Sword Art Online Progressive 4

  The fragrance of cooking meat hit me directly in my empty stomach, but first I had to check the interior through the window. As I expected, the place was full of players, but most were DKB members. The ALS would be staying in town, too, but they were likely congregated within a different restaurant lower in the town.

  From what I could tell peeking through the window, the DKB looked cheerful. Even through the window, the jostling of mugs, cheers, and raucous laughter were obvious. The fulfillment of ample money and experience earned from the dungeon and the excitement about the upcoming countdown party in town were bringing those smiles to their faces.

  “…I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lind and the others smiling like that…” Asuna noted. I glanced at the table in the center of the restaurant.

  The man at the head of the table with the long blue hair tied back and his mug in the air was undoubtedly Lind, leader of the DKB. The man most recognized for the ever-present disapproving wrinkle between his brows was smiling wide.

  “Maybe he got hit with a curse that causes him to keep laughing,” I suggested. Asuna elbowed me in the side.

  “This isn’t the time for stupid jokes.”

  “Yes, ma’am…”

  I tore my eyes from Lind and continued scanning the room, then found the person I was looking for. A tall, thin man ordering from an NPC at the back counter, standing apart from the rest of the group: Shivata.

  “Here we go!”

  I opened my menu and moved to the messages tab, typed up a quick instant message made out to the player named Shivata, and sent it.

  Through the window, Shivata reacted instantly. With his back toward us, he checked his menu, then glanced around surreptitiously. Once he saw me looking through the window, he made a face of obvious displeasure, but left the counter, said a word to one of the other members, and left.

  By the time he got outside, Asuna and I moved away from the window and into the shade of the adjacent building.

  “Over here,” I called quietly, and Shivata walked over to us but kept going without slowing down. As he passed, I heard a faint “Follow me,” and we let him go before following at a distance.

  Shivata climbed the spiral path for one or two hundred feet, then walked into an empty dwelling. Once we were certain no other players were in the vicinity, I opened the same door and set foot inside the dark interior.

  As soon as Asuna closed the door behind me, a voice of pure, 100 percent irritation shouted, “What are you playing at?!” from the darkness.

  Leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed was Shivata, his eyebrows angled in a way that would be impossible in real life. Asuna prodded me forward and whispered, “What kind of message did you send him?”

  “Uh…I just asked which ALS member had been involved in planning the countdown party with them…”

  “And that’s why he’s so angry? You didn’t put anything else especially insulting in there?”

  “I-I didn’t! I think.”

  As if he heard us, Shivata’s brows began to change angles. They started at a V for maximum fury, then shot past horizontal and ended in a slight reverse slope of miserable concern.

  “…You…you didn’t contact me because you knew about me and my partner?” he asked.

  I frowned. “Partner…? We know that tonight’s party was joint planned between you and the ALS, but nothing more than that…”

  For some reason, Shivata clamped his mouth shut, looking guilty. His eyes started wandering suspiciously over the ceiling, and he cleared his throat evasively a few times.

  I had no idea why the DKB officer would need to react in such an inexplicable way, but Asuna had latched onto something. “Oh-ho,” she gloated, stepping past me and pulling back her hood.

  “It’s all right, Shivata. We just want to know how the party was put together. If you simply tell us that, we won’t pry into anything else, and we won’t tell anyone what we learned here.”

  That seemed to bring some calm to Shivata’s nerves, but the suspicion in his eyes hadn’t disappeared entirely. The tall man leaned forward a bit and grunted, “How can I be sure of that?”

  “We just want the party to happen as it was planned. Now, I’m just guessing, but…have you perhaps received a foreboding message from the planner on the ALS side?”

  “H-how did you know…?” he asked, stunned.

  Asuna took a step forward.

  “We’ll help you solve the problem. So will you tell us in more detail? With your ALS counterpart, if possible.”

  I panicked a bit, thinking she had gone too far, but Shivata’s athletic features only contorted with indecision. He grunted, “You’re certain you’ll keep our secrets?”

  “I swear on my blade,” Asuna replied theatrically, which seemed surprisingly effective on Shivata. He nodded his head in defeat and opened his window.

  While the DKB member tapped awkwardly at his holo-keyboard, I leaned in toward Asuna and asked, “What in the world just happened?”

  The fencer chuckled smugly back at me and whispered, “You’ll find out soon.”

  However, when the door opened again three minutes later and a smallish ALS member entered, I still hadn’t found my answer.

  He was probably a tank, outfitted with a full steel plate that was rare at this early floor and a heavy armet helm that covered his whole head. A long mace was slung over his back. Even in town, the helm’s visor was down, so the face behind the vertical slit was invisible.

  If our bad suspicions were true, this man was a hard-line saboteur of the ALS and was in an ongoing play to deceive Shivata. In the worst case, he was the second companion of Morte, infiltrating the ALS. In fact, he might even be the same man Morte was meeting in the catacombs.

  If that was the case, he might start swinging that mace any second now. The man glanced in our direction as I went into full vigilance mode—then he turned back to Shivata.

  “What’s this about, Shiba?”

  The man’s words were distorted by the metallic effect of the closed helm, so I couldn’t tell if it belonged to the cloaked partner from a few days before.

  Shivata scratched at his short hair and gave his excuse. “Sorry for calling you out like this. But they said they’re going to help with the party. Plus…I think the fencer’s figured it out.”

  I looked at Asuna in disbelief, but I still had no idea what she had figured out. The man in plate armor budged, clanking from the joints as he looked up at Asuna.

  “…Really? How could you tell?”

  Asuna returned a very confident smile and said, “From the way Shivata reacted. It was obvious.”

  “…”

  After a long silence, the metal helm creaked in Shivata’s direction.

  “I told you, you let too much show on your face, Shiba.”

  “I-I can’t help it. The NerveGear just takes your emotions and puts them out there.”

  “Then you ought to wear a face-covering helmet, too.”

  “C-come on, you know I can’t…”

  As I listened to the plated man and Shivata talk, an indescribable feeling began to eat away at me. I tugged on Asuna’s cape.

  “Hey…what’s going on here…?”

  But the fencer merely grinned back, then took a step forward and said to the plated man, “Listen, I don’t mean you any harm. We’re looking forward to tonight’s party, and we know there’s a problem on the ALS side. We just want to know more so we can help solve the issue.”

  “…”

  After a full five seconds of silence, the man nodded slowly at last.

  He lifted his right hand, clad in heavy gauntlet, and opened his window. He placed his finger against the top slot of his equipment mannequin and flicked.

  The armet vanished in a brief spray of steel-colored particles.

  What emerged was orangish hair cut neatly above the brows and the cute, doll-like facial features of a girl.

  No way, you can’t determine sex in SAO by the features alone. Yo
u can’t say for sure that a guy would never look like this…

  That thought was cut off by the very cute sound of a female voice nothing like the metallic echo I heard earlier.

  “We believe you. I…I have a lot of respect for you, Asuna. Plus, Shiba and I put a lot of work into this party, and we want it to succeed.”

  Shivata’s track-runner features took on an expression that should’ve been accompanied by the sound of an angelic chorus.

  So that was what it meant. The plate-armored man from the ALS was a plate-armored woman. And she and Shivata from the DKB were more than strangers, though it wasn’t clear when it started…

  “…What the hell?!”

  It was all I could do to hold my head in my hands and shout.

  The woman, whose name was Liten, sat down in an old chair with her helmet off but the rest of her heavy armor still on.

  Shivata sat next to her, and Asuna and I took seats across from them. The chairs had been abandoned in the old house long enough that I was concerned for their sturdiness, but the furniture from NPC houses was all essentially indestructible, so even the weight of full-body armor wasn’t enough to break them.

  I leaned across the similarly ragged table and asked the first question.

  “So…Liten. How long have you been in the ALS?”

  “December twenty-second,” she said instantly, her bowl-cut orange hair totally still. I consulted my mental calendar.

  “So the day after the fourth floor was opened…Did you enlist? Or…”

  “I was scouted. Because of this.”

  Liten spoke frankly, glancing down at the suit of armor covering her body.

  I’d felt earlier that the type of steel plate armor she was wearing was rather rare for the fourth or fifth floor. NPC shops did not sell the complete set, and I couldn’t think of any monsters that dropped it.

  Which meant it had to be crafted, but it was a difficult task to commission NPC blacksmiths or players with metal armor crafting skills for something like that. Just seeing a list of the crafting ingredients you’d need would be enough to put you off the task.

  Collecting metal materials started with mining ores with a pickax from the walls of caves and the sides of rock boulders.

  Once the player’s inventory was full of the heavy, bulky ores, they needed to return to an NPC smith to have the ores refined and forged into metal planks or larger ingots. It took two ores to make a plank and six to fashion an ingot.

  “Iron” in Aincrad was what we would call pig iron in the real world, just a rank above bronze in quality. But iron ingots could be used to produce the more-valuable steel ingots. It was a simple process to melt down iron ingots, but the yield was poor; it took four iron ingots to make one steel ingot, meaning four times the iron ore.

  And to create a full set of steel heavy armor required at least sixty steel ingots. That meant 60 × 4 × 6 iron ores, or…1,440 in total.

  I couldn’t imagine how many days it would take to mine that much ore. If things hadn’t changed since the beta, ten ores was the maximum extractable from a particular vein, and on the lower floors, such veins were few and far between. So crafting seemed to be ruled out. Then how did Liten get this armor?

  Yet that suspicion of mine was flatly denied by the first female voice I’d heard in ages that didn’t belonging to Asuna or Argo.

  “This armor was player made. Of course, I didn’t make it myself.”

  “R-really…? Which means you mined out a thousand-plus iron ores? How long did that take you, if you don’t mind me asking…?” I said, aghast. Liten only grinned and shook her head.

  “You don’t have to be so polite with me, Kirito. You’re my senior among the advanced group.”

  “Er, right…”

  I glanced beside her, where Shivata was nodding, his athlete’s mask cracking to reveal some other kind of emotion.

  “Yeah, that’s fine. You and I are on pretty equal terms, so it would feel weird for you to act formal around Liccha…around Liten.”

  “W-well, if you insist…”

  I really wanted to bust his balls about the nickname he had nearly given her, but my sense of propriety prevailed.

  “So about the topic at hand…” I prompted.

  Liten pursed her lips for a moment, then spoke heavily. “Well, this is something I’ve told only Shiba, so I’d appreciate it if you kept it between us…”

  “Of course. That was our promise from the very start,” Asuna intercepted. I agreed. Satisfied, Liten resumed her explanation.

  “It was about a month ago that I left the Town of Beginnings. Of course, it was my first time playing a VRMMO, but I’d tried online games before, so I didn’t want to just wait around in town for someone else to beat the game. I wanted to join the fight and help out. It was a late start compared to Shiba and Asuna, but I had chosen the Heavy Armor skill just after the game started, and it was a huge task to put together my armor…”

  “So you were always planning to be a tank?” Asuna asked.

  Liten immediately answered, “Yes. I usually played a defensive role in the other games, too. I hunted the boars and such outside the Town of Beginnings, and when I finally got a store-made Copper Mail, I thought I could finally proceed upward. But then I found that no parties would accept me. I know it’s not something I can help, but I kept hearing that they couldn’t trust a woman to be a tank.”

  “Even though it has nothing to do with your fighting abilities,” Asuna added, incensed.

  Liten’s eyes narrowed.

  “I should have told them that…but instead I got very stubborn and said I’d make the front line as a solo tank and started mining ores for my armor and grinding levels…”

  “I know tanks have high strength, and thus high carrying capacity, but mining a thousand ores is still incredible work,” I commented, impressed, but Liten looked down for some reason. Meanwhile, Shivata muttered to her that she didn’t have to mention it if she didn’t want to, but the bowl-cut girl shook her head.

  “Yes, I gathered all the ores to make this armor myself. As you said, I had to mine at least fifteen hundred iron ores. But…it’s not something to be proud of at all.”

  “What do you mean?” Asuna asked in a calm, gentle tone meant to reassure—sadly, a sound I almost never heard from her.

  “I was grinding levels near the town of Marome on the second floor,” Liten went on. “I found a vein of ore in a little valley, so I switched my mace for a pickax and started chipping away like usual. Normally I would get seven or eight and that would be it, but this spot just kept producing and producing without running out. At first I just thought I had found a lucky spot, and was very excited, but eventually it got scary…By the time I had pulled out over a hundred, I finally figured it out. That it was…”

  “An infinite bug?” I asked, stunned. Liten nodded. Asuna looked confused, so I explained, “It’s a bug in the program that causes monsters or items to continue generating past their normal limit. I’ve never heard of one in SAO…but I guess everything is prone to them…”

  “Oooh…so you could just keep mining the same vein for ores as long as you wanted. It’s like winning the lottery or something,” Asuna said innocently. The rest of us grimaced. Shivata spoke as representative for the hard-core gamers.

  “It’s not that simple, Asuna. Taking advantage of such a bug is called glitching, and whether or not you take advantage of it in a single-player game is up to you. But in an MMO, if the management finds out about it, they can roll back your status or even ban you.”

  “So Liten…didn’t give up on it? I mean, you have the armor, after all…”

  The short hair bobbed up and down in affirmation. “Yes…I was conflicted, but I couldn’t stop myself. With an infinite supply of iron ore, I could skip right past iron armor and go to steel. It was all I could think about…”

  “I don’t blame you. If I found a spot like that, I’d go crazy mining it,” I reassured her.

  Shivata sa
id, “I’d do it too!” in an oddly competitive way.

  Steeling myself against the look I was certain Asuna would give me, I asked, “And, um, just out of curiosity, this infinite-generating point is still active…?”

  “No…” Liten said, shaking her head sideways this time. “I mined it nonstop for about thirty minutes, until suddenly the rock texture seemed to fail. It came back to normal right away, but no ores dropped from it anymore.”

  “So the devs noticed the bug and fixed it…? I mean, if there even are any devs…” I wondered.

  Shivata shrugged. “Well, the bug was fixed, so what other possibility is there?”

  “But none of the Argus staff can tamper with the SAO server now, right? The only person with administrator privileges is Akihiko Kayaba…”

  “Then Kayaba fixed it.”

  At that point, I had no grounds to deny it. I mumbled that maybe he was right and got back to the topic.

  “Meaning that you made your plate armor from the ores you mined there. I’m surprised you could carry over a thousand ores, though…I remember that iron ore has a pretty long decay period, but even then, it had to be a monster task, right?”

  Liten shook her head again. “No…I didn’t transport it all myself. In fact, even after I brought it to the village, it wouldn’t all fit into the storage at the inn…”

  “Oh, good point…”

  If you rented out an inn room, it would come with its own chest, which could be used for external storage, but the ones at the budget-rate inns were small in size. Of course, it was enough for extra gear, food, and potions, but not hundreds and hundreds of metal ores. Storage for heavy ores was an issue for everyone and the biggest initial challenge for a player who wanted to be a blacksmith.

  “In that case, what if you brought a portable forge to the mining spot and melted them all down? You can carry way more as ingots. And if that wasn’t possible, you could go straight to an NPC smith to do the job,” Asuna suggested.

  I had tried that idea in the beta, a fond memory of my early trial-and-error days. I explained why it wouldn’t work: “Unfortunately, you can only use a portable forge to craft gear and upgrade it. Ingots have to be cast at a large, fixed forge. You could take them to a blacksmith, but that could lead to trouble if other players saw you. A combat-centric player hauling in tons of ore to melt down is practically advertising that there’s a huge stack of it outside town…”