“We might need to refocus and prioritize dealing with the numbing,” I said, stepping out of the way of a three-part hammer combo from Nato. Asuna nimbly matched my steps beside me.
“I agree. But if we start calling out orders for the main force, it’s only going to confuse the chain of command. We need to get our ideas to Lind’s ears.”
Her hazel eyes darted over the HP of team H, and then Colonel Nato.
“We can handle him with just five. Go and talk to Lind, Kirito.”
“Um… a-are you sure?”
“Yeah, no problem!” boomed Agil, who must have overheard. “The four of us can handle guarding for now! You’ve easily got two or three minutes to go talk with him!”
I turned back to look at the chocolate-skinned warrior and his friends, who seemed resolute, and I made up my mind. The key to defeating Baran was to keep his paralysis out of the equation. The battle was holding up for now thanks to our large number and high average level, but if this was the same party that tackled him in the beta, we’d be wiped out by now.
“All right, just for a bit! I’ll be right back!”
Before I left, I unleashed a Vertical Arc into Nato’s back as he stood frozen after missing with a big attack, and sped off for my target.
I shot across the coliseum-styled chamber, more than a hundred yards across, and headed for the main battle in the back. My pasty, skinny real body back home would be lucky to break fourteen seconds in the hundred-meter dash, but the agility-heavy Kirito crossed the space in ten flat. My bootheels screeched to a halt as I lined up next to a blue cape at the rear.
For a moment, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever been face-to-face with Lind, leader of this raid and former confidant of Diavel the knight.
Ten days earlier, just after we defeated the previous boss, he’d screamed, Why did you abandon Diavel to die? You knew the moves the boss was using! If you’d told us that information to start with, Diavel wouldn’t have died!
I hadn’t apologized. I’d met him with a cold smile.
I’m a beater. Don’t you ever insult my skill by calling me a former tester.
And having said my piece, I had put on the Coat of Midnight I was still wearing, and left the first-floor boss chamber. I hadn’t interacted with Lind since that very moment.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that when I sidled up next to him, Lind’s first reaction was a grimace of disgust. His narrow eyes went wide, his blade-sharp chin trembled, and his thin lips went even thinner.
But that manifestation of his true emotions soon sank back beneath his skin. It bothered me that both he and Kibaou were attempting to mask their true feelings about me—though it also wasn’t my business to care about it—but now was not the time to worry about feelings.
“I ordered you to handle the sub-boss. Why are you—” he growled before I interrupted with the line I’d prepared.
“Let’s regroup. If any more members get paralyzed, it’s going to make escape nearly impossible.”
The raid leader looked back at the seven or eight players waiting to recover, then at the state of the fight itself. Following his lead, I checked the HP bar of General Baran. Out of his five bars, they’d lowered the third to the halfway point—we were already half-done with the boss.
“We’re halfway there. Why would we need to retreat now?”
I had to admit, there was a part of me that thought it would be a waste to give up now. In the ten minutes since we had started the battle, several people had been paralyzed, but no one’s HP had fallen into the red zone, and the pace of our damage against the boss was better than expected. There was more than a small chance that we could continue to press on, and make it through…
But as if seeing through my hesitation, a voice rang out from behind us.
“How’s about we pull back if one more person gets paralyzed?”
I turned around to see Kibaou’s familiar, light-brown spikes of hair. No doubt he was also filled with a powerful disgust at me for being a tried-and-true beta tester, but the look on his face was honest and forthright.
“Everyone’s got the hang of the numbing range and timing. They’re focused, an’ morale is high. We been poundin’ paralysis and healing potions, so if we stop now, we might not have the supplies ta give it another shot until tomorrow.”
“…”
Again, I let my mind race for half a second before reaching a conclusion.
The most important thing here was not the number of tries or the sum of spent resources but human life. We had to succeed without losing anyone. That was the first rule of any boss battle in Aincrad.
But Lind and Kibaou already knew that. And if the leader and sub-leader of the raid decided that we could still win, the only thing that a single fighter from an outlying party would do by disagreeing was sabotage the chain of command—obviously, a bad decision. And on top of that, my own instincts were telling me that if we could just maintain our current progress, we could defeat Baran without any casualties.
“All right, one more. Just be careful when we get down to the last HP gauge,” I said. Kibaou growled in acknowledgment and turned back to his station. Lind nodded silently and resumed his command.
“Team E, prepare to retreat! Team G, prepare to advance! Switch at the next stagger!” he ordered as I turned back and crossed the coliseum to rejoin team H.
Asuna wasted no time in asking, “What happened?!”
“We’ll pull back if one more person gets paralyzed! But at our current pace, we can probably make it!”
“I see …” She briefly looked upset and glanced over at the main battle, but grudgingly agreed with the decision. “All right. In that case, let’s finish off this blue guy quick, so we can join the others.”
“Yeah!”
Having reached a rapid consensus, we turned back to see that Colonel Nato had just unleashed a massive attack that was expertly blocked by Agil’s group. There was just a bit over one full HP bar left. With perfect precision, we hit the beast with sword skills to either flank.
That attack brought Nato to his final HP bar, and the blue-skinned minotaur bellowed up at the ceiling. He stamped the ground with hooves as big as buckets, then hunched over to expose his horns and tensed like a coiled spring. It was a new pattern to this fight, but not one I’d never seen before.
“He’s gonna charge! Watch the tail, not the head! He’ll go along that diagonal!”
Nato turned to his left and charged right for Agil. But the axe-warrior, poised and prepared, easily dodged out of the way and unloaded his double-handed combo, Whirlwind. He stepped back, and Asuna and I switched in to continue the onslaught. The damage was so great that spinning yellow rings appeared over the colonel’s head, and he began to wobble. We’d inflicted our own stun status on him.
“Now’s our chance! Everyone use two full-power attacks!!”
“Raaah!!”
All six of us surrounded the taurus and pummeled him with flashes of light in red, blue, and green. His HP bar lost refreshingly large chunks in quick succession and soon plunged into the yellow zone that signified less than half remained.
Our full attack a success, we held distance once more, and the taurus’s skin turned purple as he raged even louder. This berserk state before he died was, again, the same as in the beta. His attack speed was half again as fast as before, but with a calm head, this was not an issue.
On the other side of the chamber, the players let out a roar. I nearly lost my balance for a moment before I realized it was a cry of high spirits. General Baran’s final HP bar had gone yellow as well. Meanwhile, the number of paralyzed along the wall had not risen but had shrunk to five.
“It’s a good thing there weren’t any surprises since the beta,” Asuna opined to me while we waited for our skills to cool down behind Agil’s protective wall. I looked back to the battle at hand and nodded.
“Yeah. But if we’d been paying attention against the kobold lord, we’d have
noticed that the weapon on his back was a katana, not a talwar. And General Baran hasn’t changed an inch from the beta. So …”
I suddenly realized that a shadow had passed across Asuna’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Um…nothing. I’m just overthinking things … I was just noticing that it’s weird the first-floor boss was a lord, but the second one is only a …”
Ga-gong!
A sudden crash interrupted our conversation. We all turned as one to the source of the sound—the center of the coliseum chamber.
But there was nothing there. Only a series of concentric floor rings made of blackish stone …
No. It was moving. The three circles of paving stones were sliding, rotating counterclockwise and slowly picking up speed. The stones were rising from the floor before my eyes, elevating into a three-step stage at the center of the room.
Suddenly, the view of the far wall over the center platform began to waver.
“Uh-oh…” I grunted. That was the visual effect that signaled a very large object being generated into the map. As I feared, the wavering in the air rapidly spread and began to generate a thick, menacing shadow at the center.
The shadow soon coalesced into a humanoid form and grew two legs thick as tree trunks that thudded heavily onto the stage. Sturdy, dark chainmail covered the figure’s waist, but its torso was, as usual, bare. This one had a long, twisted beard that hung down to its stomach. The head was that of a bull, but it had six horns instead of two, and atop the center of its head was a round accessory of silvery platinum—a crown.
The mammoth figure, so black it might as well have been painted with ink, reared back, and the third and largest of the tauruses let out a roar. Flashes of lightning spread around the minotaur, filling the chamber with blinding light.
Finally, a six-part HP bar appeared so high in my field of view that it seemed to be stuck to the ceiling. I gazed dully at the letters that appeared.
Asterios the Taurus King.
Keep your mind moving! Think! I told myself so hard that if I wasn’t gritting my teeth, I’d have spoken the words aloud.
It was clear what had just happened. General Baran, whom every player present, including me, had assumed was the second-floor boss, was just as much an opening act as Colonel Nato.
Baran’s final HP bar turning yellow must have been the trigger to generate the true boss—the pitch-black King Asterios. But speculation about the origin of the creature was pointless. What mattered was what we did next.
There was no need to think. We had to retreat out of the chamber. We didn’t even know how this monster would attack… and the risks of fighting this taurus king were clearly far greater than that of the general.
The problem was that Asterios had spawned in the center of the chamber, and the raid party was fighting in the back of the room. The group would need to charge through his attack range in order to reach the exit. Team H, fighting Colonel Nato, was the closest to the exit, and we could probably make it out safely now, if we broke for it … but if we did that, and teams A through G were wiped out by the king, our chances of beating this game of death disappeared along with them.
How to evacuate a forty-seven-man raid party? The first step was eliminating our present foes as quickly as possible.
Time seemed to spring back into motion once our path became clear, and I promptly raised my sword high and shouted, “All units, all-out attack!!”
I tore my eyes away from Asterios atop his three-step stage, and fixed a gaze on the berserk Colonel Nato. I leapt as hard as I could, following the path of his hammer as he raised it behind him.
As a speed-focused swordsman with no heavy metal armor, I could jump about six feet from a standing position. Nato was closer to seven or eight feet, but with the added reach of my sword, I could easily get to his head.
My Slant skill hit the shining black horns directly. Nato’s attack motion stopped partway, and he reared back and roared. The tauruses of the second-floor labyrinth, excepting only a few (say, the Taurus Ironguard, which wore a heavy metal helm), were weak to blows to the horns. I hadn’t tried to strike their foreheads at any point until now because jumping attacks were inherently risky, and even a clean hit from a sword skill was no guarantee that the opponent would suffer a movement delay. But this situation called for desperate measures.
At the exact moment I landed, Asuna and Agil’s team followed up with attacks of their own, knocking Nato’s HP into the red zone. His delay wore off, and the minotaur roared and began his motion for a numbing skill. In any other case, now was the time to pull back, but I pushed forward.
“Raaah!”
With a roar of my own, I unleashed my very best Horizontal. Even if I hit the beast’s weak point, I couldn’t stagger the creature on consecutive attacks, but it wasn’t the forehead I was aiming for—it was Nato’s giant hammer. The timing window was extremely short, but if I hit his sword skill with one of my own just before he fired it off, it was possible to cancel the attacks out.
There was a piercing clang that seemed to strike directly into the center of my brain, and my sword shot backward. Meanwhile, the hammer was pushed back overhead. Without missing their chance, my five companions proceeded to launch another wave of attacks. Only a few pixels of HP remained.
Under normal circumstances, chaining sword skills together was impossible. But I knew from our hunting of the Windwasps the other day that you could get past that limitation if you used weapons of different categories. I curled up in midair and kicked out with my left foot. The resulting Crescent Moon, a vertical kick attack as I spun backward, caught Nato right on the forehead.
The taurus hurtled backward and let out a high-pitched screech before freezing stiff, then exploding into a massive cloud of polygons. It must have been treated as a proper sub-boss, not just a typical mob, because I promptly saw a Last Attack bonus readout. I didn’t have time for that, however; I spun around as I hit the ground.
The first thing I saw across the room was a towering ebony back. King Asterios was on the move. Fortunately, he hadn’t targeted any of the five paralyzed along the east wall, but his destination was the thirty-six remaining fighters of the main party—who were still busy with General Baran.
My worst fear was that the main force would fall into total panicked chaos and retreat if faced by a boss on either side. Fortunately, that was not happening. But very soon, his lumbering steps would take him within attack range of the raid. We had to defeat the general before then.
“Let’s go, Kirito!” said Asuna, her voice tense. But I wasn’t sure if I should agree. It wasn’t that I was afraid for my own life—for some reason that I couldn’t explain, I was gripped with a sudden feeling that once I set foot into the battle ahead, I could not guarantee that she’d survive.
I knew damn well just how good Asuna was. I wasn’t even sure if I could beat her in a one-on-one duel. But there was no denying my urge to force her to escape right there and then.
After I had abandoned my first and only friend at the start of this game, and was nearly killed by a fellow beta tester just hours later, I had sworn to live as a solo player, relying on no one but myself. The week that we had just spent as a partnership-of-sorts was only a means to uncovering and stopping Nezha’s fraud. Nothing more.
So why was I being ruled by this emotion… this sentimentality?
Why was I so desperate to keep Asuna from dying?
“Asuna, you need …”
To run, I wanted to say—but I saw the powerful light in her hazel eyes. They told me that she knew full well what I was thinking. Her eyes were full of an emotion that was neither anger nor sadness but something even purer. Again, she said, “Let’s go.”
There was enough strength in that voice that it bottled up the fear that had overtaken me.
“… All right,” I said, and looked back at Agil’s party. The axe-warrior nodded at me, not frightened in the least.
“We’ll swing around the right flank and
defeat Baran first. If the king attacks before then, we’ve got to pull him away as best we can to help buy them time.”
“Got it!” the others shouted. Bolstered by their courage, I leapt forward. By the time I reached full speed, my hesitation was gone.
The monster’s reaction zone, also called its “aggro range,” was invisible to the naked eye. But the more experience one built, the more it felt like a tangible thing. I followed my instinct and circled around the right side of the plodding King Asterios toward the main party.
Baran’s HP bar was already down into the red zone. But as with Nato when he was nearly dead, Baran had gone into a berserk state and was using his Numbing Detonation at every possible chance, slowing the group’s attack progress.
We had thirty seconds until the king started to attack, I gauged. I darted right between the wide-eyed Lind and Kibaou, directly in front of General Baran, and leapt high into the air, aiming for his blazing orange horns. But the general was nearly twice the size of the colonel. Even my highest jump combined with my longest reach couldn’t make it all the way.
“Rrraah!”
At the apex of my jump, I took pains to hold my stance and just barely managed to throw off a sword skill. My Anneal Blade glowed green, and my body sped back into motion as though pushed by invisible hands: Sonic Leap, a one-handed sword charge skill.
This desperate attack hit him right in the weak point, and the general’s body arched backward. This staggering was our final chance.
Asuna and the other four didn’t need my order to know what to do. They raced in to land blows, then pulled back. The rest of the raid followed their lead, and General Baran was enveloped in flashing effects of every color.
But once again, it wasn’t quite enough. There was still a pixel or two left on his HP bar.
“Not again!” I cursed, clenching my left fist. Coming out of a major sword skill off-balance, my only option was a simple attack. I roared and swung forward with a Flash Blow, hitting him square in the chest. It was just enough damage to do the job, and that tiny little jab sent the massive body expanding … and exploding.