Early and Late

  “Sorry for the wait!” I shouted, looking up. I dropped the ovule into my belt pouch—I’d feel better having it stored safely in my inventory, but I didn’t have time to perform all those actions now. I held up my sword and ran several steps—

  But my feet stopped for some reason.

  Even I didn’t know why. Up ahead, my temporary partner Kopel was avoiding attack nimbly with sword and buckler. He was good at defense, because he was able to glance over at me now and then, even in the midst of battle. Those earnest, narrow eyes, staring at me. That stare.

  Something in that stare stopped my feet.

  What was it? Why would Kopel look at me like that? Doubting, perhaps pitying.

  He deflected a vine attack with his buckler and broke away from the fight, glanced quickly at me, and said, “Sorry, Kirito.”

  Then he turned to the monster and held his sword high over his head. The blade started glowing blue. He was starting a sword skill—the motion for the overhead slice attack, Vertical.

  “Wait…that’s not going to work…” I said automatically, while my mind still puzzled over what he’d just said to me.

  The weak stalk of the Little Nepenthes was hidden beneath its prey-trapping pitcher, so vertical attacks were minimally effective. And Kopel had a very clear reason not to use a vertical slice now. He must know that.

  But once a sword skill started, it wouldn’t stop. With the system behind the wheel, his avatar leaped forward on autopilot and drove the glowing sword downward upon the Nepenthes’s pitcher—and the bobbing fruit hanging above it.

  Powww!

  The forest shook with a tremendous blast.

  It was the second time I’d heard that sound. The first was in the beta test, of course. One of the temporary party members at the time had accidentally struck it with a spear, and a swarm of Nepenthes descended on us. The four of us, all levels 2 or 3, died before we could escape.

  After smashing the fruit with a Vertical, Kopel quickly sliced the Nepenthes’s pitcher loose, killing it. The monster promptly blew up, but the green gas hanging in the air and the stench in my nostrils did not go away.

  As Kopel leaped away from the smoke, I mumbled, dumbfounded, “Wh…why…?”

  It wasn’t an accident. It was intentional. Kopel hit the fruit of his own volition to make it explode.

  The beta tester who had worked with me for the last hour did not look me in the face.

  “…Sorry.”

  I saw a number of color cursors appear on the other side of him.

  To the right. To the left. Behind us. They were all Little Nepenthes, summoned by the smoke. It had to be every single individual currently present in the area. There were at least twenty of them…no, thirty. The moment I recognized that it was pointless to fight, my legs started to run, but that in itself was pointless. Even if I broke free of the net, the Nepenthes’ max speed was much higher than you’d imagine from their appearance, and another monster would just target me before I could break free. Escape was impossible…

  Was it suicide?

  Was he planning to die here and take me down with him? Had the threat of true death driven this man to try resigning from the game altogether?

  It was all I could think about as I stood stock-still.

  But my guess was incorrect.

  Kopel put his sword back into the scabbard on his left side, not looking at me anymore, and started running into the nearby brush. His stride was steady, full of intent. He hadn’t given up on life. But…

  “It’s pointless…” I said, all air and no voice.

  The swarm of Little Nepenthes was coming in from every direction. It would be difficult to slip through them or fight your way out, and even if you succeeded, another foe would just hold you back. In fact, if he was going to run, why would Kopel use Vertical on it at all? Was he planning to die, then got frightened by the swarm and decided to make one last struggle?

  As my half-numb brain tried to grapple with all this, I watched Kopel leap into a small overgrowth of brush. His avatar was covered by the thick leaves, but his color cursor…

  Disappeared. He wasn’t more than seventy feet away, but his cursor vanished from view. For a moment, I wondered if he’d used a teleport crystal, but that was impossible. They were incredibly expensive, unaffordable at this stage, and they weren’t sold on the first floor or dropped by any monsters here.

  Which left just one answer. It was the effect of the Hiding skill. His cursor disappeared from the view of players, and he no longer attracted the attention of monsters. Kopel’s second skill slot wasn’t open; he used it on the Hiding skill. That was how he snuck up on me before our first meeting without me detecting him…

  As the mass of monsters thundered closer and closer, I finally—and very belatedly—realized the truth.

  Kopel wasn’t attempting suicide or fleeing in fear.

  He was trying to kill me.

  That was why he struck the fruit and drew all those Nepenthes here: He could use his Hiding skill to escape the danger. All thirty-plus monsters would be left to concentrate solely on me. It was an orthodox trick, an MPK—monster player kill.

  Knowing that made his motive much clearer: to steal my gear and the Little Nepenthes Ovule I put in my pouch. If I died, all items I had equipped or in my pouch dropped on the spot. Once the swarm of Nepenthes left, he could scoop up the ovule, return to the village, and complete the quest.

  “…I see…” I mumbled. Meanwhile, the beasts themselves were finally coming into view.

  Kopel, you weren’t hiding from the reality of the situation. Just the opposite. You recognized this game of death and took your place as a player. You decided to lie, cheat, and steal your way to survival.

  Strangely, I felt no anger or enmity toward him.

  My mind was strangely calm, despite being put in a deadly trap. Perhaps that was partially because I’d already recognized a hole in Kopel’s plan.

  “Kopel…I’m guessing you didn’t know,” I said to the brush, though I had no way to tell if he could hear me or not. “It’s your first time taking Hiding, right? It’s a useful skill, but it’s not all-powerful. The thing is, it doesn’t work very well on monsters who rely on senses other than sight. Such as the Little Nepenthes.”

  Part of the hissing horde coming down on us like an avalanche was clearly heading for Kopel’s hiding spot. By now, he had to be realizing that his Hiding attempt wasn’t working. This was the exact reason that I chose Search first.

  Still calm, I spun around and stared down the charging line of plants. The ones behind me would attack Kopel, so I didn’t need to concern myself with them for now. If I could wipe out the enemies ahead before the battle behind me finished, I might have a chance at escape. Even if that chance was a hundredth of 1 percent.

  I gripped my Small Sword, still not recognizing the full reality of the situation, despite death bearing down on me. After over a hundred battles, the sword was considerably worn, the blade chipped here and there. If I was too rough, it might even break in this fight.

  I would keep the number of attacks to a minimum. I would only use Horizontal, boosted by my movements, so that I hit each enemy on its weak point and killed it in one hit. If I couldn’t manage that, I was sure to end up dying due to a broken weapon, a truly miserable end.

  Behind me, I heard monster roars, the clashing of attacks, and Kopel screaming something.

  But I didn’t pay attention. Every one of my nerves was fixed on the enemies ahead.

  What happened over the next few minutes—it couldn’t have been more than ten—I couldn’t fully remember afterward.

  I lost all higher thinking. All that existed was the enemy before me, my sword, and the body swinging it—the movement signals my brain was emitting.

  I tracked the monsters’ trajectories, evaded with minimal movement, and countered with my sword skill. It was the same thing I’d done in every other battle, only executed with perfect precision.

  There were no au
to-homing magic attacks in SAO. So theoretically, if a player had good-enough decision-making and response time, he could evade every single attack. But I wasn’t that skilled of a player, and there were too many enemies, so I couldn’t dodge everything. The vines coming from all directions nicked my limbs, and the deluges of corrosive spit put holes in my new leather coat. Each hit took down my HP bar, bringing virtual and real death one step closer.

  But I dodged all the direct hits just in time and kept swinging my sword.

  If I got knocked into a delay of even half a second by a direct hit, I would be battered about continuously until I died. Either they would eventually whittle my HP down to zero first or they’d knock me still and wipe me out in an instant.

  I’d been in this kind of desperate situation countless times in the beta test, and in all the other MMOs I’d played before this. Each time, after a brief struggle, I’d let my HP drain away, grumbling about the experience penalty or hoping I didn’t lose my weapon.

  If I really wanted a taste of reality here, I should try that now. At least then I’d find out if Kayaba was telling the truth or just playing a very nasty, tasteless prank.

  I thought I heard a little voice whispering that suggestion into my ear. But I ignored it, continuing to use Slant and Horizontal on the endless stream of Nepenthes.

  Because I didn’t want to die? Of course I didn’t.

  But there was another motive that drove me to fight, something different. Something that twisted my mouth into a fierce grimace—or even a smile.

  This is it.

  This was SAO. I spent at least two hundred hours diving into the beta test, but I never saw the true nature of the game. I wasn’t fighting in the true sense.

  My sword wasn’t an item of the weapon classification, and my body wasn’t simply a movable object. There was a place you could reach only when those things were combined with the mind when in a situation of extremes. I had only glimpsed the entrance to that world from a distance. I wanted to know what came next. I wanted to go further.

  “Ruaaaahhhh!!”

  I howled, leaped.

  The Horizontal even outstripped the light, blasting two consecutive Nepenthes’ pitchers skyward.

  Then, from far behind me, I heard a sharp, nasty crash, a brief blasting apart of a body.

  It was not anything like the sound of a monster exploding. It was the death sound of a player.

  Beset upon by at least a dozen of the monsters, Kopel had finally perished.

  “…!!”

  I just barely stopped myself from turning to look, and made sure to quickly finish the last two in my vicinity.

  Only then did I turn around.

  Having finished off their first target, the Nepenthes were looking at me with bloodthirsty interest. There were seven of them. Kopel must have killed at least five of them. I was certain that the lack of a scream from him was a sign of his beta-tester pride.

  “…GG,” I said, the standard compliment for a player of a game well played, and I held my sword out. Perhaps escape was an option by then, but the thought didn’t even enter into my head.

  Among the seven Nepenthes bearing down on me, of all the irony, one of them had a bright red flower blooming atop its carnivorous pitcher.

  If Kopel had kept working hard, rather than trying to MPK me, he could have soon earned his own ovule. But that lesson was lost on him. Choice and result: that was all there was.

  My HP bar was under 40 percent and would soon fall into the red, but I no longer felt sure I was going to die. Sensing that the two on the right were about to enter the spitting animation, I raced toward them and dispatched them both at once while they were charging their attacks.

  Over the next twenty-five seconds, I finished off the other five, bringing the battle to an end.

  In the spot where Kopel vanished, I saw his Small Sword and buckler. They were both about as ragged as my gear.

  He fought for several hours in the floating castle Aincrad, then died. Technically, his HP dropped to zero, and his avatar disintegrated. But there was no way for me to know if, somewhere in Japan, lying down on his bed, the player controlling that avatar was truly dead or not. All I could do was see off the warrior named Kopel.

  I thought for a moment, then picked up the sword and stuck it into the base of the biggest tree around. Then I picked up the ovule from the second flowering plant and laid it next to the weapon.

  “It’s yours, Kopel.”

  I got to my feet. The durability of the abandoned items would slowly tick away and they would disappear, but for at least a few hours they would serve as a grave marker here. I turned on my heel and started toward the path to the east that would take me back to the village.

  I’d been tricked, nearly died, witnessed the end of the one who tricked me, and somehow just barely survived, but my sense of the “reality” of the game of death was still hazy. At the very least, my desire to be stronger had grown somewhat since before. Not to leave the game alive, but the secret, shameful desire to know the ultimate pinnacle of sword battle in SAO.

  Our long hunting trip must have really dried up the spawn rate, as I made it back to Horunka without encountering a single monster along the way.

  It was nine o’clock. Three hours had passed since Kayaba’s tutorial.

  By this time, there were a few players in the clearing of the village. They were probably former testers, too. At this rate, if all the testers kept moving forward, it would lead to a major rift between them and the vast majority of inexperienced players…but it wasn’t really my place to worry about that.

  I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, so before any players could notice me, I headed down the back path to the end of the village. Fortunately, the NPC hadn’t yet entered her late-night activity pattern—there was still orange light in the window of the house.

  I gave the nonfunctional knocker a little rap, then opened the door. There was the mother, still boiling something at the window. There was a golden exclamation point over her head that indicated an in-progress quest.

  I walked over and took the Little Nepenthes Ovule out of my waistpouch, the center of the orb still glowing a faint green.

  She broke out into a smile that immediately took twenty years off of her age, and she accepted the ovule. As she fired off thanks after thanks, my quest log updated on the left side of my view.

  The now-young mother dropped the ovule into the pot, then walked to a large chest on the south end of the room and opened the lid. From inside she pulled out a faded, but clearly more impressive longsword in a red scabbard. She returned to me, and with another bow of thanks, presented the sword with both hands.

  “…Thank you,” I said simply, taking the weapon. I felt its weight press down against my right hand. It felt about half as heavy as the Small Sword. I’d used this Anneal Blade quite a lot in the beta test, and it would take some time to get comfortable with it again.

  A message floated up informing me I’d completed the quest, and the bonus XP from that feat pushed me into level 4.

  The old me would have leaped up and out of the village to challenge the Large Nepenthes found farther into the western woods to test out my new blade.

  But I no longer had the motivation for that. I stored the new weapon in my inventory and slumped into a nearby chair. The quest was over, so the young mother would no longer bother to offer me water. She turned her back on me, stirring away at the pot.

  A fresh wave of exhaustion flooded through me, and I gazed at her as she busied herself. How many minutes passed with us doing just that? But as I watched, she took a wooden cup off the shelf and scooped a ladleful of the pot’s contents into it.

  Carrying the steaming cup even more carefully than the sword earlier, she walked toward the door in the back. Without much reason, I stood up and followed her. The NPC opened the door and proceeded into a dimly lit room. I was pretty sure I remembered trying to open the door myself in the beta, and it had been locked by the system. Hesitan
tly, I crossed the threshold.

  It was a small bedroom. The only furniture was a set of drawers against the wall, a bed near the window, and a small chair.

  Lying on the bed was a little girl, about seven or eight years old.

  Even in the light of the moon, I could tell she was sickly. Her neck was scrawny, and the shoulders poking out above the bedsheet were bony.

  The girl’s eyelids fluttered open when she sensed her mother’s presence, and then she looked at me. I stopped still, surprised, and then her pale lips rose in a tiny smile.

  The mother reached out and helped her sit up, holding a hand to her back. Suddenly, the girl tensed and coughed. Her brown braid ran limp down the back of her white negligee.

  I checked the color cursor for the girl again. Sure enough, it had the NPC tag right on it. Her name was Agatha.

  Agatha’s mother rubbed her back gently and sat down in the bedside chair.

  “Look, Agatha. The traveling swordsman brought this medicine from the forest. If you drink this, I’m sure you’ll feel better.”

  She held up the cup with her other hand and gave it to the girl.

  “…Okay,” Agatha said in a cute, high-pitched voice. She held up the cup with both hands and drank it, gulp by gulp.

  No, there was no golden light that shone down from the heavens, color didn’t immediately return to her face, and she didn’t leap to her feet and run around the room. But if it wasn’t my imagination, I thought Agatha’s cheeks were a bit rosier than before when she lowered the cup.

  She gave the empty cup back to her mother, then looked at me again and grinned. Her lips moved, and she lisped a few words, like tiny little jewels.

  “Thank you, Big Bwudda.”

  “…Ah…”

  I gasped, unable to come up with a different response, my eyes wide.

  In the past—long, long in the past, I remembered a similar experience.

  My sister, Suguha, was bedridden with a cold. Our father was overseas for work, as usual, and our mother had to go to work for a little bit, so I was in charge of watching over her for two hours. At the time, I was…some grade in elementary school. Honestly, I’d been annoyed by the whole thing, but I couldn’t just leave her behind and play, so I wiped away Suguha’s sweat and changed out the cooling pack for her forehead.