Sword Art Online - Volume 25 - Chapter 6

6

Over half the group was already gathered in the yard outside the log cabin.

Lisbeth was at the smelting furnace, banging away with her hammer, while Sinon watched closely. Asuna and Yui were preparing something at the stove, and Argo and Alice were in conversation near the gate. Agil, Hyme, and Klein were slated to show up around seven o’clock, and the other insects had gone to the Maruba River for some quick leveling, having learned the trick to killing four-eyed giant flatworms from Alice.

Yui was the first to spot me descending the steps of the porch, and she raced right over. “Welcome back, Papa!”

“I’m home, Yui. Thanks for watching the house while I was away,” I said, ruffling her hair as she clung to me. She smiled and made a ticklish face. It made me wonder how I was going to ensure her safety during battle.

“Heya. You got enough sleep, Kiri-boy?” Argo smirked, approaching with a jaunty lean, her hands stuck into the pockets of her knickerbockers.

I grimaced and replied, “I bet I did better than you. Sure you don’t want to catch a little nap before the operation begins?”

“Wha—? I’m fine, I’m fine. I’d be a poor excuse for an info agent if an all-nighter or two knocked me out.”

“Well, I appreciate the effort, but…Hmm? Wait; if you’re logged in here, how are you monitoring those social media accounts?”

“Ah, that.” Argo peeked down at Yui and beamed. “I know it’s cheatin’, but I’ve got Yuicchi keeping tabs on ’em. She’s able to monitor social networks while she’s online.”

“Huh. I see,” I murmured, then looked down at Yui, who was still hugging me. “Wait, Yui, are you sure that’s safe? It’s not going to cause a ‘ripple’ in your individuality or anything…?”

“No problem!” she claimed, puffing out her chest proudly. “I haven’t duplicated my core program; I’m simply multitasking to manage data. Did you know that I am ordinarily maintaining an average of ten thousand tasks in parallel? Adding one more is nothing!”

“T-ten thousand…?”

I couldn’t help but stare at her tiny head. Obviously, Yui’s brain—her CPU—wasn’t contained inside her avatar. Yui’s core program was stored on my desktop PC, sitting in my bedroom, but it was so quiet that you wouldn’t think it was busy with so many tasks at the same time, and the monthly notice of how much power it was expending didn’t add up to all that much.

I loved Yui without reservation, but at the same time, I had no idea what was going on inside her core program. Asking her to show me felt like it would be similar to demanding that Alice show me the lightcube that contained her fluctlight…

Meanwhile, Alice herself walked over and said, “Kirito, if you are rested enough, shall we patrol the nearby woods while waiting for everyone else to arrive?”

“P-patrol? Why?”

“If I were Mutasina, I would send a few scouts first, before the main force leaves. If they are monitoring our actions, then they will know everything we’re doing tonight.”

“Yeah…I was worried about that, too, so I went out to search the forest last night, but there was no one out there,” I told her, glancing toward my partner in that endeavor, Argo, but she just scowled and grumbled.

“Alicchi is right—they could have sent out scouts today, instead. In fact, it would be more natural to assume that…What do the socials look like, Yuicchi?”

Yui blinked, then responded, “Of the twenty-one accounts I am monitoring, eight have been silent for over an hour. The other thirteen have been making increasing statements like ‘Getting ready now,’ ‘Gonna be in all night,’ ‘The battle is beginning,’ and ‘Ugh, this sucks.’”

“…I see,” said Argo. “Seems like they’re just about meetin’ up now. Since real-life circumstances come into effect, too, I’m assumin’ they won’t get all one hundred of the folks who took the Noose, but we should probably assume they’ll have at least eighty…no, ninety of ’em…”

“With that many, I would assume five or six scouts would be no problem for them to send. Guess we could go do the rounds again…”

I was wondering whom to choose for this task, looking around the spacious yard area—when the wooden gate swung open, and a cheerful voice boomed, “Hey, guys!”

The Insectsite players came stomping through. In the lead was Zarion the rhinoceros beetle, followed by Beeming the stag beetle, then a brown grasshopper. The circular pattern on its forehead was attention-grabbing, but even more curious to me was the white string the grasshopper was dragging behind it.

The string was tied around a long, thin object that was about five and a half feet long. Well, not quite tied—something was wrapped up in the string. Upon a second look, I could see that the object was twitching irregularly.

“……”

I was briefly at a loss for words, but I recovered and approached them, replying in English, “’Sup, guys!” I pointed at the wrapped-up object and asked, “So…what’s this?”

The brown grasshopper—technically, a cricket known as Prosopogryllacris okadai—named Needy silently lifted the object. Up close, I could see that the white rope was made up of countless extremely thin threads woven together. It looked far sturdier than the crude ropes we were weaving out of grass.

Needy spun the dangling object around. The rope began to unwind around the top of the object, eventually revealing (as I expected) a human being. More specifically, the face of an ALO player.

“Bwaaah!” gasped the man, taking a deep breath. I took a good look at him; his skin and hair color revealed him to be a salamander, but he was a short and skinny example of one. His bangs were slanted, his eyes were sunken, and he wore a line of pink paint on his left cheek.

When he saw me, he shrieked, “A-are you with these bug people?!”

“Um, yeah.”

“Dammit! J-just kill me and get it over with, then!” he raged, which struck me as strange. Something about this situation seemed familiar to me for some reason…

I was about to ask Zarion where they’d caught this man, but someone else behind me shouted, “Ohhh! It’s that guy!”

I turned to see Leafa running over, her golden ponytail swinging. She was less than twenty minutes behind me to log in; I thought she’d take much longer. It made me worry that she’d skipped her kendo practice again, but I couldn’t ask that and ruin her lively mood. She said hello to the group and approached the strung-up man.

“I knew it…Big B…I mean, Kirito, this is him!”

“Him who?” I asked.

This time it was the man who yelled, “Ahhh! Are you Kirito?! Master Black?!”

“Huh? H-have we met before?”

“It’s me! Remember me? On New Year’s Day last year, I fought you when you turned all demonic in the Lugru Corridor, and you nearly ate me…”

Two seconds later, I shouted, “Ohhhh! You’re that guy!”

It was over a year and a half ago.

Having been freed from the deadly SAO, I dived into ALO in search of information on Asuna, who should have been logged out but still wasn’t waking up. With Leafa and Yui, I headed for the World Tree at the center of the land of fairies. Along the way, we were attacked by a band of salamander mages in a dungeon called the Lugru Corridor, and I managed to fight them off with the very unorthodox method of using spriggan illusion magic to transform into a demon…But if I recalled correctly, Leafa instructed me to take one of them alive and ask why they had attacked.

Back then, too, the man had boldly shouted, “Kill me, if you’re going to do it!” but we had ourselves a deal two seconds after I told him I’d offer all the items the deceased salamanders dropped in exchange for the information. Laden with valuables from his dead friends, the man walked off happily, and we never saw him again. Until…

“I dunno…Are you sure…?” I asked, staring at the man in disbelief. But Yui emerged from behind Leafa and stated, “His avatar’s appearance and the spectogram of his voiceprint is identical to that of the salamander back then.”

“I guess it really is him…What were you doing here, huh?”

“What was I…?” he repeated, his eyes rolling around in stark indecision.

Suddenly struck by an idea, I asked Needy, “Can you loosen the string a bit more?”

Needy’s grasshopper face bobbed, and he rotated the dangling man a few more times. Once the rope was slack around his lower jaw, I gave the signal to stop. Sure enough, right around his neck was a black ring-shaped symbol: the Noose of the Accursed.

Meaning that after this salamander had been converted from Alfheim to Unital Ring, he joined one of the newly formed cooperative teams and took part in that friendly meetup at the Stiss Ruins.

I considered this knowledge, then said, “Got it. So you got hit by Mutasina’s suffocation magic, huh?”

The man’s body jerked back and forth. He waggled helplessly in the air and rasped, “Y-you know about her? And this stupid spell she cast?”

“Of course I do. And I know that a hundred players trapped by the Noose just like you are going to attack this town tonight.”

At some point, everyone else had gathered around us. Argo was busy interpreting our conversation for the English-speaking insect players.

The man was too stunned to speak, so I took a step closer. “She ordered you to scout out this town, didn’t she? Until the insects found you and caught you. And your friends are…?”

I glanced over at Zarion and Beeming. The rhinoceros beetle and stag beetle just shrugged the moment Argo’s translation caught up.

“…Guess they fought back and died. So what will you do? You know we can’t just release you. Will you bounce out of Unital Ring now, or will you be our prisoner and tell us what you know?” I said, presenting him with his options in as stern and menacing a tone as I could muster.

The man studiously avoided looking me in the eyes again, until he finally summoned up some guts and stared me back in the face. “Kirito, you know how freakin’ scary the Noose’s effect is—and you still want to fight Mutasina? You’d be better off not taking her magic lightly. You can’t just withstand the effect with willpower and mental preparation. I don’t wanna be her slave either, but the only way to survive in UR is to obey her…”

I lifted my hand to stop him from speaking further. I grabbed the throat protector of my armor and pulled it down, along with my undershirt. His eyes and mouth went wide, and he fell silent.

“Kirito,” whispered Asuna nervously. Her concern was well-founded. It was utterly reckless to reveal to him that I was under the effect of the Noose. If he told Mutasina about that, she could shut me down with a single thump of her staff before my sword could reach her.

Which made this a gamble. If I could get the information this man knew, we could improve the chances of our plan working. In order to do that, I’d need to convince him that there was a chance he could be freed from the suffocation spell.

The man wasn’t saying anything yet, so I tried the last resort.

“If you tell us everything you know, and we beat Mutasina in battle tonight, I’ll give you everything she drops. Except for the staff—I’m breaking that, of course.”

He exhaled, long and slow, then smiled weakly and asked, “Really?”

When the salamander named Friscoll was freed from Needy’s strings, he plopped himself down in the middle of the open plaza and demanded something to drink.

Asuna offered him some lukewarm tea. He drank three cups and chowed down on some harve meat stew to boot. In the meantime, I asked Zarion what had happened.

The insects had taken a break from hunting four-eyed giant flatworms and decided to return to Ruis na Ríg to recover SP, until Harvey the Anaciaeschna martini dragonfly, who had excellent eyesight, spotted four players hiding in the brush. The insects split into two groups and approached, but the hiding players attacked before they could talk to them, and so they had to defeat three of the four, then captured Friscoll when he tried to flee and brought him back to Ruis na Ríg with them. The white rope that tied him up wasn’t crafted out of material items but was part of a skill Needy had to produce the silk from his mouth.

In the real world, such crickets could indeed produce silk. That made me wonder if most of these insect avatars could actually fly, but like the ALO players, their ability of flight had been removed. It seemed like a major disadvantage to insects like dragonflies and bees, which were known for flying, but according to them, even in Insectsite, flight was held to very limited distances. As Zarion told me with great chagrin, that was because in the very early days of the game, certain idiotic players would log out and then try to jump down their stairs and get hurt.

In any case, with the help of Alice’s flatworm-hunting method, the Insectsite team reached an average level of 15. They were below the ALO players, but they would still be much higher than Mutasina’s army, which was only leveling around the starting ruins. Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be enough of a difference to make up for the gap in personnel numbers, but we were going to get to the bottom of that soon.

Once Friscoll’s SP and TP were recovered, the questioning fell to Argo, who worked as a writer and researcher in real life. The Rat used clever lines of inquiry to trap Friscoll in various webs, and we had a great deal of information in just fifteen minutes.

According to the interrogation, Mutasina’s army’s average level was around 10 or 11, and they were leaving at nine o’clock, later than our initial expectations. As we predicted, they would be traveling along the east bank of the Maruba River and expected to arrive at Ruis na Ríg exactly at midnight. Again, as we predicted, their strategy was to destroy the forest around the town to create a flat, open area. If we hid in the town, they would use the logs to break down the wall, and if we charged them, they’d surround us and allow Mutasina to cast the Noose on us.

Excluding the four scouts in the party, their total group was eighty-seven in number, with those players who couldn’t attend due to real-life scheduling being left out of any distribution of spoils and reward payment.

“What’s the reward payment?” Lisbeth asked.

Friscoll made a face that suggested he wasn’t sure what to think. “They say it’s ten el per person, but I dunno. That’s a thousand el, if it goes to a hundred people. All the materials I gathered in an entire day added up to less than thirty dim. How did Mutasina and the VSS save up a thousand el with just the four of them? It’s impossible.”

The VSS was presumably her club, the Virtual Study Society. I didn’t know there were only four members. This would mean that the other three in the club knew about the effect of the Noose but accepted its effects in the big coliseum roundup in order to help pull the spell off—and had to withstand the choking demonstration.

“…What are the other three in the VSS like?” I asked.

Friscoll made a face. “Hmm…I dunno; it’s hard to say much about ’em. There are two swordswomen with almost identical faces and builds called Viola and Dia—and a dark mage guy named Magis. They’re basically like the lieutenants of the group. The two women won’t chat with you at all, and the mage is actually pretty decent once you talk to him, but…I dunno how to describe it…”

He grimaced, clearly wanting to say something but not finding the right words to describe it. Eventually, he gave up and shrugged.

“Anyway, they’re all weird, including Mutasina. If they’re that tough from the very start, they’d have to be absolute top-tier players in ALO, but nobody’s ever seen them before or heard their names. Do they ring a bell to you?” he asked.

We shared a look. It was indeed just as he’d said—no recognition, just silent headshaking.

“…Is it possible that they’re aliases? The player’s cursor doesn’t show up here until you attack or get attacked, you know. When she cast the Noose on me, she was too far away to see her cursor well,” I pointed out.

Friscoll performed a two-finger spinning gesture in the air. “There’s another way to see a player’s name aside from their cursor, you know. I’ve been in a raid party with the other three, so I made to sure to check on their names that appear up here on the left. That’s how I know how to spell the three names. If you ask me, they sound pretty typical for player names.”

I looked to Yui, not recognizing those names, but even she shook her head—she would remember every individual we’d come into contact with in Alfheim.

Not only did we not find their identities, we were left with more mysteries than before. But…

“In any case, this doesn’t change what we need to do. We’ll beat Mutasina and clear up this hurdle before we head off for the center of the world. It’s been a long series of events since that first night, but this time, we’re going to get a good clean start for ourselves!” I announced, rousing my companions. Everyone gathering in the yard in front of the log cabin—even Friscoll, shamelessly—lifted a fist into the air and roared in response.

Agil, Hyme, and Klein showed up at the time they mentioned, maxing out our group. We discussed a number of issues first, then left Ruis na Ríg at eight o’clock.

The first issue was what to do with Friscoll, who was technically our prisoner. It was impossible for me to see his reactions after being dragged in by Zarion’s group as anything but natural, but there was always the possibility that he was acting as a double agent, pretending to give us info and leaking ours to Mutasina’s side. If this were Aincrad, we could lock him up in a room somewhere, but in Unital Ring, you could always log out, and then we couldn’t stop him from making contact with his friends in the real world. Friscoll’s three companions had surely alerted Mutasina’s army that they’d already died by now.

After much discussion without including the man in question, we decided that we would be taking Friscoll with us. Despite being a rather inhumane line of action, we wrapped him back up in Needy’s threads before starting our preparations for the battle and dangled him from a tree. Without being able to use his hands, he couldn’t bring up the menu or log out. If his heart rate or need to urinate rose above the base levels, the AmuSphere would automatically cut him off, and if he didn’t return within several minutes, we’d know that he had betrayed us. We did offer him two options of either being tied up and traveling with us or being monitored in the Bashin home area, where they’d cut off his head if he opened his menu. Scowling, he chose the former.

The second issue was what to do about the Bashin and the Patter.

Personally, I wanted to avoid any NPC casualties at all, so I preferred for them to stay at Ruis na Ríg, but both groups stubbornly insisted that it was their home now, too, and they demanded to fight to protect it. As a compromise, we took five warriors from each group with us. Naturally, among them were Yzelma, leader of the Bashin, and Chett, leader of the Patter—both women, coincidentally—along with four of their handpicked best.

That put our number in the battle party at eleven of us, twenty of Hyme and her friends, and ten NPCs: forty-one in total. Plus Misha, Kuro, Aga, and Pina.

At eight thirty, we arrived at the spot that Argo and I picked out the night before. First, we strung up Friscoll from a tree a ways from the river, then used the resources we’d packed into all of our item storage—aside from the NPCs’—to start building the contraption that would form the essence of our counterplan. It was the kind of massive construction that would take a month with heavy equipment in the real world, but as long as you understood the tricks of the crafting system, you could build it all with the proper hand gestures in this world.

Despite struggling a little with the fine-tuning, we were finished by nine thirty. Now all we had to do was wait for Mutasina’s army.

The enemy was supposedly leaving the Stiss Ruins at nine, so I would have liked to send out scouts of our own to check on their location, but there was no guarantee we wouldn’t get spotted and caught like Friscoll’s group had.

It was possible they might change their route just beforehand, but if they didn’t pass through the safe Maruba River, that would mean cutting through the Zelletelio Forest in the middle of the night. There were almost no dangerous monsters in the southern portion, but that was because we were at an average of level-15, and even the frequent bats and foxes were much more dangerous than the tiny critters that populated the Stiss Ruins region.

According to Friscoll, Mutasina’s army had no better than leather armor, so if they just so happened across a large creature like a thornspike cave bear, even a huge battalion of ninety or so was going to suffer 10 or 20 percent losses. We knew that Mutasina’s strategy was to surround us with a superior force to hold us in place, so she’d want to avoid losing any of them before they could execute their plan.

Their main advantage was the size of their army. To make use of it, they absolutely needed a large open space. That meant they had to travel north up the Maruba River.

I watched our completed defenses beginning to work and pondered the probabilities of the various ways this could all play out.

Yui approached me and looked up. “I’m sorry, Papa…”

“Hm…? For what?”

“If I were still a navigation pixie, I could access the map data and confirm the route the enemy is taking to approach…,” she said, crestfallen.

I knelt down to look her in the eyes, then put my arms around her. “I’m glad you’re a player now, Yui,” I whispered. “Yes, I’m worried that you’re no longer impervious to damage…But this means there are so many more things we can share, right? I know I’ve had you deciphering NPC language and monitoring social media, but those are things you’re doing with your own talent; you’re not accessing the game system behind the scenes to do them. So, uh…”

I ran out of steam and wasn’t sure how to continue. Fortunately, there was a gentle voice overhead to pick up where I left off:

“You’re our child, Yui, so you don’t have to push yourself so hard,” said Asuna, who knelt beside me and caressed Yui’s head. The girl reached out with one hand, still cradled in my embrace, and grabbed Asuna’s dress.

“Mama…”

“Of course, we’re very happy to see you trying so hard, but now that you’re finally a player like us, we want you to enjoy your life in this world. I know it sounds silly to say this, when we’re about to have a war…But one part of the fun in a game is the chance to pit yourself against a worthy opponent.”

Something in her gentle voice caused my eyes to bolt wide open. Ever since being put under the Noose of the Accursed in the ruins, I’d been trying to gauge the depth of Mutasina’s evil. I was so focused on the “darkness” she spoke about that I never tried to examine the darkness within me.

But taking a step back and trying to be objective, Mutasina was just another player in the game called Unital Ring. The sudden-death rules of this game were harsh, but unlike in Aincrad, nobody was going to lose their life here. What was about to happen was a huge PvP battle but not an actual, bloody slaughter…

I rearranged my arms so I had one around Yui and the other around Asuna and squeezed them both. “Yeah. Let’s do our best…and enjoy this,” I whispered. “Even if we lose, it’s only happening in a game. We can always get back what we’ve lost. All you need to do is what you’ve been doing already as a player, Yui.”

Trapped between our chests, Yui gave a muffled but determined “I will!”

Kuro, who had been lying down nearby, promptly growled in apparent agreement. I looked over at the creature and noticed that our friends were watching the three of us with big grins.

At eleven, everyone was at their stations. All members were registered in a raid party, aside from the Bashin and the Patter. All preparations were complete.

At eleven thirty, Sinon, who was monitoring downriver through the Hecate II’s scope, sent a message that said, I see light that looks like torches.

At eleven forty-five, while hiding in the brush, I spotted the flickering orange light, too.