Sword Art Online - Volume 25 - Chapter 8

8

I held out a hesitant chunk of raw Life Harvester meat, and a huge beak snatched it away with frightening speed, gobbling it down whole.

On my left, Kuro growled unhappily, so I gave the panther a chunk of meat, too. Then the bird of prey that owned the deadly beak chirped, prompting me to present it with another.

The bird, which was about the size of Kuro, was known as a leaden long-tailed eagle. In keeping with its name, the bird’s feathers were dark gray, and the edges of its tail feathers were nearly long enough to drag on the ground. Its beak and claws were even darker than the feathers, almost entirely black except for a bluish tint to the sharp tips.

By the time we finished our negotiations with Holgar and his men, the abandoned bird’s HP was nearly gone. Even still, it attempted to fulfill its heartless owner’s orders and attacked us as we approached. I thought it would be a mercy to put the thing out of its misery, but Yui insisted that she wanted to save the bird.

She was the MVP of the night, after all, and I couldn’t refuse a request from her. I got closer and offered some raw harve meat, expecting to get nipped. Sure enough, it attacked me with its beak without even a glance at the meat, but I kept thrusting the meat in its face as I evaded its attacks, and eventually the bird—or more accurately, the game system—gave up and allowed the taming meter to appear.

Fortunately, I had tons of harve meat on hand, so I kept feeding the beast and filling its meter bit by bit, finally succeeding after twenty long minutes. All my companions stopped to watch this process, as did the eighty-plus former members of Mutasina’s army. When I finally pumped a fist in triumph, I was treated to a huge round of applause from the crowd.

Of course, I wasn’t in any mood to hop right onto the bird’s back, so I joined the others—including Friscoll, whom we freed from his silky prison—and walked back through the forest to Ruis na Ríg, where we started another feast in the open area by the stables. The former Mutasina army soldiers downed the roast harve and harve stew at an incredible rate, and we and the insects and the Bashin and the Patter were in no mood to be outeaten. I was certain we must have used up all the meat by now, but upon asking our head chef Asuna, she told me (terrifyingly) that “I think we’ve used up about twenty percent of it as of tonight.”

Thinking about it, the Life Harvester was over sixty feet long. If a cow was about six feet long, then this creature was of a size that could fit twenty cattle in two rows. I thought I’d read somewhere that a single cow could make a thousand portions of barbecue, so the Life Harvester could feed twenty thousand. By that standard, consuming 20 percent of it in two feasts was actually a considerable feat.

We drank up all the beer the Insectsite players had brought us the last time, so Klein complained “If only we had some beer” no less than ten times, but the feast was quite lively even without the benefit of virtual alcohol. Holgar, Dikkos, and Tsuburo all but admitted that they were going to play Unital Ring under the threat of the Noose until they beat the game or died, so it must have been hard to describe their feeling of liberation. I felt the same way, of course.

My only concern was that we’d let the entire Virtual Study Society get away, not just Mutasina. We’d destroyed the staff, so that horrible suffocation spell was no longer possible for her to cast, I assumed, but there was no way they’d give up on their aims for Unital Ring. I had a feeling we’d run into them again, with another unexpected trick up their sleeve.

But that was a matter for another time. And I wouldn’t allow them to torment Yui, Asuna, and my friends again.

I was sitting off to the side of the dwindling party, swearing oaths to myself as I fed my two pets dinner, when faint footsteps approached. There could only be one person who practiced such stealthy footwork as a matter of course…

“Good job today, Sinon,” I said, turning to see the gunner, wearing a dark-green cloak to hide her revealing battle armor.

She blinked at being detected and replied, “Same to you. I had Holgar split up his men among the buildings in the south area.”

“Did we have enough rooms…er, beds?”

“Not quite, so Liz made more on the spot. We’ve got plenty of materials, after all.”

“I don’t know if I’d be excited to sleep in a crude wood and dried-grass bed, though…”

“It’s only in order to log out. They could sleep on the floor just as fine,” she snapped, making me chuckle.

I decided to bring up something I hadn’t been able to say at the feast. “By the way, Sinon, thanks a ton for your help. If you hadn’t sniped with your musket, I wouldn’t have been able to knock Mutasina to the ground,” I said, bowing in thanks.

Sinon seemed conflicted about this compliment. She looked at the leaden long-tailed eagle. “The truth is: I was aiming for Mutasina, not the bird, but that was the best I could do with the musket. I was useless in the battle after that. Got to raise my accuracy a bit more…”

“Hmmm…What are the other former GGO players fighting with, once the grace period is over?”

“From what I’ve seen online, almost everyone is using crossbows or matchlocks they’ve found around the starting ruins.”

“Matchlocks…? What are those again?”

Fortunately, Miss Sinon had an entire lecture for me. “They’re guns with fuses, basically. Technically, they’re classified as muskets like my gun, but mine is a flintlock musket, not a matchlock musket. Both are significantly easier to shoot than their actual counterparts in the real world, but even still, a matchlock requires you to light a fuse, so it takes a few extra seconds than a flintlock.”

“Ohhh, a fuse…That seems like it’d be stressful, if you’re used to all the laser rifles in GGO…”

“Yeah, it’s a lot easier being able to fire fifty or a hundred shots in a row with a single power pack.” Sinon smirked. “But once you get used to working a matchlock, it’s only two or three seconds’ difference from casting Flame Arrow. When you’re dealing with dozens of them at once, they’re a major threat…The GGO starting point is just to the left of ALO’s, so it’s quite possible we’ll run into them as we proceed toward the center of the world map.”

“Good point…We’ll need to work on developing shields and armor that can stop a bullet before then. But preferably, we can make peace with them, like with Holgar’s people.”

“True,” Sinon admitted, looking to the night sky to the north-northeast—the direction of the land revealed by the heavenly light. “But even if we’re able to cooperate with them, as we get closer to the goal, eventually we’ll…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but I didn’t need to hear it to know what she meant. If only one team—or one single player—could beat the game, they would eventually need to determine a winner among those who were working together. Either by dialogue, drawing straws, playing rock-paper-scissors, or as Mutasina said, by deadly combat.

“…I’m sure we’ll figure out the right answer when that time comes,” I told her, giving the leaden long-tailed eagle the last of the meat. The bird gobbled it down happily, then chirped “Pwee!” and started walking toward the stable behind us without needing an order. Kuro followed it, equally sated.

“…What are you going to call the bird?”

“Huh? Hmmm…”

I called the lapispine dark panther Kuro for its black color, so if I was to choose a Japanese name using the same logic, I would have to call the gray bird Haiiro, but people like Leafa would probably make fun of me for coming up with generic names again.

“So…what are some other names for the color gray?” I asked Sinon.

The bookworm lived up to her reputation, as she wasted no time in listing them off. “Well, there’s nezumiiro, that’s like mouse gray; there’s usuzumiiro, that’s the color of faint, watery ink; then there’s namariiro, the color of lead.”

“Nezumi, Usuzumi…Oh, I think I like Namari. And it’s already taken a shot from your lead bullet, too.”

“Not that I was aiming for it, like I said,” she snapped, punching my shoulder.

I apologized, chuckling, and called after the retreating bird of prey, “Hey! Your name is Namari now, just so you know!”

The eagle’s head spun around, and as if to say “It’s a stupid name, but I guess I’ll take it,” squawked, “Pwee!”

The next day, October 2nd, Ruis na Ríg began to grow at a speed that far surpassed my initial expectations.

First, a paneled road ten feet wide was built along the east bank of the Maruba River, meaning that the unstable, rocky trip to the Stiss Ruins was suddenly remarkably easier.

The south quadrant of Ruis na Ríg now opened for business in earnest, and both surprisingly and luckily, the Insectsite players and Holgar’s team agreed to take over managing the inn and general store and so on, meaning we no longer needed to travel to the Stiss Ruins to hire NPCs to work for us—assuming that was even possible.

Of course, the south area was also home to Lisbeth’s armory, where she put out her personally crafted weapons and armor, but because iron ore was still precious, the Fine Iron series had to be sold at a premium. Asuna, Alice, and Leafa were using weapons a rank above that, in the Steel tier, but the Premium Steel Ingots that made them came from melting down my inherited weapon, the mighty Blárkveld, and we couldn’t make more for the time being.

While Lisbeth was strongly pushing for a stable source of more iron ore, the most lucrative mining spot we’d discovered so far was the secret cave behind the falls down the Maruba River. We knew from testing that it was possible to craft within the cave, so I wanted to create a workspace capable of smelting ingots in there, but everything required serious labor. And we couldn’t simply spend all our time focusing on running the town. Ruis na Ríg was nothing more than the beachhead we needed to journey to the center of the world.

Yes, now that five days had passed since the start of this new phase, September 27th, we had finally concluded the preparations we needed to head from our log cabin’s landing point to the northeast: the land revealed by the heavenly light. We were presumably the furthest along of any ALO players, but there was no way to know how close any of the other games’ players were to the goal. For now, all we could do was proceed with the equipment and stats we had—but before that, there was one thing I needed to know.

The next day, Saturday, October 3rd, I woke up early to leave my home in Kawagoe at five o’clock and arrived at Rath’s Roppongi office in Minato Ward before the clock struck seven.