Early and Late

  If I were playing in a party, I’d hear a rousing round of “gratz” for the feat. Instead, all I heard was the rustling of the breeze among the leaves as I put the sword back into my sheath. I swiped downward with my right index and middle fingers to bring up the menu window. Over in my status tab, I put one of the three stat points I earned into strength, and the other two into agility. Without magic spells in SAO, these were the only two stats I could see, so there wasn’t much point contemplating my options. In exchange, there was a great number of battle and crafting skills to choose from, so when I started earning more skill slots, that’s where the really big choices would come in.

  But for right now, I had to focus on surviving the next hour. I needed to level up until I had built up a good “safety margin” before I could stop and consider the future.

  Done with my level-up, I closed the window—and heard two abrupt, dry pops.

  “…!!”

  I leaped backward and put my hand on my hilt. I’d been so absorbed in my menu that I failed to pay attention to my surroundings—a terrible newbie mistake.

  Cursing my own lack of discipline, I assumed battle stance and saw a humanoid monster, one that shouldn’t actually spawn in this forest. No…it was a human.

  And not even an NPC. A player.

  It was a man, slightly taller than me. He wore the light leather armor and buckler sold in Horunka. Like mine, his weapon was the Small Sword. But he wasn’t holding it. His empty hands were held together in front of him, and his mouth hung open.

  Meaning the pops were actually from this man—no, boy—clapping to congratulate me on the level-up.

  I let out a little breath and lowered my hand. The boy smiled awkwardly and bowed.

  “…S-sorry for startling you. I should have said something first.”

  “…No, it’s my bad…I overreacted. Sorry,” I mumbled and put my hands into my pockets for lack of anything else to do with them. The boy’s smile widened in relief, his features giving him a first impression of being earnest and serious. He put his right hand up to his right eye for some reason, then realized what he was doing and self-consciously dropped his hand. I guessed he wore glasses in the real world.

  “C-congrats on leveling up. That was quick,” he said, and I automatically shrugged. I felt awkward, like he’d somehow sensed I was just thinking about if I had been in a party at this moment. I shook my head.

  “No, it wasn’t that fast…If anything, you’re pretty quick here, too. I thought I had another two or three hours before anyone arrived at this forest.”

  “Ha-ha-ha, I thought I was first, too. The road here’s pretty tricky to remember.”

  And with that, I finally came to a belated realization.

  He was just like me.

  Not in terms of weapons or gender. Not in the fact that we were both SAO players and prisoners of this game of death.

  This boy knew the game like I did. The location of Horunka. The reason not to buy a Bronze Sword. And where the most Little Nepenthes spawned. Meaning…

  He was a former beta tester. Just like I was.

  Today was November 6th, 2022, the first official day of Sword Art Online, the world’s first VRMMO. But three months earlier, they’d run an experimental beta test with a thousand players, chosen by lottery.

  With a tremendous amount of real luck (or as I thought of it now, bad luck), I was chosen out of the hundreds of thousands of applicants. The test ran all through August. Thanks to my summer vacation, I was able to dive in from morning until night—or in my case, midday to early morning. I ran all over Aincrad when it wasn’t a horrible prison, swinging my sword and dying. A lot. Over and over.

  Through an unlimited process of trial and error, I gained a massive amount of knowledge and experience.

  Little paths and shortcuts not listed on the map. The locations of towns and villages, and the wares on sale there. The prices of weapons and their stats. Where quests were offered and how to beat them. Monster spawn locations, their strengths, their weaknesses.

  All of this knowledge was what brought me here alive—to this forest far from the Town of Beginnings. If I were a total newbie who hadn’t played the beta, I probably wouldn’t even think of leaving the city alone.

  And the same could be said of the boy standing a few yards away.

  This swordsman, with slightly longer hair than mine, was undoubtedly another beta tester. I could tell that he was totally comfortable in the SAO VR engine just from the way he was standing, not to mention his presence here, on the other end of a maze of forest trails.

  With all of this deduced over a few seconds, the boy confirmed it all by asking, “You’re doing the Forest Elixir quest, too, huh?”

  That was the very quest I’d accepted in the woman’s home just minutes ago. There was no way to deny it now. I nodded, and he put his hand up to his nonexistent glasses, grinning.

  “Anybody using one-handed swords has got to do that quest. Once you get that Anneal Blade as a reward, it’ll take you all the way to the third-floor labyrinth.”

  “…Even if it doesn’t look that impressive,” I added, and he laughed. When he was done, he paused for a moment, then spoke. It wasn’t what I was expecting to hear.

  “Since we’re both here, want to work on the quest together?”

  “Uh…but I thought it was a solo-only quest,” I responded automatically. Quests were divided into those that could be finished with a party and those that couldn’t, and the Forest Elixir was the latter. Since only a single Little Nepenthes Ovule would drop from a single mob, a party would need to hunt down multiple items to finish as a group.

  But the boy seemed to expect that answer. He grinned.

  “Yeah, but the flowering kind gets more likely, the more normal ones you kill. It’ll be more effective than the two of us working separately.”

  In theory, he was right. As a solo player, you could only go after solitary monsters, but as a duo, we could handle two at a time. It would shorten the amount of time needed to pick out a proper target, allow us to kill them faster, and increase the probability of coming across a flowered mob as we went.

  I was just about to agree with his plan when I stopped my avatar short.

  Just over an hour ago, I’d left friendly Klein behind…Did I really have the right to go forming a new party, just after I’d abandoned my first friend here?

  But the boy interpreted my hesitation in a different way and quickly added, “I mean, we don’t have to form a party. You were here first, so you can get the first key item. If we keep going with the probability boost, I’m sure the second will show up in short order, so you can just go along with me until then…”

  “Oh…uh, right…well, if you don’t mind…” I said awkwardly. If we formed a party to fight, any key items we earned would go not into our individual inventories but to a temporary shared storage, which would make it possible for him to claim the item and run off. He probably thought I was concerned about that. I hadn’t been thinking that far ahead, but it wasn’t worth correcting him.

  The boy smiled again, walked closer, and held out his hand.

  “That’s great. Well, here’s to working with you. I’m Kopel.”

  As a fellow beta tester, I might have actually known him back then, but the name wasn’t familiar to me.

  He could certainly be using a different name now, and the color cursor didn’t display his official character name, so it might not even be his real name. I could have used an alias as well. But I wasn’t very good at coming up with names; in every online game I played, I always used the same handle, clumsily adapted from my real name. So I wasn’t clever enough to come up with another one on the spot.

  “…Hiya. I’m Kirito.”

  Kopel reacted oddly to my introduction.

  “Kirito…Wait, have I heard that…?”

  It seemed that he knew of me in the beta test, if not directly. I sensed incoming danger and immediately interrupted.

  “You’re t
hinking of someone else. C’mon, let’s hunt. We’ve got to earn two ovules before the other players catch up.”

  “Y-yeah…That’s right. Let’s do this.”

  And with that, Kopel and I raced off toward a pair of Little Nepenthes clumped together.

  Kopel’s battle instincts were impressive, just as I’d expected from another tester.

  He understood the right range for a sword, the monsters’ various tells, and how to use a sword skill. From my perspective, he was a bit too passive and defensive in his style, but given the circumstances, I couldn’t blame him. We naturally assumed a pattern of teamwork in which Kopel drew aggro first, and I led an all-out assault on the enemy’s weak point. This worked well, and we tore our targets to polygonal shreds one after the other.

  The hunt was going smoothly, but the more I thought about it, the odder the situation became.

  Kopel and I hadn’t shared a single word about the state of SAO yet. Was Kayaba’s proclamation true? If we died in the game, would we die for real? What would happen to this world we were trapped in…? He had to be thinking about the same questions as I was, yet we never spoke a word about anything other than items and the quest. Yet despite that, our conversation was totally natural, not forced.

  Perhaps that was just a sign of what MMO addicts we were. Even in a realm of death without a log-out button, as long as we were in a game, we were going to quest and earn levels. It was pathetic in a way, but considering that Kopel had applied to beta test SAO, it should be obvious that like me, he was an online gamer to the bone. We were just able to put our impulse to power up our characters in front of our fear of dying…

  No.

  That wasn’t right.

  Both Kopel and I…we just weren’t able to face reality yet.

  Our brains were busy calculating experience gains, spawn rates, and other numbers, but they weren’t considering the big picture. We were avoiding the reality that if our HP reached zero, the NerveGears we were wearing would fry our brains with high-powered microwaves, and the only way for us to escape that was to blindly face forward. You might even say that all the players still hanging out in the Town of Beginnings were reacting to the situation with more clarity than we were.

  But if that was the case, then the reason I could face these fearsome monsters with absolute composure was only because I wasn’t facing reality. I was only able to avoid the sharp vines and dangerous acids, which were perfectly capable of killing me, because I wasn’t feeling the true danger that was present.

  The moment I came to this realization, an insight hit my brain.

  I was surely going to die…and very soon.

  If I didn’t understand the first rule of this game, that true death lurked everywhere, then I wasn’t seeing the line that I should not cross. I might as well be walking alongside a deadly cliff in pure darkness, trusting luck to keep me alive. In that sense, leaving the town alone and heading into a dark forest with poor visibility was already an extremely reckless move…

  A shiver of cold burst through my spine into all of my extremities, hampering my movement.

  At that moment, I’d lifted my sword to strike the umpteenth Nepenthes in a row on its weak point. If I held that spot for half a second more, it would hit me with a very painful counterattack.

  I came back to my senses and restarted my Horizontal skill, which just barely severed the plant’s stalk in the nick of time. The creature exploded and the intangible bits of glass passed through me as they expanded outward.

  Fortunately, Kopel was dealing with another Nepenthes with his back to me, so he didn’t notice my momentary lapse. Five seconds later, he finished off the monster with a normal attack, exhaled, and turned back to me.

  “…They’re not popping…”

  There was fatigue in his voice now. Over an hour had passed since we started hunting together. Together, we’d killed about a hundred and fifty Nepenthes, but there were still no flowering types.

  I worked my shoulders hard, trying to dislodge the chill that still rested between my shoulder blades.

  “Maybe they changed the pop rate since the beta…I’ve heard about other MMOs tweaking drop rates on loot between beta and full release before…”

  “It’s possible…What should we do? We’ve gained a couple levels, and our weapons are pretty worn down. Maybe we should go back to—” Kopel started to say, when a faint red light appeared at the foot of a tree not forty feet away.

  A number of rough, blocky models were being drawn in midair, combining together and taking shape. It was a familiar sight to me—the process of a monster popping.

  As Kopel said, I’d gained a ton of XP from our run of slaughter, and we were both Level 3 now. From what I remembered of the beta, the expected level for beating the first floor was 10, so it was still too early to push onward, but there wasn’t much point waiting for a single Nepenthes. The enemy’s color cursor was now regular red, not magenta.

  “…”

  Kopel and I stood in the grass, watching the monster spawn. Within a few seconds, the hundred-and-somethingth Nepenthes of the night took shape and began to walk, vines wriggling. It had a vivid, gleaming green stalk, a carnivorous pitcher with its own individual markings, and on top—shining red in the gloom—an enormous tuliplike flower.

  “…”

  After several seconds of blank stares, our faces snapped toward each other.

  “—!!”

  I made a silent scream. We brandished our swords and prepared to leap onto the long-awaited flowering mob like cats stalking a mouse.

  But I stopped suddenly, reaching out with my free hand to hold back Kopel as well.

  He looked at me in bewilderment, so I held up my index finger, then pointed beyond the flowering Nepenthes as it walked away from us.

  It was hard to see among the trees, but farther in that direction was the shadow of another Nepenthes. I’d only noticed it because of the increased level of my Search skill. Kopel didn’t have that skill yet; he squinted into the darkness, but after several seconds, noticed it at last.

  If it were just a normal Nepenthes hiding behind the flowering one, there would be no reason to hesitate. But of all the odds, the second one also had a large mass bobbing over its large pitcher head.

  If that was a flower, too, I was ready to lower my “real bad luck” sign forever. But dangling from the second creature’s thin stalk was a round ball about eight inches across—a fruit. It was bulging as if ready to burst at any moment, and if we harmed it in any way, it would instantly rupture and release foul-smelling smoke. That smoke would draw an army of crazed Nepenthes, plunging us into a trap we couldn’t escape from, even after leveling up.

  What to do?

  I wasn’t sure. In terms of skill, it was certainly possible that we could defeat the fruit-bearing one without touching the fruit. But it wasn’t an absolute guarantee. If there was any risk of death whatsoever, perhaps we should wait for the two Nepenthes to separate a bit before moving in.

  But then a rumor I recalled from the beta made me hesitate further. I thought I remembered hearing that if you waited for too long after a flowering Nepenthes popped, it would eventually turn into the exceedingly dangerous fruit model.

  It wasn’t out of the question. In fact, it sounded quite likely. If we stood here and watched, the petals on the flowering Nepenthes fifty feet away might begin to fall, eventually leaving us with two fruit-bearing monsters on our hands.

  “What to do…” I murmured without thinking. The fact that I didn’t have an immediate answer was proof that I didn’t have that clear line between danger and safety established yet. If I wasn’t sure, the reasonable decision was to pull back, but I couldn’t even trust my sense of reason at this point.

  As I stood there, practically locked in a stun effect, I heard Kopel whisper, “Let’s go. I’ll grab the fruit one’s attention while you take out the flowering one as quick as you can.”

  Without waiting, he strode off, his starter boots
crunching the grass.

  “…All right,” I answered, following him.

  I hadn’t gotten over my ambivalence. I just kicked it down the line. But once things went into motion, I had to focus on controlling my sword and avatar. If I couldn’t do even that, I really would die.

  The flowering plant noticed Kopel’s approach first, and it turned around. The edges of the pitcher, grotesquely similar to human lips, opened and hissed, “Shaaaa!”

  Kopel moved to the right, heading for the fruit-bearing Nepenthes in the back, but the flower stayed on him. I approached it from behind and raised my sword, my mind empty.

  Despite being a rare variant that appeared less than 1 percent of the time, the flowering Nepenthes had basically the same stats as the normal kind. Its defense and attack were slightly higher, but now that I was Level 3, that difference was negligible.

  While my brain raced with questions, the physical instincts I’d built since the beta test moved my avatar automatically, dodging and parrying the Nepenthes’s vine attacks, then countering. In ten seconds, its HP bar was yellow. I jumped back and prepared the finishing sword skill.

  All that battle had raised my One-Handed Sword skill, and I could feel the initiation speed and range of the attacks increasing. Before the Nepenthes could even half inflate its pitcher to spit acid, my Horizontal skill cut across with a blue line of light, severing the stalk.

  It let out a scream that was a bit different from the usual kind. The severed pitcher rolled to the ground and burst into little polygons—but not before the flower on its head fell off.

  A faintly glowing orb about the size of a fist rolled out and toward my feet, coming to stop against my boot toe just as the monster’s torso and mouth shattered.

  I crouched down and scooped up the glowing Little Nepenthes Ovule. I’d killed about a hundred and fifty of the monsters just to gain this item, grappling with many questions along the way.

  It was enough to make me want to fall to my butt in the grass, but I couldn’t relax yet. A short distance away, Kopel was doing me the favor of distracting the dangerous fruit-bearing Nepenthes, and I needed to help him.