Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 17

17

The first action the gilnaris queen hornet took was not a charge attack, as Silica expected, nor a bite, nor even a poison stinger.

Hovering about five yards off the ground, the queen opened scissorlike jaws and emitted an unearthly screech.

It was a supremely unpleasant frequency, like a cacophony of abrasive metal objects scraping together. It was hard to believe the sound filling Silica’s eardrums could be a virtual signal sent by the AmuSphere into her brain, and she couldn’t help but cover her ears with her hands. On her shoulder, Pina wailed pitifully. It was an attack directly on the senses, not a kind of system-based status effect, but she had never experienced something so powerful before.

On her left and right, others were hunched over the same way. Silica was about as experienced a VRMMO player as there could be, and this was new to her, so it had to have taken others like Holgar by complete surprise. Even the insects, which did not have visible ears, were covering the sides of their heads. It would have seemed funny…if it were possible to think about anything in this situation.

Bzzz! The four soldier hornets charged. It was a simple body-blow attack, but when a human-sized creature covered in tough armor came hurtling toward you at high speed, the force was greater than a critical hit from a two-handed hammer.

“Gwah!”

“Aieee!”

Deep bellows and high-pitched screams ensued as the eight attackers aside from Silica and Misha were knocked off their feet.

On the left side of her view, eight HP bars lost a big chunk. The biggest damage happened to Leafa, who was high-level but put all her points into attack and wore light armor.

“Leafa!” Silica cried, starting to rush her way. But Leafa, despite a stun effect visible over her head, bravely shouted back, “I…I’m fine! Focus on your role!”

“……!”

Silica grit her teeth and faced forward. The queen wasp was already recovering from the delay after the sonic attack. The next attack would be coming in a second or two. If it was poison or an area-based physical attack, it might actually break down the front line.

Her job was to draw the queen’s aggro—more precisely, to have Misha draw it. But as long as the queen was hovering twenty feet in the air, even Misha couldn’t reach far enough to hit it with teeth or claws.

There was only one option remaining. It was a major attack that couldn’t be repeated, but it’d be the height of foolishness to put yourself in a corner because you didn’t want to use up your secret weapon.

“Misha, Thornspike!”

On her command, Misha reared back on its hind legs and spread its front paws wide.

The queen curled up in midair, fearsomely long stinger shining red.

Silica had a sudden intuition that a poisonous area attack was coming. But the attack was just a split second too late.

“Groaaaah!”

The lightning pattern in the fur on Misha’s chest glowed as silver lights shot out of it. It was the namesake of the thornspike cave bear, a special attack that transformed fur into steel quills that shot at the enemy.

The storm of needles, which had wiped out Schulz’s team and nearly shot down Mutasina, struck the queen and the four soldiers at her sides directly.

“Greeeee!”

The five hornets screamed in a hideously metallic way and flew over ten yards backward with the force of the attack. The queen took the brunt of the damage, losing nearly 80 percent of her first HP bar. Her guards lost half their health, too.

“Can you manage, Silica?!” Sinon asked from the rear. Silica held up her hand and replied, “I’m all right!”

“Got it! Argo, continue cleaning up!” Sinon called out. From the back of the dome came an energetic “No sweat!” Argo, Friscoll, Needy, the Bashin, and the Patter were finishing off the paralyzed hornets in quick fashion. It took only one or two blows to the neck or chest, where they were most vulnerable, but there were just so many of them. It would take at least five minutes before any of the cleanup crew could join the fight against the boss.

“Great job, Silica!” said Agil.

“What a relief!” followed Zarion in English. They had just recovered from the stunning effect of the body blows. The stun icons on the other frontline party members’ HP bars were blinking, too.

But the queen and her soldiers were stable again after taking Misha’s big attack, also, and were closing the distance once more.

Most likely, their basic tactical pattern was for the soldiers to repeat physical attacks while the queen performed a number of special attacks from a high altitude out of weapon range. If they finished off the soldiers, the queen might fly lower, but the group would certainly take more than one area attack in the meantime.

For now, it was only Sinon’s musket that could hit the queen. If Silica told her she couldn’t withstand the queen’s attack pressure, Sinon would help, but as the leader of twenty-three, her main duty was to give orders.

Silica and Misha were waiting back in the tunnel for when the boss showed up. There was no way they could use their special attack once and call it a day.

She glared at the descending queen and thought hard. What would Kirito do here?

After the UR incident began, Kirito continued to break through difficult situations with his trademark outside-the-box thinking and proactive style. Dumping loads of logs from the roof to crush monsters, using temporary construction ghost objects as a visual impediment, firing his ghastly Rotten Shot inside his own mouth to break out of the feeling of suffocation—Silica didn’t have that kind of ingenuity, but there had to be something she could try that would help.

She was at least ten feet too short to hit the queen hornet with a weapon. Lisbeth could use the Carpentry skill to build a scaffold, but monster AI in Unital Ring were sophisticated, and the queen would probably just move out of range again. Maybe a movable scaffold would work, but there wasn’t going to be anything like that in the construction menu…

And that was when an idea took form. It was so perfectly simple that Silica was momentarily dumbfounded. She had to shake off her hesitation and act.

She placed a hand on Misha’s side—the bear was glaring up at the queen overhead—and jumped as high as she could, climbing the beast’s furry back so she could get on its shoulders.

“Misha, stand!”

“Grau!” the bear growled and straightened. Its shoulders rose, lifting Silica like an elevator. Naturally, the angle of her feet changed, too, but she’d be a poor excuse for a light, nimble fighter if she couldn’t handle that.

Misha was larger than a real-life brown bear, and when it stood on its hind legs, its shoulders were over ten feet above the ground. Silica had the second-smallest avatar of anyone after Yui, but if she used a sword skill from this position, she should be able to reach the queen at fifteen feet high.

The wasp seemed to recognize this, too, and stopped to hover. But the four guards were approaching slowly from a low height. Apparently, the needle attack had transferred their aggro to Misha. However…

“You’re supposed to be fighting us!” bellowed Klein, who came running up to do a tremendous jump slash. He was using a scimitar rather than a Japanese-style katana, but Lisbeth had forged the weapon to be as long as possible on his request, and it was enough to just barely reach the soldier hornet’s belly.

Following him, Leafa, Dikkos, and Holgar leaped as well, slashing at the remaining soldiers. The hornets’ attention turned to them, and the four resumed buzzing angrily around the players.

In the back, the queen opened her jaws as far as she could again: the setup for the sonic attack.

“Forward, Misha!” she instructed. The bear stomped toward the queen. Silica waited for the right moment, then activated her sword skill in the air: the single thrust Rapid Bite.

Silica’s inherited skill from ALO was Short Swords, but since her proficiency fell down to 100, she couldn’t use the high-ranking four- and five-part skills for now. Still, a single-hit skill should be enough to sabotage a special attack activation—should.

Stop! she willed, slamming the tip of the dagger into the queen hornet’s mouth.

At present, they’d only been able to mine iron ore, so they wouldn’t be able to make steel weapons for a while. Silica’s fine steel dagger was made with steel ingots gained from melting Kirito’s favorite sword from ALO, Blárkveld. In other words, this dagger had originally been Kirito’s sword.

Of course, the source of the resources wouldn’t make a difference on the specs of the result, but in a tense battle that could go either way, your feelings might be enough to affect the outcome of the fight. With her righteous weapon in hand, Silica pierced the queen’s defense with a fierce blow and not only stopped the sonic attack before it could start but also knocked back the creature, which was twice her size.

“Gyashhh!” the enemy hissed with fury. Silica did a backflip in midair and landed on Misha’s shoulders. Pina came back down to land on Silica’s head, too, and squeaked “Pyui!” with pride.

“Nice one, Silica!” cheered Lisbeth from the ground.

“Only thanks to the dagger you made for me, Liz!” she shouted back. And thanks to Kirito’s ingots.

As for the queen, Silica’s Rapid Bite had been a critical hit, and the boss’s first HP bar was now gone. There were two left, but this probably meant a change in attack patterns. She would have to keep handling the queen safely and ensuring that every attempt at an area attack was prevented.

The queen had recovered from the knockback and came rushing forward again. Her matte-finish compound eyes had no eyelids or pupils, but somehow, they expressed anger anyway.

“Gyiii!” the queen snarled threateningly. Silica stared boldly right back at it.

All around them were the sounds of furious battle between the four soldier hornets and the eight players fighting them. As long as she could keep the queen off-balance and occupied until the soldiers were wiped out, victory was assured.

Just hang in there, Chett. We’ll rescue you soon, she told the distant nest, squeezing her dagger.

At that moment, the queen’s cutting-machine jaws opened slightly, the sharp mouth behind it twisting. Almost like a mocking smile.

The queen hornet rose higher. Six yards, seven…At this point, Silica couldn’t reach her even using Misha’s shoulders for a lift.

Did the queen have a hidden attack that could hit the ground from that height? If that was the boss’s special, most dangerous trick, she had to stop it somehow. Throw the dagger? No. A Throwing Weapons sword skill might be one thing, but simply hurling an item wasn’t going to cancel out a major attack.

Hovering at over twenty-five feet, the queen confirmed Silica’s fears by starting a motion she hadn’t used before.

The giant wasp’s body curled up as round as it could go, compressing the legs. Its long antennae stood erect, and pale light shone from the ends, then started traveling up the antennae. If the lights reached the base, something very bad would happen.

“Sinon!” Silica shrieked, fighting back against a chill that threatened to engulf her whole body. “Shoot it!”

The raid leader must have sensed the danger already. At almost the exact moment Silica cried out, there was the dry crack of a musket.

The queen’s left antenna broke off right along the middle.

It spoke to Sinon’s shooting skill that she could hit a narrow antenna with a gun as clumsy as a musket. But it was a fraction of a second too late. The light passed through the point where it split just before it happened and reached the queen’s head after all.

The triangular array of eyes flashed so brightly you couldn’t look directly at it. The light turned into a ring that spread to cover the entire dome.

That was all. There was no damage to Silica, Misha, or any of their companions, and there was no TP or SP loss. No Debuffs, either, it seemed.

Then what did the attack do…? Silica was at a loss.

A low hum began to fill the dome. It rose in volume very quickly: the buzzing of wings. The worker wasps that had been paralyzed by the lobelia poison were getting up off the ground.

The blue light wasn’t an attack meant for the players. It was a special technique that removed all Debuffs from the other hornets.

“Cleanup team, gather around Misha!” Sinon commanded. The scattered players all around the dome began racing back. Workers rose and began to congregate as well. There were at least forty—no, fifty of them.

The queen and soldiers were dangerous enough enemies as it was, but if they got surrounded by this many workers on top of that, even retreating might be difficult. Silica was utterly stunned by this development.

Overhead, the gilnaris queen hornet’s mouth once again curved into a mocking smile.