis na Ríg. And Sinon indicated the circle farther away. “I suspect this basin is where the Ornith village is. I just assumed that they had dug the land down that way…But I suppose it was a natural feature instead.”

Asuna and Silica nodded along with them, but I had seen neither basin for myself. Yui was examining the map closely next to Asuna. She had visited the Bashin village twice, so I asked her, “Yui, was the basin where the Bashin live really that circular?”

“I did not have the opportunity to view it from a high altitude, so I have not confirmed the full scale of it…But from what I observed, the arc of the basin’s boundary has an estimated roundness deviation of about two inches. That number is certainly impossible to imagine coming from the Seed program’s landscape-generation process…”

It took me a moment to digest this explanation. A roundness deviation of two inches meant that the miles-wide basin, when measured against a perfect geometric circle of the same size, wouldn’t deviate more than two inches from its border. Indeed, that could only mean it was intentionally placed by the world’s creator.

“…What are these circular basins for anyway?” I asked Argo.

The info dealer’s grimace was clearly visible under her hood. “That’s what I’m lookin’ up. For now, I know there’s been over thirty of these basins found all over the map. And there’s somethin’ inside every one of ’em. NPC villages, ruins, dungeons…I spotted one of them around here after meeting up with Hyme tonight, in fact.”

She drew a third circle on the map, two inches east from Ruis na Ríg—which was probably more like twenty miles in actual distance.

“There’s no intel about this one on the net yet, so I wanted to at least see what was inside it. I asked them to wait outside, and I snuck in. Inside a forest of dead trees, there was a stone circle ruin, and I felt sure I smelled treasure inside. That was when that huge freakin’ humantipede jumped out at me…”

“…I see.”

Over to the east of the clearing, the only sight were the trees of the Great Zelletelio Forest that surrounded Ruis na Ríg. But of course, the map continued on beyond the boundary of the forest, which was only a tiny part of the world of Unital Ring.

“And you got chased by the Life Harvester from that basin all the way to where you met up with us.”

“Who would have guessed the thing would give chase for twenty whole miles? I really screwed things up for Hyme’s group…,” Argo lamented, a rare sign of deflation from her.

But Zarion, the something-or-other rhinoceros beetle, said happily, “Never mind that, girl! I had a blast!”

Beeming, the something-or-other stag beetle, added, “I felt so much better after we beat that guy!”

The other insects chipped in with their own words of reassurance. To my surprise, Argo replied with English just as smooth as Agil’s.

“Hey, do you think the reason that giant freak chased us so long is because it was an Eighmore, and y’all are Sixes?”

The insects erupted in laughter, and I couldn’t help but think, Wow, Argo, this is incredible!

With the situation fully explained now, I had no reservations about bringing the twenty insects into Ruis na Ríg. If anything, I was ready to beg them to join us…except that there was one warning to give them before that could happen.

Employing plenty of help from Agil, I used every last bit of my English ability in explaining to Hyme and her friends the ultimate danger that was approaching us as soon as tomorrow night.

Upon learning about the witch Mutasina, leader of the Virtual Study Society, and her terrifying suffocation magic, plus the army of over a hundred players under her thrall coming to attack our town, Hyme engaged in a very serious conversation with her companions.

She turned back to me at one point to ask, “Is there any possibility of cooperation with this Mutasina?”

“……”

I couldn’t give her an immediate answer. Without realizing it, I lifted my hand to touch the throat guard of my armor. Beneath it, there was a stark, ringed black symbol around my neck, symbol of Mutasina’s suffocation magic. In the Stiss Ruins far to the south, Mutasina could thump the butt of her staff against the ground, and I would be reduced to rolling around on the ground, unable to breathe.

There was no doubt that her overall power was in the top echelon of the entire Unital Ring. If we could work alongside her, we would have a tremendously reassuring ally. If.

Picking my English words carefully, I translated Mutasina’s words for them to hear.

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?

Even after the final question at the end had been relayed, the insects did not speak for some time. I started to worry that my choice of English had been poor, until Hyme spat, “Ridiculous.”

She crossed her thorny arms before her chest and said in Japanese, “No, I don’t think we’ll be making friends with her. And now that I’ve heard about this, I can’t possibly move on and pretend it didn’t happen.”

“W…well, I want you to consider this carefully. We’re talking about an army of a hundred…You could stay here for the night and leave tomorrow morning, and no one will think the worse of you.”

“Yes, a hundred players is no laughing matter. But between your friends, Kiri, those cool natives, the cute mice, and all of us, that makes sixty, right? I know we’re better in terms of individual combat ability, and we’ve got the advantage of our defenses. It’d be closer than you think, wouldn’t it?”

“Well…that’s true.”

It seemed like desperate odds for us this morning, but the twenty insects added to the equation made for a much different picture. And the players on Mutasina’s side had no idea that we had the Insectsite team on our side, so if they took part in the big battle, the visual shock of those grotesque insect avatars might have a psychological effect on the enemy. As long as we cooked up a good plan and confused them with traps and sneak attacks, we might have a chance to win.

But…

“A good chance” wasn’t good enough. Fighting off an enemy invasion only to lose half of our number wasn’t really victory. If you died at all in Unital Ring, you could never log back in. I didn’t want to lose a single companion until we could beat it altogether. And it was doubly true for NPCs, who really would die for good. I only wanted to fight if I was certain that we could turn back a hundred enemies without a single casualty on our side. And those players in Mutasina’s army were under her coercion, so I didn’t really want to cause mass casualties among them, either.

“…If we can just do something about Mutasina before the battle begins,” I proposed, as I’d done in the meeting before we fought the Life Harvester.

Klein, who’d been through somewhere between ten and twenty beers, lamented, “That’s what it comes to, huh? It ain’t in my playbook to do a sneak attack on a lady I’ve never even seen before, but if they’re gonna attack us, I guess it’s gotta be done…”

“If you want to go alone and talk her out of it, be our guest,” Lisbeth suggested.

He shook his head and wailed, “Hell no! Not if it means walking right up to her and having her cast that choking magic on me!” Our friends and even the insects chuckled at this.

To my right, I could feel Argo’s gaze on me, and I carefully avoided looking back at her.

Last night, when traveling to the Stiss Ruins where the ALO players started, I fell under the effects of Mutasina’s choking magic, the Noose of the Accursed—but I hadn’t told my friends yet. The only person who knew, because she’d been there, was Argo.

I made her promise to stay quiet; because if the others knew, they would demand to place solving my curse at the top of the priority list when we had a mountain of other tasks to stay on top of. I didn’t want to be the reason we were falling behind on leveling up and getting better gear.

At every opportunity, Argo sent me telepathic messages saying “Ya better tell ’em,” but once the Siege of Ruis na Ríg began—or Defense of Ruis na Ríg, from our perspective—Mutasina wouldn’t activate the Noose spell. Not only would it immobilize me, it would affect all one hundred of her followers as well.

My guess—which was almost certainly accurate—was that killing Mutasina or destroying her staff would undo the Noose. I could explain the situation to Asuna and everyone else after that point and apologize for keeping it secret, I told myself, to assuage my feeling of guilt.

I turned to Hyme. “I’d be very grateful if you stayed around to fight. If so, I think that it will be the key to our victory, as you said. But at the current moment, it will be hard for us to fight off a hundred enemies without losing anyone. So I want to search for a way to avoid this war, until the last possible moment, and if it comes to this…I think we should consider abandoning the town.”

No one spoke for a long time.

Now that the Patter and the Bashin were here, with the Patter having had children to boot, we had just come to the conclusion hours ago that we could not abandon the town. The others had to be wondering what I was thinking to go back to it again.

But after experiencing the possibility of total loss against the Life Harvester, the chill running down my spine was still present. I didn’t want to lose my companions. I didn’t want anyone to die. I would be happier to just stop playing Unital Ring if going on meant losing anyone…

I clenched my fists briefly, then turned to look Asuna in the face. Her eyes, which smoldered with quiet flames, stared right back into mine. It seemed to me, however, that there was a faint note of misgiving in them, too.

I couldn’t blame her. The center of Ruis na Ríg was our home, the log cabin. It should have been smashed to pieces along with the twenty-second floor of New Aincrad when it fell, but through a number of miracles and an incredible amount of effort, we managed to make it land in this forest. Abandoning Ruis na Ríg meant abandoning our home.

Amid the heavy silence, a voice arrived that was as cool and refreshing as a night breeze.

“Kirito, if you think only of what happens in defeat before you fight, you will end up losing winnable battles,” said Alice. Her back was proud and straight, and her hand rested on the pommel of the sword on her left hip. Even wearing crude iron armor, she looked just like the Integrity Knight she had been in her old glory days. But what was I saying? She was still the proud and noble Osmanthus Knight, of course.

“Of course, it is important to consider all circumstances,” she continued, “but they must be considered for the sake of victory; is that not true? I believe that it would be losing sight of the entire purpose if we were to choose to run in order to avoid battle.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

During the Otherworld War that took place in the Underworld, Alice threw herself into a battle that was three thousand against fifty thousand, and against those astronomical odds, she led her troops to victory with a massive sacred art of her own making. At the time, I was in a comatose state, so I wasn’t able to help—and those words coming from her now were a sucker punch directly to my heart.

Yes…we had over twenty hours before Mutasina’s army attacked. It was too early to be giving up yet. If we thought hard, we might find a way—a way to defeat a raid party of a hundred without losing a single one of our friends.

In the corner of my view, it said ten pm. The evening was getting long by now, but for VRMMO players, this was prime time. Perhaps now was a good point to move to the log cabin and start strategic planning for real.

But Hyme, who’d been discussing something with her companions, turned to me and motioned nimbly with her strange praying mantis shoulders. “Kiri, I hate to say it, but my friends need to log out now.”

“Huh? Oh…right, the others are diving from America, huh…?”

Agil’s wife lived in Tokyo, but the other nineteen of them lived in the United States, I presumed, so the time difference was a consideration. I tried to calculate what time it would be over there. Yui was thoughtful enough to recognize the look of pain on my face and did it for me.

“It is currently five AM on the West Coast, and eight AM on the East Coast!”

“Thanks, Yui. Yeah, that’s a long night…Sorry for taking so much of your time,” I said.

Hyme’s triangular head shook from side to side. “No, we had a great time. Do you mind if they use those shacks to log out?” she asked, pointing at the stables on the north end of the clearing.

They might have been nonhuman avatars, but it didn’t feel right to treat them like stable animals. Instead, I guided them to the inn—which wasn’t yet functioning as a business—on the south side, where Zarion and the others could log off.

Left behind on her own, Hyme came to the cabin with us. We sat on the floor of the spacious living room to resume our talk.

On a bulletin board I built using the Beginner Carpentry skill, I drew a simple map of the environs around Ruis na Ríg using some bonfire ash. Then I posed a question to the group. “Think about this as if you were Mutasina. If you were going to attack this town with a hundred players, what strategy would you use?”

They were taken aback by the sudden mental exercise but took the scenario seriously.

Ruis na Ríg was a circle two hundred feet across, surrounded by sturdy ten-foot-tall stone walls and wooden gates in the four ordinal directions: northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. Thick forest surrounded the town, with the only exception being a road from the southwest gate leading to the Maruba River that ran to the west of the forest.

After thirty seconds, the first to speak was Agil, who’d been freed from his interpreting duties now that the Americans were gone. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like this Mutasina has a real sick personality, so I doubt her forces will just come rushing right up the southwest road.”

“I agree,” said Silica, Pina resting on her head. Misha, Aga, and Kuro were sleeping in the stable, but Pina’s default location in this world was its owner’s head. “Mutasina will want to minimize the loss of her allies, too, so I think she’ll try to come up with a plan that will catch us by surprise. Like, hiding separate parties in the woods on either side of the road, then catching us in a pincer attack when we rush out at them…”

The rest of the party murmured in agreement. Luring enemies out of their safe zone into being surrounded was a classic strategy against monsters. If it worked in a PvP setting, it would have great effect, too.

“I wonder if clearing out the surrounding forest is the safest thing to do, in the end…,” Sinon questioned. Again, murmurs arose, sounding more conflicted this time.

Argo, who was sitting cross-legged against the wall, rocked back and forth. “I ain’t just sayin’ this because I’m using a scouting build, but you can use forests in a big free-for-all, too. Clearing out the trees to open up the land removes the danger of an ambush, but it also leaves us with fewer options for strategy.”

“Indeed,” agreed Asuna. “The reason Schulz’s ambush group burned the forest first was probably for light—and also to protect against us launching a sneak attack through the trees. I would guess that, generally speaking, in the open the advantage will go to the side with numbers…”

“That’s true,” said Sinon, who did not have a rebuttal.

The next to speak was Yui, who usually dedicated herself to listening carefully in discussions like these. “In that case, would Mutasina attempt to level the forest before launching her attack? You would need some heavy machinery in the real world, but in Unital Ring, depending on your skill level and tools, you can cut down a grown spiral pine in about ten seconds. With a hundred players, I think they could clear out every last tree within five hundred yards of Ruis na Ríg in an hour.”

“……Uh-huh…” In the back of my mind, I thought of the witch as I had witnessed her at the Stiss Ruins. “There’s no way that the Noose of the Accursed is the only spell that Mutasina can use. If she can use other attack spells, she’ll want to remove any cover to hide behind…So it seems possible that she’ll open up the land around us, then put another tactic into play.”

“Great thinking, Yui! It’s so good to have you with us!” exclaimed Lisbeth, hugging the girl and scrunching her hair.

Asuna watched this interaction with delight but soon took on a more serious expression. “Say, Kirito…do you think this Noose of the Accursed might be possible to recast…or add new victims to somehow?”

“Uh…meaning, can she maintain the hundred who are already under the spell and cast the Noose on more players?”

“Yes,” she said, totally serious. I was almost going to laugh it off, to say that it would practically be cheating to work like that.

But everyone’s heads turned when a voice said, “Why not?”

Eleven pairs of eyes fixed on Argo’s face. She continued, uncharacteristically severe, “In the Stiss Ruins, when Mutasina said their first target was Kirito’s team, Dikkos of the Weed Eaters had said, ‘Why would we do that? Use this choking magic on them and make them your slaves, too, why don’t ya?’”

Indeed, that quote sounded like something I’d heard atop that stage in the ruins. But it was impressive that she could recall the details of the quote amid all the chaos of that scene.

“And Mutasina replied, ‘It is not easy to succeed at casting the 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.’ She didn’t say that it was impossible for the spell to add extra targets to its effect. Of course, that coulda been a bluff to make her threat more effective…”

Another long silence settled over the scene. I was keenly aware of an itching around my throat where the symbol had been placed.

Asuna, who had brought up the topic, suggested, “It might be a bluff…but we should assume it’s possible. Which means she might attempt to place the Noose upon us at some point, too. It might have lengthy motions and an obvious magic circle, but if the targets are surrounded with no escape…”

Her words brought the image of Mutasina to mind again.

She looked like a holy woman, wearing a spotless hooded white robe and bearing a simple staff, and her voice was pure and righteous, but the words she spoke were utterly cold and ruthless. She had called SAO, the world that Asuna and I and our friends lived through, a world of pure hell that took four thousand lives with it, kicking and screaming.

I had to take a deep breath to calm myself from the memory. “Yes, it’s quite possible that Mutasina will attempt it…In fact, I can’t imagine her doing anything else. She could clear out the forest around the town to prevent guerilla combat, surround us with a huge army to cut us off of escape, and then put the Noose on us. If that works, she’ll earn herself sixty new followers.”

“You know, I was thinking something,” said Klein, still holding up his beer mug.

“Go ahead.”

“You just said sixty—that includes the Bashin and the Patter, yeah? This might sound cold, but…will suffocation magic even work on NPCs who don’t have physical players inside them?”

“Uh…” This question took me so by surprise that I had to blink several times before I could compose myself. “Um…While I know I said it was suffocating, it’s not actually stopping the player’s breath; it’s just making it feel that way for the avatar, so…”

“Huh? Really?”

Now it was Klein’s turn to be surprised. Even having experienced it for myself, I couldn’t state for certain that it was safe. The recollection of that frighteningly realistic choking sensation came back to me, and I nearly started coughing out of sheer impulse.

“I conclude that it is impossible for an AmuSphere signal to stop actual physiological breathing,” said Yui firmly.

She was being held in Lisbeth’s lap at the moment and hopped up to walk over to me at the bulletin board, where she turned, white dress twirling, to continue her explanation.

“Respiratory control in the human body lies in the medulla oblongata, at the lower part of the brain stem. But the AmuSphere signals that allow a game program to interact with the brain only reach the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain. The cerebral cortex includes the sensory processing areas, so you might be able to create the illusion that breathing has stopped, but the AmuSphere is not functionally capable of stopping the body’s respiration, and even if it were, the safety would kick in and forcefully log the player out of the system.”

The collected group murmured with admiration at Yui’s tactful, logical deduction. I had to take her word for it about the medulla oblongata and cerebral cortex, but I understood the final part of her speech very deeply. The AmuSphere was built directly in response to the NerveGear that took the lives of thousands of SAO players. It was packed with layers of safety features, so that if the user reached an unsafe heart rate, or went into a dehydrated state, or even just held their bladder for too long, they could be pulled out of the program. It was unthinkable that the people who made it would allow for any kind of freakish outcome that might have a direct effect on the user’s life.

The Noose’s feeling of constriction, like the sounds I was hearing and scents I was smelling, was nothing but a virtual sensory signal. But even still…

Yui continued, “Also, I surmise that the suffocation magic will be effective against NPCs like the Bashin and the Patter as well. NPCs in Unital Ring utilize the same language engine that I do. Through my avatar, I receive sensory information, including not just sight and hearing, but also smell, taste, and touch. I enjoy good smells and delicious flavors, but I am programmed to find pain and heat unpleasant in the same way that you all do. I was made indestructible in SAO and ALO, so I never felt pain in them, but now that I am a player, I will feel pain if I am slashed by a sword, and I will feel anguish if my windpipe is blocked.”

Without thinking, I reached out toward Yui, rubbing her little head with my left hand. She smiled at my touch, reacting as though it was ticklish.

Yui could find delight in these interactions and think that Asuna’s cooking was delicious, but she could also feel physical pain and agony. The elaborate nature of Akihiko Kayaba’s AI programming was as stunning as ever, yet I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t just stopped at simulating the feeling of pleasure alone.

I didn’t want to put Yui into our defensive battle, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t accept that as an answer.

Klein smacked his knee to break the heavy silence. “Even if the suffocation spell works on NPCs and Yuippe, we can deal with it! If it’s just an illusion, we can basically ignore it,” he said confidently.

“Ah yes. If we know it’s fake from the start, there’s no need to panic about it,” Leafa added. “In fact, our best chance to strike might be by allowing Mutasina to cast the magic on us. All the other enemies around us are going to fall over, so if we just withstand the pain and sprint to her, we could beat her with two or three good sword skills, right?”

That was my sister, ever the bold and confident combatant. In the Otherworld War, she had used the Terraria account to protect the Dark Territory’s orcs and pugilists from thousands of American players, thanks to that spirit of hers.

However…

Unfortunately, the feeling of suffocation that the Noose of the Accursed simulated was horrifyingly difficult to bear, even knowing that it was just a virtual sensation. When I felt the effect of the Noose for myself in the coliseum of the Stiss Ruins, my first thought was what Yui had just said: It had to be false, because the AmuSphere’s safety systems made it impossible to stop the user’s respiration. But the feeling was so overwhelming that it shattered that logical thought process in an instant. The realistic sensation of having something stuck in my throat, impossible to swallow or spit out, caused a primal, biological panic. If she had waited five more seconds to turn off the spell’s effect, I would have logged off to escape the terror of death.

Despite having experienced it already, and knowing that it was an illusion, I didn’t think that I could ignore the effect and act with full and total movement. We ought to make our plans under the assumption that if the Noose was placed and activated, everyone under its effect would collapse to the ground on the spot.

But would the others believe me if I told them that now?

It was tempting to take on the Noose of the Accursed on purpose and launch an attack when Mutasina was expecting to have the advantage. It made it highly possible that we could keep our casualties to zero. And defeating Mutasina alone aligned with our core values better than an entire war. It made me wish that this was our only valid option—if only I hadn’t experienced the suffocation for myself.

The group seemed likely to lean toward Klein’s plan. I had to think of something to say that would convince them to go the other way…

I felt eyes on my cheek and turned to look directly into the gaze of Argo, who was seated cross-legged in the back row. The Rat’s gold-tinged irises were telling me loud and clear, Just give up and admit it already.

…Oh, fine. Fine.

I exhaled and raised my hand.

“All right, folks, listen up. Unfortunately…I don’t think that Klein’s suggestion will work as well as you think.”

“Why’s that, Kiri, my man?” grumbled the katana-wielder.

I opened my ring menu, moved over to the equipment window, and removed the Fine Iron Chest Armor. Underneath, I wore only the Ubiquicloth Undershirt that Asuna had crafted, but it was a turtleneck style and nearly black in color, so it still wouldn’t make the symbol of the Noose stand out, even if I pulled the collar down.

Throwing caution to the wind, I unequipped the undershirt, too, baring my torso. Leafa grimaced and exclaimed, “Hey, hang on, Big Brother! Why are you taking off…your…?”

She slowed down and trailed off as her wide eyes caught sight of what was on my throat. Everyone aside from Argo made the same expression.

“So yeah…This happened.”