Sword Art Online - Volume 27 - Chapter 5

5

If only there were two of me!

In my eighteen years of life, I had probably never made this wish as hard as I did now.

I was curious about what was happening in Unital Ring, of course. After I heard about Silica’s team beating the hornet boss, the three-tiered world map, the staircase dungeon up to the second tier, and that two other factions were already ahead of the ALO players, it wasn’t easy to bring myself to log out again.

But even as I was rushing through the Great Zelletelio Forest, I couldn’t get the swirling mysteries in the Underworld out of my mind.

The secret base on Admina, the cruel experiments being performed there, the relationship of the enigmatic gunner Istar to Eolyne, and the identity and motive of the intruder from the real world.

On top of that, I still hadn’t had a real conversation with Ronie, Tiese, and Selka yet. Selka, in particular, I hadn’t spoken with since first leaving the village of Rulid. Ronie and Tiese were present for the peace talks with the Dark Territory, which I barely remembered, but whatever the last words we traded were, I could not recall.

If possible, I wished I could duplicate my fluctlight so that one of me could be in Unital Ring and the other could be in the Underworld at the same time—until I realized that it meant being two people at once. And knowing my personality, I would not end up being friends with my other self. I had already cursed (on many occasions) His Majesty Star King Kirito, and that wasn’t an imaginary identical twin, but my actual, nonreplicable past self.

I guess I’ve got no choice but to keep alternating between the two worlds and catching up each time, I lamented to myself.

Then I remembered that, before we went into Central Cathedral, Eolyne had said there might be a way to solve all our problems of limited time here. What did he mean by that? Obviously, he wasn’t going to convince our parents to let Asuna and me go on another long-term dive with an IV for fluids.

I was turning all these ideas over in my head as I marched through the forest on autopilot when Lisbeth came to a stop ahead of me and pointed out the entrance to the hornet’s nest dome.

I held out my hand to stop Kuro, the lapispine dark panther, and lifted my torch with the other.

About five yards ahead, thick and thorny bushes formed a tangled, elongated structure that acted as a natural barrier. According to Friscoll (who told Lisbeth, who told me), this thorny barrier continued to the east and west for miles and couldn’t be walked around.

Lisbeth was pointing at the mouth of a dark tunnel in the middle of the thorn bushes. The way the pointed thorns crowded around the entrance like teeth was very ominous.

“…And the boss won’t repop?” asked a worried Asuna, who was accompanied by Aga, the long-billed giant agamid.

Lisbeth made a face and looked upward. “Mmm. Maybe?”

“Maybe? Liz…”

“Ah-ha-ha! You’ll be fine. Even if it has repopped, the tunnel exit is a safe area, and you’ll know from the wings buzzing right away.”

“I’m trusting you on this!” Asuna reminded her, and Aga threw in an admonishing “Qweh!”

Of course, there was no such thing as a long-billed giant agamid in the real world, but agamids were a family of tree-climbing lizards found in a wide range of habitats from Asia to Africa. The more famed members of the family included frilled lizards and bearded dragons, and the others were all very lizardish, to coin a word. But for some reason, while Aga had a body like a miniature carnivorous dinosaur, its head looked like it belonged to a platypus, which made me want to ask, How is this a lizard?!

Its body was covered in green scales, and many sharp teeth lined the inside of its beak. There were vicious claws on the ends of its limbs, and it looked the most monstrous of our four pets—five, if you included Pina—but there was something about it that was strangely endearing.

Lisbeth walked up to Aga, gurgling “Agagagaga” for some reason, and scratched it under the chin. Then she went to Kuro and shook the scruff of its neck, going “Kurrrr.” Once she was satisfied, she turned on her heel.

“Let’s go!”

Asuna and I shared a very bemused look before following Lisbeth down the tunnel.

Fortunately, the gilnaris hornets had not reappeared. It had only been four hours since they were vanquished, so we couldn’t be sure they would never come back, but if they were like floor bosses in SAO, they’d probably never return.

That made me regret not being there to take part in the fight, but I had to give the highest of props to Silica and Sinon for leading the battle and seizing victory without losing a single player or NPC. Subsequently, I also wanted to know what kind of treasure dropped…

We walked through a vast dome under a canopy of tree branches. There was no buzzing of wings here, but large rafflesia-like flowers dotting the ground played host to some ominous skittering sounds. According to Lisbeth, the sounds were coming from large four-inch ticks that fed on the nectar of the flowers, which were called gargamols.

The ticks’ bellies were full of nectar, so if caught, they might serve as a valuable source of sugar, but I held off on collecting any, as I gauged that there was at least a 70 percent chance that Asuna would scream her head off.

Once across the fifty-yard dome—which made it nearly the size of Ruis na Ríg—a nearly vertical cliff face came into view. I took it to be the base of the six-hundred-foot wall that separated the first and second tiers of Unital Ring’s world map. If I climbed to one of the taller trees in the Great Zelletelio Forest during the day, I would probably be able to see it to the north.

The surface of the cliff had a dull, hard luster to it, and almost zero outcroppings that you might use as a handhold or foothold. Even in a virtual world, attempting to free-climb this cliff was an act of suicide.

Maybe with a flying pet, like Namari, the leaden long-tailed eagle, you could fly up, I thought for a moment. But of course, it wouldn’t be that simple. There would inevitably be a lair of some incredibly powerful flying monster at the top that would destroy you if you flew closer, and I didn’t want to test that theory out.

So I stifled my sense of adventure and let Lisbeth guide us toward the rock face. Our three torches illuminated an elliptical cave mouth, hidden behind two trees.

The opening was about seven feet tall and five feet wide. At first glance, the rough rock face was hard to identify as natural or artificial. If I didn’t know it already, I never would have guessed that this was the only route to get to the next tier of the map.

“It’s surprisingly tiny,” Asuna remarked.

“Right?” said Lisbeth. “Sinon was guessing that this was meant to limit the size of the pets you can take with you to the next tier.”

“Oh…”

She glanced at the pets with us. Aga was about as tall as Asuna but had a slim profile, so it should be able to squeeze through in terms of width. Kuro could easily fit, of course, but Misha, the thornspike cave bear, was likely to hurt its shoulders trying to scrape through.

“Is that why Silica didn’t take Misha? Because it would be terrible if it got stuck?”

“Yep. She wanted to reach the exit with just people first, so she could check if Misha could get through all the way.”

“I see…And who’s inside the cave right now?”

“Ummm, Silica, Sinon, Klein, Argo, Leafa, Yui, Holgar, Zarion, Ceecee…and Friscoll, I think,” Lisbeth listed, counting them off on her fingers. “There were a bunch more in the hornet boss fight, but they all returned to Ruis na Ríg first and re-formed the cave raid party with people who still had time. The Bashin and Patter have a rule that you must not cross the Last Wall.”

“The Last Wall…”

The name bore a faint similarity to the End Mountains, which surrounded the human realm of the Underworld, but that was surely a coincidence.

“Why didn’t you take part in the cave raid, Liz?” Asuna asked.

Lisbeth just smiled for some reason.

“You’ll find out soon.”

It was chilly inside the cave, but still much more comfortable than the slick, dampened cave behind the waterfall we found downstream on the Maruba River.

About sixty feet down the twisting passage, we entered a wide-open chamber. On the other side was an upward staircase that had clearly been carved by human hands. We held out our torches to illuminate every bit of the cave, but there were no monsters.

Instead, I found a reddish-black bit of rock sticking out of the dark-gray wall, and grunted with excitement. The texture was cold and rough to the touch. It was a bit of iron ore.

“Oh! There’s still some left in here?” Lisbeth commented, so I spun around to face her.

“I get it. You were able to refill on iron ore in here, so you took it back to Ruis na Ríg to do more smithing with it.”

“Bingo.”

“Then I guess we interrupted your work. Sorry for making you escort us, Liz,” Asuna apologized, but Lisbeth shook her head vehemently.

“No, no, I’ve got enough stock in the store to last a night, and you can never have enough iron ore!”

She approached the wall with a pickax and smacked the ore outcropping with practiced ease. It took only five swings to break the ore in two and send it crumbling to the ground.

I picked up half and handed it to Lisbeth. Unfortunately, as far as I could see, there were no other ores around.

It was time to feed Kuro and Aga some dried meat, and we refilled on TP and SP before heading up the stairs. About three stories up, by real-world measurements, there was another flat passageway. Like the labyrinth towers in Aincrad, it seemed this dungeon was made of floors connected by stairs. But while the ones in the old game got up to a hundred yards tall, this was two hundred. It was nearly as tall as the Tokyo municipal building.

Some monsters began appearing on the second floor, but very infrequently. Silica’s group had an hour and a half head start on us, so they had probably cleaned up everything in our path.

We went as fast as we could while dispatching classic cave monsters like scorpions, bats, and centipedes and snatching every bit of ore we came across. Thankfully, the advance party had done us the huge favor of marking their direction at every fork in the path. It was a very simple method—they placed a chunk of favillite from the Maruba River on the route leading to the next set of stairs—and because it was much lighter in color than the rock of this cave, it made for an easy visual marker.

We cleared the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors with ease, and I was just thinking that we were about halfway through, when I heard the faint ringing of metal, and Kuro growled softly. If Kuro’s sharp hearing heard it, then it wasn’t just a trick of my ears. If there was conflict happening in this cave, one side was guaranteed to be Silica’s group.

“That’s combat!” I hissed to Asuna and Lisbeth, and took off running.

When I rushed up the stairs to the next floor, the sounds grew much clearer. At the same time, I had a bad premonition. If they were fighting scorpions or centipedes, there wouldn’t be this much continual metallic clashing. If this was the sound of weapon on weapon, or weapon on armor, then their opponent might be human—other players.

I rushed up three stories’ worth of stairs, nearly forty feet, and launched myself onto the eighth floor, where I learned that my expectations were only half-correct.

It was a space the size of a basketball court, with a level of artifice and craft that was very different from the natural caves of the previous floors. The floor and ceiling were excavated into flat surfaces, and there was a semicircle of pillars along the walls. Niches between each pair of pillars held vases filled with oil, presumably, because they flickered with eerie pale flames.

Ahead of us in a diamond formation, their backs turned to us, was our friends’ advance party.

But they were not fighting other players. It was a giant, ten feet tall and made of stone—a golem.

Our friends hadn’t noticed me yet. I had to hold myself back from calling out to them; distracting a party engaged in combat while executing tight combination maneuvers would only throw them into chaos. Asuna, Lisbeth, Kuro, and Aga stopped just behind me, maintaining their silence.

I tried to stifle my impatient concern and focused on getting a grasp of the situation.

On the front line of the formation were Holgar, Zarion, Klein, and Leafa. In the center were the shield-bearing Holgar and the rhinoceros beetle Zarion, blocking the golem while Klein and Leafa assisted them from either side.

The middle line of the formation was Silica, Argo, Friscoll, and a slender Six. That was probably Ceecee. They were attacking from the left and right, hoping to catch the golem’s weak spot, but it seemed like they were only drawing lots of sparks and not delivering any real damage.

In the rear were Yui and Sinon. The plan was probably for them to attack at a distance with magic and the musket, but both were only on standby, watching and waiting.

Just as I felt I understood the situation, the golem let out a bizarre bellow.

“Gwooohnnnn!!”

It put its fists together, like two carved boulders, and held them behind its head.

“Here comes the slam!” Klein warned, dropping his hips and squaring up. The four tanks in front might be tough, but my instincts were screaming that they couldn’t withstand a blow like that. I wanted to shout at them to dodge; instead, I had to tell myself that they knew what they were doing better than me.

The golem held its charging motion for a tauntingly long time, at least two whole seconds, before slamming its fists down with such speed, the air of the chamber shook.

The four on the front line weren’t fooled by the golem’s timing and leaped out of the way just at the right moment. The golem’s fists smashed into nothing but ground, but that was not the end of it. A shock wave spread outward along the ground, wobbling the legs of the players nearby. It would have been too fast if I were standing right there, but at this distance, I had enough time to watch the wave approach and jump over it.

While in the air, I raised my sword to my right shoulder. The blade whined with vibration and glowed bright green.

As I landed from jumping over the shock wave, I unleashed the sword skill Sonic Leap. Pushing off my planting foot to maximize the acceleration boost the system gave me, I flew right at the golem’s head, twenty-five feet away and ten feet off the ground.

Obviously, the golem’s limbs were as hard as metal—but what about the head?

“Rrraah!”

I struck the golem between the eyes with every bit of force I could muster. From what I recalled of the Jewish legends that the golem came from, its forehead was its weak spot.

However, while my strike was accurate, it only produced an ugly, discordant clang and enough sparks to sear my vision with the color white. I was easily knocked back and lost my balance, but not before I got a foot on the golem’s shoulder, allowing me to push off and do a backflip into a steady landing.

“Nwah?! K-Kiri?!” Klein clamored from over my left shoulder.

I decided to forgo a greeting, instead telling him, “See if you can pull its aggro for another ten seconds!”

“Y-yeah, you got it!” he called back, thankfully grasping what I planned, and readied his scimitar at waist height.

While my best attack had been deflected, it did succeed at giving the golem a minor stun effect, stopping it cold. Klein used the sword skill Reaver with his special-order extra-long scimitar to strike the golem’s shin.

“Gwooohnn!”

It wasn’t the golem’s weak point or anything like that, but the golem sounded furious nonetheless. The monster thrust its left fist at Klein, but Zarion blocked it with the thick carapace on his forehead.

At that point, I raced around the golem, trying to circle behind it. The group would have tried attacking its back already, of course. In fact, there were fresh marks all over its back, but none were deeper than a mere scratch of the surface.

My eyes were wide, searching intently all over the golem’s massive form. I’d already seen its front, and there was nothing that indicated a weak point. So maybe its back would have something, I hoped—but there were no words, no jewels, no sigils, not even any minor protrusions or divots to take advantage of.

The boss of the fifth floor of Aincrad, Fuscus the Vacant Colossus, had the symbol of its weakness visible on its forehead at the start; that point then moved to other spots around its body as the fight wore on. They didn’t look at all alike, but a golem was a golem, and there would surely be a weakness somewhere, I assumed. Apparently, I had assumed wrong.

Once again, the golem placed its hands together and swung them back over its head.

Since I’d managed to land a blow on it, the golem’s spindle cursor was now visible to me. It had two HP bars and the name Statue of Aur-Dah. I didn’t know how the last part was meant to be pronounced.

The golem’s HP was practically full, while the front-line members had dropped down to around 70 percent of their health. They succeeded at jumping away from the powerful smash attack, but the shock wave was once again unavoidable. When they faltered, the golem tried to kick them.

“…?!”

When it started the kicking motion, I thought I saw something on the underside of its right foot as the limb was pulled back.

“Gwohnnn!”

The golem thrust its foot out powerfully. The four in front were still faltering and couldn’t avoid it. They tried to block with shields and weapons, but they couldn’t absorb all the force. They flew backward and smashed into the four members in the middle.

So the formation hadn’t broken down, but the front row took even more damage, pushing the center pair of Zarion and Holgar below 50 percent.

“Haaaaah!”

“Uryaaa!”

Two sword skills shone in white and orange. A rapier and a mace struck the golem’s midsection, knocking it back several yards. It only knocked a few pixels off the golem’s HP bar, but it did succeed at making it stumble.

“Zarion, Holgar, pull back and heal! Leafa and Klein, take the flanks for Liz and me!” Asuna instructed. The others snapped into action. The golem recovered its balance as the formation was rearranged.

I hadn’t just been idly watching the situation play out. In order to turn my earlier discovery into certainty, I’d gotten down on all fours, watching like a hawk.

So it wasn’t just my imagination. But how do we…?

I tore my eyes off the golem as it lurched into motion again, and scanned the chamber. Kuro and Aga were on standby at the entrance, but their claws and teeth would be literally pointless against the golem’s stone skin. I could see a door on the far side, but it wasn’t going to open unless the golem was dead.

The only things on the left and right sides of the room were pillars and walls. Technically, there were also the lit oil vases in the niches along the wall, but if we broke any of them, they’d just send burning oil spilling out across the floor and ruining the fight.

Upon closer look, not all of the vases were lit. Out of the twenty total—ten on each side—five were dark. What did that mean? Would the golem weaken if all the oil vases were burning? That seemed like a common video game trick, but it didn’t seem to fit in the world of Unital Ring, where everything usually had a clear cause and consequence. On top of that, five vases to set off a trap like that seemed way too low.

No, wait.

That’s not it. You don’t light them on fire. It’s not the fire that matters—it’s the oil inside the vases.

I bounded up off the floor and said, “Asuna, buy me one minute!”

“You got it!” she replied, and I turned to the rear line of the formation. “Come with me, Sinon!”

Sinon answered my summons, leaving her position to run toward the center of the chamber. Despite the difficult situation, she wore a grin of quiet confidence.

“Did you finally come up with an idea?”

“For now. Can you spot the five pots on the walls that aren’t lit and shoot them all with your gun?”

“Excuse me? Well…if you want them broken, I can do that,” Sinon said with considerable skepticism. But she readied her musket anyway.

The heavy pounding of the golem’s attacks being blocked by the others was joined by the dry sound of gunshots.

Her first shot, delivered standing up, struck one of the unlit pots and shattered it. Oil gushed out, running down the wall and spreading onto the floor. She smoothly reloaded the gunpowder and bullet, then shot the next pot.

It took only thirty seconds for her to shatter all five pots. The oil that flooded out of them gathered in the center of the chamber, forming a puddle about twenty feet across.

So far it was going the way I’d hoped. Now I just had to find out if my theory was right.

“Nice shots, Sinon!” I cried, then turned back to give the rear row a new order. “Kuro, Aga! Attack the golem’s leg once, then come over to my position!”

This was about as complex as you could make a command to your pet, but the two beasts rushed forward from their waiting spots to attack. Kuro took the golem’s right leg, while Aga tore at the left foot with its claws as it rushed around the golem’s side.

While this didn’t draw any damage, either, it succeeded at grabbing the golem’s attention. It roared with fury—or so it seemed—and began to chase them.

Waiting for the right timing, I eventually said, “Kuro, Aga, jump!”

The two nimbly leaped into the air, easily clearing the black, gleaming liquid and landing at my side. I waved a hand to brush them back, even as I pulled away with Sinon, too.

“Gwooohnnnn!!” the golem bellowed like a broken bell, through a mouth that did not actually open. It plunged forward in a straight line, large form leaning forward, raising its hands high, and pressing in to smash us flat.

A leg like a stone pillar plunged into the mass of oil.

The golem did not care in the slightest about the oil. It got through one step, then a second, but on the third step, it lost all grip on the floor and tumbled headfirst so spectacularly that it was actually airborne for an instant.

The rumbling this caused was enough to shake the entire room. Tons of oil splashed and lapped as the golem came to a stop, resting on its chest. While it could absorb tons of slashes, damage caused by its own weight was a problem it couldn’t solve. Its HP bar began to drop before my eyes.

But that wasn’t what I was after.

Because the golem fell forward, I couldn’t see the bottoms of its feet. So I called out to my stunned companions watching from the other side.

“Guys, is there anything on the soles of the golem’s feet?!”

“There is!!” cried Leafa, who was ready with her bastard sword next to Asuna. “There’s a round metal plate thing stuck into the bottom of its right foot!”

I knew it. It wasn’t my imagination that something shiny had reflected off the bottom of the golem’s foot.

“That’s its weak point! Attack it!” I instructed, only to add, “But don’t step in the oil! You’ll slip and won’t be able to move properly!”

They had started running but came to a screeching halt after the latter comment. There was nearly six feet of space between the edge of the oil puddle and the bottom of the fallen golem’s foot. That was a tough distance for a spear to bridge, much less a sword.

“Gwoohnn,” the golem grunted, placing one hand on the ground. If it got up onto its feet, we would have to wait for it to fall again.

Damn, I should have thought of a method to attack the weak point without stepping in the oil first, I thought ruefully.

Just then, a silver flash shot through the eight-inch gap between Asuna and Leafa. Someone had thrown something metallic from behind them.

From my position, I couldn’t see the bottom of the golem’s foot, but I could certainly hear the high-pitched clang! The golem shrieked, “Gwoa!” in a different tone than before, and its huge body shook violently. More than 10 percent of its first HP bar melted away.

“I got ya covered on hitting the weak point! But you gotta hold its attention!” shouted Argo, sand-colored hooded cape drawn up over her head, as she came running by. In her left hand were three pointy throwing weapons, much like the throwing picks I had used so often back in SAO.

“Since when did she…?” I murmured.

Thankfully, Sinon filled me in. “I think she had Liz make her some before they left.”

“Lucky. Wish I had some…”

But I couldn’t finish that sentence, because the golem was placing one hand on the floor again. Very quickly, it pushed its oil-slicked body upright and stood on its feet once more.

If we wanted it to fall again, we couldn’t let the golem escape the puddle of oil. But that wouldn’t be easy, either. What could we do…?

“If you don’t have a ranged weapon, run counterclockwise around the oil puddle!” shouted Holgar, back in action with his longsword now that he was fully healed. Without stopping, he ran up to the oil spill and kept pace around the edge.

Everyone else, including myself, was briefly taken aback, but Asuna and Leafa were the quickest to respond, rushing after Holgar. The rest of the party joined in, aside from Argo and Yui.

“…Get going, pal,” Sinon snapped, bringing me back to my senses.

“Oh…r-right. Keep hitting that weak spot,” I said, and slid between Zarion and Friscoll. If the diameter of the oil pool was twenty-three feet, then the circumference would be somewhere over seventy feet. That was a very cramped space for ten people to run in laps, and the curve was much sharper than on the four-hundred-meter track at school. It was harder than I thought to run beside it at high speed, but I soon understood why Holgar suggested it.

Whomever the golem targeted out of the ten of us, it would be forced to rotate constantly within the puddle of oil. If it were normal solid ground beneath its feet, the monster would manage to get off an attack at some point, but now it had to contend with a slippery surface. The stone giant already had a high center of gravity, so what would happen when it tried to move forward while in a rotation?

The golem’s feet slipped again, and it toppled over.

The ten of us promptly stopped and made space toward the direction its feet were pointing. Then the ranged attacker nearby—Sinon, in this case—took aim and shot at the weak point on the underside of the golem’s foot.

The musket was much more powerful than the throwing pick, of course, and it knocked out nearly a third of the first HP bar. The ten of us resumed once the damage had been inflicted.

On the third fall, Argo hit it with a throwing pick, and on the fourth, it was Sinon again. The fifth time the golem fell, Yui was in the direction of its feet.

I assumed she was going to hit it with her fire magic specialty, but instead, Yui held a weapon I did not expect to see at all. In her hands was a small twenty-inch bow.

Before I even had time to be shocked, the string twanged. The arrow sank right into the center of the metallic plate embedded into the golem’s sole.

With that, the first HP bar was gone.

A boss in Aincrad would change patterns once you got into its second health bar, and from what Lisbeth said, the gilnaris queen hornet that had guarded the way to this cave had been the same way.

But even on its second bar, the golem continued to rotate and slip, rotate and slip. Maybe it did have a secondary set of attacks, but Holgar’s spinning strategy was so effective that it couldn’t make use of them. Between Sinon’s gun, Argo’s picks, and Yui’s arrows, we ground down the second HP bar just as quickly.

About fifteen minutes after I had first reached this chamber, the metal plate stuck under the golem’s right foot shattered into fine pieces, just like glass.

With its HP gone, the golem—pardon me, the statue of Whatever-It-Was—gave one last bellow, deep and long, before falling eternally still. All of its joints detached, and the stone crumbled to the floor in chunks.

The first person to break the abrupt silence that followed, to my surprise, was Ceecee, the tiger beetle. “We did it!! Whoooo-hooooo!!”

The beetle raised her skinny arms and slapped Holgar on the back. Based on the rapid-fire stream of English that followed, it seemed that Holgar’s spinning maneuver was a big hit.

Klein and Friscoll celebrated and pumped their fists, while Sinon, Leafa, and Silica shared high fives, all smiles.

I wanted to ask Holgar why he said “counterclockwise,” but that could come later. I slipped between my celebrating friends and rushed over to Yui. Asuna snuck past me along the way.

“Yui!” She scooped the girl up with both hands, bow and all. “That was incredible! When did you learn to use a bow?”

Yui just grinned happily. “This was a spoil of war from the gilnaris hornets’ nest. I requested it when we were dividing up the loot.”

“You mean…you only just got it a few hours ago?! And you can already use it that well?!” Asuna exclaimed. My mouth hung open. For some reason, Yui looked away and murmured under her breath so only we could hear.

“After a few test shots, I learned that when I use a bow, as long as my feet are steady, I have time to calculate trajectory, and if there are no spontaneous bursts of wind, I will never miss my target, apparently.”

“……”

Once again, I was aghast.

The day after the log cabin had dropped into this world, I had spotted Yui practicing her swordsmanship against Alice. I’d thought she showed promise at the time, which implied that she was still a bit awkward. And yet she had mastered shooting a bow, which was much harder than using a sword, after just a few attempts?

Already anticipating my skepticism, Yui explained, “The action of swinging a sword requires a precise string of movements using the avatar’s entire body, which is not something I can easily optimize. But shooting a bow means immobilizing most of the body and performing only a simple finger movement to release the string, so I can use nearly all my ability to calculate trajectory.”

I thought, Is it really that simple, though?

I was a totally uncultured swine when it came to archery. I was aware of a Japanese school of thought, the Eight Pivots of Shooting, referring to eight very precise movements in the course of shooting an arrow, from taking stance to releasing the string. But of course, that was all in the real world, and in the virtual world, maybe keeping your body as still as a statue increased your accuracy instead.

A simple measure of full-dive conformity—one’s aptitude for the full-dive environment—was to stand on one leg for a number of seconds. If the signals coming from the brain weren’t strong or precise enough, the avatar wouldn’t be stable, and even if you could handle one leg fine at first, the minor differences in one’s sense of balance and gravity in contrast to the real world would eventually cause most people to drop the other foot after twenty or thirty seconds.

But as an AI, Yui had no wavering brain signal or distortion of senses to worry about. She could probably stand on one foot indefinitely without any issue, and for the same reason, it was a piece of cake for her to hold her avatar totally still, if she wanted.

Yui had looked away uncomfortably earlier because she thought her ability was like cheating. And indeed, there were probably players who would say just that, if they heard about it. But Yui hadn’t asked to be a Unital Ring player. She was dragged into this world against her will, and no one had the right to complain about her using the full extent of her abilities. No one.

I rubbed her head reassuringly. “Thank you, Yui. Your skill with the bow helped us beat that golem earlier. If you had shot a fire spell, it would’ve lit up the oil on the floor and burned us, too. Keep using that bow to help everyone out.”

“…I will!” she said, beaming. Our companions were standing all around us and broke out into applause for her.

Once it died down, Lisbeth came up to me and handed me a pickax, for some reason. “Here you go.”

“…Here I go…what? What is this?”

“Isn’t it obvious? We’re going to break up the remains of the golem and collect the contents. I’m sure we’ll get some very nice ores! If anyone else has a pickax, help out!”

Asuna lowered Yui and opened her window, materializing a whole ton of fired pottery containers.

“If you don’t have a pickax, help us scoop up the oil on the floor!”

I think these two are adapting to this world better than I am, I thought, resting the pickax against my shoulder and strolling over to where the golem’s remains were strewn across the floor.