Sword Art Online - Volume 25 - Chapter 3

3

It was eleven PM, and we paused the meeting for a ten-minute bathroom break. Like my companions, I logged out.

I emerged from the game on my bed, staring up at the dark ceiling for several moments, waiting for the floating feeling to vanish.

I’d been prepared to suffer some major criticism for keeping secrets from the group when I revealed that I’d actually been hit by the Noose of the Accursed, but with Argo’s assistance, I’d been spared their lectures for the time being. But as I feared, the topic of the session turned toward how to dispel the magic instead of the bigger picture, so I proposed that we take a quick break.

Time was too valuable to waste on getting rid of my sigil. If I was going to play until four in the morning, that left us with five hours to work with—and I wasn’t positive we’d be able to finish the preparations for Mutasina’s invasion.

“…If necessary, I might have to dive from school,” I muttered, sitting up. I took off the AmuSphere and put the Augma on in its place, when a voice yelled “Big Brother!” and the door to my right burst open. It was Suguha, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. She’d bolted out of her room as soon as she logged out, judging by the AmuSphere in her hand.

“H-hey, you could at least—”

Knock, I was going to say, only to be interrupted by Suguha jumping onto my bed, pushing me back down. She straddled me on her knees, her chest thrust outward with indignation.

“That’s the problem!”

“Wh-what is?” I asked.

Her eyebrows were sharp even at normal times, but now they were positively jagged with fury. “You know what! I mean your bad habit of taking on all the trouble by yourself! Like in the Underworld, with the max…maximum…”

“Maximum acceleration phase?”

“Yes, that! You were warned that if you didn’t log out before that phase started, there would be consequences, but Asuna was there with you, and she said you never warned her about it!”

“B-because if I did, she would have insisted that she’d stay in the Underworld with me…”

“Even so, you have to say it!”

Suguha’s eyes traveled slightly upward.

“You agree, don’t you, Yui?!” she continued.

A tiny fairy flew down from above my head, putting her hands on her hips in midair just like Suguha, and made an adorable little version of an angry, scolding expression. “That’s right, Papa! You should put more trust in Mama and Suguha and the rest of us!”

With my daughter in on the lecture, there was no longer any room for rebuttal.

“Y-you’re right; I’m sorry. I thought it would worry you,” I offered, putting my hands together in a sign of apology.

Yui moved up to sit on Suguha’s shoulder. “Worrying about others and letting them worry about you is an important part of communication in a community, Papa.”

“That’s right, Big Brother. Obviously, it makes sense not to do things that will make others worry about you, but if something bad does happen, you have to be able to admit it and get help, rather than hiding it.”

Suguha’s lecture occupied my attention so fully that I only just now realized she had her Augma on, poking out below her bobbed hair. She must have telegraphed to Yui that they were going to raid my room before they logged out.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll talk to people about these things next time,” I announced again.

My sister glowered down at me. “Swear to Stacia?”

“S-swear to Stacia.”

“Good!”

At last, her face crinkled into a smile, and Suguha got off of me, sitting down on an empty spot on the bed. She didn’t seem intent on leaving, so I went ahead and asked, without any tact, “Don’t you need to use the toilet?”

“I already did. Maybe you should go.”

“Y-yeah, I will…”

I got my feet on the floor, and Suguha added, “Bring back some sparkling water from the fridge, too! The lime flavor!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I groaned, exiting to the hallway. I started heading for the bathroom but noticed Yui flying just on my left. “Um, Miss Yui…I’m about to use the restroom…,” I whispered, which took the pixie by surprise at first.

“Oh! I’m sorry, Papa!” she stammered. “I just had something for your ears only…”

“What is it?”

“Take a look at this,” she said, showing me a holo-window. It was a real-time display of my vital signs, with numbers and graphs for temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate. The microsensor implanted in my chest was sending the information to the Augma.

This sensor was implanted—at a specialty hospital, of course—when I was about to perform the job of STL test diver for the Oceanic Resource Exploration and Research Institution, better known as Rath, at their recommendation. Now that the job was technically over, I could have it removed, but I’d chosen not to, for three reasons. One, because it would hurt. Two, I didn’t have to put on a heart monitor when riding a bike for exercise. And three, because Asuna liked being able to monitor my vital signs, for some reason.

I felt oddly embarrassed about having my temperature and heart rate visible, but I found it difficult to say, “No more.” So I left the sensor where it was. But why was that data coming into play now…?

Yui gave me the rapid-fire answer to that question. “This is your vital data starting from 10:18:35 last night, Papa.”

“After ten…?” I repeated, wondering what I was doing at that point.

Then I recalled that it was when Argo and I were sneaking into the meetup of ALO players at the coliseum in the center of the Stiss Ruins. I was fighting off the temptation of the buffet feast and thinking of slipping away when Mutasina cast a massive spell from the stage. Yes, 10:18 was the very minute that the Noose stopped my breathing.

Stunned, I looked at where Yui was pointing out the bottom of the three line graphs: my heart rate.

“Unfortunately, the sensor chip implanted in your chest cannot monitor the number of breaths you’ve taken, so there’s no way to determine whether the Noose of the Accursed actually stopped your respiration. But you can see that your heart rate shot upward here.”

“Yes, I see…But that’s normal, isn’t it? Your heart rate goes up a fair amount even when fighting monsters, so while the sensation is virtual, it’s natural that feeling like you can’t breathe will cause your heart to hammer away…”

“That’s not the problem,” she said seriously, shaking her head. “The AmuSphere’s safety restriction system is designed to activate if the user’s heart rate passes a certain maximum threshold for at least five seconds. The threshold is set to be two hundred and twenty, minus the user’s age. So, in your case, it would be two hundred and three.”

“Two hundred and two, next week,” I noted pointlessly.

“Indeed,” Yui replied, obliging me for a split second. “But look here. Your pulse rose to two hundred and five at 10:18:41, then dropped to a hundred and ninety-five after four seconds. At 0:48 seconds, it rose to two hundred and four, then dropped after four seconds again, to the hundred and nineties. At 0:55 seconds, it descended back to a normal pulse.”

“…Uh-huh…”

The pulse graph showed exactly what Yui pointed out. I’d passed the maximum threshold twice, but both cases lasted just under the five seconds needed to detach me from the system. I was alarmed by the numbers themselves, but the safety mechanisms were working normally, it seemed.

“So what’s the problem?”

“Your heart rate crossed the safety threshold twice within twenty seconds, but both times, it decreased after four seconds. I feel that the specificity of the four-second period is artificial in nature.”

“Artificial…You mean, because both times it dropped just before it reached the five-second cutoff? But that could just be a coincidence, right? This heart rate graph is based on my chest sensor’s readings, not the AmuSphere’s, and there shouldn’t be any way for the AmuSphere itself to control my heart rate.”

“That is accurate. However,” Yui cautioned, “even if it was sheer coincidence that your heart rate dropped twice after four seconds, if the same magic is cast on a hundred people in the same place, more than a few of them ought to have tripped the safety threshold and been forcibly logged out by their devices. When the Noose of the Accursed was activated, did you notice any players disconnecting around you?”

“……Um…”

I gazed into the gloom at the end of the hallway, using it as a screen to envision what I had seen. While the Noose was active, I had been so desperate to eject the object stuck in my throat that I didn’t have the wherewithal to look around me, but despite that, I couldn’t recall any light or sound that accompanied the logging-out effect. After the suffocating sensation vanished, the density of the crowd in the coliseum was the same as before the spell was activated.

“…No. I can’t be certain…But I don’t think that anyone was removed from the game from an emergency shutdown…”

“I see…,” Yui replied, but that was it. She closed the holo-window and rose higher. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your bathroom trip, Papa. Take your time.”

I felt a little bit self-conscious hearing that from Yui, who had no need for the restroom, but there was no time to waste—only four minutes left in the break.

“A-all right. Go on back to the room.”

“I will!”

She flew off with a twinkling sound, passing right through the door, at which point I turned and sprinted for the bathroom.

I washed my hands and face at the sink, then went to the kitchen to grab the lime-flavored sparkling water for Suguha and a bottle of oolong tea for myself before returning to my room. The entire while, I thought about what Yui had shown me.

If the heart rate of all one hundred people at the scene had dropped just before the safety measures kicked in, then Mutasina’s suffocation magic somehow knew the maximum allowable pulse in each player’s AmuSphere—and could limit their heartbeats so they did not cross that value for five full seconds.

I could hardly believe such a thing was possible. Since the maximum rate was 220 minus the player’s age, the number would be different for each player, and even if you could acquire that number, it wasn’t the brain that controlled the heart’s palpitation rate, but an area of the heart itself called the sinoatrial node. There was no way the AmuSphere’s microwaves could reach that far.

There must have been something I was missing. If Mutasina’s spell was controlling something, it wouldn’t be the heartbeat itself…but something related to it, such as…

“You took too long, Big Brother!” shouted the voice that made me realize I’d gotten back to my room. Suguha was sitting there on the bed, waving her hands to beckon me over. “Only ninety seconds left!”

“Sorry, sorry. But they aren’t going to flip out over a minute or two of delay…”

“That’s no example for the leader to set!”

“F-for one thing, I’m not officially the leader…,” I argued weakly, handing her the bottle of water. The sparkling water that we always had a healthy stock of at the house required some hard wrist work to open, but my kendo-practicing sister had no trouble breaking the seal and furiously downing the water. She made a childish grimace as the carbonation tore at her throat and then ejected the carbon dioxide as daintily as one could before putting the cap back on and setting the bottle on the headboard.

“One more minute! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

Suguha went to lie down on the bed, and I hastily pulled the oolong tea away from my lips.

“Really? Are you going to dive in here again?”

“It’s your fault for coming back so late. Plus, just in case, if Mutasina’s magic really does make you stop breathing, I have to perform lifesaving measures on you.”

I wasn’t sure how serious she was being, but I couldn’t just laugh off a statement like that. Yui, floating nearby, nodded seriously.

“If that happens, you have to take care of Papa, Leafa!”

“I got ya covered!”

Seeing them back each other up made me realize just how long the two of them had known each other.

Back in the log cabin, there were thirty seconds left in our break period, but everyone was already online again. It was after eleven o’clock, but there was a bristling enthusiasm coming from the entire group that said we were just getting started.

It made sense that they were motivated. Before Mutasina made her nature known to the genial gathering of ALO players (and Argo and me), the mood was very friendly. I didn’t sense any hostility from the hundred motivated players there. Meaning that if we beat Mutasina in a direct fight, there shouldn’t be anyone left who’d want to attack Ruis na Ríg. With that hurdle cleared, we’d be free to challenge Unital Ring without any extra anxiety.

Thinking back on it, however, Mocri’s party that tried to kill me that first night had mentioned something about a mysterious “Sensei” who might have been egging them on, and it was possible that the same was true for Schulz’s team, Fawkes, that attacked the cabin the second night.

When my three-part sword skill hit Schulz, he had uttered a few enigmatic words before he was permanently banished from the realm.

Kirito…you’re…really…

His avatar disappeared right at that moment, so I couldn’t hear the rest of what he was going to say. I had a feeling it was going to end in a question, perhaps in surprise that I hadn’t been what he expected. If that information was false, something fed to him—and the person who said it was the same Sensei who’d taught Mocri and his friends PvP combat…then someone was manipulating the former ALO players in an attempt to get them to wipe us out of Unital Ring.

Would that person happen to be the leader of the Virtual Study Society, Mutasina? Or was that witch also under this Sensei’s control…?

I stood on the spot where I’d logged in, pondering this, when someone smacked me hard on the back.

“Yo, Kiri, my man, everyone’s here! What’s up? Should we continue what we were discussing before?”

“Huh? Oh, right…,” I stammered, looking up at Klein, who was wearing his trademark bandana. But I came to my senses and shook my head. “Um, no, let’s not.”

I turned to the others, all standing in the center of the living room, and announced, “May I have a moment? As far as our plans go…I honestly think that searching for a way to undo the power of the Noose of the Accursed on our own would be a waste of time.”

Several protests arose at once. I appreciated their concern for my sake, but we had a higher priority at the moment.

“I’m not saying I don’t think there’s a way. There was dispelling magic and potions and items in ALO, so it wouldn’t be a surprise at all if such things exist here as well. But we’re totally lacking in knowledge about magic skills right now, and even if we discovered the way, a massive spell that can choke a hundred people at once is naturally going to require an equally high-level method to undo. There’s no way we can get the proficiency high enough to pull that off in just a day—no, half a day.”

This time, there were no arguments.

But I could see the strained looks on their faces, as though they were all suffering the Noose for themselves. They probably were feeling that way, in all honesty. They were the best companions I could ever ask for, and that was why I didn’t want to lose a single one on the way to finishing this game. To do so would require the greatest possible effort—without harming my school studies, of course—before Mutasina’s army attacked.

I nodded slowly to the group and got to the most crucial point.

“Just as hard as dispelling the Noose of the Accursed would be to ignore its effects. It’s difficult to describe in words…But when she activates the spell, it truly feels like you’re suffocating, like there’s a big sticky lump stuck in your throat. You can’t exhale or inhale, and of course, you can’t talk, either. If you suck in a huge breath and hold it right before the spell is activated, you might be able to last on that for part of a minute…But all she needs to do is strike the ground with her staff, so you’d have to keep a close eye on her movements at all times, and that’s not possible in a battle. Unfortunately, I think that Klein and Leafa’s suggestion that we succumb to the Noose in order to get up close and strike isn’t going to work out.”

Slowly, I exhaled the breath from my avatar’s virtual lungs.

If you thought about it, air didn’t actually exist in any virtual world. The scent of wood in the log cabin, the chill of the night breeze coming through the open window—these were sensations the AmuSphere was sending directly to our brains. There wasn’t a single molecule of gas carrying any smell or temperature in the environment. The same was true for the sensation of air passing through our mouths, throats, and lungs when we breathed. In a sense, this world was a more perfect vacuum than even the actual vacuum of outer space. But knowing that this was true was not going to help anyone overcome that horrifyingly real sense of suffocation. The inability to breathe was one of those experiences that was simply encoded into the human soul as a primal fear…

“But, Kirito, how do you intend for us to fight against an army of a hundred?” said a soft voice, drawing my attention back to the room and the people in it.

It was Alice, who stood directly across from me. The knight’s blue eyes stared right into mine without blinking.

If I was going to rule out Klein and Leafa’s plan to intentionally suffer the Noose, I had to offer an alternative idea. A plan that would bring us victory without losing any of our own, the Bashin, the Patter, the pets, or more than a minimum of enemy deaths.

“…I want to avoid a head-on confrontation with a hundred-strong army,” I replied.

“I know,” said Klein, “but Yui already predicted that Mutasina’s army is gonna cut down all the trees around Ruis na Ríg. If you have two huge raid parties meeting in a flat, open area, it’s gonna come down to direct combat, ya know?”

“Yes, I assume so. Which means…”

Over a span of fifteen minutes, I explained the idea that I’d been turning over in my mind from the moment I learned that Mutasina and her army of a hundred would be attacking our town.

There were many questions, but I ultimately won everyone’s approval, and we decided to begin preparing for the plan at eleven thirty. Before that, however, we got together for some tea and snacks for a little morale boost.

The beer that had been served at the feast hours earlier was provided in great amount by the Insectsite gang, but there was none left (due to Klein’s bottomless stomach) and I didn’t know where they got the stuff. I liked it, too—I was still a minor, but it wasn’t illegal for me to drink in a virtual world—so I hoped to learn how they got it and acquire some for myself once we had defeated Mutasina’s army. For now, I sipped our oddly flavored tea.

After this, Argo and I would act separately from the group. My SP and TP were topped off, so I headed for the door to set off before the others but was interrupted by Lisbeth clapping her hands.

“All right, everyone! Attention, please!”

What was this? Lisbeth was standing in front of the board, with Silica and Leafa on her right; Sinon, Alice, and Argo on her left; and Yui pushing Asuna into the center of the living room. Asuna seemed just as mystified by this as I was.

Next, all the aforementioned girls opened their menus and went to the inventory. Then they paused, timed themselves (“Ready, set—”), and shouted…

“Happy birthday, Asuna!!”

The group materialized something, all at once.

It was a massive proliferation of tiny colorful objects: flowers. An eruption of flowers piled atop their windows, which the seven of them scooped up with both hands and tossed at Asuna. The many-colored petals fell around her like snowflakes, filling the living room with their sweet scent.

Klein, Agil, and Hyme weren’t aware this surprise was coming, either, but they rallied at once and broke into applause. Asuna looked upward, blinking with surprise, at the rain of petals around her, then put on a dazzling smile.

“Liz, Silica, Leafa, Shino-non, Yui, Argo, and Alice…thank you all so much.”

I joined in the applause, determined not to be left behind, and couldn’t help but think, I’m so glad that Mutasina’s invasion wasn’t tonight…