Sword Art Online Progressive 1

  “Mind your own beeswax! I happen to like this hood! Besides, it’s nice and warm!”

  “Oh … I see.”

  I wisely chose not to ask her what would happen when the weather got warm again. Instead, I glanced at the stunned Nezha. I couldn’t overcome the urge to ask him a follow-up question.

  “So, erm… Do you know who I am…?”

  It wasn’t because I was interested in finding out how famous I was around the game. This was purely research to see how far the stories about “the first beater” had spread from that initial front-line squad.

  “Um, well … I-I’m afraid I don’t …”

  My reaction was equal parts relief and shock. That conflict must have showed on my face, for Asuna patted me on the shoulder. “There, what have I always told you? Stop worrying about it so much.”

  “But … I really like that bandanna.”

  “Tell you what—I’ll give you your own nickname. How about the Ukrainian Samurai?”

  “Wh …why Ukrainian?”

  “That bandanna’s got blue and yellow stripes, just like the Ukrainian flag. I guess you could also be the Swedish Samurai, if you prefer.”

  “… Sorry, can I choose neither?”

  Nezha listened to our back-and-forth in timid silence, then worked up the nerve to interject.

  “Um, pardon me … Is what you said true? Did Asuna really say she would die eventually …?”

  It was obviously a difficult thing for her to answer. I tried to smooth things over by answering for her in as light and breezy a tone as I could.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. It was wild, she just passed out right in front of me during a four-day camp-and-hunt expedition in the labyrinth. I couldn’t just leave her there, and I didn’t have the strength level yet to carry a player, so I had to take a sleeping bag and—”

  Shunk.

  Asuna slammed her heel down hard on my toes to shut me up. She composed herself and said quietly, “To be honest, that feeling hasn’t disappeared. We’re only on the second floor, and there are a hundred. There’s a constant conflict inside me between my desire to get that far, and resignation that I’ll probably fall along the way. But …”

  Her hazel eyes shone bright from the shade of her hood. While the brightness of that shine was no different from what I saw that first day in the labyrinth, it seemed to me that the nature of it had changed.

  “… But I’ve decided that I’m not fighting in order to die. Maybe I’m not quite optimistic enough to say that I’m doing it to live, to beat the game … but I’ve found one simple goal to strive toward. That’s what I’m fighting for.”

  “Oh… really? What’s your goal, to eat an entire cake of that Tremble Shortcake?” I asked earnestly.

  Asuna sighed for some reason and said, “Of course not.” She turned to Nezha again.

  “I’m sure you can find your own reason. It’s already inside of you. Something you ought to fight for. I mean, you left the Town of Beginnings on your own two feet, didn’t you?”

  “…”

  Nezha looked down, but his eyes were not closed. He was staring at the leather boots on his feet. I realized that they were not non-functional shoes for wearing in town, but actual leather armor.

  “… It’s true. There was something,” he mumbled. Amid the resignation, it sounded like a tiny kernel of some kind, a burning ambition. But he shook his head several times, as if trying to extinguish the flame. “But it’s gone now. It was gone before I even got here. That happened the day I bought this NerveGear. When I … when I tried the first connection test, I got an FNC …”

  FNC. Full-Dive Nonconformity.

  The full-dive machine was an extremely delicate apparatus that sent signals back and forth to the brain with ultra-weak microwaves. It had to be finely tuned to work with each individual user.

  But of course, they were producing thousands and thousands of units for mass-market use, and they couldn’t spend ages of time on fine maintenance. The machine had an automatic calibration system that went through a long and tedious connection test on first use. Once that was done and it knew the player’s settings, you could dive in just by turning on the unit.

  But on very rare occasions, a person received a “nonconforming” response during that initial test. Perhaps one of the five senses wasn’t functioning properly, or there was a slight lag in the communication with the brain. In most cases it was merely a slight obstacle, but there were a few people who simply could not dive at all.

  If he was here in Aincrad, Nezha’s FNC couldn’t have been that serious—but he would have been luckier if it had prevented him from playing. He wouldn’t be trapped in this game of death.

  We packed up all the tools and items into the carpet and moved to an empty house near the plaza to continue hearing out Nezha’s story.

  “In my case, I have hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but there’s an issue with my sight …”

  As he spoke, Nezha reached out to the cup of tea Asuna left for him on the round table. But he did not immediately grab it—he reached his fingers closer, and only when his fingertip brushed the handle did he carefully lift it up.

  “It’s not that I’m entirely blind, but I have a binocular dysfunction. It’s hard for me to grasp distance. I can’t really tell how far my avatar’s hand is from the object.”

  For an instant, I thought this didn’t seem so bad … but I soon reconsidered.

  If SAO was an orthodox fantasy MMORPG, Nezha’s disability wouldn’t be such a big deal. There were classes that had auto-hitting long-range attacks—a mage, for example.

  But SAO didn’t even have archers, much less mages. Every player who fought in the game did so with a weapon in his hand. And whether sword, axe, or spear, the ability to judge distance, to tell exactly how far away the monster was, made all the difference in the world. The very cornerstone of combat here was understanding, on a physical level, how far your weapon could reach.

  Nezha took a sip of tea and carefully returned the cup to the saucer. He smiled hollowly.

  “Even hitting a stationary weapon on top of an anvil with my short little hammer is extremely difficult …”

  “So that was why you carried out the steps of the process so painstakingly.”

  “Yes, that’s why. Of course, I did also feel apologetic toward the swords I was breaking … but …” He looked back and forth at me and Asuna, smiling weakly. “It might not be right for me to say this, but … I’m impressed that you saw through my switching trick. But it wasn’t just today … you remotely retrieved Asuna’s Wind Fleuret plus four three days ago. So you must have known then …”

  “Oh, at that point it was just a suspicion. At the time I noticed, the hour limit to maintain ownership was nearly up, so I had to burst into Asuna’s bedroom and force her to use the Materialize All Items command, then—”

  I felt a piercing stare from the right and narrowly avoided spilling the beans on what her inventory contained.

  “—the Fleuret came back. That was when I knew you’d committed fraud … but it was two days ago that I figured out you were using Quick Change to pull it off. The key was in your name, Nezha … or should I say, Nataku.”

  “… !!”

  Nezha (or Nataku) sucked in a sharp breath. His fists clenched and he even lifted up out of his seat for a moment. When he sat again, he looked straight down in shame.

  “… I had no idea you’d figured that out, too …”

  “Well, that required an information dealer to discover. I mean, even your friends in the Legend Braves were calling you Nezuo. It means they didn’t know either, did they? Why you’re named after Nataku.”

  “Just call me Nezha. I picked that spelling because I wanted people to call me that,” the blacksmith said. He nodded and began to explain. “Yes, you’re correct …”

  Nataku. Also known as Na-zha, or Prince Nata.

  He was a boy god in the Ming period fantasy novel, Fengshen Yanyi. He used a variety of magical weapons
called paopei and flew through the sky on two wheels. He was every bit the legendary hero as Orlando or Beowulf.

  In the Western alphabet, the Chinese name was transliterated to “Nezha,” but only a true fanatic of Eastern mythology would recognize that as a reference to Nataku. It would be especially difficult here in Aincrad, without any Internet search engines. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of brain trust Argo had in her network of contacts. At any rate, when I saw the blacksmith’s true name at the end of her write-up on the Legend Braves, I finally had an epiphany.

  He did not join this game intending to be a crafter. He tried to be a fighter, but due to his circumstances, he was eventually forced to become a blacksmith.

  However, that meant that despite playing as a smith now, his weapon skills might already be above a certain level. Following that line of logic, I eventually hit upon the possibility that he was using the battle skill mod Quick Change to switch out weapons, and the rest was history.

  “The Legend Braves are a team we formed for a different NerveGear action game, three months before SAO came out,” Nezha explained after another sip of tea. “It was a very simple game, where you used swords and axes to fight off monsters in a straight-line map, and tried to get the high score … but even that was difficult for me. Because I had no perspective, I’d swing when the monsters were too far away, and then they’d come in close and hit me. The team could never get into the top ranks because of me. It wasn’t like I knew Orlando and the others in real life, so I probably should have left the team or quit playing the game … but …”

  He clenched his fists again, his voice trembling. “… No one told me to leave the team, so I used that as an excuse to stick around. It wasn’t because I liked that game. It was because we decided that we’d all switch over to the very first VRMMO, Sword Art Online, when it came out in three months. I really, really wanted to try out SAO. But because of the FNC, I didn’t have the guts to start it up on my own. I was … weak. I figured, if I got to be in Orlando’s party in SAO, I might be able to grow stronger … even if I still couldn’t fight that well …”

  We could only sit in silence as we listened to his painful confession. It would be easy to say that I understood how he felt. The moment I saw the very first trailer for SAO, I swore to myself that I would play this game. Even if I’d had a worse FNC than Nezha, I’d have gone in headfirst, as long as I was able to dive.

  But I couldn’t say that aloud. I abandoned my very first friend back in the Town of Beginnings—someone seeking help, just like Nezha.

  However he interpreted my silence, the blacksmith smirked in self-deprecation and continued his tale.

  “I went by a different name in the previous game … I used a name that anyone would recognize as a hero, like Orlando or Cuchulainn. The reason I changed it to Nezha was a sign of humility, or flattery. I was trying to say, ‘I won’t call myself a great hero like you guys, so can I still stick around?’ When they asked what it meant, I said it was based on my real name—that was a lie, of course. Every time they call me Nezuo, I want to say that it’s still a hero’s name. I don’t know … It’s silly …”

  Neither I nor Asuna denied or agreed with Nezha’s self-flagellation. Instead, a quiet question emerged from her hood, which was still up, even indoors.

  “But then things changed when we got trapped in here, didn’t they? You stopped venturing into the fields and switched to crafting. As a blacksmith, you can still support your friends without fighting. But … why would you make the jump to swindling people? Whose idea was it in the first place? Yours? Orlando’s?”

  She leapt to the point as quickly and accurately as if she were in battle. Nezha had no response. When he did answer, it was a surprise.

  “It wasn’t me, or Orlando … or any of us.”

  “Huh …? Then, who?”

  “For the first two weeks, I tried to cut it as a fighter. There’s one skill, just one, that allows you to fight remotely … I thought I might be able to hack it that way, even without being able to judge distance …”

  That didn’t seem like it would work to me, but I explained for Asuna’s sake. “Ahh, the Throwing Knives skill. But that’s kind of …”

  “Yes. I bought as many of the cheapest throwing knives as I could in the Town of Beginnings, hoping to train up my skill, but once I used up my stock, there was nothing I could do. Plus, the stones out in the field you can throw hardly do any damage. So it wasn’t really much use as a main weapon skill … I gave up once my proficiency reached fifty or so. And because the other Braves stuck around to help me with that, we ended up getting off to a slow start …”

  The Legend Braves’ slow start was probably not due to them helping Nezha train with throwing knives, but because the other beta testers and I rushed off at top speed on the very first day and left everyone in the dust. I had a feeling Asuna would throw me some very dirty looks if I mentioned that, however, so I kept it to myself.

  “Things got very … tense when I said that I’d give up on learning how to use throwing knives. No one said it out loud, but I’m sure they were all thinking that the guild got off to a slow start because of me. Even after becoming a blacksmith, training a crafting skill takes a lot of money … It seemed like the other guys were just waiting for someone to suggest that they cut me loose and leave me back in the Town of Beginnings.”

  He bit his lip before continuing, “Really, I should have offered on my own … but I just couldn’t say it. I was afraid of being alone … Anyway, in the corner of the bar where we were talking, someone I thought was just an NPC came up and said, ‘If you’re going to be a blacksmith with some weapon experience, there’s a really cool way to make more money.’ ”

  “… !”

  Asuna and I shared a look. It hadn’t occurred to us that the idea for the Quick Change weapon trick came from someone outside of the Legend Braves altogether.

  “Wh-who was it …?”

  “I don’t know the name. They only told me how to switch the weapons, and left immediately after that. Haven’t seem ’em since. It was a very … strange person, too. Funny way of talking … funny outfit. Wore a hooded cape like a rain poncho—glossy and black …”

  “Poncho …?” Asuna and I repeated together.

  Hooded capes were a fairly common item in fantasy-styled RPGs like SAO—practically a staple of the genre. Asuna herself was wearing one of her own at this very moment, though it was on the shorter side.

  Just minutes earlier, she had claimed she wore it for its warmth, but the real reason for those hoods was not the ability to keep out the cold and rain but to hide her face. And whoever this man in the black poncho was, he likely wore it for the same reason …

  Asuna seemed to read my mind, and she pulled back her gray hood with a snort. Even in the empty room, lit only by a single lamp, her gleaming chestnut-brown hair and pale skin seemed to give off a light of their own.

  Upon seeing her face clearly, Nezha’s wide eyes squinted, as though staring into the sun. Given that player names were not displayed by default in SAO, the main means of recognizing a person was the face, followed by the body. Eventually, the equipment and fighting style of a player might become part of their persona, but at this point in the game, everyone was rapidly switching to newer gear and even changing their main weapon skill. Someone playing a knife-wielding thief in leather armor one day might be a heavy warrior decked out in full plate armor the next.

  Essentially, with an average build and a concealed face, pretty much anyone could pass anonymously. Even voices could be altered using a few special means, such as the great helm I was wearing when I approached Nezha.

  But there might be a way to learn more identifying features of this man that taught Nezha how to swindle others. He was still staring at Asuna, so I brought him back to the topic at hand.

  “About the guy in the black poncho …”

  “Ah … y-yes?”

  “How did he demand the margin be paid? I mean, how di
d he want you to hand over his share of the money you made?” I asked. Asuna nodded in understanding. If they were making cash handoffs, we could stake out the place and catch a glimpse of the man.

  But Nezha’s answer blew that possibility to smithereens. “Um, actually, he didn’t really say anything …”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Well … like I said, he taught me how to use Quick Change and the Vendor’s Carpet to pull off the weapon-switching trick, but he didn’t say a word about a share, or the payment for his idea, or anything.”

  “…”

  Asuna and I stared at each other again, dumbfounded.

  The trick was brilliant and nearly flawless. I made sure Nezha knew my opinion of it. The trick was certainly possible back in the beta test, but not one of the thousand testers had come up with the idea. Whoever devised it was a creative genius. If Nezha had chosen a player handle based on his own given name, or Asuna hadn’t asked Argo for info on “Nataku,” I would never have figured the trick out.

  But because of that, it was very jarring to hear that the poncho man who devised this brilliant idea would hand it over without asking for anything in return. If he hadn’t asked for col … what did he stand to gain from giving his idea to the Legend Braves?

  Clearly it wasn’t out of sheer altruism. It was fraud, a means of ripping off other players.

  “So you’re saying … he just butted into your conversation, explained how to switch weapons like that, and then disappeared?” Asuna asked. Nezha was about to agree, but he stopped before committing.

  “Well … Technically, he did say a bit more. A scam is a scam, so Orlando and the others weren’t into the idea at first. They knew it was a crime. But then he just laughed. It wasn’t put on or menacing. It was just a really pleasant laugh, like out of a movie.”

  “Pleasant … laugh?”

  “Yes. It was like—like just hearing it made everything seem so unimportant anymore. The next thing I knew, Orlando, Beowulf, all of us were laughing with him. Then he said, ‘We’re in a game, don’t you know? If we weren’t supposed to do something, they’d outlaw it in the programming, right? So anything you can do … you’re allowed to do. Don’t you think?’ ”