My sword descended and struck Morte’s shield dead center, generating a vivid clash effect. We both staggered backward, as though pushed by the sparks of the collision.
I desperately fought back against the virtual inertia, hoping to recover even a tenth of a second faster than my foe.
No matter how familiar Morte was with the menu, he couldn’t possibly have opened his equipment screen, hit the left-hand icon, then picked out the shield from his inventory when it appeared, all in that brief amount of time. The swishing noise I’d heard was none other than the Quick Change mod that allowed him to flip to a preset equipment loadout with a single button.
Which meant the shield wasn’t the only thing in his hands now. I couldn’t see his right hand, as it was held behind his body, but it must have been clutching a new sword. The instant he recovered his footing, Morte would launch a counterattack.
I tried my hardest to tilt over to my right within my stagger animation, hoping to evade his attack and deliver my own counter. In SAO, the book on shield users was to flank them on the shield side. In the ultimate first-person combat game, the shield was both a trusty source of defense and a wall that blocked eyesight. Plus, nobody won a duel by doing nothing more than defending. This was basic information I’d learned way back in the beta, but the basics were useful in any situation.
Back from his delay just a step before me, Morte’s twisted lips opened and emitted a fierce shriek.
“Shaoo!”
His gauntleted hand struck like a black viper. I expected one of his vertical thrusting slices, so I jumped off my left foot, sidestepping to the right. His round shield rose upward with his attacking motion, and I tried to swipe a counter below it.
Whoosh!
A dull, heavy roar cut the air.
Morte’s right hand was not clutching a sword. And his swing trajectory was not vertical.
It was an ax, a dense blade on the end of a handle over two feet long. I recognized that individual type of ax: a Harsh Hatchet.
He spun like a top, ax whirling on a flat plane right for my left flank. I couldn’t dodge or defend. The dark head of the ax struck me squarely in the side, in the exact same spot that I’d hit Morte just moments earlier.
The blow was heavy enough to lift me off the ground and took away close to 20 percent of my health, as well as knocking me into another stagger.
The overwhelmingly powerful two-handed ax was a favorite of many players, but its one-handed counterpart was something of a niche weapon. Its power was equal to that of a one-handed sword, but without the benefit of thrust attacks. Its greatest bonus was the severe delaying effect its heavy attacks inflicted, but it was very hard to land them—unless you used a different weapon to lure the opponent into thinking you would only use thrusts, that is.
“Hrgh,” I grunted, coming again to a belated realization.
Morte’s repeated spamming of sword thrusts was nothing but a feint to set up this ax blow.
If true, that meant this Harsh Hatchet was his true main weapon, not the Anneal Blade. This was not an idle experiment without the actual weapon skill behind it—he would come after me with a sword skill next.
Morte’s entire body twisted back on itself like some kind of rubber toy. The ax, held back at maximum tension, began to glow red.
“Shahaaaa!!”
With an unearthly screech, Morte unleashed the two-strike one-handed ax skill Double Cleave.
At nearly invisible speed, the ax rotated twice, striking my chest and stomach at nearly the same time. I blew backward like a pile of rags from what felt like an explosion within my body, slammed into a large boulder, and fell to the ground.
The stun icon flashed, and my field of vision blinked and blacked out in spots. My HP bar began to drop precipitously, stopping only just before the halfway mark.
The stun effect itself lasted only three seconds, but I still couldn’t stand. A freezing chill stole into me from the two spots where I’d been hit, both glowing red with damage effects. Even my fingers and toes felt numb.
As I crawled on all fours, a pair of fish-scale-patterned boots lazily approached. The owner of those boots stopped just six feet away, and I looked up to see, within the dim shadow of the coif, the glint of his eyes for the first time.
“Oooh,” came his voice, slick and derisive. “That’s a shocker. Still not yellow after all of that? You’re good. This ax is upgraded to be plus six to Heaviness, you know that? It can even slice through plate armor.”
As Morte continued on in his smarmy but venomous tone, my fingers began to regain their strength, and I gripped the hilt of my sword again.
“Aren’t you going to finish me?”
“Oh, now, you’re not going to get me with that one. I skip on over and you break out your best counter to surprise me! Besides, just a simple love tap at the end would be a really unfitting end to a duel with you, wouldn’t it? I’ll wait here for you to stand up. Take your time!”
So he could sense my plan to aim for his legs. Resigned, I put a hand against the boulder behind me to get to my feet.
In a duel, six feet might as well have been point-blank range. But even at this close distance, Morte held his round shield and hatchet loosely, carelessly at his sides, with not a concern in the world. It was not the laziness of a superior position, but the confidence of experience.
Thinking back, even before the duel, Morte had me outclassed in every respect. Battlefield position, use of the countdown timer, first strike, battle placement and tactics, and hidden tricks up the sleeve: everything. He understood the way of the duel in the retail version of SAO far, far better than I did. He might have even chosen his character build for the express purpose of excelling in duels. Otherwise he wouldn’t waste a skill slot so he could use a redundant weapon type.
“…!”
At that point, my mind passed through its current deep, narrow valley, and my breath caught in my throat.
If Morte was a dueling specialist, could it be that leaving my HP just a tick above halfway was not a coincidence, but an intentional move on his part?
A half-strength duel ended as soon as either combatant’s HP dropped below 50 percent. Within the safe zone of a city, any attack that occurred after the results screen popped up would be automatically nullified, and outside of town, extra damage would be classified a crime, turning the attacker’s cursor orange.
But according to my hazy memory, the exact moment a duel ended was not when the HP reached half. It was at the point that the normal attacks or sword skills’ damage had taken over half of the opponent’s HP.
Meaning that if I had 510 out of 1000 HP remaining, and I suffered a single attack worth 600 damage…the duel would be over, but my HP would go to 0, killing me, and leaving the opponent a legal green player.
If Morte had left me just a bit of health on purpose…
He was not hoping to win this duel and force me to leave my quest for another day.
He was planning, here and now…
To kill me.
A chill colder than any ice ran up my back, and for just a moment, I shivered.
Sensing this, Morte’s lips twisted upward, and he exhaled a chuckle.
“Aha!”
It wasn’t the first time another player had wanted to kill me.
On the first night in this game of death, I had formed a brief pickup party with another player, who attempted to murder me.
His plan was not to swing his sword at me, but to have me killed by a summoned crowd of monsters: an MPK, or monster player-kill. And before he used his Hiding skill to disappear, he told me he was sorry.
Of course, an apology did not excuse the act of murder. But at the very least, that partner of mine had made his choice bitterly, to ensure that he received the Anneal Blade that would help him survive, as soon as humanly possible.
But Morte had no tangible benefit to gain by killing me. If I lost in the duel, I was simply going to leave the infiltration quest for tomorrow, and eve
n if I didn’t believe his promise, whether I completed the quest or not had no actual effect on Morte.
Which meant he was a PKer in the truest sense: He killed for the sake of killing.
It was impossible. SAO was an inescapable, deadly trap. Morte was stuck in this digital prison just like the rest of us. If he killed another player in the group of clearers advancing our progress in the game, he only delayed the possibility that we beat the game and earned our freedom. Under that simple fact, the act of knowingly murdering another player meant that he did not actually seek to be free of this place.
“…You can’t…” I murmured, but Morte cut me off with another cackle.
“Aha! Let’s not have this conversation. Not when the going’s so good! Show me something, Kirito. This isn’t the end of the strongest man in the game, is it?”
He held up his ax and deftly spun it around with three fingers. Even with that cocky show, there were no weak points to attack. If I rushed him at once, he would hold up his shield and finish me with a counter. If that counter happened to be a sword skill powerful enough to deal over half of my HP in damage, I would die.
There was a way to avoid the worst-case scenario—if I resigned right away. I would lose the duel, but at least Morte wouldn’t be able to avoid turning into an orange criminal if he hit me. He was involved with the DKB with some kind of plot in mind, and surely he couldn’t stand for his cursor to change color. That was all wishful thinking, I knew.
I could acknowledge my lack of power and surrender in order to survive, or I could aim for a come-from-behind victory, find out what Morte was after, continue the quest, and salvage some measure of pride.
Sadly, if I chose the latter, I had no stock of plans or secret weapons to make use of. If anything, it was Morte who was likely to have more up his sleeve. The overlooked one-handed ax actually became a bonus in a PvP battle. I knew that I could recognize any longsword, scimitar, dagger, rapier, greataxe, or greatsword skill just based on the initiating motion, but there were some one-handed ax or one-handed hammer skills I didn’t even know the name of. In fact, since we’d started pushing forward from the start of the game, I couldn’t name a single player on the frontier who used a simple ax…
Something prickled in the back of my brain.
The way he flipped the ax around with his fingers.
I’d seen someone doing the same thing before, and recently—here on the third floor.
It wasn’t during the strategy meeting in town. It was before that…when Asuna, Kizmel, and I hid in the corridor of the queen spider’s cave, as a group passed by.
Ax in his right hand, round shield in the left. And a gray metal coif on his head.
That description fit Morte to a T. It had to be the same person.
But this was impossible. The man I’d seen flipping his ax around…was traveling with Kibaou and the ALS.
Just seven or eight hours later, I saw Morte in the midst of Lind’s DKB. He did have the coif on, but no shield, and his weapon was a longsword. That’s why I hadn’t considered he might be the same person I’d seen with Kibaou. The thought never occurred to me.
That was because I—and many others in SAO—saw a player’s main weapon as his defining feature. I was a swordsman. Asuna was a fencer. Agil was a double-handed axman. And Morte was both a swordsman and an axman.
Morte was using this dual nature to moonlight in both the DKB and ALS. He switched his weapons back and forth, helping with Lind and Kibaou’s quests at the same time.
But why? Was it sheer altruism, an attempt to make good on his beta experience? If that was the case, was I just imagining the cold bloodlust I felt from him?
Or was he hiding some true motive, even deeper, vaster, and darker than I could imagine?
“…What…what are you…?” I whispered in a voice so quiet even I couldn’t hear it. Morte tilted his head in confusion.
“Hmm? Hmm? Feeling more up to it now? Don’t worry, we’ve got all the time in the world.”
“…That’s true. And the fight isn’t over yet,” I said, this time at an audible volume.
It was perilous to keep fighting without a plan for victory. If Morte wasn’t a good person at heart, it was quite likely that he would actually kill me.
But my instincts told me that surrendering and leaving was an even more dangerous choice. If I didn’t get to the bottom of Morte’s hidden intentions and discover his connections, something irreparably awful could happen in the near future…or so I felt.
He smiled gleefully at my response. “That’s right, that’s the spirit. You never know how your hand’s going to play until you turn over that river card. So shall we get down to it? Flippety-flip!”
“…Time for the showdown, then?” I asked, brandishing my Anneal Blade in front of me.
“Aha! Very nice. Too bad we don’t have an audience, though. It’s…showtiiiime!” Morte blurted, raising his shield and holding his ax behind his body. We were only standing six feet apart, so the tip of my sword nearly touched his shield.
The will of battle rose in the two metal objects, like an electric charge, until virtual sparks snapped into life—and I moved.
I leaped off my right foot, circling toward his dominant hand, against the theory of shield combat. Morte spun to his right, trying to keep the shield facing me.
I expected that response. In order to land a major sword skill, the foe needed to be knocked off balance, staggered. The quickest way to do that was with a normal attack with a high staggering effect, but Morte couldn’t use that. Even a minor hit would knock my HP below half, ending the duel. If he wanted to knock me into an open position, he had to deflect my attack with his shield.
If anything, the fact that he’d met my flanking maneuver with his shield rather than his ax proved that he was trying to use the duel as a method of legal PK-ing. The knowledge that any mistake could literally prove fatal was like a needle of ice in my brain, but there was no turning back now. If I didn’t make use of all my experience and ability, the worst would come true.
“R-raah!” I howled, raising the Anneal Blade high overhead.
It was the exact same upper-right slash I attempted to no benefit right after Morte used his Quick Change trick, and with an added yell to boot.
Morte confidently raised his shield in a defensive position. The two-foot-wide wall of steel hid the venomous leer he wore.
In order to ensure that a shield guard inflicted a delay effect on the opponent, you couldn’t just hold it up—it had to be thrust out in a parrying motion, just as the enemy attack struck. With his shield held before his face, Morte couldn’t see my upper half, but he could see the top of my sword.
Morte’s every sense must be focused on my blade, timing the exact moment the slash began.
If even a tenth of his attention was anywhere other than my sword, if he wasn’t planning on a perfectly timed guard, if he happened to notice the red glow suffusing my left fist…
I would die.
Showdown.
I thrust forward at the shield, not with my sword, but my clenched left fist—the quickest of all martial arts skills, Flash Blow.
At this moment, Morte’s left arm would be relaxed, waiting for the right time to guard against my sword.
The brief, red uppercut hit the round shield along its lower left edge. A metallic shock echoed through the clearing, and the wall of steel disappeared.
In battle, there were three bad things that could happen to weapons or shields: Destruction, in which the item disappeared entirely; Snatching, in which the enemy stole it away; and Dropping, in which the item fell to the ground. Attempting to cause any of these negative effects was known as a “disarm” attempt.
In general, these attacks came from monsters. The lakeside Swamp Kobold Trappers halfway through the first floor killed more than a few players by knocking weapons loose into the sinking mud, then preying on their victims when they rushed to pick the weapons up.
Players could attempt to
disarm as well, but it was very difficult to pull off. You could either aim at the hand holding the weapon or attempt to hit the weapon directly on its side. But in either case, it would not work unless the weapon was held loosely. And the only time a player didn’t have a death grip on his weapon was just before initiating an attack.
Assisted by sheer luck, my Flash Blow caught that precise moment perfectly. The shield was ripped from Morte’s left hand and went flying into the night air. The smile beneath that dangling coif was gone, and one of his canines glinted in anger.
My shield disarm was successful, but I couldn’t stop there. His HP bar was still at over 90 percent.
My experience in man-on-man combat was far inferior to Morte’s. But I was certain that based on his Quick Change settings, he had two basic combat patterns: longsword with no shield and ax with shield. I hoped that pushing him into an ax with no shield helped close that experience gap. I had to start an attack that would take a little over 40 percent of his health away. If I couldn’t do that, I probably wouldn’t last long enough to win.
But winning and losing, living and dying—these concepts were nothing more than distractions.
Just move forward!
“Rahhh!”
With a true roar of triumph, I swung my sword down at his left shoulder. Morte leaned backward in an attempt to evade, but the end of my augmented blade caught his black scale mail, leaving behind a glowing red sign of damage. His HP was down to 85 percent.
“Shah!” he hissed, lashing back with his Harsh Hatchet. But all one-handed ax attacks swung in a wide arc and weren’t very handy at such close range. I ducked to avoid the howling swipe. The name “hatchet” made the ax sound small, but its thick blade felt deadly as it brushed my hair overhead. Still in my crouch, I swiped at his legs. The tip of the sword smashed against the shins of his boots, two quick whacks. It wasn’t nearly enough damage to cause localized effects, but it was another 5 percent of his health. Even better, the blow to his feet caused Morte to stumble.