Early and Late
I was afraid of Klein’s friends’ dying—specifically, of the look he would give me if that happened. I didn’t want something bad to happen. I didn’t want to be hurt. That selfish desire caused me to abandon the first player to speak to me and invite me to play with him…
“…!!”
Even my self-deprecating line of thought couldn’t cover up the true revulsion that swarmed up from my stomach. I clenched my teeth and reached back to grab the sword equipped over my back.
A blue boar popped in the grass just ahead. They were nonaggressive monsters, so I planned to just ignore them and race through the grassland, but a sudden impulse drove me to draw my simple starter sword and unleash the one-hit sword skill Slant on it.
Reacting to being targeted, the boar glared back at me and scratched the ground with its front right hoof: the animation for a charge attack. If I faltered now and stopped the skill, I’d suffer major damage. Both calm and irritated at myself, I stared down the foe and aimed the skill for the back of its neck, the monster’s weak point.
My sword glowed a faint sky blue, and with a sharp sound effect, my avatar moved, half automatically. As it did for all sword skills, the system assistance largely helped me do the slashing motion on its own. Careful not to interfere with the timing of the movement, I intentionally sped up my launch foot and right hand to add power to the attack. I once spent nearly ten days in town firing off the skill against a combat dummy to practice that trick.
My Level-1 stats and starter gear were as weak as it got, of course, but with that little power boost and a critical hit on a weak point, the Slant would take the blue hog—officially called a Frenzied Boar—almost all the way down. My slash caught the charging boar fiercely on its mane, boldly knocking the four-foot-long beast backward.
“Greeeeh!”
The creature squealed, bounced on the ground, and stopped unnaturally in midair. Spaash! There was a burst of sound and light. The boar emitted a blue light and dispersed into countless tiny polygonal shards.
I didn’t even bother to look at the readouts of experience points and dropped ingredient items as I charged right through the cloud of visual effects without slowing. There was no feeling of triumph. I thrust my sword back into the scabbard and ran toward the dark, approaching forest as fast as my agility stat would allow.
I made my way through the forest paths as quickly as I could, careful to avoid the reaction ranges of the monsters within, and made it to the village of Horunka just before the sun disappeared entirely.
Between the homes and shops there were only ten buildings in all, which I scanned quickly from the entrance. All the color cursors that popped into view had the NPC tag on them. I was the first to arrive—which made sense. I pretty much sprinted off without a single word to anyone the moment that Kayaba’s “tutorial” speech ended.
First, I headed for the weapon shop facing the cramped center clearing. Before the tutorial, when SAO was still a normal game, I had beaten a few monsters with Klein, so I had a number of ingredient items in my inventory. I wasn’t the crafting type, so I sold them all to the NPC storekeeper. I then used what little col I had to buy a brown leather half coat with pretty good defense.
I hit the instant-equip button without hesitation. The sturdy leather gear appeared with a brief glowing effect over my white linen starter-shirt and thick gray vest. Bolstered by a feeling of slight relief, I took a glance at the large full mirror on the wall of the shop.
“…It’s…me…”
The old shopkeep behind the counter lifted an eyebrow curiously as he polished a dagger sheath, then went back to his work.
The avatar in the mirror, aside from height and gender, was completely different from the old Kirito I’d so painstakingly fashioned.
He was gaunt and thin, without a trace of manliness to his features. Black bangs hung low, and his eyes were black. In fact, they were dark. It was my own, real self, recreated in virtual form in startling detail.
The idea of this avatar wearing the same flashy metal armor the old Kirito had worn sent a pulse of horrifying rejection through my entire body. Fortunately, even light leather armor in SAO provided the necessary defense for a speed-minded swordsman. I couldn’t play a tank that attracted all the enemies’ attacks, but a tank build was pointless to a solo player anyway.
As long as circumstances permitted, I would continue wearing leather. As plain as possible.
With that in mind, I left the weapon shop. I only upgraded my leather coat, with no shield, and still held my starter sword. Next I raced into the item shop and bought all the healing and antidote potions I could, until my cash balance read zero.
There was a reason I didn’t buy a new weapon. The Bronze Sword, the only one-handed sword sold at this village’s shop, was more powerful than my starter Small Sword, but it ran out of durability faster and was weak to the corrosive effects of the plant enemies ahead. For hunting larger numbers, my Small Sword was better. But I couldn’t rely on the weak blade for long. I left the item shop and sprinted for the house at the very back of the village.
An NPC stirring a pot in the kitchen, the very picture of a village wife, turned to me and said, “Good evening, traveling swordsman; you must be tired. I would offer you food, but I have none right now. All I can give you is a cup of water.”
In a loud, clear voice—to make sure the system recognized my statement—I said, “That is fine.”
I could have just said “sure” or “yes,” but I preferred to play the role a bit more seriously. However, if I’d been more polite and said, “Don’t mind me,” she would take me at my word literally and not offer anything.
The NPC poured water from a pitcher into an old cup and set it down on the table before me. I sat down in the chair and downed it in one go.
The woman smiled briefly, then turned back to the pot. The fact that something was bubbling away in there, yet she claimed she had no food, was a hint. As I waited, eventually the sound of a child coughing came from the closed door to an adjacent room. The woman slumped sadly.
After several more seconds, a golden question mark appeared over her head at last. It was the sign of a quest. I promptly asked, “Is there a problem?”
That was one of the many acceptance phrases for NPC quests. The woman turned slowly toward me, the question mark flashing.
“Traveling swordsman, it is my daughter…”
Her daughter was very sick, so she tried herbs from the market (the contents of the stew) but that did not help, so her only choice was to try a medicine harvested from the ovule of the carnivorous plants in the western forest, but as the plants were dangerous and the flowering ones were rather rare, she couldn’t harvest it herself and could you see your way to helping, traveling swordsman, because then she might just part ways with her ancestors’ sword, which had been passed down for generations…
I sat and patiently waited out the very long speech, punctuated by various gestures. The quest wouldn’t continue unless I listened to the whole thing, and with the way the daughter coughed in the background, it was hard to be rude.
She stopped talking at last, and a task updated on the quest log located on the left side of my vision. I stood and shouted, “Leave it to me!”—unnecessary but another part of the role—and darted out of the house.
Immediately, the little platform in the center clearing chimed the hourly melody that was common to every town in the game. It was seven o’clock.
What was it like in the real world by now? It had to be chaos. As my real body lay on my bed with the NerveGear attached, I was sure either my mother, or sister, or both, were sitting next to me.
What were they feeling now? Shock? Doubt? Fear? Or grief…?
But the fact that I was still alive in Aincrad meant that at the very least, neither of them had tried to rip the NerveGear off. That meant that, for now, they believed—in Akihiko Kayaba’s warning and in my eventual return…
In order to leave this game of death alive, someon
e would need to reach the unfathomable hundredth floor of Aincrad, beat a final boss monster that was impossible to even imagine, and finish the game.
Of course, I didn’t entertain the idea that I would do that—not at all. What I should do—what I could do—was simply struggle with all my might to survive.
First, I needed to be stronger. While I was on this floor, at the very least, I needed to be able to protect my own life, no matter how many monsters or antagonistic players attacked. I could think about what to do next after that.
“…I’m sorry for worrying you, Mom…I’m sorry, Sugu. I know you hate these VR games, and look what’s happened now…”
Even I was surprised by the words that tumbled through my lips. I hadn’t called my little sister by that nickname in three years or more.
If…if I got back alive, I’d look her in the face and called her “Sugu” once more.
With that decision made for no real reason, I headed through the village gate and into the eerie night forest.
There was no sky inside Aincrad, only the surface of the next floor up, looming three hundred feet above at all times, so the only way to see the sun directly was during a brief time in the morning and evening. The same rule applied for the moon.
But that didn’t mean that it was dark during the day and pitch-black at night. The VR game took advantage of its virtual nature to provide proper sky-based lighting to allow for acceptable eyesight at all times. Even in the forest at night, there was just enough pale light around one’s feet to allow you to run without falling.
But that was a separate issue from the psychological creepiness of it all. No matter how cautious you were, there was always that cyclical fear that something might be just behind you. Of course now I wished for the security of party members, but it was too late to go back. Both in terms of distance and the game system.
A Level-1 player started off with two skill slots.
I used the first on One-Handed Swords at the very start of the game right after one o’clock, and was planning to think hard about what to use on the other one. But after Kayaba’s nightmare opening speech and leaving the Town of Beginnings, the fun of weighing my options was lost.
There were certain invaluable, necessary skills to playing solo. The most important were Search and Hiding. Both greatly increased one’s survival, but the former aided in hunting effectiveness, while the latter was slightly less useful in this forest, for certain reasons. So I chose Search first and decided to add Hiding when my next slot opened up.
But both of those skills were not very useful in a party, where the added numbers and eyes provided the safety. So by choosing Search, I had basically locked myself into playing solo. Perhaps I would one day regret that choice, but for now, it was the right one…
As I ran along, I noticed a small color cursor pop into existence. The Search skill increased my detection range, so I couldn’t see the owner of the cursor yet. The cursor was red, indicating a monster, but the shade was a bit darker, more of a magenta.
The depth of red was a rough indication of the relative strength of the enemy. Those monsters who were well beyond any reasonable attempt to fight would be a dark crimson, darker than blood. And the monsters so weak you’d hardly get any XP for killing them would be a pale pink that was practically white. An enemy about the same level would appear pure red.
The cursor in my view now was slightly darker than red. The monster’s name was Little Nepenthes. For being “little,” the ambulatory, carnivorous plant was nearly five feet tall. It was Level 3, which explained why the cursor looked purplish to a Level-1 player.
This was not a foe to be overlooked, but I wasn’t going to be cowed, either. A thin yellow border—the sign of a quest target mob—bound the cursor.
I stopped short, made sure there were no other mobs around, then resumed running straight at the Little Nepenthes. Monsters without eyes like this one were basically impossible to hit with a back attack.
I stepped off the path and around an old tree, and it came into view.
As the name suggested, it had a torso like a pitcher plant, supported at the base by a multitude of wriggling, writhing roots. On either side were vines with sharp leaves, and the “mouth” at the top was opening and closing hungrily, dripping sour saliva.
“…No luck,” I muttered. Every once in a while, one of these monsters would have a flower blooming on top. The “Little Nepenthes Ovule” I needed for the quest in Horunka would only drop from those flowering Nepenthes. And the spawn rate for the flowering kind was less than 1 percent.
But if you kept beating the normal Nepenthes, the flower rate would rise. So fighting them wasn’t a waste of time. There was just one thing to be wary of.
At the same rate as the flowering type was another rare Nepenthes spawn with a round fruit. That was a trap—if you attacked, it would explode with a tremendous blast and shoot out foul-smelling smoke. The smoke was not poisonous or corrosive, but it would draw distant Nepenthes down upon you. If the area was farmed out, that didn’t mean much, but with the forest basically untouched right now, it would spell disaster.
I squinted and made sure the enemy had no fruit, then drew my sword. The Nepenthes noticed me, and the two vines rose up in a display of intimidation.
This mob would swipe with its daggerlike vines and expel a corrosive liquid from its mouth. That was more variety than the blue boars, who simply charged blindly, but compared to humanoid mobs like kobolds and goblins who used sword skills of their own, it was still pretty easy.
And most importantly, it was designed for attack and had weak defense. In the “old” Aincrad, I liked monsters like this. As long as you didn’t get hit, you could wipe them out in short time.
“Shuuuu!” The carnivorous plant hissed and thrust its right vine forward. I detected its path instantly and leaped to the left, swinging around the side and striking at the connection between its thick stalk and the pitcher—its weak point.
It felt good. The Nepenthes’s HP bar dropped nearly 20 percent.
The creature roared again and puffed up its pitcher, the warm-up motion for its corrosive spray. It could cover a good fifteen feet, so just backing up wasn’t an option.
Not only would that take down my HP and armor durability quite a bit, the stickiness would impede my movement. But the angle of the spray was narrow, only thirty degrees facing forward. I waited for just the right moment, and when the pitcher stopped expanding, I jumped hard to my right this time.
Bshu! A pale green liquid sprayed out, hissing and steaming when it touched the ground. But not a single drop hit me. When my foot hit the ground, I held up my sword and whacked at the weak spot again. The Nepenthes arched backward with a scream, and yellow visual effects began to spin around it—I had inflicted a stun effect. The idea of a plant being stunned was weird, but I wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity by thinking about it.
I drew back my sword, wide to the right. By holding it in place for a moment, a sword skill initiated, and the blade glowed pale blue.
“Raaah!”
With the first battle cry in this fight—since SAO’s release, in fact—I leaped forward. It was the single-strike flat slash Horizontal. The only difference between this and Slant was that the latter was diagonal, but this move made it easier to hit the Little Nepenthes’s weak point.
The sword skill struck the exposed stalk of the stunned mob, which was just about halfway dead after the previous attacks. Naturally, I had thrown a little extra effort into my forward foot and swinging arm to boost the attack. The shining blade dug into the hard stalk, leaving me with a brief bit of feedback, and then—
Thwack! The pitcher was cut loose from the stalk and flew into the air. The rest of the HP gauge swung to the left, turning red. As it hit zero, the Little Nepenthes’s body turned blue and froze. It exploded.
I came to a stop in the follow-up pose of the skill, sword held out in front of me. About twice as much XP flooded in as for beating the boar. Th
e time of battle was about forty seconds. If I maintained that pace, I’d get quite an effective head start.
Naked blade still in hand, I looked around the area. A few more Little Nepenthes cursors popped up at the edge of my detection range. Still no players.
I had to hunt as much as I possibly could before others showed up here. I had to attempt to dry up the whole area’s spawn rate myself. It was quite an egotistical idea, but there was no concept more paradoxical than a charitable solo player.
I settled on my target without emotion and resumed running through the deep forest.
In the next fifteen minutes, I dispatched over ten Little Nepenthes.
Sadly, no flowering mobs had appeared yet. In this type of quest, which gamers called “real luck dependent”—meaning they came down to whether you were personally lucky or not—I couldn’t remember ever being showered with good fortune.
To my irritation, somewhere out there in the world, there were players who scored ultrarare drops with a success rate less than 0.01% percent, or succeeded in upgrading a weapon ten times in a row, or even managed to get close with a girl in the game. There was no way to compete with those lucky SOBs aside from sheer persistence and experimentation. In regards to scoring rare drops, of course—I had no intention of hitting on every girl I saw.
In fact, after Kayaba’s godly act of turning all in-game avatars into their owners’ actual appearance, I was certain that the number of girls in Aincrad had dropped dramatically. That saved me the trouble of wondering if every girl I saw was secretly a guy, but it had to be a real trial for those players who chose a starting name and gear because they wanted to role-play as a female. For their sake, I hoped that Kayaba had prepared a name-changing item or quest somewhere within the game.
This mental diversion was brought about by a bit of confidence as I finished off my eleventh Nepenthes. Just then, I heard a pleasant fanfare. A golden light shone all around my body. Including the experience I’d earned hunting boars with Klein before the game turned deadly, I had finally reached the threshold for a level-up.