Early and Late

  King Thrym’s first round of attacks comprised of downward punches with both fists, a three-part stomp attack with his right foot, a straight line of ice breath, and a summon of ice dwarf adds, twelve at a time, rising from the floor.

  The most troublesome of these were the dwarves, but the stunning accuracy of Sinon’s arrows in finding the weak points from the back row cleaned them up in no time. As for the direct attacks, they could be dodged entirely as long as you paid close attention, so with the help of Yui’s countdown, the three of us in front were able to continually evade damage.

  Once we had our defense down, it was time to go on the attack, but if anything, this was the hard part. As I feared, our swords could reach no higher than Thrym’s shins, and thanks to his thick fur leggings, they had significant damage resistance, if not as high as the golden Minotaur. I could do a three-part sword skill with perfect timing to get as much HP down as possible, but without going into attacks with longer delays, the damage was piddling. It felt wrong, like I was whacking away fruitlessly at an indestructible game object.

  Under these circumstances, Freyja’s lightning attacks were a wonderful boon. I needed to apologize to Klein afterward. As an NPC, her ability to coordinate with us was clumsy, but each time the purple bolt of light rained down, Thrym’s HP took noticeable damage.

  After more than ten minutes of battle, the first gauge was finally depleted, and the king of the giants let out a vicious roar.

  “Watch out! His pattern’s going to change!” I shouted.

  From the side, I could hear Leafa’s worried voice whisper, “This is bad, Big Brother. There are only three lights left on the medallion. We’ve probably got only fifteen minutes.”

  “…”

  Thrym had three bars. But it took us over ten minutes to eliminate one of them. It was going to be a monumental task to knock out the other two within fifteen minutes.

  And worse, spamming the Skill Connection trick I used against the golden Minotaur was not likely to work. Afflicting a monster with knock-back required high-damage blows within a combo. Thrym was not weak to either swords or magic, so putting four sword skills together in a row was not going to do major damage, given his vast total of HP.

  As if sensing my moment of panic, Thrym suddenly puffed out his chest like a bellows and sucked in a tremendous breath.

  The powerful pull of wind dragged the five of us in the front and middle rows toward the giant. This had to be the precursor to a major wide-area attack. The first trick to evading would be to neutralize the suction with wind magic. Realizing this, Leafa held up her left hand and began chanting a spell.

  But I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be in time unless she started from the moment his tell began.

  “Leafa, everyone, defensive positions!”

  At my command, Leafa canceled the spell, crossed her arms in front of her, and bent her legs. Everyone else assumed the same position.

  Right then, Thrym’s mouth emitted a diamond dust across a wide range, not at all like the linear breath attack he’d been using before.

  We were enveloped in pale, glowing light. The chill pierced Asuna’s buff and seemed to slice my skin. With sharp tingling noises, our five avatars began to freeze solid. I tried to escape, but the thick sheet of ice kept me in place. Leafa, Klein, Liz, Silica (with Pina held tight in her arms), and I were all turned to blue ice sculptures.

  At this stage, my HP bar was still full. But that was little relief. The longer an attack like this took, the worse the damage we would suffer.

  Up front, Thrym was gradually lifting his enormous right foot. Oh no, oh crap, oh shoot, I screamed to myself.

  “Nrrrn!”

  He slammed his foot onto the floor with a bellow. The shock wave swallowed up the ice sculptures, rattling tremendously. With a stomach-dropping craaash! the ice that covered my body split apart. The shock nearly blinded me. I was thrown to the floor, visual damage effects flashing past.

  At the top of my view, five of the eight HP bars shot down into the red at once.

  Of course, the three in the back outside the range of Thrym’s massive attack were not standing by as the rest of us were immobilized.

  Just after we lost about 80 percent of our HP, a gentle blue light shone down, healing our wounds. It was Asuna’s high-level full-party healing spell. The spell was perfectly timed, pre-cast so that it went off right after we took damage.

  But most of the major healing spells in this game were heals-over-time, meaning they only healed a portion of the total each second and not all at once. If we took another attack now, it could easily wipe us out, even as the heal spell was working on us.

  Thrym proceeded forward, ready to deliver the finishing blow as we got to our feet. Suddenly, a series of burning red arrows shot up at the beard covering his throat. They stuck in and burst. That was Exploding Arrows, Sinon’s Two-Handed Longbow skill. The one-part physical, nine-parts flame-damage attack was to the frost giant’s weakness, and his HP loss was visible.

  “Mrrrn!” Thrym roared, changing directions. He was targeting Sinon now. It was usually an elementary mistake when low-defense, high-power attackers in the back earned too much hate with a major attack and pulled a boss’s aggro away from the tanks in front, but that was not the case here. Sinon had used herself as bait to give us time to regroup and recover.

  “Give us thirty seconds, Sinon!” I shouted, grabbing a healing potion out of my pouch. Nearby, the others were already pouring the red liquid into their mouths. Pina had just barely survived, thanks to her master’s guarding skill. Unlike in Aincrad, there were pet resurrection spells here, but they took so long to cast, they were almost useless in battle.

  I looked back and forth between the agonizingly slow refueling of my HP and the light blue cait sith barely evading Thrym’s ferocious attacks. Sinon was new to ALO, but her reflexes were incredible. Since she played a sniper with no defensive skills in GGO, she must have built up a lot of experience darting out of the way when close-range attackers honed in on her.

  “…Prepare to attack,” I commanded my partners, seeing that my HP gauge was finally up to 80 percent. But just as I brandished my swords again and started a countdown, I was interrupted by a surprising voice.

  “Sir Swordsman.”

  It was the eighth member of our party, Freyja, whom I’d assumed was still next to Asuna.

  The AI-controlled NPC stared at me with her odd golden-brown eyes and said, “At this rate, we cannot defeat Thrym. Our only hope is the treasure of our people, buried somewhere in this chamber. If I get that back, my true power will return, and I can defeat Thrym.”

  “T-true power…”

  For the span of an entire breath, I couldn’t decide what to do.

  Then my mind was made. There was no point in being afraid of Freyja using her regained power to join Thrym’s side and wipe us out. At this rate, we would enter a battle of attrition and the quest would run out of time, if we didn’t get destroyed first. We had to make use of any possibility we could.

  “All right. What’s the treasure?” I said, just slow enough so the NPC would recognize my speech. Freyja spread her hands about a foot apart.

  “It is a golden hammer, about this size.”

  “…Huh? A h-hammer?”

  “A hammer,” she repeated. I stared at her for half a second. Then I noticed that Sinon, trapped in the back right corner of the chamber, finally took some splash damage from one of Thrym’s attacks, losing nearly a fifth of her health. I couldn’t force her to hold his aggro any longer. I turned to Klein, Leafa, and the rest.

  “Go and back her up! I’ll catch up with you in no time!”

  “You bet!” the samurai responded, then raced off shouting. In seconds, the sound of group battle resumed, and I looked desperately around the vast treasure chamber.

  There were piles and piles of shining golden items against the walls of blue ice. And I was supposed to find one little hammer? Sure, finding the hidden item was a classi
c quest type, but this was like finding a needle in a haystack!

  The quest had to have been designed for a raid party of at least thirty members. There was no way to find a single item out of all these without an excess of members like that.

  “…Yui,” I said, turning a wishful eye to the navigation pixie, but all she did was shake her head.

  “It won’t work, Papa. Map data don’t include the locations of key items. I believe it was probably randomly generated when we entered the room. The only way to determine which one is the key is to give it to Freyja!”

  “Great…uhhh…”

  I wrung out my brain so hard, steam might as well have shot out of my ears. But this time, no idea was forthcoming. It seemed as though my only hope was to start digging through a nearby pile and hope I hit the jackpot…

  Just then, Leafa looked over and shouted from the distant battle.

  “Big Brother! Use a lightning-type skill!”

  “L-light…?”

  I was taken aback for a moment, but the next instant, I swung the sword in my right hand up high.

  Since I had only learned the very basics of illusion magic, there was only one way for me to produce lightning damage.

  “Seyaaa!”

  I launched forward, doing a front flip in the air, and plunged the sword downward as I fell, holding it backhand. It was Lightning Fall, one of the few heavy-hitting area attacks in the One-Handed Sword category: three parts physical, seven parts lightning.

  My blade plunged deep into the ground, accompanied by the dry crack of thunder. Purplish sparks raced in every direction from that point. I rose at once and did a quick spin, cutting across all the piles of objects with my eyes…

  “…!”

  I saw it. Deep in the mountain of gold, a quickly pulsing purple light, answering the call of my blast. I clenched my teeth and raced for the top left corner of the room. With Thrym’s massive throne to my right, I dove completely into the mountain of treasure, ripping aside priceless items and hurling them behind me as I went.

  “…Is this it?!”

  A few seconds later, I reached out to what was one of the less impressive items in the treasure chamber. It was a small hammer with a golden hilt and a platinum head embedded with jewels. The moment I grabbed and lifted it, my avatar sank with a phenomenal weight. I roared and hoisted it up, turning to shout, “Freyja, here!”

  And with that built-up momentum, I hurled it overhand. Then I panicked. What if this was interpreted as my attacking a friendly NPC? Fortunately, the curvaceous blonde simply held up a slender hand and caught the deadly heavy hammer with ease.

  But the next moment, she crouched down into a ball, most likely due to the weight. Her long, wavy hair fanned out, and the exposed white skin of her back trembled.

  …Wait, was that bad? Did I give her the wrong thing?

  At that point, I heard Freyja’s low-pitched murmur.

  “…wing…”

  There was a little crackle of electricity in the air.

  “…flowing…I am overflowing…”

  It struck me as an odd thing for a young, beautiful witch to say. Maybe the Cardinal System’s language module made mistakes sometimes? But her voice was off, too. The glazed, husky voice from before was now deeper, cracking.

  Bzzp, zapp. The sparks were growing fiercer. Her golden-brown hair rose up into the air, the hem of the thin white dress flapping upward.

  “I am overflowing…with POWERRRRR!!”

  The third scream no longer belonged to the old Freyja in any way. I was beyond a “fishy feeling” at this point and in full-on open-mouthed shock as the muscles of the beautiful woman’s limbs and back bulged like ropes. Her white dress exploded into shreds and vanished.

  No doubt making use of his secret ability Hyper-Senses, Klein turned away from the battle on the other side of the room at that very moment. When he caught sight of his beloved Freyja’s utterly nude form, his eyes bulged. Then his jaw dropped.

  I couldn’t blame him. As the lightning crackled all over Freyja, she began to grow. Ten feet…fifteen…It wouldn’t stop. Now her arms and legs were the size of tree trunks, her bust even brawnier than Thrym’s. The hammer in her right hand had grown to match the size of its owner. It was already too large for even a heavy gnome warrior to wield, and it sprayed lightning in all directions.

  And then, Klein and I spotted the detail that delivered the greatest, nastiest shock yet.

  From the downturned face’s rugged cheeks and chin fell a long, very long, golden—beard.

  “She’s…”

  “A dude!”

  Two male screams echoed on opposite ends of the room.

  The captive beauty who had spurred Klein’s samurai code into motion was nowhere to be seen now. The new giant with the stunning, rippling muscles looked like nothing other than a bodybuilder in his forties.

  “Raaaaahhhhh!”

  The giant dude unleashed a roar that rattled the entire chamber. He took a rumbling step toward the distant King Thrym with a thick leather boot that had appeared out of nowhere.

  With dread, I looked over to the left to check the eighth name at the bottom of the list of party members, below all the HP and MP bars.

  While it had read Freyja less than a minute ago, there was now a different name in its place.

  Our new companion’s name: Thor.

  5

  Even I, with my total lack of mythological knowledge, had heard that name before.

  One of the most famous of Norse gods, alongside Odin and the trickster Loki, was Thor, god of thunder. The sight of him swinging a hammer that caused lightning to strike down giants was a visual motif found often enough in movies and games.

  From what Leafa told me later, there was indeed a story in Norse mythology about Thor going to take his hammer back from King Thrym of the giants. In the story, Thor is disguised as the goddess Freyja and offers to be Thrym’s wife. At the celebration, despite losing his cover several times, his true identity stays hidden through Loki’s clever explanations, and when he finally gets his hammer back, he crushes Thrym and all of his giants one by one, a story as comedic as it was brutal. So it was most likely that Cardinal had collected that myth and rearranged it a bit to attach it to the quest as an optional sub-story.

  In other words, if someone present actually knew the story, they would have realized as soon as the name appeared that Freyja was not a secret agent of Thrym’s. I was still grateful to Klein’s honest instincts and samurai code for saving her at the cell—regardless of how he felt after learning of Freyja’s true identity.

  “Rrrgh…Cowardly giant! You shall now pay for the theft of my precious Mjolnir!”

  Thor the god of thunder held up the massive golden hammer in his right hand and charged across the thick floor so hard he seemed likely to break through it.

  Thrym the frost king blew into his hands, producing a battle-ax of ice. He swung the weapon and shot back, “Treacherous god, you will rue this deviant lie! I will cut off your beard and send it back to Asgard when I’m done with you!”

  Now that I thought about it, Thrym believed that Freyja was a real goddess and was looking forward to their marriage. He might’ve been the villain, but he had a right to be angry.

  In the center of the chamber, the two bearded giants of gold and blue met, golden hammer and icy battle-ax clashing. The impact caused the entire castle to shudder. Meanwhile, the rest of us were still grappling with the shock of Freyja’s growth—and sex change. At the back of the room, Sinon finished up her healing and called out to the group.

  “Let’s all attack while Thor’s holding his attention!”

  She was absolutely right. There was no guarantee that Thor would be helping us to the very end of the battle. I swung my swords and shouted, “All-out attack! Use all the sword skills you can!”

  The seven of us leaped as one, bearing down on Thrym from every direction.

  “Nraaaah!”

  I felt as though something was s
parkling from the ends of Klein’s eyes as he charged with his katana overhead and a particularly fierce battle cry, but my warrior’s mercy made me pretend not to see it. Ignoring the skill delay, we assaulted Thrym’s legs with every sword skill of three or more hits we could. Asuna had switched out her wand for a rapier and was tattooing his Achilles tendon. Next to her, Lisbeth was beating the tip of a toe with her mace.

  “Gr…rrgh…!”

  Thrym grunted in pain, wobbled, and fell to a knee. A yellow effect was spinning around his crown—he was stunned.

  “That’s it!” I cried, and we all unleashed our biggest combos. Brilliant flashes of light enveloped his naked torso. From overhead fell a furious rain of orange arrows.

  “Hrrng! Return to the depths from which you came, giant king!” roared Thor, bringing down his hammer right onto Thrym’s head. The crown cracked and flew off, and the boss who had seemed completely untouchable fell face-first onto the ground.

  His HP gauge was already gone. His massive limbs and the tip of his beard began to crackle and turn into ice.

  The blue light that sparkled in his black eye sockets faded, vanishing. Just then, his tangled whiskers parted and emitted a deep voice.

  “Nwa-hah-hah…Enjoy your triumph, little bugs. But you will see…You will regret trusting the Aesir…for they are the true pl—”

  Zumm! Thor stomped down powerfully, his foot breaking through the ice giant. An End Flame animation of extraordinary scale erupted, and the frost giant blasted into countless shards of ice. We held our hands up against the pressure of the effect, taking a few steps back. From the heights above, Thor cast us a look with his golden eyes.

  “…You have my thanks, fairy warriors. Now I have regained my honor after the shame of losing my treasure. You must have a reward.”

  He lifted his left hand to brush the hilt of the massive, beautiful hammer in his other hand. One of the gemstones embedded in it came loose, began to glow, and turned into a hammer sized for a human to use.

  Thor tossed this golden hammer, a shrunken-down version of the original, to Klein.