“Ask him what?” Asuna wondered.
I unveiled my brilliant idea: “Well, if that track athlete tries to make physical contact with Liten, then he should inevitably be collecting data on the limits and conditions of the Harassment Code, right?”
Suddenly, the fork in the fencer’s hand shot audibly forward toward my nose. If it had been a knife, she might have successfully pulled off a Linear.
“L-listen to me! You are absolutely not allowed to ask an indecent question like that! I don’t care about the guy, but it’s not fair to Liten!!”
“I-I understand. I won’t suggest it again, so please put the fork down…”
Once it was safely resting on the surface of the table again, I breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back in the chair.
“Hmm. The only other thing I can figure is that it evolves depending on the target player…”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying that it could be triggered most easily between two strangers who have never had contact before, but that it gets eased as the players’ relationship grows…I just can’t imagine how they track and quantify the emotional closeness of the two players…”
I looked down from the ceiling, and the fencer was quiet, her expression flat. I worried that I might have said something stupid again, but for whatever reason, I noticed that redness was rising on her skin, from the collar of her cape up toward her mouth and nose.
Anticipating an eventual eruption, my legs tensed, prepared to dart away in escape, but to my considerable fortune, the jingling bell at the door rang at that moment, cutting through the thick tension.
The visitor to the café was none other than Argo, who had set up in Mananarena before we arrived. It wasn’t coincidence, of course; I had sent her a message as soon as we were done with Shivata and Liten.
“Heyaaa.”
The tired-looking whiskered broker walked over and sat in the chair next to Asuna. She ordered a roll cake, triple thick, and let out a long breath.
“You dragged me outta my own business, so I hope this is more important than the boss quests, Kii-boy.”
“O-of course,” I reassured her. For a brief moment, I considered breaking the ice with a silly question about the Harassment Code conditions, then decided it wouldn’t be worth it if nobody was going to laugh.
“Umm, I think we figured out why the ALS is planning to sneak ahead on the boss.”
As befitting a creature that fed on information, Argo’s face immediately brightened up.
“Wait, really? Even I haven’t caught that morsel in my net of intelligence. This is quite impressive.”
“Rather surprising, isn’t it?” I asked.
“…What is?”
“Well, I would have thought you knew already…Don’t you remember anything about an item from the fifth-floor boss causing trouble in the beta?”
“Trouble…?”
Her painted whiskers twitched—I had successfully tweaked her pride as an informant. Argo pursed her lips for a while, consulting her memory, then eventually lifted her hands in surrender.
“I hate to admit it, but I can’t remember. If I can make an excuse, I wasn’t an info broker in the beta. I also wasn’t a front-runner, so I didn’t take part in that boss fight…”
“Oh, you didn’t? Well, I won’t hold it over your head, then…I think the ALS is after a guild flag.”
“Guild…flag? Why would they want a flag?”
“As an object, it’s no more than a low-powered long spear…but if you do this…” I stood the fork in my hand straight up and struck the base of it against the table. “When the player with it equipped sticks it into the ground, all guild members within fifty or sixty feet get increased attack and defense, as well as extra resistance against debuffs.”
“Wh…what…?” Argo said, the same as Shivata’s stunned reaction. She pointed at the fork in my hand and asked, in rapid succession, “C-can the player with the flag move around? How long does the buff last? Is there a limit to how many players it affects?”
“The answer to your first question is a half yes. If you take the flag out of the ground, the buff shuts off, but once you move and plant it again, it kicks right back in.”
“…Hmm.”
“The answer to your second question is: as long as the flag is planted.”
“…Hmmmm.”
“The answer to your third question is: no limit, as long as they are guild members.”
“…Hmmmmmmmm.”
Argo crossed her arms, grunting, as a piece of banana cake three times as thick as mine and Asuna’s arrived. At eight inches long and over two inches wide, it was nearly the size of a small whole cake. Argo split a quarter of it off with her fork and stuffed the entire mound into her mouth.
“…That is indeed very big trouble, Kii-boy.”
“Exactly…”
“The statistical boost is one thing, but the effect on the players’ mentality is especially dangerous…If the ALS gets that item and plants it during battle, their morale is going to skyrocket, and the DKB’s will plummet. The same would hold true for the reverse…It’s more than powerful enough to crush the uneasy balance that exists now.”
“You can understand why Kibaou would decide to attempt the boss prematurely once he learned about it,” I murmured, bringing a piece of cake up to my mouth. In the meantime, Argo had made another quarter of her own cake disappear. She glanced over to her left.
“…You seem pretty quiet today, A-chan.”
“…Er…uh, no, it’s nothing!” Asuna insisted, finally getting her conscious brain back in motion. She scrambled to eat more cake, and Argo blinked in surprise.
“So…how’d that spiky-haired buffoon manage to get word about this item? It’s kind of a shock to me that they got this intel before I did.”
“W-well, you and I aren’t the only beta testers, Argo,” I pointed out.
I hadn’t told Argo about the PK gang lurking in the shadows of Aincrad, a decision that Asuna was holding me to. Naturally, we were afraid that if she learned about them, she would attempt to collect information about them on her own—and that was a job far more dangerous than compiling boss intel.
I didn’t doubt Argo’s ability. I knew that she had the speed to dart out of the most dangerous locales. But the ability of the man in the black poncho, the suspected leader of Morte’s gang, was a total unknown. Until I could find out what kind of danger he represented, I didn’t want Argo to get involved with them.
The informant smiled in an all-knowing way and nodded, giving in. “Well, ya got a point there. What’s important now isn’t where the deets came from, but what to do about ’em…If it’s really that huge of an item they can loot, the ALS won’t be deterred by direct arguments.”
“Um, I was thinking…” Asuna started. She had finished her cake a bit later than I did, and took a sip of tea before suggesting, “What if we simply share the information about the guild flag with the DKB? The reason the ALS is being so reckless about looting it isn’t because they want it that bad, but because they’re afraid the DKB will get it, right? If Lind proposes a fair way to split the loot…”
“…Yeah…That’s not a bad idea…”
I thought of Lind’s deadly serious face. If Shivata was an imaginary track-and-field athlete, then Lind belonged to a martial arts club or even a calligraphy club.
“No matter what, Lind can be reasoned with…He might be able to force a conversation with the ALS. It’s just…joint managing the guild flag is impossible, much less sharing its power. Once the item is registered under a guild, I can’t imagine that you can alter it, and it wouldn’t be possible to split the flag and the staff apart, either. Ultimately, they’re going to come down to a rock-paper-scissors match, or a roll of the dice, or even a five-on-five group duel.”
“…I can’t imagine that Kibaou would accept that proposal…” Asuna muttered. Both Argo and I nodded.
It was an ironclad belief of Kibaou that all resources should
be shared to hold the casualties of the game to a minimum: gold, items, information. It was the foundational philosophy of the guild he started.
Lind and DKB held that the top players with the deepest knowledge and greatest power should fight bravely at the front line and serve as a symbol of hope, thus generating the energy and inspiration to defeat the game.
I didn’t know which was right. All I could say was that both were successors to Diavel the knight. And both would strongly desire the guild flag to further their respective causes. Neither would dream of ceding it to the other.
Why did you have to die, Diavel? I asked the departed knight, leaning back in my chair and staring up at the boarded ceiling.
There was no answer, of course. But somehow, I heard his final words repeat in my mind.
You have to take it from here, Kirito. Kill the…b—
His avatar had blasted into pieces before he could finish his sentence. Yes—I, too, had inherited something from him.
Kibaou inherited the knight’s sense of fairness, and Lind had taken on his heroism. And what I took, as a fellow beta tester…was his sense of realism.
I opened my eyes slowly, looked at Argo and Asuna in turn, then spoke.
“…Let’s beat the boss.”
The words melted into the air of the room, echoing and vanishing, but the info dealer and fencer did not speak.
Argo’s fork, which had been hovering in the air for several moments, finally stabbed into the remaining half of the thick roll cake, then lifted the mass of sponge and cream, which disappeared as if it was a magic trick. In true rodent fashion, the Rat’s cheeks bulged comically as she chewed away at her meal.
At last, she asked, “You mean the three of us?”
“Oh, not at all.”
After all, when Asuna suggested the same thing, I stated that it was impossible, even with Kizmel the elite knight on our side. Asuna turned to me, curious.
“Then who are you going to ask for help?”
“Well…”
I started to list the candidates on my fingers.
“First, there’s Agil and his three friends; then, Nezha might help us…”
“………That’s it?” Asuna wondered, staring down at my folded thumb and fingers. I coughed and cleared my throat awkwardly.
“…Um, Argo, do you know anyone…?”
“Come on, don’t be ridiculous, Kii-boy,” she said. But even my safety net, with her entire intelligence network, could only shrug. “Well, I keep an eye on the people trying their best to join the front-runners, but that very potential means I can’t invite ’em on a dangerous mission. Why do ya think I’ve been handing out those strategy guides on lower floors for free?”
“Yeah, good point…Well, even if Nezha says yes, that’s me, Asuna, Argo, Nezha, and the Bro Squad for eight in total…I’m going to say we need at least twelve for two parties…”
“No way, even with two parties, that would be hard enough,” Asuna said, waving her hand in front of her face. “You were the one who said we just barely beat the fourth-floor boss with a full raid, Kizmel, and Viscount Yofilis. If the next boss is tougher than that sea horse, how is a group of twelve going to win…?”
“Hmm…In numerical terms, every fifth boss is always going to be especially tough. Assuming that each boss grows stronger at the same equivalent amount…”
I made imaginary slices along the edge of the table, setting aside four chunks, with the fifth being slightly larger.
“…then I imagine that the fifth-floor boss is going to be close in strength to the sixth-floor boss. But a boss’s strength isn’t measured in just attack, defense, and HP. If that giant golem hasn’t been altered since the beta, there’s a way for even a twelve-man raid to beat it. Depending on the information from the boss quests and recon of the boss chamber, of course…”
Only when the sound of my own voice hit my ears and I processed what I was saying did I remember that on the other side of the table, Argo had been doing those quests already.
“Oh, r-right. What kind of hints were the boss quests giving?”
“Kii-boy, are you forgetting that I deal information for a living?”
I quickly opened my window to propose a trade, but the Rat was already smirking at me.
“I’d thank ya for the transaction…but I’ll give it to you in return for that tidbit about the guild flag. Speaking from conclusion first, it seems like the boss is still a golem.”
She opened her own window and switched to the memo tab, designed for saving notes and such.
“Let’s see here…Remember what you told me from the elf quests, the secret of Aincrad’s creation, and whatnot?”
“Oh…the Great Separation, you mean?”
I had already given Argo a rough outline of the elf legend that Kizmel had shared with us.
It said that the hundred floors of Aincrad hadn’t always existed as they were now. The various elf, human, and dwarf realms had been cut in circular chunks from the earth and summoned up to the sky to form the floating castle. In that moment, all the powers of magic had been lost. But that story hadn’t played any part in the game yet, outside of the elf campaign quest.
Argo grimaced and explained, “Well, in a shortened form…this floor was originally an industrial area for a human kingdom. They dug up metal and magical ores with spells and mass-produced arms that were sold into a regional conflict elsewhere. But the king of that land didn’t export the truly powerful magical ore, saving it up to build a massive war weapon…the golem. When the golem was finished, he was going to use it to invade the dwarves that were his trade rivals when the Great Separation occurred, and the golem and king were summoned up into the sky. The power of magic was lost, so they couldn’t mine or refine the material…and that’s the story.”
“Ahhh, I see…”
Across from me, Asuna realized something and spoke up.
“Um…now that I think about it, when we fought that zombie boss in the catacombs…wasn’t he wearing a crown of some kind?”
“Yeah, since you mention it…So that giant zombie was the king from the past? But he wasn’t human-sized at all.”
Argo chuckled at my bafflement. “Hey, it’s customary for all those evil king bosses from video games to magically grow in size.”
“Either that or being in a damp place for eons made him bloat from all the moisture. Zombies always seemed highly absorbent to me.”
I had to move on quickly once the two girls wrinkled their noses at my sizzling-hot sense of humor.
“Anyway, back to the floor boss…If that’s what the boss quests said, then it seems like we can rest assured that the golem from the beta is still in place.”
“In a basic sense, yes,” Argo confirmed. She closed her window and downed the rest of her tea. “It’s just…even the bosses that have looked the same as their beta form have been changed in some way. The minotaurs on the second floor got an extra companion, for example…”
“That’s something we won’t know until we scout it out…Also, we should plan out an escape method from the boss chamber,” I said, switching to concrete boss strategy topics when Asuna cut me off.
“Wait, Kirito. You just said a twelve-man raid would be enough to handle the boss, but that still leaves us four short. And we don’t even know if Nezha and Agil’s group will help us…”
“If the Bro Squad says no, we’re plain out of luck. If that happens, we can tell Lind about the guild flag and pray that his talk with Kibaou reaches a peaceful conclusion. As for the four other members…”
I paused, then went with my gut.
“Let’s ask Shivata and Liten.”
“Wh…what?!” Asuna blanched, leaning back. “Y-you know that won’t work…They’re members of the DKB and ALS!”
“That’s exactly why. If they were members of the same guild, they wouldn’t assist a plan that ultimately undercuts their group…but since they’re each from one, I think there might be a chance.”
 
; At that suggestion, Argo perked up and grinned. “Liten’s the one in the plate armor who just joined the ALS? So she and Shivata from the DKB…Ahhh, that’s a new one to me.”
“Hey! No, Argo, you can’t sell that to anyone.”
“Nya-ha-ha, I know. But like Kii-boy says, if they’re that close, they might help us out. Love is stronger than guild regulations, as they say.”
That line was so out of character, I had to hold myself back from commenting on it.
“A-anyway…if Shivata and Liten can each bring a partner, that will make twelve. Fortunately, they’re both members of the party-planning committee, so they should be moving from Mananarena to Karluin soon. If we can catch them before and head straight for the tower, their guilds won’t find out about their participation in the boss battle…I think…”
“You’d better be certain about that. Also, assuming Shivata and Liten even agree to help us, how will we help them if they get kicked out of the guild for what they do for us? I can’t agree to bring them into our plan if you can’t give me a proper answer to that,” Asuna stated decisively, leveling me with a determined gaze.
Our insane plan to attempt the floor boss with just two parties was meant to prevent either the ALS or DKB from taking an unstoppable lead, and it seemed likely that if we couldn’t carry the plan out, Shivata and Liten would be forced to choose between their guilds and each other…but Asuna wasn’t talking about logic, she was talking about loyalty. They had trusted us with their private information, and it wouldn’t be right for us to use them like disposable pawns in our game.
“…Agil’s party has exactly four. I’ll ask them if they mind letting the other two join up. If that’s a no go…we’ll invite them into our party,” I said, displaying no small amount of determination. Asuna smiled and nodded.
Agil and Shivata were on the fifth floor, so we could contact them with instant messages, but we’d last seen Nezha on the second floor. If he wasn’t up here, we’d have to take the tunnel back to Karluin, then teleport down to lower floors and send messages there. If he happened to be in a dungeon, even that wouldn’t work, and we’d have to forget about him. With a silent prayer, I decided to attempt contact with him first.