Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 6

6

After chopping up all the veggies left in the fridge, frying them a bit, and simmering them with canned tomatoes for a simple minestrone, then eating the soup with leftover bâtard bread for a late breakfast, Shino Asada was ready to plan her day.

Kirito, Asuna, and Alice would be investigating in the Underworld from morning until evening, so the heavy work in Unital Ring wouldn’t start until seven o’clock. She’d finished virtually all of Friday’s homework last night, except for the workbook material in Classical Literature B. In ALO she could bring her homework into the game and have a study session with her friends, asking for help when needed and having fun all the while, but Unital Ring had no feature to import outside file contents.

She always prioritized her schoolwork, and besides, she couldn’t truly enjoy a game with 100 percent of her concentration if the thought of some unfinished homework was in the back of her mind. So she should focus on her workbook in the morning and save her dive until the afternoon. Despite this, however, she couldn’t help but feel curious about the current state of Ruis na Ríg.

If her game performance was going to suffer because of thinking about homework, and she couldn’t focus on her homework because she was wondering about the game, then the latter would probably represent a worse betrayal of her studies, she decided. So maybe it would be best to zip through Ruis na Ríg, confirm that the town was functioning properly, and then focus on her homework with all qualms cleared up.

I feel like I’m starting to think the way Kirito does, she realized. But it didn’t stop her from putting on the AmuSphere and lying down in bed.

“Link Start,” she announced, feeling a bit guilty. It’s just one loop of the town! she told herself, passing through the tunnel of light and emerging in the living room of the log cabin as Sinon the sniper.

“Back row acquired!” someone shouted, tugging on her collar from behind.

“Unnyaa?!” she squealed. “Wh-what was that?!”

She spun around and saw Silica and Klein standing side by side. The one who’d grabbed her turned out to be Lisbeth.

“…What’s going on here?” Sinon asked, blinking suspiciously.

Silica gave her an innocent smile. “Good morning, Sinon! We’re about to go exploring in the forest to the north. Would you like to join us?”

“I—I was only coming in to do a quick patrol of the town,” Sinon explained before realizing that this was the sort of question in which only the answer yes would result in her collar being released. “Uhhh…er, all right. As long as it doesn’t take too long.”

“Nooo, not long at all!” Klein beamed. “We’re just doin’ a liiiittle bit of mapping!”

“Yep! And then searching for a teeeeensy bit of iron ore while we’re there!” Lisbeth added.

Why do I find that hard to believe? Sinon thought, even as she said, “Okay, fine.”

The party of four topped off their consumable items, stopped by the stable to add Misha, the thornspike cave bear, to their number, then left the town through the Two O’Clock Gate to the northeast.

Yui wasn’t with them because she was spending the majority of her processing resources on monitoring the network while Kirito and Asuna were investigating the Underworld. That meant not a single member of Team Kirito was left behind in Ruis na Ríg, although there were several members of the Insectsite group, and besides, if they started seriously pushing forward, they wouldn’t have the luxury of leaving people in town anyway. Ruis na Ríg was functioning well as a waypoint now, and they’d just have to pray that no violent ruffians came by and tried to destroy the town.

Thirty yards north of the gate, the little path they’d built for transporting lumber ended, leaving nothing but untouched natural forest before them. It was a grand sight, as the name Great Zelletelio Forest suggested, but unlike real forests, the undergrowth wouldn’t block your progress. The ground was covered in soft grasses and dotted in warm, dappled light that filtered through the branches, like a scene from an Ivan Shishkin painting.

“Mmm, gotta love a good forest!” opined Klein, who stretched luxuriously. From the rear line behind him, Misha, the thornspike cave bear, agreed, growling, “Gruhhh…”

It felt nice, that was true, but this wasn’t a picnic trip. “You’re here to help us explore, right, Klein?” said Sinon.

“And you need to be looking for iron ore sources, too,” snapped Lisbeth.

The katana-wielder gave them a massive thumbs-up. “I’m on it! The only things that don’t get picked up on my sensor are ghosts and chameleons.”

“You seem awfully convinced that we won’t see any ghosts in the middle of the day,” Sinon noted dryly. Klein protested, claiming that surely there wouldn’t be any daytime ghosts, but all the same, his eyes swiveled around the surroundings with a higher frequency after that.

At the very least, they knew from Kirito and Alice that the world of Unital Ring did contain astral-type undead monsters. Four days ago, they’d gone to meet up with Argo at the Stiss Ruins, where they unintentionally met the requirements to encounter a quest monster called a vengeful wraith, a fight that nearly proved fatal.

The condition to run across the wraith was to have a silver item manifested on your person. The silver coin Sinon had given to Alice did the trick, apparently. She’d given the silver coin to her to try to buy any musket bullets and gunpowder they might be selling at the ruins. Unfortunately, there were no such items available.

Bullets could be fashioned out of iron, so there wasn’t any concern of running out of ammo—the problem was gunpowder. According to the Ornith siblings who gave Sinon her musket, the explosive was made by mixing charcoal powder with the secretions of an insect called a bursting beetle.

Bursting beetles were found at the foot of cacti growing on the west end of the Giyoru Savanna, but that was over eighteen miles from Ruis na Ríg, and there was a massive natural rock formation like the Great Wall of China in between that further complicated travel.

She had about sixty uses of gunpowder left. Once that was gone, she’d have to use the Bellatrix SL2 optical gun dropped by a former Gun Gale Online player who’d died shortly after coming into this game. But of course, she couldn’t recharge its energy stock, so that would eventually run out, too. She needed to find a means to produce gunpowder sooner rather than later…

These thoughts occupied her mind on their trek through the beautiful forest environment, and before long, there was a low vibration audible ahead of them.

Misha uttered a short, quiet alert. Up front, Klein and Lisbeth came to a stop.

Vmmmmm…It sounded like the hum of a large mechanical monster from GGO, except the pitch was rising and falling ever so slightly. Nothing could be seen yet because of the curtains of vines hanging from the branches of the ancient trees around them.

Klein held a finger to his lips for silence, then pointed to a spot where the curtain of greenery was thinnest. The others followed him and snuck forward in silence.

After parting the vines, they found that the shrubbery ahead formed a kind of arched tunnel. The vibration was coming from somewhere down the tunnel. It was just wide enough for Misha to pass through, but the bear wasn’t going to be able to nimbly back up, which would cause trouble if any monsters came charging down the tunnel at them.

With some more hand signs, they elected Sinon and Klein to perform recon. They headed into the tunnel, examining the dense shrubbery around them. The thick, intertwined branches were bristling with thorns. It was most likely an indestructible piece of terrain that would cause damage on contact. The thorny brush ran east to west for quite a long way and was clearly dividing the forest into two sections.

Fortunately, the tunnel itself was only about thirty feet long. The other exit was also covered by vines, and it was beyond there that the undulating vibration was coming from.

Klein and Sinon lined up and carefully pulled aside the curtain with a fingertip.

“Eugh!” he promptly exclaimed. Sinon would have scolded him because he had been the one who shushed them all first, if not for the fact that she understood his feeling.

The tunnel ended in a domed space about fifty yards across. In the middle was the largest and oldest tree they’d seen yet in Unital Ring, and the ground was dotted with massive, rafflesia-like flowers with petals in toxic colors. But neither of those things were what elicited Klein’s disgusted reaction.

The tree’s knotted trunk and gnarled branches were swallowed up by a dark-brown mass. It was made up of elliptical shapes covered with a scale-shaped, striped pattern—just like a wasp’s nest. Except these shapes were each easily over fifteen feet across, five or six of them fused together, like some kind of wasp apartment building.

Naturally, the residents of this apartment were gigantic wasps.

From holes all over the structure emerged twenty-inch-long wasps, busily milling about. Their bodies were a dark metallic green, with light-brown wings. Each one sported a long, slightly curved stinger from its bottom.

Upon leaving the nest, the wasps buzzed loudly about the dome before landing on one of the rafflesia flowers and sticking their heads into the center. After a few moments, each wasp would fly back to the nest. Sinon and Klein couldn’t begin to imagine how many there were in total.

“This could be big trouble for us if we’re not careful,” Klein whispered. That’s true for most monsters, Sinon thought but nodded to show her agreement. Let happy wasps lie. They should retreat with haste—but the problem was that, based on the landscape around them, the wasp nest dome was most likely the only…

“Hey, you two.”

Sinon was taken by such surprise that she raised her musket out of sheer reflex. Eyes darting left and right, she saw, lurking in a kind of natural evacuation zone surrounded by rocks and shrubs near the wall to the right, a man.

He was this close, and I didn’t notice him. Very good Hiding skill, Sinon noted with frustration. In Unital Ring, staring at a player did not produce an automatic cursor, but she did recognize his face. He was a former ALO player who was captured by the Insectsite group while scouting on Mutasina’s behalf. And his name was…

“Oh, is that you, Friscoll?” Klein hissed. The man nodded and waved them closer.

If Friscoll had been observing the wasp dome, it would be well worth hearing what he had to say, but the others were still waiting at the mouth of the tunnel. Their impatience meter was probably about to hit its limit. If they didn’t go back soon, the others would come marching down the tunnel with Misha.

Sinon beckoned to him and whispered, “You come with us.”

Friscoll made a face but acquiesced. He watched the nest carefully, then crawled out of the evacuation zone, slithering almost silently along the wall to the tunnel.

At last he stood up, and it became clear that he was wearing a very strange outfit, indeed. It was a hooded robe that covered his entire body, but the faded green cloth was adorned with many fluffy linen strips, almost like a ghillie suit for snipers. In fact, it was probably designed for that exact purpose.

“What? Oh, this?” Friscoll grinned, noticing the way Sinon was staring at him. “Pretty nice, huh? The rats—er, the Patter back at Ruis na Ríg sell them. They said it takes four days to make a single suit.”

“Oooh…”

Impressed, Sinon started to make a note to buy a suit the next time they finished one, then reminded herself that now was not the time. She and Klein followed Friscoll back down the tunnel; Sinon apologized to Silica and Lisbeth for leaving them waiting and explained what they’d found. Both girls loudly grimaced.

“Wasps, huh?”

“They are familiar enemies, though…”

As Silica said, wasp- and bee-type monsters were common in both ALO and GGO, and presumably in SAO as well. But that didn’t mean they were easy pickings. They had three major danger attributes—flight, poison, and groups—so most games tended to peg them as dangerous foes in the early-to-mid game sections.

On that note, Klein rubbed at his stubble and commented, “They’re bad news, guys. That nest was the size of a freakin’ house. Best move is probably to go around them.”

“I knew you’d say that, old man,” said Friscoll, who was mysteriously cocky, with a smirk. Klein snapped, “You’re basically the same age as me!” but the man was unbothered by it.

“You guys know how the UR world is structured by now, right?” he asked.

“Yes…it’s a circular map with a radius of over four hundred miles, with all the VRMMO players arranged along the outside and the goal in the very center,” she said, quoting Argo.

Friscoll smirked again. “You’re mostly right but a little out of date.”

He scooped up a dead branch off the ground, then used it to draw a circle in some exposed dirt. Then he added another circle on the inside, then another.

“If you combine what all the Seed game players are saying, you’ll find out it’s not just a simple flat circle, but a tiered structure with the goal at the middle.”

“Tiered…like a wedding cake, you mean?” Silica asked.

“That’s right. Like concentric circles.” Friscoll said, speaking faster with excitement. “If the radius is over four hundred miles, then for every sixty miles or so heading inland from the shoreline at the very outer edge, it gets another step taller. And after the next length, it gets taller again. There’s a cliff just north of the Stiss Ruins, and the difference is, like, six or seven times the height of the ruins. It was easily over six hundred feet. Of course, at scale on the map, it’ll look like the width of a piece of paper, but in person, you’d have to be suicidal to attempt free-climbing it.”

“Then how do you get up there?” Lisbeth asked. Once again, Friscoll grinned.

“I’d prefer to charge you for anything else…but given that I owe you a debt for freeing me from Muta-Muta’s bastard magic, I’ll tell you for free.”

Muta-Muta was Mutasina presumably. If she found out he was calling her that, she’d probably come straight here to murder him, but that was his problem to deal with, so Sinon ignored the comment and prompted, “And?”

“Listen, this is ultra-rare intel, so don’t go blabbing this to any old person you meet. There are actually places designed for you to get up to the next step. Usually, it’s a dungeon that goes inside the cliff face, but some of them are stairs carved into the rock or rickety old ladders that could fall apart at any moment.”

Friscoll wore an expression that said this was incredibly sensitive information he was passing on, but it all sounded quite commonsense. It wouldn’t be much of a game if you were faced with unscalable cliffs and had no route to safely get up.

He could clearly sense they were thinking this from their facial expressions, so he hastily added, “But they also say there’s always some super-dangerous barrier arranged along each route to get up the next cliff step. Like puzzles that cause you to die if you fall off or field bosses powerful enough to wipe out a whole thirty-man raid party.”

“And…that wasp nest is our field boss in this case?” Sinon asked.

Friscoll pursed his lips. “Yep, no doubt about it. I’ve traveled east and west from the tunnel mouth for a while, and these thorny bushes just continue forever. No blades or fire can harm the stuff. I’m thinkin’ that waspy area is supposed to be the first checkpoint for everyone who started at the ruins.”

“Ah, I see…”

This information aligned with Sinon’s observations. Unless they figured out some way to get past the wasp nest dome, they would never reach the land revealed by the heavenly light…

On the other hand, there was another solution, one that was definitely not the “proper” answer.

“But if what you said is true, then if we keep going either east or west for long enough, we should find the barrier and cliff for the players from a different game. If they’ve already broken through that barrier, couldn’t we just trace their route up to the next step?”

“Uh…well, sure,” Friscoll said, crossing his arms. It made all the frills on his ghillie suit wiggle. “From what I hear, some folks have already broken through the first barrier.”

“Are you serious?!” yelped Klein, stepping closer. “Which game was it?”

“Tsk. All right, but this is the limit of what I can tell ya. I’ve only heard it secondhand, haven’t confirmed it myself, but from what I hear, as of this morning, two groups have broken through the first barrier. The first one is called Apocalyptic Date, a game where all the players are anthro.”

“Oh! I’ve heard of AD!” Silica reacted instantly. Her triangular ears twitched with excitement. “All the avatars are so cute and fluffy! Though I’ve heard there are reptiles and amphibians, too…I was thinking of converting over to try it out sometime.”

“Now, listen up, little miss. They might look cute, but they’re fierce fighters. The reason they’ve been making quick progress is because their fur and claws are so tough, they’ve only needed to do the minimum of equipment production,” Friscoll pointed out, eliciting a puffy-cheeked pout from Silica.

“As long as you look cute, the rest doesn’t matter! Anyway, what’s the other game?”

“Oh, this one’s famous, so you’d probably recognize it,” Friscoll prefaced. In hushed tones for dramatic effect, he revealed, “It’s Asuka Empire.”

“……”

The group shared a look. Even Sinon, who didn’t know much about any VRMMOs except GGO and ALO, knew what sort of a game that one was. It featured a beautiful world design with a traditional Japanese motif and had character classes like samurai, ninja, monk, and miko. It was so popular among gamers that its active playerbase was nearly as large as ALO’s.

“But…unlike AD, Asuka would have to make their own equipment. How did they get so far ahead?”

“If you want the simple answer, it’s because they didn’t get bogged down in BS,” Friscoll told Klein, arms folded. He shrugged. “Thanks to Muta-Muta, us ALO players had a huge infighting problem, and that was true of most of the game groupings. On our left, GGO was getting into gunfights over ammo, and on our right, Insectsite was fighting between Sixes and Eighmores, right? Basically, no game population can really focus on conquering the game until the fight over hegemony is settled. For whatever reason, the Asuka Empire folks settled on a cooperative stance right at the start and set up a huge production center near their starting point.”

“……”

The group fell silent again. In the past six days, the former ALO players had, as Friscoll put it, a “huge infighting problem.” But that was clearly because the witch Mutasina and her companions immediately began plotting against the others, cast a massive Noose of the Accursed spell to enslave an army of a hundred players, and attempted to seize control over any rivals.

Mutasina’s ambitions were foiled for now, but her influence still heavily colored the population. More than a few players had given up on playing again, intimidated by the possibility of being afflicted by the Noose.

Perhaps this slowdown will prove fatal for us, Sinon thought, biting her lip.

“Hey, don’t get down, Sino-Sino,” said Friscoll, the very person who had just given her all this depressing information, smacking her on the shoulder. “Yeah, Asuka and AD have a big lead, but we’ve got a huge advantage on our side, too.”

“…What advantage is that?”

“Ruis na Ríg, of course! Not a single other game has such a large and advanced base built as far ahead as we do: nearly twenty miles from the starting point. If we can break through that waspy-wasp area today, our supply train logistical advantage should help us make up a ton of ground on those other two groups.”

“……Well, you may be right about that,” Sinon agreed, nodding slowly. With its helpful magic spells, ALO made it surprisingly easy to just grind through long questlines, but in GGO, you needed ammo, energy packs, and med kits, so when tackling a major quest far from town, you had to start by setting up a campsite out in the wilderness.

Magic skills existed in Unital Ring, but for the moment, they couldn’t generate water and food. In order to travel to the center of the world, you’d need to travel between your progress point and a production hub several times. That made the presence of a massive forward base like Ruis na Ríg extremely beneficial.

The town had grown to its current size only because Kirito and Asuna and Alice had fought so hard to protect the log cabin that had fallen out of New Aincrad. The three of them wouldn’t be back until tonight, so the rest of the group was obligated to carry their own weight by making further progress until then.

“…All right. Let’s break through that wasp dome,” Sinon announced. Klein, Lisbeth, Silica, and Friscoll all grinned at her words. She glared swiftly at the last of them, who was acting like he was a long-term member of the team already, and added, “Also, if you call me Sino-Sino one more time, I’m going to find out if that ghillie suit is as flammable as it looks.”