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Table of Contents
Insert
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Afterword
Yen Newsletter

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 Copyright

SWORD ART ONLINE, Volume 23: UNITAL RING II

REKI KAWAHARA

Translation by Stephen Paul

Cover art by abec

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,
living or dead, is coincidental.

SWORD ART ONLINE Vol.23

©Reki Kawahara 2019
Edited by Dengeki Bunko
First published in Japan in 2019 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION,
Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION,
Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

English translation © 2021 by Yen Press, LLC

Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of
copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and
artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without

permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you
would like permission to use material from the book (other than for

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review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your
support of the author’s rights.

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First Yen On Edition: November 2021

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The Yen On name and logo are trademarks of Yen Press, LLC.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that
are not owned by the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kawahara, Reki, author. | Abec, 1985– illustrator. | Paul,
Stephen, translator.
Title: Sword art online / Reki Kawahara, abec ; translation, Stephen
Paul.
Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen On, 2014–
Identifiers: LCCN 2014001175 | ISBN 9780316371247 (v. 1 : pbk.) |
ISBN 9780316376815 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296427 (v. 3 :
pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296434 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296441
(v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296458 (v. 6 : pbk.) | ISBN
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 9780316390408 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390415 (v. 8 : pbk.)
| ISBN 9780316390422 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390439 (v.
10 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390446 (v. 11 : pbk.) | ISBN
9780316390453 (v. 12 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390460 (v. 13 :
pbk.) | ISBN 9780316390484 (v. 14 : pbk.) | ISBN
9780316390491 (v. 15 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975304188 (v. 16 :
pbk.) | ISBN 9781975356972 (v. 17 : pbk.) | ISBN
9781975356996 (v. 18 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975357016 (v. 19 :
pbk.) | ISBN 9781975357030 (v. 20 : pbk.) | ISBN
9781975315955 (v. 21 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975321741 (v. 22 :
pbk.) | ISBN 9781975321765 (v. 23 : pbk.)
Subjects: CYAC: Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction /
Adventure.
Classification: pz7.K1755Ain 2014 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2014001175

ISBNs: 978-1-9753-2176-5 (paperback)

978-1-9753-2177-2 (ebook)

E3-20211019-JV-NF-ORI

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1
Thirst.
The sensation of thirst was so realistic, it was hard to believe it was
just a simulation created by the AmuSphere. The tongue lost
moisture, and the throat hurt with each breath. It made her wonder
if her biological body, resting on her bed in the real world, was
suffering from dehydration.
I wish I could log out and chug an entire glass of ice-cold water, she
thought. But in this mysterious world, Unital Ring, her avatar would
not vanish while she was away. Her thirst meter would stop, but if
she logged off, drank water, and logged back in, the meter would still
be depleted. And now that the grace period had ended, if she died
once in UR, she could never log back in again. Potentially, she could
lose her character and all of her items. That was the one thing she
had to avoid.
And that was why Shino Asada, aka Sinon, was rushing desperately
across the barren wasteland in search of water to quench her virtual
thirst.
Running made the thirst meter deplete more quickly, but walking
wouldn’t get her there any faster, either. She just had to trust that if
she ran far enough, she’d find a source of water before her TP hit
zero. The desert was very flat overall, but about half a mile ahead,
there was a small boulder with what looked like plants growing along
its silhouette. If there wasn’t water around there, she was out of
ideas.
“Seriously…How could I let myself get stuck in this situation…?”

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Her voice was hoarse in her parched throat. Sinon clicked her
tongue, thinking about the mistakes in judgment that had led her
here.

Six hours earlier, at 4:50 PM on Sunday, September 27th, 2026.

Sinon was logged in to the VRMMORPG Gun Gale Online (GGO),
delving in a high-level dungeon and farming mechanical enemies for
rare metal drops.
Since making an account for ALfheim Online (ALO), the home
territory of her friends, she’d spent more time playing over there,
but Sinon had no intention whatsoever of quitting GGO. The only
weapon she’d ever used that was truly a part of her was the Hecate
II, and she intended to win the next Bullet of Bullets tournament
entirely on her own. Her solo metal farming was so that she could
customize the Hecate and avoid the attention of her rivals in doing
so.
The metal had only a 3 percent drop rate, and she was down to just
one more to go when it happened:
The ground of the dungeon had rumbled beneath her feet, rainbow
colors had filled her vision, and then she was teleported back to the
surface.
She found herself in a town she’d never seen before. Weak sunlight
coming through a thin cloud layer quietly illuminated a gray city. The
road stretched in both directions without a soul in sight.
Sinon had traveled the world map of GGO from end to end, but she
didn’t recognize this place. The buildings were constructed not of
concrete but of old-fashioned stone, and the road was paved with
cracked bricks rather than asphalt. More and more GGO players
teleported in around her, all of whom looked around in
bewilderment. She didn’t recognize a single one.

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The situation was baffling, but Sinon did not appreciate being
surrounded by unfamiliar men, so she stole away into a nearby
building. Checking to make sure there were no residents inside, she
hid in an upstairs room, clutching the Hecate to her chest as she
listened to the voices outside.
About ten players gathered together and began to discuss what was
happening in the hopes of finding an answer. Someone eventually
noticed a fundamental change to the UI of the system menu, so they
attempted to contact the development team but got no response.
That left logging out as the only option to collect more information.
By now, there would be plenty of posts about this anomaly on GGO
community sites and social media. Sinon really wanted to log out to
learn more, but an ominous feeling kept her online.
Outside the building, the ten players were using their strange new
menus to return to the real world. Once the outside area was silent
again, Sinon leaned out the empty window to look at the road below,
and gasped.
The ten avatars were still there, resting in the middle of the road on
one knee. That was the standby pose, a familiar sight from GGO and
ALO. In most VRMMOs, it was common practice to keep player
avatars present in the world for several minutes after they logged off
while outdoors to prevent them from being able to escape from
monsters or other players by just turning off the game. If that rule
still held true, it meant this city was considered “wilderness” rather
than an actual city and offered no automatic protection. Then again,
there were absolutely no civilians around, so you couldn’t even call it
a city—more of a ruin, really.
And that meant…
Sinon was watching the scene with her breath trapped in her lungs
when she heard a kind of skittering, scraping sound. She looked to

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the right and saw a number of long, thin shadows emerging into the
waning sunlight from a side path. They were insectoid monsters, like
a cross between a centipede and an earwig, except they were about
two and a half feet long.
Based on the size, they didn’t seem to be that dangerous. But all the
GGO players within their attention were offline at the moment. The
gleaming assault rifles and laser guns on the players’ backs were
impressive, but they were useless without an active finger to pull the
trigger.
“Come on—log back in!” she hissed, gripping the windowsill, but the
ten of them just knelt there, perfectly still. The centipedes were
rapidly approaching, their many legs skittering across the paving
stones. Sinon reached behind her on pure instinct, grasping for the
backup MP7 she kept in a holster.
But she stopped short. The five centipedes visible weren’t necessarily
the only ones nearby. Gunshots could potentially attract an entire
swarm of them. She had a silencer on the MP7 for this very purpose,
but she’d left it in item storage while she was farming for materials
to maximize her carrying space. There was no time to dig through
her menu so she could pull it out and snap it onto the muzzle.
While she sat there, paralyzed with indecision, the lead centipede
crawled onto the back of one of the players and dug its huge jaws
into his unprotected neck. Crimson damage effects spilled from the
spot like spurting blood. The other centipedes quickly set upon the
rest of the players.
Sinon assumed that, even as helpless as they were, the players could
survive a few minutes of biting. The centipedes were obviously low-
level monsters, and the men were outfitted with pretty fancy armor.
But just a matter of seconds later, the player who had been bitten
first simply emitted blue particles and vanished. The other players

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died shortly after him. It happened all too quickly. Either the
centipedes were much tougher than Sinon thought or…
Sinon opened the strange ring menu. Out of the eight icons there,
she touched the human-shaped one, which she guessed was her
status window. When she saw the values that appeared, she gasped.
Level-1. Maximum HP, just 200. Her stats had been reinitialized.
That wasn’t all. Below her white HP bar was a green MP bar, then a
blue bar marked TP, and a yellow bar marked SP. MP was easy enough,
but she had no idea what SP and TP were supposed to represent.
There was no point trying to figure that out now, though. She
glanced out the window again—five players were gone. The other
five still living were now in the centipedes’ sights. They were going to
be wiped out before any of them returned.
“Ugh…!”
Sinon drew her MP7. She unfolded the foregrip, extended the stock,
and switched the selector from safety to semi-auto. Pulling the
cocking lever loaded the first bullet into the chamber, and she took
aim at the lead centipede, resting her body against the windowsill.
Her finger slid against the trigger and tensed just a little.
“Huh…?”
She was aghast. One of the two major systems that made GGO, well,
GGO was nowhere to be seen: the bullet circle.
A bug? A system error? Or…? There was no time to wonder. Some
monsters had the ability to nullify the bullet circle, forcing you to use
your sights and aim the traditional way. She was shooting down from
the second floor, but at this distance, there was no real concern
about the trajectory being off.
Sinon aimed at the head of the centipede as it prepared to bite its
new target, then double-tapped. Its reddish-black shell burst,
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shooting sticky green fluid outward. The second shot missed by a bit,
but an HP bar with an unfamiliar shape over the centipede’s head
rapidly dwindled to zero. The centipede screeched with its final
breath, curled backward, and fell to the street, then…did not burst
into blue shards and disappear. It was still there, but it was definitely
dead.
She tried to aim for the next centipede and clicked her tongue. There
were red cursors over the heads of the other four creatures. Her
instincts told her they were focused on her now, and that was
correct. They changed direction to approach her building. She told
herself not to panic and took out a second centipede with another
double-tap.
The remaining three immediately scurried straight up the stone wall.
She switched the selector to full auto and leaned out the window to
aim downward. The rhythm of the gunfire was pleasing, and a third
centipede fell to the ground, ooze pouring from its carapace where
the 4.6 mm bullets struck it.
The fourth met the same fate as the others, but the fifth reached the
window. Sharp mandibles extended from its mouth toward her, and
it swung its pincer bottom to point at her, too.
Sinon didn’t force her shot, kicking off the sill instead. She did a
backflip as she flew and opened fire with the MP7 when she landed.
It cracked the fifth centipede’s head as the insect tried to get inside
the building. Its long, thin torso hung over the sill.
“Whew,” she exhaled, checking the remaining ammo in her
magazine out of sheer habit.
A sudden, unfamiliar musical fanfare blared in her ears, and a blue
ring rose from her feet up over her head. A window popped up in
front of her.
Sinon’s level has risen to 2.
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“Level-2…”
She couldn’t help but repeat it like a lament. In GGO three days ago,
Sinon had just reached level-107. Once Zaskar, the dev team for
GGO, realized the error, they would probably do a server rollback for
everyone, but the game map and monsters were too polished for
this to be some kind of glitch. It was like she’d been tossed out of
GGO and pulled into a completely different game…
With her MP7 still at the ready, Sinon carefully walked toward the
centipede’s body. She poked it with the muzzle a few times, but it
did not move. After that, she took her hand off the foregrip and
tapped the creature with a finger.
A properties window appeared with a shwam sound. It said: Red-
bellied Centiwig Corpse, Material, Weight: 5.82.
The red-bellied part of the name made sense. The red coloring on its
underside was brighter than on its back. And if it was classified as a
material, that suggested something.
Sinon put the MP7 back in its holster and reached for the knife on
her belt. But she touched nothing. She looked down at her right side
and saw that the space where she kept her favorite survival knife
was empty.
“…”
She glanced in confusion at the Hecate II resting against the wall. She
had her main weapon and her side weapon, plus all her armor, so
why would her knife be the one thing missing? Maybe it fell out
when she did the backflip—not that such a thing should ever
happen—but there was no sign of it around the room. She did,
however, notice a cabinet against the wall.
On closer examination, the cabinet was unlike the metal cabinet
style of the world of GGO. It was an old-fashioned wooden cabinet,
more suited to the world of Alfheim, if anything. She opened the
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grimy old doors and found almost nothing inside except for some
broken dishes, a bottle filled with an unidentifiable substance, and
one small knife.
She picked up the knife. It was not meant for combat; at best, it was
suited for peeling fruit, but the blade still had a little bit of an edge,
at least. With the rusty knife in her hand, she went back to the
centipede. After much hesitation, she jammed the knife into the gap
between its segments.
There was a skin-crawling chugk sound and a vibration in her hand
that made her want to hurl the knife away—but fortunately, one
action was all it took for the centipede’s body to flash blue and
vanish. A number of items fell on the spot it had occupied.
A message appeared reading Dismantling skill gained. Proficiency
has risen to 1.
She shrugged and minimized it. On the ground were a couple of
reddish-black plates and what looked like two curved thorns. She
scooped them up and tapped them, turning them into Inferior
Centipede Carapace and Inferior Centipede Pincers. She didn’t know
what they were for, but it couldn’t hurt to have them. Sinon opened
her menu and tossed the carapace and pincers into her inventory.
Then she stuck the knife into her belt, picked up the Hecate II, and
left the room to head back down.
From the entrance of the building, she peered outside. She’d blasted
the gun at full auto, but no new centipedes or other monsters
seemed to be emerging.
The five players she’d saved were still in their standby poses. She
used her knife to dismantle the four other centipede bodies and
claim their materials.
“Can’t upgrade the Hecate with centipede shells, I assume,” Sinon
muttered, sighing once again. However, she soon noticed that there
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were five dark bags resting on the ground where the player avatars
had died earlier.
“…”
Feeling hesitant, she approached, sticking the knife back into her belt
and touching one of the bags. It turned into a ring of light and
disappeared. There was a new message for her now:
AK-47M acquired. Tactical Vest acquired.
“…”
Both were standard equipment in GGO. As she expected, the
contents of the black bags belonged to the dead players. Of course, it
was the centipedes that had killed the players, not Sinon, but looting
a dead player wasn’t her style. She was opening her inventory to put
the items back when she noticed something.
In basically every VRMMO, items left behind in the world would
vanish after a certain amount of time. She wasn’t sure where the
respawn point would be for those players, but once they realized
their weapons had dropped, they’d be rushing back to reclaim them.
If she wanted to be considerate, she should hold on to them until the
players returned.
So she decided not to materialize the first items she’d looted, and
she picked up the other four bags. She was worried about storage
space, so she checked her window again, but her carrying capacity
wasn’t even at 20 percent.
Struck with foreboding, she checked the contents and saw that all
she was carrying were ten retrieved items and the materials from the
centipedes. All of the items she had earned in GGO were gone.
“Unbelievable…”
She closed the window.

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Her items would probably come back once the situation was
resolved, but it was worrying that there was still no announcement
from the dev team. She wanted to avoid losing her Hecate and MP7
if she died, so it seemed like she’d have to make her precious guns
last until the rollback could begin—and then another thought made
her suck in a breath through her teeth.
If everything in her inventory was gone, that meant her healthy stock
of 12.7 mm ammo for the Hecate and 4.6 mm ammo for the MP7
was gone, too. The only things left were the seven shots in the
Hecate’s magazine and the forty or so bullets between the MP7 and
its magazine on her belt. Once she’d fired them all, the only weapon
Sinon would have left would be the rusty kitchen knife she’d found in
the cabinet of the abandoned home.
Strictly speaking, she also had the weapons and ammo dropped by
the five dead players. But if she made off with them, she was nothing
but a looter in name and fact.
Belatedly, she regretted using her guns on the centipedes at the full
auto setting. Still, Sinon waited for the other five to log in again. The
centipedes would be back eventually, so the six of them had to work
together to survive. She pulled the MP7 from her holster again, then
backed against the wall of the building and waited for three minutes.
At last, one of the players twitched, then bolted to his feet.
“Hey, everybody, let’s move! In the middle of the ruins is…,” he
shouted but stopped when he noticed that only Sinon was present
and listening. He looked around, then lowered his voice and said,
“Hey, you, there were about five more people here before, right?
You know where they went?”
“They died, unfortunately,” she said, shrugging.

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Sinon was about to explain about the centipede attack when the
player—who was dressed in gray digital camo and used an optical
gun—took aim at her with the assault rifle on his shoulder.
“So you’re a PKer, huh?!”
“What?!” she shouted, a mixture of surprise and outrage. Then she
realized that what she said could be interpreted as a bit of creative
assassin role-playing. Plus, she had the MP7 in her hand, so she
quickly lowered it and protested, “No, it wasn’t me—it was giant
centipedes!”
“Oh yeah? And where are they?!”
“I took them out! I saved your lives!” Sinon objected. She wanted to
open her window so she could take out the carapaces to prove it to
him, but the man immediately pulled the trigger and left a burn mark
on the wall just to the right of Sinon with a yellowish-green laser.
“Hey!!”
“Don’t move! Only the lowest of the low would prey on people while
they’re logged out!”
“I’m not preying on anyone!” she hissed, trying to suppress her
anger. But the man was in a rage and wouldn’t take his finger off the
trigger. If she tried to move again, he would hit her for certain. Sinon
was only level-1—well, level-2—so even a low-powered optical rifle
could kill her instantly. If she died and dropped the Hecate, the man
would assume it was rightfully his, won in battle.
Should she take the initiative and kill him first to protect her partner?
But how?
A new voice broke the silent tension.
“Damn, this is crazy! It’s not just GGO,” shouted one of the other
players as he got to his feet. When he noticed the man with the gun

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and Sinon, he exaggeratedly leaned backward in shock. “Wh-whoa,
what are you doing, man?”
“Use your brain! This chick killed five of us while we were offline!”
“Yikes!”
The second man pulled a large-caliber revolver—probably a Ruger
Blackhawk—from his holster. Sinon’s back was literally against the
wall, and while she was searching for a way out, the other three
awakened in quick order.
She’d completely lost the chance for initiative. It seemed the only
thing she could do now was pray that one of these people would be
calm and hear her out.
Then a familiar dry skittering hit her ears. She looked around briefly
and saw two long antennae extending from a split off the road, to
the left behind the men. The antennae just wavered there for a
moment, then emerged farther, attached to a head with huge
mandibles and a long body. The red-bellied centiwigs had
respawned.
Because the guy with the optical gun was screaming his head off, the
others didn’t realize the danger. She rolled her eyes yet again and
muttered quietly, “Behind you.”
“What?! Did you say something?!” her assailant growled.
Again, she warned, “Behind you!”
“What, you think I’m gonna fall for the oldest trick in the book?
Hurry up and drop your loot before I shoot—”
But a shriek—“Aaaiiieee!”—interrupted him.
“What the hell was that for? Would you shut up…?” the rifleman
snapped, glancing over his shoulder, only to let out a yelp. “Gwah?!”

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At last, he’d noticed the centipedes emerging onto the road. There
were at least ten of them.
The five brigands backed away, guns aimed.
This is it…I have to escape now. The red-bellied centiwigs looked
frightening, but two or three 4.6 mm bullets from the MP7 were all it
took to kill them. The players’ gear was at least mid-rank, so if they
shot like hell, it would take less than a minute for them to kill the
bugs.
The instant she heard the first shot, Sinon bolted. She put the MP7
back into its holster and sprinted in the opposite direction of the
gunfire. It was strange that she could run perfectly fine with the
ultraheavy Hecate II on her back, despite being only level-2, but she
wouldn’t know why unless she survived this situation.
In less than five seconds, she heard an angry shout among the
gunfire.
“Ah! Hey, the chick ran away!”
“Dammit! Let’s finish them off and go after her!”
At that point, she was rooting for the centipedes to put up a better
fight. This left her with maybe ten seconds to get away from the
wide-open main street.
Right after he’d logged back in, the optical rifleman had said, Hey,
everybody, let’s move! In the middle of the ruins is… The most
straightforward interpretation of that statement would be In the
middle of the ruins is a safe space. So she wanted to head that way,
but it was difficult to go to a place with lots of players around if some
of them assumed she was a PKer. So she should head for somewhere
outside the ruined town.
Sinon recalled what she’d seen looking out the upstairs window. In
her memory, the direction across from the window—meaning the

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left side of where she was running—featured a group of larger
buildings. If that was the center of town, then the right-hand side
was the way to leave.
The gunshots were wrapping up in the background. She had to get
away from the main road before the men spotted her. Side street,
side street…There. Five yards ahead.
Sinon tilted herself as far as she could go and made a ninety-degree
turn down the side path as close as possible without slipping and
tumbling. There was a narrow alley barely four feet wide between
the buildings. If it was a dead end, she was screwed; she just had to
have faith for now.
As she ran, stepping as lightly as possible, she saw three half-broken
wooden boxes up ahead. She jumped behind them and crouched. In
less than ten seconds, she could hear the stomping of heavy combat
boots as well as irritated exclamations.
“Damn! Where’d that girl go?!”
“Maybe she snuck into one of the houses or down a side alley?”
“So we have to go searching them one by one? Man…”
“Don’t complain! She killed five of us!”
“Plus, that chick’s sni-ri was superrare. If it doesn’t get rolled back,
we could sell it and split the winnings and still all come out
superrich.”
…What the hell is a sni-ri? she wondered, then realized it was
supposed to be an abbreviation of sniper rifle. They were right that
the Hecate II was one of the rarest weapons in GGO, but if she lost it
to scrubs who would call it something as stupid as a sni-ri and then
sell it for cash, she’d never live that down.
If the men came down the alley in a line, she’d just have to shoot
through all five of them with one of the Hecate’s 12.7 mm bullets.
Page | 27
But doing that, even in self-defense, made her a true PKer. Plus, she
had only seven bullets left, and she didn’t want to have to use them
on this.
Don’t come down here! she begged.
It was as though they could hear her mind. The footsteps slowed at
the entrance to the alley. She couldn’t see them, but she could sense
their attention on the spot where she was hiding.
Sinon silently slipped the Hecate off her back and held it in both
hands. Now she wished she’d left one more bullet in the chamber for
good measure. She placed her right hand on the bolt handle. She’d
wait for them to come down the alley as close as possible before
loading the bullet, and then she had to shoot before they reacted to
the sound.
One, two…three seconds later.
“Hey, someone check those busted crates…”
But she didn’t hear the rest because it was drowned out by the burst
of a submachine gun. Live bullets burst through the wooden boxes,
grazing Sinon’s hair and combat boots. Her instincts screamed at her
to bolt from the hiding spot, but through sheer willpower, she kept
her avatar still.
“Nothing there.”
“Don’t just start shooting like that, man!”
The first voice merely laughed. Five sets of footsteps moved away,
but Sinon stayed in place for another thirty seconds before carefully
rising. The wooden boxes were torn up after getting shot, and one
more impact would have crumbled them to splinters.
You’re going to regret wasting those bullets, she warned them
silently, then rushed down the other end of the alley.

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Fortunately, the narrow path wasn’t a dead end, and it took her to
another, larger street. Once upon a time, many people must have
walked the stone-paved road that now hosted little more than wind
and dust. What had turned this town into an empty ruin? The answer
might lie in the center, but she wasn’t going there anytime soon.
Sinon headed for the outward edge of the town, realizing that at
some point, she had stopped thinking of this place as a glitch or an
unintended case of human error but as a proper VRMMO world with
its own internal logic. She encountered the occasional centipede,
spider, and scorpion-type monster, but she chose to conserve her
limited ammo and ran away from them. At this point, she wished she
could have switched her side weapon from the MP7 to a photon
sword…but hindsight was twenty-twenty.
She was on the move for over twenty minutes, avoiding battle, when
a tall stone wall came into view. It looked very much like a castle wall
surrounding a city, but it was stacked with seamless blocks, with no
way of climbing up them.
Sinon grabbed a pebble and flicked it upward with her thumb. When
it landed on the ground, it bounced to the right, so she followed the
wall in that direction.
In less than a minute, she arrived at a large gate. Praying that it
wasn’t locked, she approached carefully, but she soon saw that her
worries were unfounded. The heavy wooden double gate was
standing on one side, but the other side had come out of the frame
and fallen to the ground.
She stopped, wondering if leaving the town was really better than
staying. But there was no way to know the right answer; the only
thing she knew for sure was that she couldn’t approach the other
GGO players who had been teleported here until she cleared up their
misconception that she was a PKer.

Page | 29
What she needed now was a safe place where she could log out. If
there were centipedes and scorpions and such all over town, the
only possible shelter she’d find was outside.
With her mind made up for now, Sinon walked up to the gate,
stepped through the empty frame, and made her way outside the
city.
“……Whoa…”
Instantly, she found herself gasping at the view spread out before
her.
The scale of the world map was, simply put, vast.
GGO’s familiar world was anything but cramped. On foot, walking
across the wasteland surrounding the capital of SBC Glocken took
over five hours. But this mysterious world wasn’t just vast—it was
incredibly detailed. Every VR world naturally faded out as you gazed
into the far distance, but the dried earth here just continued on and
on toward the horizon until it met ranges of distant mountains that
were still crystal clear to the eye. She hadn’t felt this much of a sense
of scale since her dive into that true alternate reality, the
Underworld.
Unconsciously, Sinon raised her hand and touched the side of her
head. It wasn’t here now, but back in the real world, where she was
lying on her bed, she was wearing the AmuSphere she’d been using
for close to a year and a half. It wasn’t the latest and greatest piece
of gear anymore. How was it creating such a vivid experience?
She needed to log out soon and find out what was happening. Sinon
blinked, switching gears in her mind, and stared at the wilderness
under the afternoon sun with renewed attention.
The terrain was about 70 percent dry, sandy ground and 30 percent
faded plants, with the occasional cactus rising above it all. It

Page | 30
reminded her of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, not that she’d ever
been there, though.
There were monsters, too. Just from here, she could make out two
giant scorpions and one giant lizard. It wasn’t going to be easy to
look for safety while avoiding the predators’ reaction range. But then
she finally remembered something. The Hecate’s precious bullets
needed to be conserved, but there was more her gun could do than
just shoot holes in things.
Sinon assumed a standing firing position with the Hecate and looked
through its scope, turning the dial until its magnification was at 5×,
the lowest it offered. Then she moved the gun slowly from left to
right, searching for safe ground.
It seemed like being close to the ground wouldn’t help. She needed
to find a high space where the scorpions and lizards couldn’t reach
her, with cover she could hide behind.
But it was unlikely she’d find such a convenient spot here, so she’d
settle for a raised area with a flat top…
“……Ah,” she grunted.
Sinon pulled away from the scope, then looked through it again,
raising the magnification to 10×. She’d found a tall gray rocky pillar
jutting from the desert floor. It was pointed on the top, but there
was something like a cave near the base. If she could climb her way
up there, it would be the perfect shelter. And the distance was
reasonable, no more than half a mile at the most.
She lowered her gun, steeled herself for action, and stepped down
off the fallen door. The soles of her boots hit dry dirt, slightly
scraping the ground with every step. She wouldn’t be returning to
this city for a while. She had to survive on her own until this strange
situation sorted itself out.

Page | 31
At about thirty feet, she broke into a measured run. When she saw
monsters ahead of her, she went well out of her way and kept an eye
on the distant rocky point beyond the brush.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to contend with any scorpions or lizards
up close before she reached her destination. Seen from the base, the
rocky pillar was about fifty feet tall. The sides were nearly vertical. It
seemed like only the centipedes from the town would be able to
climb something like that—until she noticed the cracks and
handholds on the rock surface. Sinon flexed her hands for a bit as she
charted out a path up to the cave entrance. Once she had one, she
grabbed the first handhold, jammed the toe of her boot into a crack,
and pulled herself up.
In GGO—and probably in real life—a sniper’s success was largely
defined by how much elevation they could gain, so free-climbing was
a regular part of her work. The trick to rock climbing in a VRMMO
was to do it fast, before the fatigue variable kicked in. She quickly got
about fifteen feet up the surface.
Climbing skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.
The sudden message, right in front of her eyes, caused her to miss
the next hold she was aiming for. Her weight slid, but her left hand
caught a small gap at the last moment, preventing her from falling.
She clicked her tongue with annoyance and closed the window, then
resumed climbing.
Thankfully, that single point of proficiency in the Climbing skill
helped, because she was able to reach the cave entrance without
further trouble. It was a dark hole about two feet around, and she
had to be careful to slip inside without catching the Hecate on the
sides. In the real world, a hole like this might end up too shallow to
be of use, but in a game, the devs never put things like this in unless
it was worth the trouble.

Page | 32
As she expected, the cave widened as it got deeper. That increased
the chances it was a monster’s lair, so she slipped the MP7 out of its
holster and turned on the small flashlight she had attached to a
mount on her right side. Its white light cut through the darkness.
The cave was shaped like a cocoon, about four and a half feet tall
and ten feet deep. There were no monsters here, nor any nest
materials around her feet. Instead, there was a single wooden box
with a reinforced metal frame along the back wall.
“……A treasure chest?” Sinon murmured, approaching in a crouch.
She tapped the lid with the gun’s muzzle, and it made a hard, heavy
sound. The chest didn’t look weathered or aged at all, in the sense of
being left behind for years and years, so in her mind, that made it
more likely that it was a treasure chest. She had to open it. As Sinon
reached out with her left hand, she noticed a keyhole in the metal
facing on the front.
She tried to lift the lid anyway, but it might as well have been glued
in place. She exhaled and peered through the keyhole.
GGO’s treasure chests—or treasure boxes, as players called them in-
game—were usually locked. There were electronic locks and physical
locks, and sometimes the boxes could have both, meaning you
needed both the Lock-Picking and Hacking skills. If it was just a
physical lock, she could attempt shooting it with her gun, but the
chances of success were low when you did that. More often than
not, you just permanently broke the latch or destroyed the contents
of the box.
Sinon looked back and forth from the MP7 to the keyhole but
successfully resisted the allure of the gamble. If she wasted a
valuable bullet and destroyed the chest, too, she’d feel like a total
failure. She would have tried picking the lock, but all of her lock-
picking tools were gone, along with the rest of her stuff. All she had

Page | 33
were the belongings of the unfortunate men, a rusty knife, and some
centipede mats.
“…”
However, a curious idea came to her. Sinon opened the ring menu
and hesitantly found her way to the EQUIPMENT icon. From her very
inadequate list, she selected Inferior Centipede Pincers and
materialized one.
A reddish-black pincer six inches long appeared. The two sharp,
curved spikes were connected at the base. If she held them in both
hands, she could work them back and forth, but she couldn’t begin
to guess what the pincers were meant to be crafted into. The only
thing that mattered now, however, was that they were sharp.
Sinon stuck the pointed end of one of the spikes into the keyhole,
then moved it around gently until there was a feeling of catching on
something. It wasn’t as effective as a proper lockpick, but she
supposed that if the chest was ranked low enough, this was a
worthwhile substitute.
She dug the spike around, trying to move whatever it was caught on,
and a new message appeared.
Lock-Picking skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.
So it seemed there were a ton of various skills in this world. There
was no way this situation could just be a system error at this point,
but she had to focus on the lock and ignore the bigger questions.
“Grrr…stupid…thing…,” she hissed under her breath, tweaking the
lock for a good three minutes. But when another message finally
appeared telling her the Lock-Picking skill’s proficiency had risen to 2,
there was a pleasant clicking sound. That was also the moment the
durability of the centipede’s pincer ran out, and it crumbled in her
hand.

Page | 34
Holding her breath, Sinon lifted the lid of the chest. It creaked ever
so slightly and revealed a handful of coins, an aged leather bag, and
one greenish rusted key.
She picked up a coin, the only silver of the bunch, and examined it
closely. It was a circle about three-quarters of an inch across, and it
was neither the credits of GGO nor the yrd of ALO. On one side was
the number 100, and on the back was an image of two trees. She
tapped it to bring up a properties window that said 100-el Silver Coin,
Currency, Weight: 0.1.
“El…?”
She’d never heard of that currency. She shrugged and deposited the
silver coin and the other copper coins into her inventory. Next, she
took out the rusted key. There was an ornate openwork flower
pattern on the handle, but she had no idea where this fancy key was
supposed to go. She gave it a tap, too. Bronze Key, Tool, Weight:
0.72. No information of use.
Sinon tossed the key into her inventory next and saved the leather
bag for last. It was tantalizingly heavy. Maybe it was full of gold
coins, unlike the inside of the chest itself. Or perhaps there was a
magical item inside. She widened the mouth of the bag and stuck her
hand inside. Her fingers brushed against a couple of round items, so
she pulled one out.
“…What is this?”
Resting in her palm was something like a metal ball bearing, small
and shining. Its dark surface felt like iron or lead. It didn’t look
valuable. She peered into the bag and saw that all the items were the
same. Sinon was disappointed, but she tapped the metal ball anyway
to see its properties.
Crude Musket Ball, Weapon/Bullet, Attack Power: 28.42
puncturing, Weight: 3.67.
Page | 35
“They’re just bullets…”
So the treasure chests that popped up in the middle of the
wilderness could only be so good. Disappointed, she nearly tossed
the iron ball aside before she stopped herself.
“…Musket ball?”
Was there a category for that kind of ammo in GGO?
From what Sinon knew, muskets were extremely primitive flintlock
guns that were muzzle-loaded. They were long guns, but they
weren’t rifles, because their barrels did not have rifling lines cut into
the inside. They were only one step forward from matchlocks.
The setting of GGO was a once-advanced world that had fallen into
ruin after a civilization-ending war, with all of the sophisticated
metalworking knowledge lost. Humanity could just barely
manufacture optical guns, which were mostly made of plastic, and
live-ammo guns, which required metal stamping and machining,
were completely beyond even the most capable NPC. The live-ammo
guns could be salvaged only from the prewar ruins. Sinon’s Hecate II
and MP7 were both items she’d looted from the dungeon beneath
the capital city.
But the guns excavated from the ruins were from the early twentieth
century at the oldest. She’d never heard of anyone pulling a
seventeenth-century musket out of a dungeon. You’d have to pack in
a new bullet and gunpowder after every shot, so even shooting at
the weakest monster would be a big pain in the ass.
Meaning…
“There are muskets in this world…?” Sinon muttered, examining the
iron ball again. Seconds later, she put it back into the bag, closed the
bag tight, and put it into her inventory.

Page | 36
So I didn’t find any proper treasure, but at least I managed to open
the chest itself, she told herself, leaning against a gently curved wall.
It was six PM. There weren’t going to be any monsters here, she
decided. Time to log out and figure out what was going on.
But before that, a break. She’d wait around for five minutes, or
maybe just three, and be certain she was safe first. Once offline, she
could replenish her fluids and eat something small…What do I have
in the refrigerator, again? She still had some pork miso soup from
last night. She could reheat that, then cook one of the millet
dumplings her grandmother sent…
Sinon didn’t even realize her eyes were closed until she sank to the
bottom of warm darkness.

She thought she heard an odd noise.

It was like the ringing of countless bells in the far distance, or of
shards of glass gently falling and piling up. Something delicate and
beautiful.
Her eyebrows worked themselves several times before her eyes
finally opened. She was looking not at the white wallpaper of her
room but at a rough stone surface. For an instant, she didn’t
recognize where she was, until she realized she had fallen asleep in
the virtual cave without logging off.
The time readout said it was 9:05 PM. She’d been asleep for three
hours. That meant there was no automatic deconnecting system
here that would log out players detected to have fallen asleep. Then
again, maybe she was lucky; if the game had cut her off, she might
have been comfortable enough in her real body in bed that she’d
have slept eight hours instead.
In any case, the strange, continuous sound was drawing her
attention toward the mouth of the little cave.

Page | 37
Her sleepiness dissipated in an instant.
There was a brilliant purple light shining into the cave from the
outside, which should have been well past nightfall by now. It was
not the light of sunset. It was cold and purple, an amethyst
glow…and it was flickering irregularly.
Sinon grabbed the Hecate and crawled along the ground. When she
reached the entrance, she went into a prone shooting position and
looked carefully up into the sky.
It was definitely nighttime. But there were no stars or moon in the
sky, just a multilayered curtain of light. An aurora…and the strange
sound was coming from every bit of it.
Suddenly, the aurora flickered powerfully, and a voice emerged.

“The seeds bud, sprout stems and leaves, and join ends to form a
circular gate. Visitors to this land, drained of hope, preserve your
solitary life. Withstand myriad trials, survive untold dangers, and to
the first to reach the land revealed by the heavenly light, all shall be
given.”

The voice sounded like an innocent young girl’s but spoke with the
wisdom of a sage. Sinon didn’t understand what it meant right away.
The only phrases that remained in her head were “land revealed by
the heavenly light” and “all shall be given.”
The heavenly light had to be referring to the aurora. She gazed into
the night sky again, where the purple curtains of light were arranged
in concentric circles. The center seemed to be north—no, northeast.
She’d have to leave to get an accurate gauge on the direction.
Sinon steeled herself to go and started to get to her feet—but she
couldn’t.

Page | 38
The rippling aurora in the sky simply vanished, like it had been
turned off with a light switch. At the same time, she felt a terrible
weight press upon her back. For an instant, she thought someone
was actually pinning her down. But in fact, the weight was coming
from the MP7, the sidearm she kept around her lower back. It had
been as light as a kitten a second earlier, but now it was a lion resting
on her spine.
“Urgh…”
She reached around her back, grabbed the grip of the MP7 where it
stuck out of the holster, and managed to knock it loose and onto the
ground. But the weight wasn’t gone. It seemed her combat suit—the
Sniper’s Jacket, it was called—was over her Equip Weight limit.
With her right hand, she opened the ring menu and got to her
equipment screen, then dragged the jacket from her mannequin to
her item storage. Once the boots and muffler were off, too, she was
finally light and agile again.
So this was likely what happened. In the four hours between her
teleportation to this strange world at five o’clock and the mysterious
announcement at nine o’clock, there was probably a grace period
where she could move normally despite being encumbered. Once
that period ended, Sinon’s Carry Weight limit matched her low level-
2 status. She was no longer able to bear the weight of her rare MP7
and the Sniper’s Jacket.
Standing in her simple undergarments, Sinon looked down at the
Hecate II on the floor.
She knew what would happen, but she tried to lift the barrel and
stock anyway. Her gun was so immobile, it might as well have been
bolted to the ground. It was an antimateriel sniper rifle, a member of
the very heaviest class of weapons in GGO—although not as heavy as
Behemoth’s prized minigun. So it was no surprise that she couldn’t

Page | 39
pick it up, but it did mean she couldn’t haul her favorite gun around
the wilderness with her. In fact, she didn’t even meet the equip
requirements now, so she couldn’t get down on the ground and fire
it from there.
The sniper knelt on the floor of the cave and gently traced the
beautiful wood stock of the Hecate.
“…Just take a little rest for now,” she whispered, then tapped the
gun to open a pop-up menu, and returned it to her inventory. The
massive gun shone briefly, then vanished. She did the same to the
MP7 with a sigh. When the virtual air filled her empty lungs, she was
aware of her throat’s dryness.
On sheer autopilot, she reached for the little canteen on her belt, but
her hand found nothing. Like the survival knife, her canteen was
gone. She’d just have to wait it out until she could replenish her
water somewhere. It probably wouldn’t be easy in this wilderness,
but in VR, thirst was just an annoyance, not a life-and-death
situation…
“Huh…?”
A nasty thought hit her. She looked to the upper left, and when she
focused on the UI elements there, she gasped.
The blue TP bar was slowly decreasing. Below that, the yellow SP bar
was also going down but at a slower rate than the TP bar. She
intuitively knew that the bars going down had something to do with
the thirst she was feeling.
T was probably short for thirst, she decided. It wasn’t hard to figure
out what would happen when that bar went all the way down. She’d
collapse and die and be teleported somewhere else, leaving all her
items behind. She just had to hope that if her guns were in her
inventory, they couldn’t be lost that way.

Page | 40
She stared at the blue bar again. It seemed to be falling at about 1
percent every minute. It would take a hundred minutes to deplete all
the way, but she sensed that this rate would change with the
environment and her physical state. It would definitely drop faster if
she left the cave to search for water, expending energy.
But not doing anything wasn’t an option. After the aurora vanished,
the sky it left behind was full of stars, with no sign of any rain in the
next hundred minutes. If she didn’t find some water, she was going
to die.
But there was one other problem. Sinon was dressed in nothing but
underwear—top and bottom—plus a belt. The only weapon she
could use was the rusty kitchen knife from the ruins. She couldn’t
even beat a mouse with that, much less a giant centipede.
“…No other choice, I guess,” she muttered and opened her
inventory.
It wasn’t to take out the Hecate or MP7. She scrolled through the
short list and stopped when she reached the icons for five black
bags.
On the right side of the icons were their names: Elcamino’s Items,
Suttocos’s Items, Lian Lian’s Items, Mishoka’s Items, and Ichirou
Masuoka’s Items. If she’d beaten those players herself, she’d think
nothing of using their stuff, but when she had only picked them up to
save their things for safekeeping, it felt disrespectful to do it.
Still, that hesitation meant nothing to the thirst that stabbed at her
throat. She checked each bag in turn, looking for weapons or armor
that a level-2 character could use. The other players she’d seen here
from GGO were fairly experienced, so their loot more than likely had
requirements too high for her. But maybe one of those five played an
extreme AGI build…

Page | 41
Thankfully, the player named Suttocos matched Sinon’s hopes. In his
bag was a weapon called a Bellatrix SL2 and Weasel Suit armor. She
could equip them both and just barely stay below her Equip Weight
limit.
After dropping the two icons onto her equipment mannequin, a long,
thin laser gun appeared on the left side of her belt, and a yellowish-
brown combat suit covered her body. The Bellatrix was an optical
gun, which wasn’t her style, and the Weasel Suit had more exposure
than she would have preferred, but it was better than running
around in her underwear with a rusty knife. Her muffler could stay
on because it weighed practically nothing.
In GGO, when you equipped a gun, the remaining ammo appeared in
the lower right part of your vision. But this world had no such
feature, so she had to pull out the laser gun and check the energy
gauge it featured on its frame. It said there was 63 percent
remaining. She didn’t know much about the gun, so she’d have to
actually shoot it to find out how much energy it lost with each use.
Sinon put the laser gun in its holster and banished the ring menu.
Her thirst abruptly became even more apparent, and she coughed.
There was still time before the TP bar ran out, but the sensation was
going to become unbearable before too long. It hurt to leave the
shelter she’d found, but water was the top priority now.

Page | 42
Page | 43
She glanced back at the opened treasure chest, then popped back
out of the narrow cave mouth and into the arid wasteland.

And here she was now—well past ten PM.

She’d spent nearly an hour on the move after leaving the cave, but
Sinon still hadn’t found any water. Her TP bar was under 20 percent,
and the feeling of thirst was excruciating. If there wasn’t any water
around the rocky outcropping she was heading for, that would
probably be where she died. She wanted to believe she’d just
resurrect somewhere else in the world, but the phrase “preserve
your solitary life” from the mysterious message stuck in her head. If a
player got only one life, then maybe resurrecting didn’t work after
the grace period. If she died here, would she drop all her items and
get sent back to GGO? Would she lose her entire character and all its
data?
There were three major mistakes in judgment Sinon had made that
had put her in this perilous situation. The first was trying to be nice
and picking up the items from the centipedes’ victims for them. The
second was not logging out immediately after she’d found the cave
and, instead, falling asleep inside it. The third was leaving the cave
and heading farther into the wilderness, rather than returning
toward the ruined city.
It occurred to her now that if she had searched the homes of the city
carefully, there would probably have been a well or something of
that nature. It had to be an intended part of the game design that
players would replenish their water at the ruins and venture outward
from there to explore; that was why there was no water outside. But
her TP bar was already below halfway by the time she realized this,
so she couldn’t turn back and return to the city.
If there wasn’t any water at the rocks ahead…No. She had to believe
it would be there.

Page | 44
She didn’t want to run into any monsters just before the end, so she
watched the darkness very closely as she ran. She’d gained
something called the Night Vision skill a while back, which gave her
slightly better vision, but she couldn’t see into the shadows by
starlight alone. She gave any big rocks that might hide scorpions a
wide berth and moved as quietly as possible.
The big rock formation’s exterior was covered in shrubs. It was only a
hundred yards away at this point.
That was when Sinon picked up some very important information,
visually and aurally. She shrank back and ducked.
What she saw was a small, flickering light at the base of the rocks.
The starlight was reflecting off something. Out in this desert, it
couldn’t be metal or glass. It had to be water.
And what she heard was a roar like thunder. The booming bass
sound couldn’t come from a lizard or rat. In typical VRMMO terms,
only a large predator—often some kind of field boss—made that kind
of sound.
Sinon’s instinct was to grab the shoulder strap of the Hecate II, but
she touched nothing. Her usual partner was in her inventory, unable
to be equipped. All she could rely on now was the Bellatrix SL2. But
optical handguns were used for their lightweight nature. Would that
really help her against a boss?
The TP bar, now bright red, was nearly down to 10 percent. Standing
here and waffling wouldn’t stop it from running out in ten minutes or
so. Finding another source of water was unrealistic at this point. Her
only options were to wait here and die of thirst or gamble and head
for the rock.
For some reason, she remembered something she’d said to the
leader of a PvP squadron that had hired her once: Show me you at

Page | 45
least have the guts to look down the barrel of a gun and die, even if
it’s “just a stupid game”!
Smirking, Sinon straightened. If she was going to die, she’d prefer
combat to dehydration.
Another ferocious roar blanketed the wasteland. Sinon drew the
Bellatrix and undid the safety.
She stared at the rock a hundred yards ahead. If there would be a
fight, she at least needed to see the monster first. All she could tell
was that something large was moving at the base of the rock
formation.
A thought striking her, she crouched again and opened her menu.
Sinon tapped the MP7 in her inventory, then selected the flashlight
option from a submenu and materialized that instead. She stuck the
miniature light that appeared to the lower mount rail of the Bellatrix.
The weight was…just low enough. She couldn’t pick up a single
pebble after this, but the nice thing about VRMMOs was that as long
as you were under that magic number, you were as nimble as if you
were holding nothing at all.
The flashlight was a high-quality part, but not to the extent of a
hundred yards. Sinon crept forward with utmost care. She closed to
half the distance, watching for monsters and avoiding cacti and
rocks.
The stone formation felt small from far away, but now that she was
closer, it was nearly the height of a ten-story building. The surface
was almost vertical, but viny plants hung down here and there, and
she could hear trickling water. Apparently, the water was running
down the surface of the rock and creating a little spring at the base.
The instant she was certain there was water, Sinon’s thirst assaulted
her senses. She felt like she was being choked, and she coughed

Page | 46
violently. Her TP bar was at 8 percent…That meant she had eight
minutes to drink or she would die.
Glancing away from the rock formation, she soon found the owner of
the roaring. There was a huge, squat shadow moving
counterclockwise around the base of the rock, as though protecting
its territory—in fact, it was definitely doing that. She couldn’t drink
anything unless she dealt with the creature.
Before she gave up and made a desperate suicide attack, she
thought of drawing its attention with a shot, then kiting it much
farther away. Even if it didn’t lose sight of her altogether, all she
needed was a minute away from the rock to dunk herself in the
water.
She moved even farther, nearing thirty yards. As a sniper, this was
unbearably close to the target, but for people who fought with
swords, like Kirito and Asuna, this was where they would start
sprinting to close the gap.
What were they doing now? Studying back in the real world? Having
fun leveling-up in ALO? She wanted to replenish her TP, find a new
shelter, and log out so she could get in touch with them. If she told
him everything that had happened to her, Kirito would probably be
more jealous than startled. She couldn’t wait to see that look on his
face.
“…I’m going to survive this,” she muttered, resting her torso against
a sloped rock nearby and taking two-handed aim with the Bellatrix.
Not only were there no bullet circles anymore, but this gun didn’t
come with a scope; she had to aim with the primitive sights and
beads. Fortunately, optical-gun trajectory was unaffected by wind
and gravity, unlike live-ammo guns, so any laser she fired would go
exactly where the sights said—technically, a fraction of an inch
lower.

Page | 47
The huge monster came around the far side of the rocky mountain,
walking in a slow curve and turning its head in Sinon’s direction. She
could probably get its attention with a shot anywhere, but she
wanted to hit a vital point to conserve the gun’s energy.
Sinon would shift her left hand to hit the switch on the flashlight
attachment, use three seconds of light to take aim, then fire. She
exhaled, inhaled, and started to move her hand.
But she never actually turned on the light.
Dat-dat-dat-dat-daaaan! There was a quick series of bursts, and
Sinon jumped on the spot. It was the sound of a live-ammo gun, and
a very high caliber one at that.
Her first thought was that the players who’d been attacked by the
centipedes had come back to recover their gear. But Sinon had spent
over an hour traveling away from the ruins. Unless they had her
bugged somehow, they couldn’t possibly track her here.
The roaring of the large monster confirmed that. It was very clearly
an angry roar, in contrast to the earlier howling meant to warn
others of its territory. She could see bloodred damage effects spilling
from its body.
There was another peal of thundering gunshots, but this time, she
saw it happen: To the southeast of the rock, on Sinon’s right side, a
number of orange lights flickered briefly atop a small hill. A moment
later, effects of the bullets hitting the creature’s left flank lit up, and
its bulk lurched to the side.
The effects vanished right away, but Sinon’s eyes had enough light to
make out the form of the monster. If one word could describe this
thing, that word was dinosaur.
Sinon’s apartment in the real world was in the Yoncho-me block of
Yushima in Bunkyo Ward, adjacent to Ueno Park. When she had time
to kill, she sometimes went to the art galleries and museums there.
Page | 48
Her favorite was the National Museum of Nature and Science, which
had hosted a dinosaur exhibit this summer. She wasn’t crazy about
dinosaurs in particular but had given it a look out of curiosity. The
highlight was a full-body fossil of something called a deinocheirus,
meaning “terrible hand.” The enormous arms and claws certainly
convinced her of why it was called that.
The monster protecting this rocky mountain was very similar to the
deinocheirus. Its back rose upward like a hill, with a long neck atop it,
a pointed head, and powerful arms and legs. Unlike the illustrations
at the exhibit that imagined what the deinocheirus looked like,
however, this one wasn’t covered in feathers; instead, it had rough,
armor-like skin. It seemed to be about sixteen feet tall and twice as
long.
The dinosaur faltered with the impact of the large-caliber bullets but
quickly recovered. It turned toward the hill where its attackers
waited, pawed at the ground with its specialized front legs, then
charged. With each footfall from its five-ton body, Sinon could feel
the vibration in the earth around her feet.
The front slope of the hill formed a rather steep little cliff, and even a
dinosaur would have trouble running right up. The players ought to
be shooting it a third and fourth time, but now the hilltop was silent,
for some reason. Who was attacking the beast anyway? If it wasn’t
Suttocos and his friends coming after Sinon for their gear, was it
another group of GGO players who had ventured out farther? But
why did all the guns sound like the exact same type?
To Sinon’s amazement, the dinosaur maintained its powerful
momentum and slammed its heavy head against the cliffside. That
attack rumbled even harder. Cracks spread outward from the impact
point.
The dinosaur then backed away, its head lowered, and tensed to
charge again. At last, a third round of gunfire sent a series of red
Page | 49
eruptions running across the dinosaur’s raised spine. This time,
however, it did not falter; apparently, the protuberances on its back
gave it higher defense there.
“Goaaaah!” the dinosaur bellowed, and it bounded forward on its
tree-trunk legs. It slammed into the same spot on the cliff with
another headbutt. The cracks reached the top of the hillside, and
clumps of dried earth fell downward.
Sinon thought she heard faint screams, and she squinted for a better
look.
Along with the earth, a figure also tumbled down the side of the hill,
which was about thirty feet tall. One of the people atop the lip of the
cliff lost their balance as it gave way beneath them.
“……Good grief.”
She was so exasperated by this display of amateurism that she forgot
about the pain in her throat and leaped out of her hiding spot. She
didn’t know who the attackers were, but working with them was her
best chance at eliminating the dinosaur and getting some water to
drink. She thought about sneaking over to the spring while the battle
raged on, but she hated the thought of being targeted by the
dinosaur and attracting the anger of the attackers as well.
Sinon gripped the Bellatrix with both hands as she rushed toward the
cliff from the south. The fallen player was trapped under rocks and
couldn’t get up. A fourth set of shots rang out from the hilltop, but
the number of bullets was fewer. The dinosaur was unconcerned,
and it lifted its front leg, threatening the fallen player with its deadly
claws.
“Over here!” Sinon shouted, turning on her flashlight. The bright light
pierced the darkness and struck the dinosaur’s head. It briefly
stopped with confusion, and she used that chance to shoot the
Bellatrix in its yellow eye.
Page | 50
There was a comparatively weak pshu! sound, and a pale-green
beam of light shot forth, penetrating the dinosaur’s right eye.
“Gyaooooo!!” it shrieked. The beast smashed into the cliffside,
having lost its balance thrashing about. More of the cliffside
crumbled, and large amounts of dirt and rock tumbled downward.
Above its head, which was similar to both a crocodile’s and a bird’s, a
red ring cursor appeared, but she didn’t have time to stand there
and read.
She lowered her gun and turned off the light, then rushed to the
fallen player, pushing hard against the large boulder trapping the
player’s leg beneath it.
“Get up!” she shouted, offering her hand—and then her eyes
widened.
The collapsed figure wasn’t a human. In a broader sense, you could
call him humanoid, but at the very least, she had never seen an
avatar like this in GGO.
The figure had a squat body covered in brown feathers, with the
head of a bird of prey.
In other words, a birdman.
He reminded Sinon of the harpy-type monsters from ALO, but he was
more birdlike in this case. His body was covered in armor made of
cloth and leather, and he held a simple rifle in his hand. This couldn’t
be a player or a monster, but an NPC.
Sinon reversed course and thrust her hand out again. Even if his
appearance was 70 percent bird, she would surely find common
understanding with a fellow shooter (even if she had no evidence to
back up the assertion).

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It wasn’t clear if the birdman understood her, but his hawklike eyes
blinked once, and then he grasped Sinon’s outstretched hand. She
pulled him to his feet and saw that she was about two inches taller.
“Can you run?!” she asked.
But the birdman answered her in a language she couldn’t begin to
comprehend.
“ .”
She had no idea what he said, but there was no time to figure that
out now. The dinosaur was shaking vigorously, trying to throw off all
the cliffside earth that had landed on top of it.
“This way!” Sinon shouted and began to run for the rear side of the
hill. The birdman followed her on naked feet that looked like an
ostrich’s. There was red light streaming from his left leg, but the
damage didn’t seem too serious.
The hill was circular in shape, about a hundred feet in diameter and
fifty feet tall. There had to be a path on the other side that the
birdmen had used to reach the top of the cliff. Or maybe they
flew…But no, that couldn’t be right. Their wings had atrophied—or
perhaps evolved—into arms. The feathers from shoulder to elbow
were more ornamental than anything and certainly not designed for
actual flight.
As they ran, her new companion abruptly shouted, “ !”
She spun around and saw him pointing at the cliff with a clawed
hand. She couldn’t see it very well in the dark, but she could tell
there was something like a ladder there. Sinon turned as hard to the
left as she could with her momentum and leaped onto the ladder.
This wasn’t just some rope ladder thrown down temporarily but a
fixed feature that had been pounded into the rock surface with
stakes. That must have meant the birdmen didn’t coincidentally

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decide to attack that dinosaur tonight but had tried picking it off
many times from the top of the hill.
Sinon hurried up the ladder as fast as she could go. The Bellatrix was
back in its holster, so if the birdman tried to attack her from below,
her ability to return fire would be delayed, but she didn’t think he
would betray her now.
Sure enough, she was able to climb the entire fifty feet of ladder
without interruption. At the top of the hill was only a small selection
of shrubs, with the rest being rock and sand. She’d hoped for a little
bit of water but saw nothing. Her TP bar was down to 4 percent.
Thinking about it brought the sensation of thirst back with a terrible
vengeance, sending Sinon to her knees. A few seconds later, the
birdman reached the top of the hill, so she asked him, “Do you have
any water…?”
But the birdman just blinked at her, confused. She glanced at his
body and saw only two tool bags on his belt and no canteen. If he
was an NPC, he wouldn’t have a virtual inventory, so whatever she
could see was everything he held.
So in the next four minutes—make that three and change now—she
had to defeat the dinosaur and get back to the spring at the base of
that mountain, or else she would die.
And I refuse to die.
Sinon summoned all her willpower to get back to her feet, then
tottered into a run toward the west side of the rocky mountain.
Within moments, she saw a number of silhouettes (birdhouettes?)
along the cliffside. They were aiming their rifles at the base of the
cliff and had their backs to her. It seemed they were going to open
fire on the dinosaur for a fifth time.
But from what Sinon could see of the dinosaur’s HP bar, it was still at
nearly 80 percent. Their rounds of gunfire hadn’t even taken off 10
Page | 53
percent each time. If they stayed up here at the top of the hill, the
dinosaur couldn’t attack directly, but the only target they could hit
was the thick hide of its back. It wasn’t doing a lot of damage. And
based on the size of the sacks on their belts, they weren’t flush with
ammo, either.
“Wait!” she shouted, causing the line of birdmen to flinch. The
feathers around their necks stood on end. They whipped around,
pointing their guns at Sinon.
“ ?!”
“ !!”
She raised her hands on sheer instinct and tried to argue her cause.
“I’m not your enemy! I want to help you beat that dinosaur!”
“ !!” shouted a larger individual who stood a head taller than the
rest. His rifle was steady on her. Nothing she could say was going to
get through to them.
Her TP bar was at 3 percent.
I guess this is as far as I get, she lamented.
Then an impact almost as powerful as an explosion slammed the
entire hill. The dinosaur had struck the cliff with another headbutt.
The lip of the cliff crumbled spectacularly, and the birdmen leaped
back from it, crying with dismay. The dinosaur’s roar set the night air
on edge.
That sound was enough to bring back Sinon’s will to fight, just as it
was running out.
She could wallow in despair once she died. As long as there was a
single pixel left on her TP bar, she would fight to survive. She just had
to make her intentions known to the birdmen and get their help to
beat the dinosaur. There had to be a way to do that.

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What would Kirito do in a situation like this? He probably wouldn’t
rely on words. He always used action—whipping everyone into battle
through the sheer brilliance of his sword and the willpower
contained within it. Sinon had no sword, but she did have a partner.
And she was the only thing Sinon could rely on here.
She opened her ring menu and quickly moved to the STORAGE icon. In
the list there, she selected the name of the gun she’d stored hours
ago and brought it back into the world.
The moment the gigantic antimateriel rifle appeared atop her
window, the birdmen screeched in alarm. Their guns were more like
the old-fashioned muskets that matched the bullets she’d found in
the cave—in no way comparable to her Hecate II, a high-precision
weapon created with modern production technology. Of course, it
was strange that the birdmen could use guns at all, but this was her
chance to get them on her side, while they were impressed.
“You and you! Support the barrel from each side!” Sinon
commanded, pointing to the largest one, who seemed to be their
leader, and the one standing next to him. They tilted their heads in
puzzlement. The gesture was so distinctly birdlike that she nearly
laughed, but she held it in.
“Hurry!” she tried again. “We have to shoot while the dinosaur is
stunned by the headbutt!”
But the birdmen did not react. It seemed they weren’t going to
respond to words in any way. There were android NPCs in GGO that
spoke a mysterious language, too, but once you got a language
conversion chip during a quest, they would sound Japanese again.
There was probably a similar thing she needed to do to be able to
speak to the birdmen, but there was no time for quests right now.
“Please, you just have to hold it up!” she begged a third time. That
was when a smaller figure leaped in from behind—the first birdman,

Page | 55
who she had saved from the rubble. He gave his right shoulder to the
middle of the barrel. Instantly, the support her player window was
giving the gun vanished, and the massive weight of the gun pressed
onto the birdman’s shoulder.
He squawked with exertion, and Sinon hurriedly reached out to the
gun, grabbing the wooden grip with one hand and supporting the
body with the other. But even with two of them, the best they could
do was keep it off the ground. They couldn’t carry it to the edge of
the cliff like this.
Her TP bar was at 2 percent.
“Urgh…Grrrgh…!”
Grunting and heaving, Sinon tried to push the rifle forward, despite
its being well over her Carry Weight limit. To the right of her HP bar,
there was an icon like a red paperweight that was flashing rapidly. A
small window appeared before her eyes, saying Physique skill gained.
Proficiency has risen to 1, but she didn’t care.
The birdman holding up the barrel was doing his best to keep it
raised, but his body was slowly sinking with the weight. With each
struggling moment, more fine feathers came loose from his shoulder,
until this began to create damage effects on his skin.
Sinon’s efforts were reaching their limit, and she was just about to
fall to her knees—
—when a large hand grabbed the barrel close to its end.
The blinking of the paperweight icon slowed down. She looked up
and, for a brief moment, met the eyes of the leader of the flock.
“ !” he shouted, then lifted the barrel and rested it on his left
shoulder. That didn’t lessen the load until it was under her Carry
Weight limit, but she felt like they might be able to transport it now.

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The three of them proceeded forward unsteadily and moved the
massive rifle to the edge of the cliff. She wanted to deploy the
Hecate’s bipod to rest it on the ground, but that wouldn’t give her
the right angle to aim at the dinosaur all the way at the bottom of
the cliff.
“Crouch down and keep holding it up!” she instructed, knowing the
birdmen weren’t going to understand her. But they quickly knelt, and
Sinon stuck her cheek to the side of the Hecate and tilted the muzzle
downward with all her strength.
But the dinosaur was already recovering from the wobbliness of its
most recent collision. Its burly head was pointed in their direction,
and it was backing up, preparing for its next blow. That wasn’t good;
if it hit the cliff now, the Hecate could tumble out of her grasp and
off the side of the hill.
The dinosaur’s HP bar, shaped like a combination of ring and pillar,
also displayed the target’s name in Japanese. It read Sterocephalus,
which certainly sounded like a dinosaur, although she didn’t know
what it meant.
Regardless, the head of the sterocephalus was protected by thick,
shell-like armor, and perhaps even the Hecate couldn’t break
through it. And that was assuming she could actually hit that target
at all, at a time when she couldn’t even lift the weapon. It was going
to be nearly impossible.
So she’d have to aim for its huge torso instead, preferably the heart.
But the sterocephalus wasn’t even exposing its sides to her, much
less its belly. Could she shoot its heart all the way through its back?
Her TP bar was down to 1 percent remaining. Sinon had sixty
seconds left to live.
“…Firing now!” she exclaimed through a throat drier than the
wasteland sands.
Page | 57
But before she could pull the trigger, the leader birdman supporting
the muzzle lifted a hand and shouted, “ !!”
The other birdmen lined up on either side of Sinon and aimed their
muskets. The old-fashioned guns, which didn’t have the benefit of
rifling inside their barrels, could barely break the surface of the
dinosaur’s hide. They couldn’t hit it in the heart. But with another
short cry from the leader, they shot in unison.
Within each musket, the flint on the end of the hammer scraped the
frizzen, creating sparks that lit the priming charge in the pan. A
moment later, the gunpowder within the barrels exploded and
propelled the bullets out of the muskets with a tremendous bang!
The spray of bullets almost entirely missed the dinosaur. Instead,
they gouged out the ground around its feet, creating a huge wave of
spark effects.
“Gwoeaaah!” roared the sterocephalus, standing on its rear legs and
lifting its front arms high in the air. The action exposed its whitened
belly, which was not covered in heavy natural armor.
This is it.
Sinon aimed through the scope at a spot she suspected was the
sterocephalus’s heart, then hastily pulled the trigger. The blast it
produced made the muskets sound like toys. Orange flames shot
from the muzzle brake. Even with three people holding it, the recoil
was too great, throwing Sinon and the two birdmen backward, along
with the gun itself.
But Sinon was certain of what she saw. The .50 BMG round struck
the center of the sterocephalus’s chest, creating an eruption of
damage effects.
As they landed on their backs, the massive dinosaur’s HP bar began
to plummet. Down and down it went, from yellow to red—to zero.

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She could hear the rumbling of the giant beast falling to the ground,
even from atop the cliff. A new message appeared before her eyes:
Sinon’s level has risen to 16. She was momentarily stunned at the
huge jump in levels—but then it occurred to her that maybe it would
refill all of her gauges. Sadly, the tiny sliver of TP was not moving.
She had forty—no, thirty—seconds until it was gone.
With a trembling finger, she tapped the Hecate next to her and put it
back in her inventory.
In concert with that motion, the birdmen all raised their muskets
high in the air and issued high-pitched shouts. The leader and the
one Sinon saved got to their feet and joined in the exultation.
But there was no time to watch. No time to descend the ladder
behind her, either.
Sinon got to her feet and sprinted for the cliffside. She had to banish
her fear and leap off the fifty-foot hill. With her upgrade to level-16,
she could probably survive an outright fall of that height, but she
wasn’t trying to gamble that hard. Instead, she was aiming for the
toppled body of the sterocephalus.
Her feet landed on the relatively soft flank of the dinosaur, and she
bent her knees to tumble forward on a diagonal, hoping to deflect as
much of the impact as possible. Ever since Kirito had taught her that
fall damage in Seed VRMMOs changed depending on if you fell or if
you braced yourself for impact, she’d practiced it in ALO. Thanks to
that, she lost only 10 percent of her HP bar, but there was only a
single pixel of TP left.
She slid down the dinosaur’s flank and hit the ground. Her vision
clouded slightly, although she couldn’t tell if that was just adrenaline
or a simulated effect of such. There were about two hundred yards
from here to the glimmering spring at the base of the rocky
mountain. She could sprint there in about ten seconds.

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Gritting her teeth, Sinon launched into motion. One, two, three
steps, and she was at a full sprint…and that was when the TP bar
silently depleted.
The worst feeling of dehydration yet burned her throat. The looming
rock blurred so that she was seeing double, and she closed her eyes.
I guess that’s it.
She waited for death to arrive, leaving her last words for the Hecate
II in her inventory:
If I lose you somehow, I’m going to do everything it takes to get
you back.
The strength was draining from her body. She collapsed forward
onto the ground. Gravelly sand brushed her cheek. Her avatar was
disintegrating into………
Nothing.
It wasn’t disintegrating at all.
Instead, she noticed that the HP bar in the upper left corner was now
decreasing. So when TP reached zero, it wasn’t instant death, just
the start of the damage to her HP. Her eyes shot open as she lay
prone on the sand.
“You could have warned me of that first!” she grumbled.
No one answered, of course. She steadily lifted herself up. Death
hadn’t come for her yet, but there was no time to waste. The HP bar
was decreasing fast enough that she could see it plummeting. Her
new grace period was maybe a minute long at best.
Sinon’s vision was still doubled, which told her that it was a visual-
effect warning that she was at death’s door. Struggling to her feet,
she resumed running for the rock ahead. She bumped into smaller
ones along the way, and by the time she crossed the two hundred
yards thirty seconds later, her HP bar was under the halfway point.
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There were beautiful, delicate flowers at the base of the rock, and a
pristine surface of water swayed beyond them. She swore to herself
that if this turned out to be a poisonous swamp, she would track
down the people who created this mysterious world and pump them
full of lead. She crossed the patch of flowers and knelt at the edge of
the water.
Sinon had no cup, so she thrust her hands into the flickering sky of
stars below. The water was shockingly cold. She lifted her hands to
her lips and drank deeply, without bothering to taste first.
“Ah…”
She gasped. Then she scooped and drank again. And again. And
again.
The dropping of her HP bar stopped, and the TP bar began to
recover, but the rejuvenation she was feeling completely overrode
any attention for small details like those. Scooping the water with
her hands felt too slow, so she lowered her mouth directly to the
water to slake her thirst like animals did.
She never wanted to leave this rock. She wanted to build a house
and live here. Sinon drank and drank from the life-giving pool, not
even noticing that her TP bar was already back to full again.

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2
The returnee school that Asuna, Lisbeth, Silica, and I attended was
located in a renovated public school that had previously been
abandoned after two local high schools combined into one.
Due to this, the campus was surprisingly complex and contained a
number of spots that, like in an RPG, you couldn’t find unless you
already knew they existed. The patch of green I was standing on was
one of them—you had to go upstairs in the extracurricular club
building, head all the way down the hall, exit through the emergency
door, go down the outside stairs, then walk along the planters until
you passed through a tiny gap you wouldn’t notice otherwise.
This patch of grass, surrounded by the tall planters, the club building,
and the library building, was a rectangle about thirty feet to a side. In
the middle, where the earth was slightly raised, was a white siris tree
and a sandalwood tree, side by side, surrounded by seasonal flowers.
Soft grass covered the ground, and there were essentially no weeds.
Someone had to be tending the space, but I’d never seen whomever
it was.
Ever since I’d found the place this past spring, Asuna and I referred
to it as the “secret garden” to keep its information private. Alas,
Lisbeth had figured it out after that, so she and Silica visited it, too.
And now there was a fifth person—actually, sixth, if you counted the
unknown gardener—who knew about the garden.
This fifth person surveyed the space and said in a distinctive voice,
“Well, well, this sure looks like a nice, tidy date spot. Ya sure ya
wanted to bring me here?”

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“I didn’t really have a choice after that flashy entrance,” I grumbled
but caught myself and shook my head. “First of all, it’s not a date
spot. So it’s perfectly fine if I show it to you.”
“Awww, it’s been so long. Ya don’t have to be so cold, Kiri-boy.
Don’tcha want a warm reunion hug?”
The small teenage girl, who wore a khaki hoodie over a dark sailor
uniform, and a small day pack, held out her arms. She was only
slightly shorter than Asuna and maybe an inch or so taller than Silica.
She seemed to have grown quite a bit since the time I’d visited her
regularly…meaning the girl who always seemed much older than I
was still growing, even now.
Argo the Rat.
That was the name of the talented info dealer from back in the
floating castle of Aincrad—who’d shown up in my classroom at
returnee school out of nowhere just a number of minutes ago. At a
school with such a distinct imbalance between boys and girls—in
favor of boys—there was no way an unfamiliar girl in another
school’s uniform would go without notice. So I’d grabbed Argo by the
arm and zipped out of the room before the other guys could crowd
around. Since it was lunch period and the halls were packed with
students, the only place I could go was this little green space. Once
we were alone, there was a different kind of tension in the air.
I backed away from Argo’s smile and outstretched hands. “I…I’ll save
that for the next occasion.”
“You’ve always been a coward, Kiri-boy.”
“I’m fine with that! More important…what the hell are you doing
here?” I asked at last. Argo stuck her hands into the pockets of her
hoodie and grinned. I couldn’t help but stare at her face.
The features beneath that light-colored curly hair were the same as
those of the Rat I knew so well in Aincrad. But because of the lack of
Page | 63
face-painted whiskers on her cheeks or because it had been two—or
make that four—years since the very start of the deadly game, she
seemed much more adult. In all honesty, the first time I’d met Argo
in Aincrad, I couldn’t be sure if she was a boy or a girl. But looking at
her now, even if you subtracted the girl’s uniform, there was no
mistaking her feminine nature. I almost felt a little self-conscious
treating her as brusquely as I typically did.
Argo apparently sensed that I was feeling a little awkward, so she
came closer, wearing a teasing smile, and said, “What am I doing
here? I transferred, of course.”
“H-huhhh?!” I shouted, then clamped my mouth shut. In a more
measured tone, I hissed, “Transferred? It’s been two years since we
escaped. Why now? And more important, why didn’t you ever
contact me? I thought for sure you were…”
I couldn’t say the rest. Argo just smiled and shrugged. “You know I
wouldn’t kick the bucket. Besides, ya can’t knock me for not gettin’ in
touch when I could say the same of you. With your connections, you
coulda learned my contact info easily.”
“……”
She was right.
In the SAO days, I didn’t know Argo’s real name or address or phone
number, but I did know the character name “Argo.” If I’d given that
info to Seijirou Kikuoka at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications’ Virtual Division, he would have pulled all the
information contained in that user’s data for me.
But it wasn’t just Argo; I didn’t proactively search out any of the
players I knew in SAO whose life or death was unknown to me. The
group who’d survived the seventy-fifth-floor boss battle would have
logged out safely, I assumed, but everyone else—like Mr. Nishida or
Kibaou, Nezha, Mahocle, and so on—could be either alive or dead, as
Page | 64
far as I knew. I didn’t try to find out because I was scared. I didn’t
want to hear from Kikuoka’s mouth, with all finality, that they hadn’t
come back.
For the same reason, I didn’t want to find out Argo’s real-life
information. I started to lower my head to apologize.
But with the same speed she had back in SAO, Argo closed the gap
and jabbed my forehead with her index and middle fingers, pushing
me back up straight.
“Did I ask ya to apologize? I said we were both responsible for not
gettin’ in touch. You’ve been kickin’ so much ass in ALO and GGO
under your own name, I coulda reached out and made contact if I
tried.”
Argo let go and retreated a step. I rubbed my forehead, unsure of
how to react. In the end, I just asked her straight up:
“That’s just it…Why didn’t you come to ALO? You’re not the kind of
person who would get freaked out by full-dive machines now, right?”
“Uh, who do you think I am?” She grimaced. Argo stuck her hands
into her pockets again and rocked back and forth. “Mmm. Well,
there are reasons. It’s not like I didn’t care about it at all. When I
heard you could bring back your old SAO character in ALO, that was a
big temptation. But…I knew that if I went into business as an info
dealer again in ALO, I wouldn’t have the same motivation I did back
then…”
“Yeah…I guess I can understand that,” I said. But the truth was that I
understood it all too well.
Sword Art Online was a true alternate world created by the mad
genius Akihiko Kayaba. It trapped us in a floating land of rock and
steel and demanded that its players beat the game with a horrifying
caveat: If you die in the game, you die in real life.

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Hardly a single day went by back then that I didn’t feel fear, despair,
panic, or anguish. But those weren’t the only things I felt in the
game. There was joy in a level-up, excitement at acquiring a rare bit
of loot, exultation after defeating a boss monster. They were true,
heartfelt emotions unlike anything I had experienced in the games
I’d played before SAO. As hard as it was to admit, even my main
game now, ALO, which I truly enjoyed, didn’t elicit the same level of
dedication that SAO had…
But I brushed that momentary sentiment aside and asked, “In that
case…what have you been doing the last two years, and where?”
“I’ve been going to school where I live, obviously.”
“Oh…”
But of course. That should have been obvious. I’d been through a lot
after SAO, as well, but for the most part, what I did boiled down to
“going to school where I live.”
“Where are you from? What year are you in?”
Argo thrust out her right hand and replied, “Two questions’ll cost ya
a thousand col.”
“Oh, right…”
I reached into my uniform pocket for a thousand-col gold coin before
I stopped myself. Argo just laughed.
“Nya-ha-ha-ha…I’m just kiddin’. I live in the lower left part of
Kanagawa, and I’m in my last year of high school.”
“Lower left,” I murmured, consulting a mental map of Kanagawa
Prefecture. I knew that in the southwestern part of it were the cities
of Odawara, Hakone, and Atami…but the last one was actually in
Shizuoka. In any case, they weren’t exactly close to Tokyo. If she was
in the third year of high school, that made her a year above me. Like
Asuna and Liz, she’d be graduating in the latter half of the year.
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“…Why would you transfer here now?”
“Mmm.” Argo grunted, then shrugged and said, “Ah, might as well.”
She reached for the little day pack she was wearing. Her fingers
dexterously found the pocket on the back without looking, and she
pulled out a rectangular case. It was made of yellow leather, and she
removed a gray card from it that she handed to me.
I took the item, which I saw was actually a business card. My eyes
were drawn to the name printed in the middle of its face.
“Tomo…Hosaka. That’s your real name?”
“Sorry, it doesn’t sound like it’d be my name, huh?”
“Erm, I didn’t mean it like that…I was just surprised that you’d tell me
your real name that easily…”
“I’m transferring to this school. It’s not like I can hide it forever.”
Argo, aka Tomo Hosaka, pouted.
I looked back at the business card. Right beneath her name was an e-
mail address and phone number. On the upper left was her title. To
my surprise, it said MMO TODAY, WRITER/RESEARCHER.
“Wait, really?!” I exclaimed.
That reaction alone told her what I had spotted on the card. She
nodded and said, “Yep.”
“So you’re a writer for MMO Today…Meaning I might have already
read several articles you’ve written without realizing it…?”
“Probably.”
“But isn’t MMO Today centered around news about The Seed? Can
you write articles if you’re not playing the games?”
“I’m not covering individual games. I’m more focused on overall
news of The Seed Nexus and the hardware end, I guess. Sometimes

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I’ll whip up a character and do a quick dive, but as soon as my
research is done, I delete ’em.”
“Ohhh…”
I exhaled and looked over Argo’s face again. It wasn’t particularly
shocking that she was one year older than I, but hearing that she was
a writer for MMO Today, the biggest source of news on the world of
VRMMOs, made me feel like the gap between us was that much
larger. I didn’t even have a part-time job.
“…I guess…I have to treat you with more respect…From now on, I’ll
call you Miss Hosaka…”
“Knock it off! Just be normal,” Argo snapped quite seriously. She
jutted her chin at me accusingly and said, “Well? You’re gonna make
me introduce myself and won’t do me the same courtesy?”
“Huh? Oh, right…”
At long last, I realized I hadn’t actually told her my real name. It felt
awkward to do it now, after all this time, but I didn’t have a business
card to do the talking for me.
“Well, uh…my real name is Kazuto Kirigaya. It’s good to see you
again.”
“Yep. Likewise,” she said, grinning, and stuck out her right hand. Her
palm was vertical this time, making it clear she was asking for a
handshake, not payment. I hesitantly reached out and grabbed it.
She squeezed firmly. Through her skin, I felt a pulse that didn’t
belong to me.
“…You’re alive,” I said, the words I couldn’t bring myself to say
earlier.
Argo smiled at me again, though the nuances of its warmth were
slightly different this time. “It’s thanks to you, Kiri-boy. The truth is, I

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didn’t see myself lasting until the hundredth floor. If you hadn’t
beaten it on the seventy-fifth, I’d have prob’ly kicked the bucket
somewhere before then.”
“It wasn’t just me…”
That was all I could say. There was a sudden wrenching feeling in my
chest. And it was true—I only defeated Heathcliff, aka Akihiko
Kayaba, because of the support, encouragement, and guidance of
many players. That included Argo, of course.
I’m so glad she survived, I thought, savoring the emotion, before I let
go of her hand. I inhaled the forest-scented air, then exhaled, ridding
myself of all those lingering feelings. Then I got back on topic.
“So…what’s the relation between you transferring to this school and
your writing position with MMO Today?”
“Ahhh, that…”
But Argo didn’t say another word. She glanced toward the gap
between the planters, which was the only way in or out of the secret
garden. I started to hear some quick, sprightly footsteps.
A few seconds later, Asuna burst into the green space, holding her
phone in one hand. I’d sent her a text while we were on the way over
here. Asuna came to a stop on the grass, looked at me first, then at
Argo next to me.
“…No way…”
Her hazel-brown eyes glittered with the light trickling through the
leaves overhead. Argo blinked, too, then lifted her hand and made a
waving motion.
“Hiya. How ya been, A-cha—?”
But she couldn’t finish her question. Asuna charged with such speed
that she seemed to be possessed by her old identity, the Flash of

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SAO, and she wrapped the smaller woman in a tremendous hug. Her
phone slipped out of her right hand in the process, and I just barely
managed to catch it before it hit the ground.
Asuna buried her face in Argo’s shoulder and murmured, “I knew…I
knew I would see you again one day.”
“…Sorry I haven’t been in touch for a while, A-chan,” she whispered,
patting the back of the other girl’s blouse. Once they separated,
Asuna stared her in the face, then said the exact same thing I had
several minutes earlier.
“So, um…what exactly are you doing here, Argo?”

Lunch period at returnee school lasted from 12:40 to 1:30. Fifty

minutes was a long lunch for a high school, but we didn’t have
enough time to sit around and reminisce. Plus, when you were a
growing teenager, skipping lunch was not an option if you wanted to
survive the day.
So the message I sent to Asuna on the way over was GET THREE PORTIONS OF
SOMETHING FROM CAFETERIA, COME TO SECRET GARDEN. Asuna brought three baguette

sandwiches. One of them was Camembert, ham, and arugula. The

second was cream cheese, smoked salmon, and tomato. The last was
shrimp, avocado, and basil. We set down a lightweight polyethylene
sheet at the foot of the sandalwood tree, and Asuna gave Argo the
first choice of sandwiches.
“Pick whichever one you like, Argo. This is on me.”
“Ah, geez, I can’t do that,” she protested, but Asuna shoved the
three sandwiches toward her face with a smile.
“Yes, you can. Remember how you helped us with the quest when
we were buying the house in the forest on the twenty-second floor?
I’m paying you back for that!”

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“…Ahhh, right, that did happen,” Argo said, her eyes narrowing as
she reminisced. “All right, I’ll accept yer gift. I think I’ll take…this
one.”
With a grin, she took the smoked salmon baguette. Asuna turned to
look at me and asked which one I wanted. Out of the two, I figured
she would want the avocado, so I told her, “Ham and cheese!”
Despite being two years since we were released from SAO—and
living together with Asuna for only two weeks in that world—I
couldn’t get past the habits from sharing an inventory back then. And
I had developed a bad one: Whenever Asuna paid for something for
the both of us, I often forgot to pay her back. I only realized it this
time after I’d taken the sandwich, and I quickly pulled out my phone.
Asuna had bought us three iced teas, too, so I totaled the cost of
three portions, divided by two, and input that into the payment app
so Asuna’s device could read the code it displayed. It was even easier
to send personal payments using an Augma, but in my panic, I left
that in my bag back in the classroom.
At that very moment, I froze, phone in one hand and baguette in the
other, and gasped, “Oh…!!”
We were supposed to be using this lunch period to meet with Liz and
Silica in the cafeteria to talk about the anomaly that had shaken The
Seed Nexus to its core yesterday. On top of that, Suguha and Sinon
were supposed to take part using Augmas from their high schools in
Ohmiya and Ueno. All of them were waiting for me and Asuna to join
them right now.
Argo gave me an odd look, but Asuna just rolled her eyes and said,
“So you did forget. Don’t worry—I got in touch with everyone and
asked them to postpone the meeting until after school.”
“Oh…th-thanks,” I said sheepishly.

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Argo ducked her head, too, and said, “Did ya have plans already?
Sorry for messin’ that up.”
“It’s fine. I knew that lunch break was going to be way too short for
what we need to do, anyway,” Asuna explained, passing us the cups
of iced tea. “Come on—let’s eat. I’m starving.”
I wasn’t about to argue with that suggestion. I peeled back the paper
and bit down on the end of the sandwich where the insides jutted
out. A local ran the meal stand in the cafeteria, so while the food was
premade, the baguette crust was fragrant and the veggies were
fresh. I ate a few bites in silence, then washed them down with some
iced tea.
Argo finished half of hers in no time, looking thoroughly satisfied.
“This ain’t your average cafeteria food. I made the right choice
comin’ here.”
“Pretty much everything on the cafeteria menu is good. But…aside
from that,” I said, clearing my throat and returning to the suspended
topic of conversation, “you gotta tell us why you decided to transfer
now of all moments.”
“The timing’s not that weird, ya know. This school splits its admission
period into early and late periods, and this is the entrance date for
the late admissions.”
“What, really? Then…they should have just made it a two-semester
system, rather than a trimester…”
“Then ya wouldn’t have winter vacation.”
“Okay, never mind, then,” I replied immediately.
Asuna giggled and explained, “This school only developed an
admissions system this August. So it wasn’t in time for the end of
summer vacation, and they had to set it up for the end of September

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instead. That makes Argo transfer student number one. Also, they
say you don’t have to be a former SAO player to transfer in.”
“Really…? But is any student at a normal school actually going to
want to come to this place? I feel like society treats this like its own
unique, isolated thing…”
“Yes, but because it’s a specialty school, lots of the curricula are
practical in nature, right? You can select the units you really want to
learn about…And since the media’s been reporting on the various
unique qualities of the school, more people are getting interested.
There was a transfer student in my class, too, and they said the same
thing.”
“Uh-huh…So Argo’s here for the same…,” I said before coming to a
realization.
The anomaly we were supposed to talk about with the others—the
forced conversion of players from every Seed VRMMO into the
mysterious Unital Ring—started yesterday, September 27th.
And Argo, who was writing articles about The Seed Nexus for MMO
Today, transferred here out of nowhere on September 28th.
Was that really a coincidence? Argo claimed it was the first day of
school for the later admissions, but that couldn’t be the only reason.
“Argo, are you actually here because of Unital—?”
She cut me off by pressing her index finger against my lips.
“Don’t be in such a rush, Kiri-boy. I’ll give ya a proper explanation,
but I don’t have enough time for it now. Mind if I join you for that
after-school meeting?”
“Wh…what?”
Asuna and I shared stunned looks.

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In the SAO days, Argo had contributed much to our advancement
through the deadly game, thanks to her business as an info dealer.
But around the middle floors, she was focused on behind-the-scenes
matters, and even I hardly saw her after that point. Silica and Liz
might have known her name, but they probably never bought or sold
her information, and Leafa and Sinon would have no point of
reference for her whatsoever.
But thinking back on it, Liz and Silica had only met Leafa a year and a
half ago, and Sinon just nine months before. But now they were so
close, it was like they’d been friends for years. Argo had a chance to
fit in, too. Asuna and I nodded and turned back to Argo.
“That’s fine. But…just…don’t say anything weird, okay?”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘weird’?”
“I’m counting on your good judgment in that regard,” I said in all
seriousness and resumed eating my baguette. Argo would make
good friends with the others, I told myself, and tried not to listen to
the note of foreboding in the back of my mind.

At three thirty, after the end of our last short homeroom period, I
quickly left the class for the computer lab, which was on the
northern end of the third floor of Building Two.
It was called a “lab” because the place had once held classes on
information technology when it was a public school; there wasn’t
actually some giant mainframe there. And most of the desktop PCs
that had been there were removed by now, so the room definitely
didn’t live up to its name.
As students of the school’s mechatronics course, two other boys and
I formed a research team and were officially borrowing the computer
lab from the school. Each of us had a key to the door, but the other

Page | 74
two were going to Akihabara to look for parts today, which made it a
convenient place for our meeting.
I rushed down the connecting hallway between the buildings, then
climbed the stairs to the third floor. I assumed I’d be first there, but
Lisbeth, aka Rika Shinozaki, was already waiting outside the room.
“You’re late!” Liz shouted as soon as she saw me.
I knifed my hand and dipped my head in apology. “No way. You’re
just early! I sprinted here as soon as my homeroom let out…”
“Well, my homeroom teacher is away on an assignment, so I didn’t
have any homeroom. What else am I supposed to do?”
“Waste some time in your class before you come over…”
“I decided to walk slowly, so I would arrive at the right time!”
We bickered the same way we did so often in ALO, but here at
school, I was in my second year, while Liz was a third-year student,
so I felt the tiniest bit submissive. Klein and Agil were much older,
and I could speak with them as equals, so this had something to do
with the structural power of school years. If they made a Seed game
set in a gigantic school, would it be popular? Maybe there already
was one.
“Why are you spacing out? C’mon, open the door already.”
Liz smacked me on the back amicably, and I returned to my senses.
There was a key with a faded plastic tag in my pocket. I took it out
and stuck it into the keyhole. The cranky old cylinder lock turned. I
pulled open the sliding door, held my hand to my chest, and bowed.
“After you, Mistress Lisbeth.”
“Thank you, manservant,” she said smugly, and I followed her into
the computer lab. We tried to vacuum it as often as possible, but
there was no escaping that particular smell of old classrooms. The

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afternoon sun blazed through the white curtains, creating a strong
enough contrast of light that we didn’t need to hit the switch.
“Ooh, nice. I really like the atmosphere in here,” commented Liz,
who had never been to the lab before. I was so used to it that it
didn’t elicit any emotions in me. If it were a wooden building, then
maybe there would be a photogenic quality to it, but Building Two
wasn’t that old. The walls were slightly cracked concrete, the floors
were faded linoleum, and the desks were cheap melamine surfaces.
But Liz crossed the room, looking at everything with great curiosity,
and turned back to me with an enigmatic smile when she reached
the window.
“Doesn’t this seem like a scene from an anime set at a school? After
class, at the older school building, where a boy and girl are alone
together…”
I leaned backward, slightly freaked by her implications.
She jabbed a finger at me and finished, “…having a crazy battle with
psychic powers!”
“A battle, huh…?” I replied, exasperated.
Liz lowered her hand and cackled. “What else would we do?”
“Nothing at all. Anyway…what’s taking everyone else so long?” I
wondered, right as the door slid open again.
“Thanks for waiting.” “Sorry about the delay!”
That was Asuna and Silica, coming in together. And behind them…no
third person.
Did Argo ask us to let her join the meeting and then back out of it? I
reached for my phone to get in touch with her, then remembered
that we hadn’t traded information. The image of Argo the Rat in the
secret garden just two hours ago was already fading into dappled

Page | 76
sunlight in my mind. As though Asuna and I had witnessed an
illusion…
“Hiya!” said a very casual voice, and Argo herself trotted through the
open doorway.
I nearly fell onto the floor. Asuna waved at her and smiled, but Liz
and Silica were dumbfounded.
Argo, still dressed in her hoodie, noticed them and gave a little bow,
then turned to me and said, “Hey, introduce me already.”
“Oh, right…Uh, Liz, Silica, this is Argo. As of today, she’s a transfer
student at the school. She’s an SAO survivor like us, and back in
Aincrad—”
Argo cut in smoothly and continued, “Back in Aincrad, I was Kiri-boy’s
special friend.”
“Kiri-boy?!” cried Liz.
“Special friend?!” cried Silica.
I performed a slide dash, rushing to Argo’s side, where I successfully
withstood the urge to yank her around by the hood of her jacket.
Instead, I hissed, “What did I tell you about not saying anything
weird?!”
“Whaddaya mean? It’s the truth.”
“How is that the truth?! We weren’t anything other than salesperson
and customer, and you know it!”
“Why, what a cold thing to say. After all the times I offered ya
preferential treatment…”
Asuna had heard enough of the bickering and snipped, “Can we leave
it at that and get down to business? We can introduce Argo during
the meeting. Otherwise we’ll have to do it again for Suguha and
Shino-non.”
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“Oh, r-right…Good point,” I said, seeing the stunned looks on Liz’s
and Silica’s faces. “I’ll explain who she is very soon, so why don’t we
prep for the meeting now?”
“Are you all right? You sort of tripped over your words there,” noted
Silica, fixing me with a piercing gaze. I quickly backed away and made
a beeline for my school bag.

Page | 78
Page | 79
 * * *
The desks in the computer lab weren’t classroom desks but long
desks for seating three people. We pushed two together in the
center of the room to make an impromptu meeting table. Asuna and
Argo sat on the left side of the desk, Liz and Silica lined up on the
right, and I sat at the end, closest to the door.
All of us wore Augmas—Argo’s was painted mustard yellow, with a
little rat symbol on the battery holder in the back. Once they were all
booted up, a little fairy-sized Yui appeared over the desk.
“Papa, Mama, Liz, Silica! Hello!” she said in a cute little voice. Then
she noticed Argo. “And this must be…”
“Oh, er, I’m going to explain in a minute, as soon as we start the—,” I
started to say, but Yui just blinked once and then grinned.
“Argo! You were very helpful to Papa and Mama in SAO. My name is
Yui,” she said, bowing.
Argo’s mouth just hung open. “Uhhh…how did you know I was
Argo…?”
“Your biometrics are a ninety-nine percent match to your SAO avatar
data!”
“But…I grew a fair bit the last two years…”
“I run a growth simulation during my identification process!” Yui
chirped, at which point Argo finally seemed to understand that Yui
was an AI, not an actual child.
After three seconds of silence, she reached a hand over the desk.
“W-well, it’s nice to be working with you.”
“Yes, likewise!”

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Yui grabbed Argo’s thumb with her tiny hands. It occurred to me that
Yui’s information-collection abilities, which were far beyond those of
any organic human being, had to be a source of envy for Argo, who
was still doing a kind of info-dealer job in the real world. As Yui
returned to the center of the table, I made a mental note to keep an
eye on her and make sure she didn’t get recruited for any fishy side
jobs.
Yui spread her hands and said, “Now I’ll connect to Sinon and Leafa!”
There was a visual effect like whitish sparks in the air, and Sinon and
Suguha appeared on the window end of the table. They were both
wearing their school uniforms and sat in chairs with different
designs.
This was the first time trying out Yui’s AR meeting system, but the
realism of the experience was stunning; it was like there were two
other people physically present in the room with us. They were just
as shocked, and they looked around the computer lab with
amazement.
“…Wow…so this is returnee school…,” murmured Sinon, who started
to get up from her chair, but I held out my hands to stop her.
“No, don’t move! What you’re seeing is being overwritten by the
Augma, so if you move around, you’ll bump into stuff and fall over.”
“Oh…right. By the way, I’m in the language lab. So if some other
student comes in, they’ll see me just sitting by myself, talking to
nothing, right?” Sinon asked.
Yui enthusiastically confirmed this, and Suguha made a face. “Ugh,
I’m connecting from the nurse’s office. Someone’s sure to come
by…”
“What about your club, Sugu?” I asked.

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The kendo team member stuck out her tongue. “I took time off
today.”
“Wait, really? Are you sure? What if the third-years take it out on
you?”
“I’ll be just fine, thank you very much! Besides, the third-years
graduated from the club after nationals in August, so I’m the vice-
captain now.”
“Wait, really? You should have said so! We haven’t done any
celebrations for you.”
“Being made vice-captain isn’t worth making a fuss over. But if I go
far in the newcomer competition in November, I’ll demand a major
party!”
We were just having a sibling chat in the midst of this important
meeting. But Silica looked surprised and asked Suguha, “If you’re the
vice-captain, then is there someone better than you in the club?”
“Oh, you bet. I win some and lose some in practice, but I kind of
follow my own individual style…You want an orthodox person to be
your team captain.”
I was starting to worry about her getting bullied again, but the kendo
club wouldn’t choose an unpopular member to be vice-captain.
Nationals had happened in early August, when I was still in the
hospital, so I hadn’t been able to go cheer her on. The newcomer
competition for first- and second-years after the seniors left was
coming up, so I definitely needed to be there for it.
“Anyway,” I said, “let’s not waste any more time. First of all, I want to
introduce her—er, our guest, I mean.”
I pointed to Argo, who rose from her seat and bowed.
“This is a new transfer student at returnee school as of today, Tomo
Hosaka…But in SAO, she was the info dealer known as Argo the Rat.”
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Immediately, Liz and Silica said in unison, “Ohhh! From the strategy
guides!” Sinon and Suguha looked at them suspiciously, muttering
“Strategy guides?” Argo herself giggled nervously and stood up again
so she could give handshakes to the four people aside from me,
Asuna, and Yui—although in the case of the two remote partners,
they had to mimic shaking hands.
Of course, it also occurred to me that this was only worsening the
imbalance of boys and girls on the team. There were tons of male
VRMMO players at this school, so if we wanted to recruit more to
the group, it would have been easy, but I just never really felt like it.
That was probably because I’d already met the greatest friend I could
ever have after two years in the Underworld. I didn’t think I’d ever
have another guy friend my age I’d reach such a close understanding
with, and I didn’t really want to. When he died in battle, a part of me
died with him. That was a scar that would never heal for the rest of
my life, most likely.
I took a deep breath of wax-scented air, stifling the sharp pain in my
chest, and stated, “Now that introductions are over, let’s get down
to business. The first thing I want to know is the state of non-ALO
players…You got converted into Unital Ring from GGO, too, didn’t
you, Sinon?”
“Yep,” she agreed, drawing everyone’s attention.
“And just to confirm, you know that your avatar stays in the virtual
space after you log out, right? Are you in a safe location?”
“Well…I think I’m safe. The birdmen are protecting me.”
Everyone, including me, looked puzzled at that. Sinon just shrugged,
as if to say she didn’t get it, either.

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3
The bus heading to the north gate of Kichijoji Station was surprisingly
empty. Asuna sat close to the exit, rested her school bag on her
knees, and exhaled.
The warmth of the unexpected reunion with Argo still buzzed in her
chest. But at the same time, there was something discordant about
the day. That feeling was coming from her meeting with the other
transfer student, Shikimi Kamura.
There hadn’t been any hostility from Shikimi, not at all. They’d talked
for just a few minutes, and she’d been completely relaxed the entire
time. The reason she’d come over to say hello, despite being in the
classroom next door, was because, according to her, they’d met at a
party within the electronics manufacturing industry years and years
ago. Asuna didn’t remember her, but Shikimi Kamura was apparently
the daughter of the founder of Kamura, the makers of the Augma
and rival to RCT Progress.
But it wasn’t Shikimi’s background that distressed Asuna’s
subconscious so much.
It was her uniform. She was wearing the high school uniform of
Eterna Girls’ Academy, a unified twelve-year school in Minato
Ward—the school that Asuna had attended before she’d become
prisoner to Sword Art Online.
Asuna had only attended through middle school, but she did not
remember ever knowing a student in her year with the family name
of Kamura. It was a distinctive name, and Shikimi had a striking
appearance, so she couldn’t possibly have missed seeing her during
all three years of school.

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That meant Shikimi had come to the high school of Eterna Girls’
Academy from somewhere else and, half a year before graduation,
transferred to the returnee school instead.
Asuna asked if that was going to have a negative effect on her
exams, but Shikimi was planning to go to college overseas and had
already received a diploma from the International Baccalaureate and
an official SAT score report. She’d heard that American colleges
valued the essay portion just as much as the score, which helped
explain the decision to come to the returnee school, where there
was a greater degree of freedom for scholastic pursuits. But it still
seemed like an extreme decision, and it was hard for Asuna to shake
the unpleasant idea that Shikimi viewed the school like a special
subsidy to take advantage of.
That impression was probably coming from the uniform Shikimi was
wearing. If the SAO Incident hadn’t happened, Asuna might have
been wearing that gray blazer, too. Eterna’s middle school had a
featureless jumper dress for a uniform, so the blazer jackets the high
schoolers wore, with their navy-blue collars, looked sharp by
comparison. Her mother had told her to take exams for other high
schools anyway, so she might not have had the chance to wear it, but
it was hard not to think negative thoughts when faced with it once
again.
Asuna didn’t have a complex about attending her current school, and
she didn’t harbor any secret wishes to redo her life from four years
ago. But looking at Shikimi Kamura in that uniform, it was like…It was
like she was looking at herself as a student at Eterna Girls’ Academy
had she never been trapped in SAO…
“…This is stupid,” she muttered, closing her eyes. There were nine
more bus stops until Kichijoji Station. She was likely to stay up all
night again tonight, so she had to find her sleep where she could.

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Asuna rested her head against the wall of the bus, but sleep would
not visit her. In the back of her mind, she couldn’t shake the image of
Shikimi’s perfectly pristine features, a clever beauty that, for some
reason, stirred up a faint anxiety in Asuna.
Asuna had no complaints with her life. She loved and trusted Kazuto
and Yui with all her heart, and she’d met the best possible friends in
Rika, Keiko, Shino, and Suguha. No matter what Shikimi, with her
perfectly unblemished record, might think of her, Asuna knew that
she was perfectly happy.
But the fact that I have to tell myself that is a sign I’m shaken by
this.
Asuna let out a long, slow breath and decided to think only about
what pleasures awaited her.
The forced conversion to the mysterious VRMMO Unital Ring had
brought great confusion and chaos to The Seed Nexus, but Asuna
was more excited than worried or frightened about this new chapter.
Even the extreme new rule, that you couldn’t log in again if you died,
wasn’t going to faze a veteran of SAO.
At present, the developers of ALO—Ymir—and many other groups
were working on a solution to the situation, according to Argo. At
some point, the incident would be over. Until then, she was going to
help protect their home in the woods and, if possible, try to uncover
the mysteries of the new world.
Sadly, Argo wasn’t planning to take part in Unital Ring anytime soon,
but her transfer to the school didn’t seem unrelated to UR, either.
Apparently, she’d had a premonition of the UR incident for a while
now, and she made the decision to transfer to the returnee school to
get closer to finding out the truth behind this event.
As always, Argo wouldn’t speak about anything she didn’t have
evidence to back up, and they had limited time for the meeting, so
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that was the extent of what she reported to them. But it was clear
she was going to be investigating the secrets of Unital Ring from the
outside. When they parted ways at the school, she grinned and said
that she’d leave the interior investigation to Asuna. That left no
other option but to do her best.
Asuna never felt like her long commute was painful, but on this day,
she finally wished that her home was closer to school. At some point,
the discordant feeling in her chest had melted away.

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4
“I’m home…”
As soon as I came through the entryway’s glass door, I heard a voice
call out, “Welcome back, Big Brother! You’re late, by the way!”
Suguha was waiting in her jumpsuit on the step up to the hallway,
hands clasped in front of her chest, hopping straight up and down.
“I can’t help that. I have twice the commute time you do. And I raced
home from the station as fast as I could.”
Sure enough, even though September was coming to an end, there
were huge beads of sweat on my forehead. It was nearly a mile and a
half from Honkawagoe Station to the Kirigaya household, and biking
that distance in six minutes had to be a new personal best. I couldn’t
brag about it, though, because Suguha could get home in under five,
apparently. Still, my wise young sister did not insult her brother’s
pitiful leg strength. Instead, she offered me a face towel.
“Here you go!”
“Oh, thanks,” I said, taking it and wiping my forehead.
Next there was a bottle of mineral water. “And this is for you, too!”
she said, taking off the cap before handing it over.
I thanked her and downed half the bottle at once.
“Ahhh, I feel alive again…”
“Now time for another sprint!” she urged me. I rushed upstairs to my
room and had just barely changed into a T-shirt and shorts when
Suguha burst inside without knocking. “Are you ready?! Let’s go,
then!!”

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In her hand was a well-used AmuSphere.
“Go? Where are you going to dive from?”
“From here, obviously! If we don’t time it right, we might end up
alone and in a dangerous situation.”
“Don’t be dramatic…It’s not like the Underworld, with its time-
acceleration feature. If we’re off, it’s only by a minute or two. Plus,
Liz and Silica should already be in there.”
“C’mon, just hurry!”
Suguha stuck the AmuSphere on my head, then jumped onto the bed
so vigorously that the wooden slats beneath the mattress creaked. I
had no choice but to lie down next to her. Suguha lifted three
fingers.
“We’ll go on the count of three! Three, two, one…Link Start!”
I chanted the command with her, wondering if Suguha’s hand was
going to drop when the device took over and flop onto my side.
Of course, I wasn’t going to see it happen, even if it did.

When my eyes opened, I was staring at a ceiling of brand-new

wooden boards.
Until around four in the morning, there had been a huge, gaping hole
through to the sky, but there wasn’t a single trace of it anymore. The
log cabin, our beloved forest home that got ripped out of New
Aincrad from the very foundation and suffered such terrible damage
in the crash to earth, had been successfully repaired with the extra
help of Lisbeth and Silica.
That’s great. I’m so glad, I thought, rolling back over, when
something smacked my side.
“Come on, Kirito, get up! We’ve got a whooooole lot of stuff to do!”

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“Yeah, yeah…”
I sat up, which loudly clanked the iron armor Lisbeth had crafted for
me, and looked to the side. There was Suguha’s avatar, Leafa,
dressed in a simple, one-piece cloth dress.
I looked around the room. The living room was much more spacious
now that all the furniture was gone, and there were no other players
present. Asuna was probably on her way home still. While the other
four of us were at school, Alice and Yui were supposed to be
protecting the cabin. Where were they now?
No sooner had the question entered my mind than a high-pitched
metallic clang! sounded outside the window. It was not the sound of
a hammer striking an anvil…It was a sword fight.
“What’s that?!”
I bolted to my feet, opened the door, and hurried outside.
There in our front yard, surrounded by a variety of crafting stations,
were two figures swinging swords at each other. The time in Unital
Ring was synced up with the real world, so the setting sun was red in
the distance ahead of me, making it hard to see who it was. One of
the silhouettes was about my height, but the other was much
smaller, like a child.
“Yaaaa!”
The childlike figure issued a fierce bellow and swung down a sword
with two hands. The speed was impressive, but the adult figure
comfortably blocked the swing with a one-handed parry. There was
another loud clang. Thick blond braids shone, dazzling, in the light of
the setting sun.
At last, I realized that the adult was Alice. And the black-haired girl
fearlessly attacking the most powerful Integrity Knight ever was none

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other than my daughter with Asuna, the world’s greatest top-down
AI, Yui.
“H-hey, what’s going on…?”
Without thinking, I tried to insert myself in the fight, and Leafa
grabbed my shoulder.
“Wait. Isn’t she training?”
“T-training…?”

Page | 91
Page | 92
I glanced at my sister, then back to the center of the yard.
It was true that Alice was receiving and blocking Yui’s attacks, but
she wasn’t striking back at all. In fact, with each blow, she seemed to
be giving small bits of advice.
“See? It’s fine,” Suguha said.
“Y-yeah…,” I agreed, although I couldn’t remember ever seeing Yui
holding a weapon…except for the one time she’d used a GM weapon
against the ultrapowerful boss monster the Fatal Scythe in the
underground labyrinth of the first floor of Aincrad. But now Yui was
treated like a player and had an HP bar like the rest of us. Alice didn’t
even need to fight back; she could potentially hurt herself with her
own sword. I was in a state of near panic as I watched the scene
unfold.
Yui finished listening intently to Alice’s advice, then took her distance
again. She held up her short sword, which had some rather exotic
decoration on it, in a basic mid-level stance…
“Yaaaa!”
Despite her young age, she cried out fiercely as she charged. I
couldn’t help but make a note of surprise.
When beginners to VRMMOs attacked with a sword, they tended to
perform a two-stage action: pull back, then swing down. There were
situations where that was exactly the right move to do, but in almost
any case, condensing the start and finish of the swing into one
motion provided better speed and power. Yui’s slash was firmly in
line with this theory, and in fact, Alice had to pull back her left foot
half a step to defend it.
Another clear, high clash of metal on metal filled the yard. The two
came to a stop, then separated again.

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“That was a very good one, Yui,” Alice assessed. I clapped in
admiration, drawing their attention. Alice seemed a little bashful,
while Yui just flashed a huge smile.
“Papa! Welcome back!” she cried and started trotting toward me,
still brandishing the short sword.
I had to hold out my hand. “Whoa, whoa, put that thing away first.”
“Oh! Of course!”
She screeched to a halt, then slid the weapon into the sheath on her
left side. Now she was free to leap into my arms, where I lifted her
high overhead before nestling her in my left elbow.
“Thanks, Yui,” I said. “So…why are you practicing with a sword…?”
“To fight, of course! My proficiency with One-Handed Sword skills
just reached 7!”
“Oh yeah? You’ve been working hard,” I encouraged, stroking her
head. Yui giggled delightedly.
My One-Handed Sword skill, which I brought over from ALO, was at
the maximum value of 1,000, but all the other new skills I’d gained
were only at 2 or 3. For a single day’s work, getting her skill up to 7
was a lot of dedication.
“If you’re up that high, maybe you can use a sword skill by now,” I
suggested.
“Ummm…”
Yui opened her ring menu and moved to the skill window to check.
“Oh! It says I can use Vertical and Horizontal and Slant!”
“There you go. Those three are the foundation of all sword skills.
Once your proficiency gets higher, I can teach you about the cooler
ones, like Vorpal Strike and Howling Octave.”

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“Yay!” Yui exclaimed.
“About that, Kirito,” said another voice, drawing my attention away.
It was Alice, coming closer in her white dress, looking somewhat
upset.
“Hey, Alice. Thanks for watching the house and tutoring Yui.
So…what did you want to say?”
“Take a look at your skill window.”
“Huh? Uh…okay…”
I drew a circle in the air with my finger. The ring menu appeared with
a jingling sound, and I picked the SKILLS icon. The window that
appeared had a list of acquired skills, arranged by proficiency, so of
course at the top was the One-Handed Sword category…
“…Huh?”
I stared at the proficiency number in shock. When I checked this
screen yesterday, it was definitely at the maximum of 1,000, but now
that number was missing a zero.
“A…a hundred?! Why…?”
“Apparently, last night, when the grace period ended, the proficiency
of whatever skills we brought over was lowered as well. Along with
that, it made all the advanced sword skills impossible to use.”
“No way…” I groaned. Leafa checked her own window and exclaimed
“Oh no! Me too!” We hung our heads together, brother and sister,
but I forced myself to rally.
“W-wait just a second…We fought those PKers last night after the
grace period finished, right? I’m pretty sure I used Vorpal Strike at
the time. That’s supposed to be a pretty advanced skill.”
“Look at your list of sword skills,” Alice stated.

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At her suggestion, I tapped on ONE-HANDED SWORD SKILLS. The sub-window it
loaded showed the sword skills I could currently use. At the top were
the basic single-attack skills: Vertical, Horizontal, and Slant; below
them were the two-part Vertical Arc and Horizontal Arc. Then there
was the low charging skill Rage Spike; the high-jumping skill Sonic
Leap; the three-part Sharp Nail…and that was the last of them that
was lit up. Below that, Vertical Square was grayed out, and tapping it
opened a pop-up that said Required proficiency: 150. The numbers
being different from SAO and ALO was understandable, but this
didn’t explain why I was able to use the advanced skill Vorpal Strike
earlier.
I scrolled through the list and found Vorpal Strike a considerable way
down, grayed out. The required proficiency was…700. That was miles
above my current number of 100.
“What does that mean…? Was I simply recreating the movement on
my own…?” I muttered.
But from my arm, Yui replied, “When you used Savage Fulcrum and
Vorpal Strike in the battle yesterday, they had proper visual effects.
That means you didn’t simply mimic the motions.”
“That’s what I figured,” I agreed, then handed Yui over to Leafa and
took a position in the center of the yard. I drew my fine iron
longsword, which was simply made but had a satisfying weight, and
dropped my center of gravity. I extended my left hand forward and
pulled the sword back in my right until it was over my shoulder—but
the pre-effect of the sword skill did not arrive.
“Uryaa!” I shouted stubbornly, whipping the sword forward, but it
merely ended in a thrust. There was no bloodred Vorpal Strike flash,
nor even a hint of that giant jet-engine roar. I tried it again…and
again. The result was the same.
“Kirito, this is really pathetic,” Alice groaned.

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“Y-yeah, I know that!” I snapped back childishly. I gave it a fourth try
for good measure.
Shwoaaaaa-shakiiiing!!
“Wh-whaaaa—?!”
Blazing crimson, the sword shot forward, dragging me behind it. I
flew ten feet through the air, then landed right on my chest.
“Gwurf!”
In the upper left corner, my HP bar decreased the tiniest bit. I
groaned, limbs splayed out like a frog, until Alice rushed over and
offered her hand.
“A-are you all right?!”
“Yeah…somehow…”
Once she’d helped me to my feet, I stared at the sword in my hand.
Then I looked to her and murmured, “That was it just now, right?
Vorstrike…”
“I must say, I do not much approve of your real-worlder customs of
abbreviating everything,” she said crossly. I gave her a hasty “My b,”
which made her glare turn even icier.
“It did activate…I’ll admit that,” she said. “I wonder what it means…”
“You try it, too, Alice!” said Yui from Leafa’s arms. Alice glanced over
at her, murmured her assent, then drew the sword from her waist. It
had the same design as my sword, so it had to have been Liz’s work
again.
I backed away until I was standing next to Leafa. Then Alice took a
stance with the blade held upright in front of her face.
Back in the Underworld, where she was born, the sword skills
imported into the system from SAO existed as “special techniques.”
That made her capable of using a great variety of moves right away
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in ALO. But she seemed to prefer the one-hit-kill types, rather than
speedy combo skills. It seemed like she was going to attempt the
advanced One-Handed Sword skill Gelid Blade.
Her left foot stepped forward, and her sword jutted behind her to
the right. Normally, performing this action would cause bluish-purple
effects to surround the sword, but nothing happened.
Undaunted, Alice shouted, “Yaaaa!” and thrust the sword forward. It
was a tremendous slash, but no Gelid Blade resulted. She pulled the
sword back and traced that exact motion once again. Two, three,
four times she attempted it, to no avail. I was starting to wonder if
the Vorpal Strike I pulled off was more a bug in the system.
But then, around the seventh or eighth thrust, a light like blue fire
burst through Alice’s sword. She stepped forward and slashed. A
tremendous cracking like the breaking of a glacier filled the air, and a
bluish-purple path flickered in the air. That was the effect of Gelid
Blade.
“Huh? It worked!” exclaimed Leafa. I nodded eagerly. I couldn’t tell if
it was a bug or a feature yet, but this suggested that if you
stubbornly tried often enough, you could execute advanced sword
skills even if you didn’t have the required proficiency. The chances of
success seemed no higher than 10 or 20 percent, however. That was
too risky to try in a real battle, and I felt bad not understanding why
it was happening.
First I looked to Yui over in Leafa’s arms—but she was just another
player now, with no special system access. I’d have to actually use
my own smarts to figure this out for once.
Then Yui suggested, “Papa, perhaps the cause of this anomaly is not
the player or item but the place.”
I pointed at my feet and asked, “P-place? You mean this clearing has
some special properties or something?”
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“No, not the clearing…”
Her eyes moved, and I followed them to the site of the repaired log
cabin, lit by the bronzed rays of the setting sun. I picked up on what
she was suggesting and trotted over to the building so I could tap the
wall. The first line of the properties window that appeared was
Cypress Log Cabin, followed by the names of me and Asuna, its
owners, then a colored bar indicating durability. It should have been
fully restored this morning, but the numbers under the bar right now
read 12,433/12,500, suggesting that buildings in the world of Unital
Ring naturally degraded over time. That was unfortunate, but the
pace seemed to be around 120 points per day, so it should last for a
hundred days even if we did nothing to help it.
At the bottom of the window were four buttons, reading INFO,
TRANSACTION, REPAIR, and BREAK DOWN. I was certain I would never press either

the TRANSACTION or BREAK DOWN buttons, so I tried INFO. Alice, Leafa, and Yui
leaned over my shoulders to watch.
The sub-window that sprang to life displayed a brief description of
the house, including numerical values like floor and storage space
and defensive strength against various properties. At the bottom was
a field labeled SPECIAL EFFECTS.
That had to be it, I decided. There was just one item listed there.
It read as follows: Level-1 / Protection of the Forest: Within a radius
of 100 feet of the center of the building, the owner and any friends or
party members have a small chance of executing attack skills whose
requirements are not yet met.
“Ahhh…that explains it,” I murmured and rubbed Yui’s little head.
“Your guess was exactly correct. Did this Protection of the Forest
thing exist in ALO, too…?”
“No, this system did not exist in ALO,” she said, shaking her head.

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Leafa interjected, “Hey, see how it says ‘level-1’? Does that mean
there are special effects that are level-2 and level-3?”
“I would…assume so. But I can’t imagine how you would unlock
those effects,” I said.
Alice glanced over and suggested, “Couldn’t we build them into
being? The way we are building up ourselves.”
“Like…raising the house’s stats? How?”
“By increasing the rooms or fortifying the structure. When I built the
cabin in the woods near Rulid, I started with just a simple shack with
walls and a roof and built it larger from there.”
“O-oh yeah? Interesting…”
My response was more than a little awkward, but I couldn’t help
that. Alice spent months in that cabin taking care of me while I was in
a catatonic state, from what I was told. I didn’t remember that time,
except for the vaguest memories of being fed with a spoon and being
tucked into bed. The topic filled me with a mixture of gratitude and
embarrassment.
“A-anyway, this is clearly the cause of the advanced sword skills
working. I must have been really lucky that I used that Vorpal Strike
and got it to work the very first time last night.”
“And that gives us one more thing to do,” said Leafa to my confusion.
She saw the look on my face and explained, “Leveling-up the house!
I’m so curious what special effects are at level-2 and level-3!”
“Oh…right. Sure, that makes sense,” I agreed, although I felt some
resistance to the idea of expanding the log cabin. I knew better than
anyone else how much love and work Asuna had put into this house,
ever since the SAO days.
But Yui could see right through my hesitation. She stated, “It’s fine,
Papa! Mama doesn’t get hung up on appearances. So as long as the
Page | 100
true nature of the house remains, I don’t think she’ll be bothered at
all!”
“What’s its…true nature?”
“That’s obvious! Being a place where you and Mama, and me, and
Leafa, Liz, Silica, and Sinon can relax and be at peace!”
“…Uh-huh. That’s true,” I agreed, nodding slowly. I rubbed Yui’s head
one more time. “But…I think any expansion is going to be a long way
ahead of us. First we need to focus more on defending the whole
lot…”
I took a wide view of the clearing, a space fifty feet across, smack in
the middle of deep, dense forest. The eastern half of the clearing was
taken up by the log cabin, and the western half was filled with large
crafting stations like a smelting furnace, a casting table, and a bisque
firing kiln. These stations were easy to create as long as you had the
materials, but getting those materials was a different matter. So I
wanted to protect the entire clearing, if possible. While we were at
school today, Yui, Alice, and Asuna’s pet, Aga, the long-billed giant
agamid, watched over the cabin. But if another disaster like the
thornspike cave bear or the pack of hostile players attacked, the
three of them would not have been successful.
The proud lady knight knew that as well and looked around the
clearing with me before opining, “First we’ll want a wall around the
outer edge of the clearing. Preferably stone, not wood.”
“True…but who knows how much stone that’ll take, if we’re talking
about the whole rim. If only we had the glorious Administrator here.
She could build us a wall of thick steel with the snap of her fingers, I
bet…”
Mentioning the name of the living god who created the Everlasting
Walls, which split the human realm—all thousand miles or so—into

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four equal parts using nothing but sacred arts earned me a chilly
glare from Alice.
“Go ahead. Ask the pontifex to perform a menial task like that. She’ll
turn you into a cricket.”
“You sure? I feel like she’d help us out if we offered her a delicious
piece of cake or three.”
Isn’t that right, Eugeo? I thought.
With a pang, I shook my head to dispel the image of my late friend.
Alice brought us a message from Dr. Koujiro of Rath yesterday, a
coded message saying The twenty-ninth, at fifteen o’clock. The
expensive cake shop. But the true sender of that message was almost
certainly not Dr. Koujiro. To learn the truth of what she meant, I
would have to go to a fancy café in Ginza at three in the afternoon
tomorrow. It occurred to me now that tomorrow was a school day.
To get from school in West Tokyo to Ginza Station, I’d have to take
the Seibu Shinjuku Line to Takadanobaba, switch to the Tozai Line
subway, then transfer to the Ginza Line at Nihonbashi. That was an
eighty-minute trip, so I couldn’t possibly make it unless I ditched my
afternoon classes.
Why would you pick that specific time? I wanted to yell. But that was
for tomorrow. For now, not having the almighty superpowers of the
godlike pontifex, I would have to collect the materials for our wall
the slow and boring way.
Fortunately, we already knew that you didn’t have to stack rocks one
at a time to build a wall. Within the crafting menu for the Beginner
Carpentry skill was a listing for Crude Stone Wall. The adjective crude
wasn’t exactly appealing, but we’d have to deal with it until the skill
proficiency got higher.

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“So…shall we go to the riverbed to look for rocks?” I suggested,
closing the cabin’s properties window. Alice, Leafa, and Yui agreed to
join me.
“While we’re gone, we’ll leave Aga to guard…Wait. Where did he
go?”
I glanced around the clearing, but there was no sight of Aga, the
long-billed giant agamid. At first, I was afraid that his taming period
had worn off, and he’d gone wild again. Asuna would be furious! But
just at that moment, there was a characteristic “Quack!” from
behind me. I spun around and saw Aga on the southern path to the
river, hopping along with Silica and Lisbeth in tow.
When the pair noticed me and Leafa, they trotted over to us.
“Kirito, what took you so long?! Did you stop somewhere to eat on
the way home?!” Liz snapped, fixing me with a glare.
Silica, meanwhile, smiled awkwardly. “Kirito has a lengthy commute.
That’s just how long it takes him to get home.”
Aga opened its bill and quacked. On its head was Pina, who
squeaked, though it was hard to tell which one of the two girls they
were agreeing with. In any sense, Aga was still clearly tamed and
friendly.
“Where were you two just now?” I asked.
Liz rubbed Aga’s neck and replied, “This little guy loses HP if he
doesn’t get a couple dunks in the water throughout the day. So we
went to the river and collected some rocks while we were there.”
“Oh, that’s great. For being a lizard, this thing’s pretty needy, huh…?”
“Papa, there are plenty of half-aquatic lizards in the real world, too.
Like the Mertens’ water monitor or the Sulawesi crocodile skink,” Yui
noted promptly. I murmured with surprise, but then I recalled that

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the first time we encountered Aga, it was coming out of the river.
And that duck-like bill was evidence that it was aquatic in nature.
“Well, we need to dig a well pretty soon, then. There’s so much to
do!”
I shook my head and checked the clock in the lower right. It was 5:50
PM. I couldn’t stay in this dive all the way to dawn this time, so if I

logged off at midnight or at two in the morning that would give me a

bit over eight hours. I was almost feeling a little wistful for the days
of SAO, when I could spend my entire day tackling the challenges of
the game.
A deep breath helped me dispel that thought. I was going to head to
the river for those stones when Leafa stepped in front of me, still
carrying Yui.
“Big Brother, shouldn’t we prioritize meeting up with Sinon instead?
In the long run, more hands will make the work go faster, and more
fighting power will be reassuring.”
“Hmm. You’re not wrong…,” I said reluctantly.
At the after-school meeting, Sinon delivered several pieces of
stunning news. Numerous players from her home game of Gun Gale
Online were converted into Unital Ring as well. That wasn’t
particularly surprising, but the fact that they were able to bring in
guns was.
Of course, we ALO players brought our swords and spears in, so it
stood to reason that GGO players could have their weapons. That
was only fair—but theirs were guns. And in GGO, there weren’t just
gunpowder-based guns but also optical guns that shot lasers. How
did the mysterious mastermind of this incident expect to manage the
logical integrity of combining such wildly different worlds?
But that wasn’t something we needed to worry about for now.
Sinon’s Hecate II was an ultrapowerful gun that was the equivalent of
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a top-tier thirty-word attack spell in ALO. Apparently, she’d lost
almost all her ammo, but if you could have a gun here, there had to
be a way to replenish them, and if we could meet up with her, she’d
be a huge benefit to our mutual defense.
But the biggest problem was…
“We don’t even know which direction to find this village of
birdpeople where Sinon is…,” I lamented, shoulders dropping.
“She said she didn’t even notice the sound or shock wave of New
Aincrad falling,” said Silica worriedly. “That would suggest the GGO
players started somewhere very distant from our initial location.”
“Hmm…”
Meanwhile, Lisbeth opened her ring menu and tapped the MAP icon in
the lower left. The map it displayed was colored in with a much
wider range than mine or Leafa’s.
“Let’s see,” she said. “This is the ruins where the ALO players started,
right? And New Aincrad’s crash landing was here. The village of the
Bashin is north of that, and way to the northeast is this cabin…Silica
and I walked here from the village, but we didn’t see any giant
dinosaurs or centipede monsters like Sinon described.”
Silica nodded, then noticed something and ran her finger over the
map. “But when we were walking from the Bashin village, it started
as wasteland and gradually turned into grassland, and then forest
once we crossed the river. Sinon said her area was a desert with no
water anywhere, so it seems like a higher probability that she’s in the
opposite direction of the forest.”
“Uh-huh…,” murmured Leafa, Alice, and I. Silica had a good point,
but even if she was right about the direction, we couldn’t go
searching blindly without knowing a rough distance. There were
stamina points and thirst points to manage here, in addition to HP,

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and that meant we needed plenty of food and water to complete the
trip.
No sooner had the thought entered my mind than I felt slightly
conscious of my empty stomach and dry throat. Thankfully, the game
preserved the points’ status while we were offline, so my bars were
down only about 20 percent for SP and 30 percent for TP, but they
would go quickly once we started working. We had a nearby river for
water and plenty of bear meat left for food, but we needed a more
stable source of that soon.
“We’ll need to chop down some trees and till a field…assuming we
can actually do that in this game,” I muttered.
“I’ll add it to the list of things to do,” Yui noted studiously.
“Th-thanks…Uh, so how’s that list looking now?”
“I haven’t put them in any priority, but it’s currently looking like:
build a defensive wall, expand the log cabin, make weapons and
armor for everyone, raise levels, tame stronger monsters, dig a well,
cultivate a field, meet up with Sinon, and reach the land revealed by
the heavenly light!”
“………”
The group shared a silent look. The last one on that list would indeed
have to be saved for last, but everything else was a high priority right
now.
“…Let’s start with the defensive wall,” I said, recovering my initiative.
Lisbeth nodded. “That’s what we figured and why we brought lots of
stones back with us. I’ll try to make a wall and see what happens.”
“Thanks, that’d be great.”
Liz shot me a thumbs-up, then closed her map and opened the skill
window instead. From the list of craftable items under the Beginner

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Carpentry skill, she chose Stacked Rock Wall, bringing up a
translucent light-purple ghost object. Awkwardly, she slid the ghost
along until it stopped at the boundary between the clearing and
forest.
“Can I make it here?” she asked.
“Hang on,” I said, then walked up next to the see-through stone wall,
checking the placement and angle carefully. “Can you push it, like, six
inches back…and rotate a teensy bit to the right?”
“L-like this?” Liz angled her fingers slightly, and the ghost crawled
forward. When it was in just the right spot, I shouted “There!”
Liz squeezed her hand shut, and a number of gray rocks tumbled out
of thin air and landed perfectly in the place of the ghost wall. The
actual wall that resulted was about five feet tall and long and one
foot thick. The rocks of various sizes were packed without any gaps,
so it didn’t feel as slapdash as I was afraid it would. Just to test, I
gave it a push, but it didn’t jar any rocks loose.
“This actually looks like it can help protect against monsters
somewhat,” I stated, patting the wall.
Alice looked a bit conflicted. “True…but I doubt it will stop the charge
of a thornspike cave bear, and any player will be able to climb over.”
“We’ll just have to pray we don’t have any teddy bears wandering
our way for a while. But as for the players…” I said, turning to
Lisbeth. “How many of your stones did you use for this block of wall,
Liz?”
“Hmm. I used thirty favillite rocks—that’s the most common one at
the river—and five pieces of rough gray clay.”
“And how much do you have left of both of those?”
“A hundred twenty-something rocks and twenty clay,” she replied.

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Silica raised her hand. “I’ve got a hundred stones and fifteen clay,
too!”
“Thanks, Silica. So that means we can make another seven blocks of
wall with what you two have on hand. Liz, test to see if you can put
another section of wall on top of this one.”
“Okeydoke,” Lisbeth replied and opened the window again. When
she slid the second ghost wall over toward the first, it snapped into
place, initially latching onto its right edge. When she tried to push it
to the left, the ghost popped over and stacked itself atop the first.
“Oh, I think it works.”
“Awesome. Do that.”
Da-doom! With another heavy rumble, the new wall fell on top of
the first one. Now it was ten feet tall. It wasn’t perfectly impervious,
but it would cause all but the most nimble players to think twice
before climbing.
Of course, in its current state, it was less of a wall than a very flat
pillar. The clearing was fifty feet in diameter, which made its
circumference close to 160 feet. To circle the entire space, we’d
want thirty-two blocks, then, which would be sixty-four when
double-stacked. I didn’t even want to calculate how much favillite
we’d need for that…
That was when the door of the log cabin burst open, and Asuna
leaped through, wearing a white dress.
“Sorry, everyone! I didn’t mean to be late!”
“No, Asuna, you’ve got good timing! What’s sixty-four times thirty?!”
I asked promptly.
Asuna looked confused at first but immediately answered, “One
thousand nine hundred and twenty.” Then she narrowed her eyes
with suspicion and asked, “Why…?”
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“That’s how many rocks we’ll need to build that wall around the
entire clearing.”
I pointed out the gray wall standing near the smelting furnace.
“Ohhh,” she exclaimed, catching on.
“Big Brother, are you really not able to do that calculation in your
head?” murmured Leafa with concern.

We headed for the riverbed as a group and collected as much

favillite and clay by the light of the setting sun as we could. After
returning to the cabin, Liz and I spent an hour using our Beginner
Carpentry skill to make sections of wall, one after another. By the
time we had finished placing a wall ten feet high around the entire
clearing, the sun had set all the way.
As a matter of fact, the wooden gates we built on the northern and
southern ends meant that the number of stones we used was a bit
below Asuna’s calculated sum—but it was still a mammoth task. But
the satisfaction of finishing the wall was tremendous, and we
celebrated with plenty of high fives, even from Alice.
“It really feels so much more secure with a wall!” commented Silica
once we’d settled down a little.
“That’s right,” I agreed. “I wonder if the ancient Greeks felt like this
when they completed a wall around their cities.”
“It’s not quite as large as Athens or Corinth,” snarked Asuna, but I
just flashed a grin back at her.
“You don’t know that. We’ll keep building and building until,
eventually, it’s a city the size of Athens—or even Centoria.”
Now it was Alice’s turn to join the fun. “Oh? A bold claim. I am
looking forward to seeing it.”

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“I…I’ve got it under control,” I boasted, thumping my chest, before
quickly changing the topic. “Anyway, that’s one item off our list of
tasks. Next up is…”
“Ooh! Ooh, ooh, ooh!” hollered Leafa, waving her arm. “I want a
sword and armor, too!”
“…Yeah, good point…”
With myself decked out in full iron armor, it wouldn’t be fair to deny
her that request. Liz and Silica had leather armor and metal weapons
they’d received from the Bashin, but poor Leafa and Asuna were still
wearing ubiquigrass dresses and wielding a stone ax and a stone
knife, respectively.
Fortunately, we had Liz, who’d inherited her Blacksmithing skill from
ALO, so the technical aspect was taken care of. The problem was all
the ore we’d need to smelt. We’d found a lot of ore in the thornspike
cave bear’s lair last night and recovered some iron equipment from
the PKers, but virtually all of it had gone to repairing the cabin. We’d
have to return to the bear’s cave to get more ore, but the owner had
surely respawned by now, and it’d taken a desperate gambit of
dropping tons of logs onto it from the roof of the cabin to kill the first
one. That wouldn’t work twice, I knew.
“Yui, did the Bashin mention where they got their ore?” I asked.
The AI was the only one of us able to understand the mysterious NPC
language, but she just shook her head. “I’m sorry, Papa. I wasn’t able
to learn that information…”
“You don’t have to apologize. It’s my fault for forgetting to ask where
to find ore when they were showing us the source of silica and flax.
We’ll figure it out.”
“That’s right, Yui. Kirito will figure it out,” Asuna said, picking up Yui
and giving her a nurturing smile.

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Yui smiled back, but she still looked worried. “What exactly are you
going to do, Papa?”
“Beat the thornspike cave bear the orthodox way, of
course…Though, hold on.” I turned to look at Silica, who was sitting
to my right with Pina on her head. “The best outcome would be to
tame it, rather than kill it. That would probably stop it from
repopulating each time.”
“What?! Tame a bear?!” she exclaimed, pulling back.
I grinned. “Asuna doesn’t even have the Beast-Taming skill, and she
turned that duck-dino into a pet. You inherited the skill from back in
ALO, so a bear should be easy-peasy for you…”
“Unfortunately, Kirito, the skill I inherited was Daggers.”
“What? Really? Your proficiency was higher in the Daggers skill?” I
exclaimed, surprised.
Silica pouted, pursing her lips. “Kirito, raising the Beast-Taming skill
to a proficiency of 1,000 is incredibly hard. From what I know, the
only person in ALO to max it out is Alicia, the master of the cait
siths.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for my ignorance…So that means Asuna actually has a
higher Beast-Taming skill at this point…”
I looked at her, but she just blinked and shook her head. “N-no, don’t
look at me! I can’t tame that horrible bear,” she protested.
Even so, I was busy thinking of how to trick—er, convince—her to
achieve that feat when Silica announced, “I-if you’re just going to
force Asuna to attempt something dangerous, I’ll do it!”
Either she was feeling bold, thanks to the armor from the Bashin, or
I’d wounded her beast-tamer’s pride. Asuna tried to say something,
but Silica held out her hands to push her back down. “No, Asuna, it’s
fine. I didn’t see this bear, but in terms of beast-taming, it’s got to be
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a lower difficulty than bug-types or demon-types. I’ll work up my
Beast-Taming skill again and bend that beast to my will!”
It’s probably not the kind of bear you’re imagining, I thought. Asuna
and Leafa and Alice were probably thinking the same thing. Before
anyone could say anything contrary, I stepped forward and grasped
Silica by the shoulders.
“Yes! That’s the Silica I know—the idol of all beast-tamers in SAO! It’s
a huge relief to hear you guarantee that!”
“Heh-heh-heh…I’ll do my best,” she replied, laughing self-
consciously. Over Silica’s shoulder, I could see Asuna sighing, but I
wasn’t going to slow down now.
“Asuna, can you teach Silica how to get the Beast-Taming skill? There
was that fox monster in the woods when we were on the way back
from the river, so that’s probably a good practice target. Me, Liz,
Alice, and Leafa will dig up a well before we run out of TP again.”
“That sounds good…but are you sure we can just dig wherever we
want in this game?” Lisbeth asked.
That gave me pause. In most VRMMOs, including ALO, it was
impossible to change the landscape of the wilderness. It would
invalidate the map design, after all, and players would be digging
giant holes all over the place just to mess with one another.
Unital Ring wasn’t a normal game in many respects, but I had a hard
time imagining you could alter the terrain here…and I’d been
thinking about this yesterday, too. But on the other hand, in the
Beginner Carpentry skill’s production menu was…
“Look…a well,” I said, pointing at the opened menu for the others to
see. Just as I remembered from the list, there was an entry that said
Small Stacked Rock Well.

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“Doesn’t that mean it’s like the smelting furnace, where if you place
it, you can have a well wherever you want?” asked Leafa, but I
wasn’t buying it.
“You really think it’s that simple? If you can create a well anytime
you want, as long as you have the materials, that totally invalidates
the point of the TP bar.”
“Don’t complain to me—I didn’t invent it. Anyway, why don’t you
just test it out?”
That was a good point. I checked the type and number of materials
needed for the well: three hundred stones, twenty sawed logs, ten
clay, fifty iron nails, one iron chain.
“Ugh, we don’t have anywhere near what we need. It’s easy enough
to get the stones and the logs, but the iron…”
“It’s not going to be easy,” said Alice, shrugging. She glanced at the
furnace. “No matter what, we’re going to need iron. It’s going to take
time for Silica’s beast-taming project to come through. Will we have
to fight another thornspike cave bear?”
“Hmm…In a normal game, I’d just go for broke and try to fight it
anyway, but now…”
I hemmed and hawed, and Alice and the others frowned.
In Unital Ring, dying meant you could never log in again. But it
wouldn’t spit you back out in ALO, either. The VRMMO worlds stuck
in the incident were overwritten on the server side and effectively
shut down to the public. Devs attempted to roll back a few of the
games, but even if the Seed program were reinstalled, they wouldn’t
function, according to Argo. Under these circumstances, even I, the
triple-crown winner of insane, reckless gambles, was not up to
fighting the ultrapowerful thornspike cave bear.
“Iron…ironnnn…”

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I folded my arms and stared up at the night sky. In SAO and ALO, iron
weapons and tools were in ready supply in even the earliest towns,
so it never felt that valuable. Monsters would drop tons of iron
items, so I regularly threw away whatever I couldn’t carry. Now I
wished I could go back in time to pick up all that excess supply.
If I searched hard enough in the area nearby, I could probably find
some iron ore in a location aside from the bear cave. But considering
the general rules of game difficulty, it seemed that the rarity of iron
ore was set to “strong enough to defeat a thornspike cave bear with
relative ease.” I shouldn’t expect a steady supply of ore on the open
sides of hills. The true Iron Age was not going to arrive unless we
could deal with that bear somehow.
“…Let’s look for Sinon,” I murmured. Alice, Leafa, and Liz glanced at
me; in the distance, Asuna, Silica, and Yui stopped talking about
beast-taming to look my way, too.
In the tense silence that followed, Asuna’s voice was crystal clear. “I
want to meet up with Shino-non, too…but we don’t know where she
is or even what direction to search. How will we search for her?”
“The Bashin people they came across might know something about
the birdpeople Sinon’s with. We want info on ore anyway, so let’s go
to the Bashin village and ask them,” I said, looking at the rest of the
group in order. “Asuna, Silica, Alice, you stay here and protect the
cabin. I’ll go with Leafa, Liz, and Yui to the village…How does that
sound?”
“I understand that Asuna and Silica have the Beast-Taming skill to
discuss, but why are you leaving me here?” demanded Alice,
sounding disgruntled.
“Because if you’re here watching the house, I feel confident it’s
safe,” I said honestly.

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“…In that case…I cannot argue. Very well…but I will insist on taking
part in the next expedition,” she announced, turning on her heel and
lining up with Asuna and Silica.
Asuna put her hand on Alice’s back, and in a crisp, clear voice that
reminded me of when she was the vice commander of the Knights of
the Blood, she said, “We will keep our home safe, so make sure you
return home safe, too. That’s a promise.”
“…It is,” I agreed. Liz added, “We’ll bring Sinon back with us!” and Yui
rushed over to hug Asuna. While that was happening, I opened my
inventory to test something I’d been thinking about.
I brought out the longsword Blárkveld, which I’d transferred over
from our home storage. My special sword from ALO was still too
costly to equip; even at level-13, I couldn’t use it yet. With my
window open, I walked toward Lisbeth.
“Liz…I hate to ask this after you made it for me, but could you melt
down this sword?”
“What?” the forger of Blárkveld exclaimed, stunned. “W-well, you’re
the owner, so you can do what you want with it…but there’s no
guarantee I can make you a sword of the same rank now that we’re
stuck in this world.”
“I know that. But I think I’ll need to get to level-40 or level-50 to use
this thing. If it’s just going to waste away in storage, I’d rather melt it
down and put it to good use for the group.”
“…Hmm. All right.” She grinned, then reached for the black sword
resting atop the window.
“Oh, hold on! Remember, if you touch it, it’ll fall to the ground, and
then you can’t move it.”
“Ah, right.”
“Hang on—I’ll put it directly into the furnace.”
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With my inventory still open, I walked over to the western side of the
clearing, opened the operating window of the smelting furnace, and
dropped Blárkveld inside. The sword floating in the air vanished,
scattering motes of light. Then I set firewood in the furnace’s
combustion chamber and let Lisbeth take over from there.
The blacksmith briefly placed her hands together to pray for the
sword she forged herself, then used a flintstone to light the logs.
Soon there were flickering red flames inside, and a roaring sound
escaped the furnace as they burned furiously.
Last night, the iron ore began to melt in just a few dozen seconds
after I set the logs in the furnace, but Blárkveld resisted the flames
for nearly two minutes. But at last, molten metal shining white
escaped the spigot and filled the ingot mold. When it was full, the
metal flashed and vanished so that the mold could fill again.
It was only a one-handed sword in there, so I figured that getting ten
ingots out of it would be a success, but in Unital Ring, it seemed that
high-ranked gear also increased the number of materials you could
salvage from it. The molten iron flowed and flowed and only stopped
after I had given up keeping track of the count.
“…It’s over,” Lisbeth murmured, opening the furnace’s window.
“Let’s see. We got…sixty-two premium steel ingots, eighteen fine
silver ingots, nine fine meteoric iron ingots, six mythril ingots, and
two black dragon steel ingots.”
“Wowww…Some of those sound really rare,” Leafa whispered with
great reverence. If Blárkveld gave us this much stuff, what would
happen if I melted down the Holy Sword, Excalibur, the other
weapon I brought over from ALO? Not that melting down the
legendary weapon that I went through such trouble to gain was
anything but a last resort, of course.

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Instead, I asked Liz, “Can you make equipment for Alice, Asuna, and
Leafa with this stuff?”
“Hmm…Remember, my Blacksmithing skill went down to 100, too. I
might not be able to use the fancier metal,” she muttered with
consternation, moving the ingots to her own inventory, then sitting
at the little chair in front of the anvil. She dropped a premium steel
ingot on the anvil’s window and opened the crafting menu.
“Oh, looks like I can just barely do steel weapons. So I’ll make Alice’s
sword first. Will a bastard sword do?”
“Yes, Liz. Thank you.”
“You got it.”
Lisbeth flashed the knight a thumbs-up and grabbed her smithing
hammer, then smacked the silvery-brown ingot that appeared atop
the anvil.
As the hammer clanged against the metal, loud and crisp, I prayed
that the new swords about to be born turned out as sturdy and
faithful as my lost Blárkveld.

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5
I’m glad I dived in without eating anything first.
Sinon stared at the chunk of meat before her, sizzling and snapping.
The rare steak was three inches thick and almost a foot in size. By
real-world standards, it was so big that even a sumo wrestler would
have trouble finishing it. But the birdmen seated around the gigantic
table were all busy with steaks of the same size, carving with their
knives and chewing vigorously.
Of course, this was a virtual world, and no matter what she ate,
nothing went into her real stomach, but one of the strange features
of full-diving was that the satiating feeling of a full belly lasted for a
while, even after logging out. Sinon had a small appetite to begin
with and wasn’t the biggest fan of meat, so a rare steak of this size
was a major challenge for her. Especially since it wasn’t beef, or even
pork.
Confirming that the birdmen on either side were completely
absorbed in eating, Sinon quickly tapped the hunk of meat. The
properties window said it was Sterocephalus Tail Meat Steak. It had
previously belonged to the dinosaur she killed with a shot from the
Hecate II.
Last night, Sinon had been on the brink of dying of dehydration just
before reaching a pool of water. Surrounded by birdmen delighted at
the defeat of their sterocephalus foe, she allowed them to escort her
to their village.
As usual, the two sides couldn’t understand a word the other said,
but she received a savior’s welcome in the village anyway. They
showed her to a pretty little house in the center of the village, where

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she was able to log out safely. This evening, she drank some water as
soon as she got home and promptly dived back in, where they more
or less forced her into this celebration.
What surprised her a little—no, a lot—was the high level of
civilization the birdmen enjoyed. The houses of the village were
neatly arranged and built with fired bricks, and the perfectly circular
outer edge of the village was surrounded by a sturdy stone wall. The
tiled streets led to a large meeting space in the center of the village
that was surrounded by shops.
She shouldn’t have been this surprised, she realized, because the fact
that they used muskets already spoke to a culture of a certain level.
So if she left the majority of her dinosaur steak, maybe they would
be civilized enough not to be angry with her, she hoped…
“ ?”
A small birdperson who came up to her side poured red wine-like
liquid into the glass in front of Sinon. Their words sounded like a
question, but she still couldn’t understand them.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying to me,” she replied. The
child’s yellow beak hung open partway in apparent confusion. Sinon
was going to apologize again when a voice cut her off.
“The child is asking why you do not eat,” the voice said from her left.
Sinon turned in that direction in utter shock.
The voice came from an elderly-looking birdman who had long gray
feathers hanging from the edges of his beak.
“You…you understand my language?” she asked hoarsely.
One edge of the elderly birdman’s beak twitched upward. “When I
was younger, I adventured all over the continent with humans.
But…does the dinosaur meat not suit your tastes, human girl?”

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“Er, no…it’s fine. Thank you,” she said, summoning her courage and
picking up the knife and fork. She carved a bit off the end of the
singed log of a steak and popped it into her mouth.
Once her teeth bit through the crispy exterior, they met much more
resilience than she expected. But a firmer bite cut through it easily
enough, and a fatty sweetness filled her mouth. It tasted like beef
ribs but was more fibrous and gamy. There was no sauce on the
meat, but the spices the birdmen cooked it with had a kick. It wasn’t
bad.
“Um…how do I say delicious in your language?” she asked the elderly
birdman. He made a sound like hyufol. She turned to the child and
repeated the word the birdman had just taught her. The child looked
befuddled.
“No. It is hyufol.”
“Hyufol.”
“Close. Hyufol.”
“Hyufol!”
After a few repetitions like this, the child finally understood her, and
she beamed and shouted, “Hyufol!” Her head bobbed up and down
excitedly, and then she walked away.
Instantly, there was a window in front of Sinon’s face that read
Ornith skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.
She blinked, then listened to the conversations happening around
her in the large room. Most of them still just sounded like strange
chirping, but occasionally she heard snippets that she understood,
like “Now the farm to the south will be…” and “I’ll have more wine…”
In their meeting after school, Yui said that the NPC language in Unital
Ring was actually the Seed protocol’s Japanese language set but with
several layers of filtering to make it impossible to understand. Most
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likely, thanks to gaining the Ornith skill, the game was decoding
fragments of those filters now and then, so she could hear the
Japanese. If she raised her proficiency further, the filter would
eventually disappear altogether, she supposed.
But how to raise that proficiency? She took another bite of dinosaur
steak, chewed it briskly, and replayed the conversation before the
skill pop-up appeared. Then she swallowed her food and spoke to
the elderly birdman again.
“Um, how do you say knife in Ornith?”
“Hmm? You mean fetu?”
“Fetu.”
“No, fetu.”
“Fetu.”
“Listen to me. It is fetu.”
“I am saying fetu!” Sinon snapped, and another message appeared,
reading Ornith skill proficiency has risen to 2. The same child as
before ran over and offered Sinon a new knife. That settled it—
raising her Ornith proficiency required repeating the undecoded
words perfectly. Why did it have to be annoying?
Once again, she turned to the elder.
“…How do you say thank you in Ornith?”

Forty minutes later, Sinon returned from the feast to her room and
flopped face-first onto the bed.
Thankfully, the birdpeople, known as Orniths, did not have any
barbarous customs of searing and devouring ungrateful guests who
didn’t finish their food. Sinon stubbornly continued to pile dinosaur
steak into her virtual stomach as she learned vocabulary words from
the elder birdman, but her core was screaming at her to stop when
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she was only half done. Still, she must have devoured at least two
pounds of it. She didn’t even want to think about eating meat again
for a while, real or virtual.
But attending the feast was certainly worthwhile, because she got
her Ornith skill up to 10 and learned much more valuable
information as well. She rolled over onto her back, opened the ring
menu, and flicked open the MAP icon.
The image it summoned showed the ruined city where she’d started,
the wasteland to the east of it, the rocky outcropping where she’d
fought the giant sterocephalus, and the Ornith village well to the
north of that. She felt like she’d covered quite a lot of ground, but if
she used two fingers to zoom out on the map, the lit portions shrank
smaller and smaller until they were the size of grains of sand. If that
represented the full size of the entire world map, then the vast
distance she’d spent hours walking across represented less than 1
percent of the game world.
The real problem wasn’t the distance to the edge of the world,
though, but how far away she was from Kirito and Asuna’s location.
At the end of the feast, Sinon asked virtually everyone who was
present if they knew about the name Bashin. When even her elderly
Ornith tutor, who had traveled the world, said “Never heard of ’em,”
she felt desperate. But by some miracle, just one birdperson there
said they’d heard the name before. So Sinon used all of her
proficiency-10 Ornith skill to ask everything she possibly could.
That one birdperson had never met the Bashin, only heard a story
from his grandfather, but the information in the story was worth its
weight in gold: The Bashin village is past the vast Giyoru Savanna to
the southeast. It was worth the trouble. Asuna’s log cabin had fallen
near the Bashin village, supposedly, so if she went southeast, she
should be able to catch up to them—possibly. Of course, if the
Bashin had villages all over the world map, she could easily find
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herself on a wild-goose chase, but for now, she could only trust that
her new lead was the right one.
“…Okay!”
Sinon closed the map and sat up forcefully. She’d already told the
Orniths that she would leave before the end of the night. The reason
they’d been waging that hopeless fight against the ferocious
sterocephalus was because the dinosaur was attacking their farm to
the south and devouring the valuable psittacos there.
It wasn’t clear what kind of livestock psittacos were, but when the
Orniths learned that their new hero, vanquisher of the previously
unbeatable sterocephalus, was leaving already, they were very
disappointed. Sinon wanted to stick around and use the village as a
base for leveling-up—after all, she could eat and stay for free—but
more than that, she wanted to regroup with her friends. That fallen
log cabin was a special place to her, too, and there wasn’t much of a
point to solving the mysteries of Unital Ring if it wasn’t with Asuna
and Kirito.
With the Bellatrix SL2 and Weasel Suit equipped again, Sinon left the
building and looked around. Across the way, the lights were already
out at the feast hall, and there was no one to be seen around the
circular building. The time was only just after seven o’clock, but the
Orniths did not seem to have a nightlife. No sooner had the thought
occurred to her than Sinon muttered, “Dammit!” She was going to
use her 100-el silver coin to buy some rations and drinking water, but
all of the shops on the southern side of the village center had their
shutters down. She’d been careless; NPC shops in ALO and GGO both
ran essentially twenty-four hours a day, but normal VRMMO logic
didn’t apply here.
“…And that probably means there’s no guarantee this village even
takes silver el coins…,” she murmured, feeling dejected. After eating
and drinking as much as her willpower could possibly allow, her SP
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and TP were full, but she never wanted to be foolish enough to head
into the wilderness without water again. Should she wait until the
morning for the shops to open? Or look for a place where she could
get free water…?
“Miss Sinon!”
She spun to her right at the sound of her name. There were two
Orniths trotting toward her, a young one and a child. At first, they’d
all looked the same to her, but now she could tell them apart to a
small degree, due to the colors and patterns of their feathers and the
shape of their eyes and beaks.
The young Ornith was the musketeer she’d saved from the
sterocephalus. The child was the birdgirl who’d been serving the
table at the feast. The young one lowered the plumage over his eyes
and asked, “Sinon, are you already ?”
Her Ornith skill was only at a proficiency of 10, so part of the
sentence was unclear, but she could guess that he was asking if she
was leaving now, and she nodded in response.
“Yes. I must go to the Bashin village.”
He understood her response and seemed to frown, as far as she
could tell. “I see…I don’t anything about the Bashin, but if you are
crossing the Giyoru Savanna to the southeast, you will need to
prepare . Please take this with you, Miss Sinon.”
He held out a shiny black musket. Sinon blinked, then shook her head
vigorously. “No, I can’t! This gun is very important to you, isn’t it?”
“No!” shouted the birdgirl, who had light-brown feathers. She looked
at the musket in the young birdman’s hands and explained, “That
isn’t my brother’s. It belonged to our late grandfather. Father says
there’s no anymore, so he should it to you for saving our village,
Sinon.”

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“That’s right. It’s an old gun, but the quality is . Of course, it’s
nowhere near as fine as your gun, but you wouldn’t want to use
something so powerful on smaller beasts and insects, would you?”
He had a good point. She only had six of the Hecate’s .50 BMG
bullets left, and they had to be saved for emergencies. The Bellatrix
also had only 60 percent of its energy remaining. The chances of her
getting more ammunition for either were low.
“…In that case, I’d be glad to use it,” Sinon said, and the young Ornith
happily offered her the musket. There was a satisfying weight to it in
her hands. He also gave her a leather bag slung over his shoulder.
“Those are the bullets and gunpowder. If you use them all up, the
bullets can be from iron, and for the gunpowder, you can mix the
secretions of bursting beetles and charcoal powder, then let it dry.”
“B-bursting beetles?” Sinon repeated, suspicious. The birdgirl, who
seemed to be the older Ornith’s sister, formed a large circle with her
hands.
“They’re at the base of cacti! Just watch out, because if you step on
them, they’ll blow up and hurt you real bad!”
“Um…okay, I’ll be careful.”
Sadly, she couldn’t make out the name of the cactus itself, but that
was all right. She wasn’t planning to go walking up to any cacti
anytime soon.
Sinon slung the gun over her back, then hung the ammo bag on her
shoulder. This time, it was the birdgirl who offered her yet another
object, a large cloth bag.
“There’s water and butter and hard bread in here! Me and Mom and
Grandma made them! There’s also a pelt cloak in there, so if a
comes, use it!”

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If she refused now, it would probably be rude. She was very curious
about what “if a comes” was referring to, but she didn’t want to
grill the birdgirl, so she thanked her and took the sack.
The birdgirl grinned and added, “The hard bread’s not very good, but
it lasts a really long time! When , sear it over a fire and spread the
butter on it, and it’ll taste much !”
“…Okay, I’ll try that. Thank you so much,” she said, bowing one more
time, then took the birdgirl’s hands in her own. “Can you tell me your
name?”
“Sure! I’m Fikki, and my brother is Ufelm!”
“Fikki…and Ufelm. I will return to this village someday. And I’ll bring
you many gifts from my travels.”
“Yay!” Fikki exclaimed excitedly. Sinon fixed the image of the little
birdgirl’s excitement in her mind and swore to herself that she would
uphold that promise.

It was seven thirty PM. Sinon left the Ornith village, opened her map
window, and looked for a landmark that would help her head
southeast. Fortunately, there was a large moon shining in the sky,
and with the help of the Night Vision skill, she could make out the
terrain on her own. Upon gazing to the southeast, she noticed a rock
growth in the distance that looked just like a gate.
“…There we go!”
With her motivation as fuel, Sinon strode across the dried earth. She
had no idea how many miles across this Giyoru Savanna was, but she
was determined to cross it and reach the Bashin village by the end of
the night. After all, beating the sterocephalus field boss had put her
all the way up to level-16, and she had a musket on her back and a
Bellatrix SL2 at her side.

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She certainly didn’t want to fight any more giant dinosaurs, but she
felt confident she could beat any centipede or scorpion. Her HP was
higher, her stats built up…
Right. Her stats. Unital Ring didn’t have basic character stats like STR
and AGI. Instead, it had a varied system of abilities, which served a
different function from skills. With the levels she’d gained, she now
had fifteen ability points to spend, and there was no point hoarding
them if she was going to try crossing the dangers of the wilderness
alone.
“…I’m really not good at this sort of thing,” she murmured, switching
from the map screen to the ability list. At the meeting after school,
Kirito had said that it didn’t seem like you could re-spec your abilities
once chosen, which was the same way it worked in GGO. The
problem was that there were way too many choices in Unital Ring.
Perhaps she should return to the Ornith village, log out in a safe spot,
then look up information on the abilities online. But no…barely
twenty-four hours had passed since the incident began, so it wasn’t
smart to believe anything you saw written on the Net at this point.
She should think for herself about what she needed and make that
choice on her own. That was a lesson the GGO player Zexceed had
taught her before he was killed by Death Gun.
“…I guess I should use ten points now,” Sinon murmured and lifted
her finger to pick from the four starter abilities.

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6
“…I’m just not good at this sort of thing,” I murmured, staring at the
ability screen.
Lisbeth finished drinking some water and groaned, “Just go by
feeling. Leafa and I did ours really quick.”
“That’s the problem. I’m not good at going by feeling,” I mumbled,
focusing on the options.
In the center of the screen were four icons in a cross pattern.
Clockwise from the top, they were BRAWN, TOUGHNESS, SAGACITY, and SWIFTNESS.
Each of those icons had two lines extending farther in that direction
toward more icons. Past BRAWN, there was BONEBREAKER and STOUT. Past
TOUGHNESS, there was PERSEVERANCE and ANTIVENOM. Past SAGACITY, there was

CONCENTRATION and LEARNED. Past SWIFTNESS, there was GALLOP and DEXTEROUS.

Tapping an icon brought up a description of the ability. According to

this, Brawn gave a bonus to medium- and large-melee-weapon
damage, equip weight, and carry weight. Toughness gave a bonus to
HP, TP, SP, and status-ailment resistance. Sagacity gave a bonus to
MP value and magic power. Swiftness gave a bonus to ranged-
weapon damage, small-melee-weapon damage, and jumping
distance.
In other words, the suggestion was that damage dealers should take
the Brawn ability tree; tanks should go for the Toughness tree;
mages, the Sagacity tree; and scouts, the Swiftness tree. As a user of
a longsword, a midsize melee weapon, that meant I should take
Brawn without overthinking it—but it wasn’t going to be that simple.
In a survival RPG, maximum HP, SP, and TP values were crucial. I
could envision myself nearly dying of hunger or thirst in the future

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and wishing, If only I’d maxed out Toughness back then, at least once
or twice, if not a full ten times.
I sighed and asked my friends, “Anyway…what did following your
feelings lead you to pick?”
Lisbeth said, “I did Toughness,” while Leafa added “Brawn for me,”
and Yui chimed in with “I picked Sagacity!”
That one took me by surprise. “Sagacity…? Are you going to be a
magic user, Yui?” I asked.
“That’s right! I want to be a battle mage just like Mama!”
“Uh…okay. That sounds reassuring.”
Of course, the reason Asuna was feared far and wide as the Berserk
Healer of ALO was because of her incredible defense and evasion
techniques, but I didn’t want to ruin any child’s dreams, so I patted
Yui’s head instead. After all, there was no way to rule out the
possibility, and it was my duty to protect her, regardless of what
build she went with.
In that sense, perhaps a tank would be best, I thought, losing myself
in choice once again. When we’d left the cabin, there’d still been
some sunset light in the western part of the sky, but that was long
gone now, replaced by dark clouds that flowed in front of the faded
stars.
“Hmm, if only I knew the effects of the second row of abilities…”
I could only read the descriptions of the currently selectable abilities,
so I’d have to actually make a choice to find out more.
Leafa was munching on some nuts across the way, and she asked
archly, “Have you considered asking us what they are…?”
“Huh…? Oh, d-duh…”

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They had already picked their first ability, so they would be able to
read the description of the next options. I cleared my throat, feeling
awkward, and turned to the other three.
“If you don’t mind the trouble, would you please tell me what comes
next?”
“If you insist,” Liz said with a sigh, opening her ring menu. “Let’s see.
The abilities past Toughness are Perseverance, which gives a bonus
to damage-reduction when guarding, and Antivenom, which gives a
bonus to damage-reduction against poison, as you’d guess.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Next, Leafa checked her window. “The abilities after Brawn are
Bonebreaker, which provides a bonus to damage that ignores enemy
guarding, and Stout, which gives you decreased knockback when
guarding.”
“Hmm…?”
Yui didn’t need to check her window first. “The abilities stemming
from Sagacity are Concentration, which gives a bonus to MP recovery
rate, and Learned, which increases proficiency gain of all language
skills.”
“Hmmmm.”
Language skills probably referred to the skills that let you speak with
NPCs, but I wouldn’t need that if Yui was around. I didn’t intend to be
a mage, so I removed the Sagacity tree from my set of options. But
even knowing what came after Brawn and Toughness, it was hard to
pick between them.
“Hmm. It sounds like Stout and Perseverance are fairly similar. Why
are the abilities for knockback-reduction and damage-reduction in
different trees…?”

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“Probably because Stout is intended to work for weapon guarding
rather than with shields?” Leafa suggested. “If you can block an
attack without losing your stance, you can counterattack that much
faster.”
I nodded. “So the Brawn tree isn’t just pure offense, either…Maybe I
should take that one, too, then…”
“Can’t you just take two of them?” Lisbeth asked.
“Mmm, I could,” I admitted, “but it’s always the case that if you
master a single tree rather than spreading the points around, you
end up tougher in the end.”

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Page | 132
“In that case, you should go for pure offense. That’s the most like
your style, anyway,” Liz said. Leafa grinned for some reason, and Yui
nodded with a big smile. I wanted to protest that I wasn’t a pure
damage dealer in SAO or ALO, but all three of them seemed on the
same page, and I doubted that Asuna, Silica, or Alice would argue
with it, either.
“…All right, but you guys are in support roles, then.”
“Sure thing. We’ll watch your back,” Liz reassured me.
I touched the BRAWN icon again and then pressed the ACQUIRE button at
the bottom of the pop-up window. Another dialog box appeared,
asking if I wanted to expend an ability point. When I pressed the YES
button, the window flashed with a jingling sound, and the black-and-
white BRAWN icon turned red.
That made Bonebreaker and Stout available, but each of them cost
two ability points this time. It seemed that each ability had ten ranks,
so I had the option of taking Brawn all the way to rank-10 before I
took Bonebreaker, if I wanted. I had eleven points left, but I didn’t
think I wanted to spend all of them yet.
After a bit of thinking, I went ahead and took Bonebreaker. That
caused two more abilities to appear past it.
One was Assault, which provided a bonus to additional strikes during
consecutive attacks. The other was Expand, which increased the span
of area attacks. As I suspected, each took three points to unlock. In
other words, getting to rank-10 in Brawn, Bonebreaker, and Assault
altogether would take a total of sixty ability points. And there were
probably more abilities farther up the tree.
“Boy, this is gonna take a while…,” I muttered to myself, raising
Brawn to rank-5. That meant I’d used seven points, leaving me with
five more. I went back to my status screen, which showed the effect
of Brawn now. The meters displaying my current usage of the total
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equipment weight and carry weight were a much lower percentage.
There was a lot of water, food, and materials to carry around in this
game, so it was a good bonus to have, even if it was boring.
“…Okay, I’ve got my abilities,” I announced, closing the window.
“How many points did you leave?” Liz asked casually.
“Five, I think?”
“Aha! At least five! I win the bet!”
“…Huh?” I gaped.
Liz thrust her hand out toward Leafa, palm up. Leafa then poured a
pile of nuts into her open hand. They’d made a bet about how many
points I was going to leave unspent?
“Thanks a lot, Big Brother! What’s the point of saving up your points?
Be a man and make good use of them!” my little sister snapped,
which seemed quite unfair to me.
Yui rubbed my head in consolation.

Done with our meal break, we hopped down to the ground from our
impromptu safe zone atop the large boulder. Off to the southwest
we continued, eschewing any man-made light to walk by the weak
light of the stars.
We’d left the forest behind long ago; now there was nothing but
dried grassland around. Because it was night, the monsters we
encountered were nocturnal types, like hyenas and bats. They
weren’t pushovers, but they weren’t too hard, either. That was
thanks to Liz’s metal equipment, of course—I’d have felt nervous
about even leaving the woods with just the stone knife and
ubiquigrass clothing.
For drinking water, Asuna filled up some handmade pottery canteens
from the river, and we brought a bit of bear jerky to eat, but for the
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most part, we’d need to rustle up some supplies along the way. The
hyenas’ meat was inedible, even after being cooked, but now and
then we found some short, rounded trees with walnut-like nuts.
They were tough to crack but tasted good once you got them out.
Two hours had passed since we left, but we were keeping TP and SP
at around 80 percent so far.
“Liz, how far to the Bashin village?” I asked Lisbeth, who was walking
with her map window open.
Over her shoulder, the blacksmith replied, “We’re still only a third of
the way there. There are two huge trees up ahead, and that’s
basically the halfway point, I’d say.”
“Like how big? As big as the World Tree in Alfheim?” Leafa asked.
Lisbeth just grimaced and shook her head. “No, not that big. I’m not
totally sure, because the last time we saw them was also at night,
but I’d guess they’re like three hundred feet?”
“That reminds me…When the Bashin passed a hill with a view of
those big trees, they stopped to pray,” added Yui, who was walking
hand in hand with me.
“Oh, right! They did!” Lisbeth agreed.
“…Praying to the huge trees…,” I repeated, thinking hard. Somehow,
that imagery stimulated something deep in my memory, but I
couldn’t tell what it was summoning. I considered asking Yui to run
that idea through her VRMMO database but thought better of it. Yui
was another player now, not a navigation pixie, and what’s more,
she was excited about that. It wouldn’t be fair of me to continue
treating her like a convenient AI tool.
Instead, I was going to ask them if they’d stopped and prayed with
the Bashin, but I got distracted by a cold, damp breeze from the
north.

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“Brrr. The night here is chilly for being a savanna…Aren’t you cold,
Yui?”
“No, I’m fine. Liz made armor for me, after all.”
Indeed, Yui was no longer clad only in that little white dress; now she
had on a thin breastplate, plus gloves and boots in the same design.
She still wore the dress underneath these items, so it didn’t look that
warm. But Lisbeth’s Blacksmithing skill proficiency was at 100, so
even reduced from before, that was very high. Maybe she had
worked a bonus against cold in there.
As for Lisbeth, she was still using the leather armor and one-handed
mace the Bashin gave her, and out of the ingots cast from Blárkveld,
she’d only made a small round shield for herself. Leafa, in contrast,
had four pieces of metal equipment, same as me, including a long
katana that could be used in one or both hands. Compared to our
original stone gear, we’d transformed into a heavily armed combat
force. But despite all that, Leafa shivered and complained the
moment the northern wind hit us.
She turned back, whipping her golden ponytail behind her, and
nimbly walked backward to talk face-to-face. “Hey, Kirito, can you
make a cloak or something out of those hyena pelts?”
“Don’t be silly. I don’t even have the Tailoring skill.”
“Then let’s run! It’ll make the trip go faster, too!”
“Uhhh…You might be able to run continuously because you get
exercise in your school club, but I just go home after school…”
“You know that doesn’t matter in the virtual world!” Leafa snapped.
I realized my mistake and cleared my throat to hide my
embarrassment. “A-anyway, running is just a waste of TP and SP. And
we can’t see the ground very well, so it’s dangerous…”

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“But, Papa, we have torches!” Yui cried and removed a sticklike
object from her inventory. It looked like a tree branch with some
dried grass wrapped around the tip. The lights we used at the cabin
were just dead branches, so this was a step beyond that.
“Did you make that, Yui?”
“Yes, but it was Liz’s idea.”
“Ooh, that’s a professional crafter for you.”
“I’m not paying out for compliments,” Lisbeth remarked, glancing
over her shoulder. “But…we should probably be ready to run soon.
Last night the Bashin told us that the…Giyoru Savanna, was it? It
sometimes has ice storms, and when that happens, you either need
to wrap up with furs or find a cave. Otherwise, you’ll die.”
“What?! Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?!”
“Because they said it only happens once every few years.”
“Okay, you of all people should know that in a video game, that
means once every few days…,” I snapped.
But Yui, in a tiny, dejected voice, said, “I’m sorry, Papa. I heard them
say it, too, but I did not classify it as important information.”
“I—I’m not blaming you, Yui. I mean, who ever heard of ice storms
on a savanna?”
“Hang on! What’s with the difference in treatment here?!” Lisbeth
fumed, puffing out her cheeks.
Just then, there was a gust from the north again, and the four of us
hunched over simultaneously. It felt much colder than the previous
one—and slightly wetter. I looked at the sky and saw black clouds
rushing from north to south with great speed.
“…I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” Leafa murmured. I offered a
vote of agreement and looked down at Yui. “Let’s get that torch lit.”
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“All right.”
Yui solemnly pointed the grass-wrapped end of the branch toward
me. I took a pair of flintstones out of my bag and struck them
together. In the real world, flint had to be struck against a piece of
metal called a firesteel to create sparks, but here, you just needed
two stones. I struck them together, telling myself that even if I didn’t
take the Sagacity ability tree, I was going to learn the fire magic skill
someday. On the seventh strike, the sparks landed true and began to
burn the dried grass.
I put the flintstones back in my bag and took the torch from Yui,
holding it high. The strong wind buffeted the flame, but it wasn’t
going to go out that easily.
A quick survey around us did not reveal any likely places to find a
cave; if there was one nearby, the light wasn’t strong enough to
reach it. But it did show us a tall, narrow silhouette like a rock
formation to the east and some gentle hill slopes to the west. Which
way to go?
It wasn’t a sure thing yet that an ice storm was going to sweep over
us, but if we waited until then to search for shelter, it would already
be too late. If there was a cave nearby, it would have to be at the
rock formation, but it was shaped like a spire, so any potential
hollowed-out caves were unlikely to be deep enough for us.
To my right, Yui cried out, “Something’s coming from the north,
Papa!”
“Huh…?”
I spun around, pointing the torch upwind, just as a huge, silent
shadow slid into the range of the light.
Pausing just five yards away, the shadow stayed low to the ground
and growled. This was not one of the hyenas we’d fought several
times already. The black-furred body was slender but far bigger than
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a hyena’s, and its front legs were burly by comparison. It wasn’t a
canine type but a feline…Based on the rounded ears, it was probably
some kind of leopard.
“Graaar!!” the black panther roared, its light-blue eyes watching the
four of us closely.
Why now?! I lamented. We couldn’t run fast enough to get away
from it, and it was clearly feeling hostile toward the torch. I moved
the torch to my left hand and grabbed the handle of my sword.
“We’re going to fight!” I shouted.
Leafa drew her weapon and stepped forward. Liz loosened her mace
from its fasteners. I whispered “Take care of Yui” to her, and she
replied, “Don’t worry. I’ve got her.”
Upon seeing my longsword and Leafa’s katana, the panther bared its
vicious fangs. They weren’t as big as a saber-toothed tiger’s, but they
were at least three times as long as any real leopard’s. Its pelt was
dark as night, with a blue luster that ran from its neck down its spine.
The black panther crouched lower, entering a leaping stance. It was
targeting me. I held my sword at my right shoulder, preparing to
fight back with a sword skill.
Then there was an earsplitting roar—not from the panther but from
the wind.
A gust that made all the previous bursts of wind seem cute by
comparison blasted us. I had to tense my feet against the ground.
Our valiant little torch couldn’t withstand this and finally went out,
plunging us into darkness. Hard pellets lashed my exposed face and
hands. It was ice…hail.
Oh, hail no! I thought, although I didn’t think anyone would have
appreciated the wordplay because, just then, the panther leaped.

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I started to activate the sword skill Vertical on instinct but stopped
myself before I could plant my feet, and I spun around.
With incredible power, the panther jumped over all four of us,
landing on the other side. It wasn’t targeting us. It just ran farther
south.
“Um, do you think…it was just running away from the storm…?” Liz
wondered, just as the same thought occurred to me. If we were
right, then these icy gusts were merely the warning blast of a storm
so dangerous that even monsters fled from its path. It also meant the
black panther had an evacuation destination in mind.
“Let’s go after it!” I shouted, sheathing my sword and grabbing Yui’s
hand. We took off running, Lisbeth and Leafa close behind. The
panther’s silhouette blended into the darkness, and if it got more
than a few yards away, we’d lose sight of it.
The torch was extinguished, so we couldn’t see the ground. If any of
us tripped on a change in elevation or a stone, that was it for our
chase. I could only pray for real, actual luck during the pursuit. I
considered scooping up Yui to carry her, but as a player, her agility
was bound to be close to my own, and she was keeping up well.
For two minutes, we pursued the fleeing black panther. A small hill
appeared up ahead. The panther leaped toward the foot of the hill,
then seemingly vanished into it. When we arrived a moment later,
there was a cave mouth about three feet tall, dark against the
hillside.
As soon as I stopped, hail struck my iron armor from behind, clanging
off the metal. The pellets were only a fraction of an inch in size now,
but they were bound to get worse. The temperature was dropping,
too; my breath was turning white.

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I could also see that my HP bar was dropping, bit by bit. A blinking
Debuff icon shaped like an ice crystal at the right end of the bar told
me all I needed to know.
“Papa, let’s go inside!” Yui urged. I nodded. The cave went much
farther in, and we just had to pray that the panther had gone as far
as it could.
I let go of Yui’s hand and drew my sword just in case as I approached
the cave mouth. I couldn’t see anything inside. The wind was so
strong that no torch would last more than a second at this point. I
steeled my nerves and bent down to go inside.
The cave sloped gently downward, and the ceiling got higher as I
proceeded. The cave was small at the ground level, but it seemed
that the full dimensions expanded as it went down. I continued
onward, feeling a bit relieved about that.
After about thirty feet, the slope leveled out, and I stopped moving
forward and straightened up. The ceiling was high enough that I
could reach upward with my sword and not touch anything. It was
quite a large space, then. There was no sign of the black panther.
I checked on my HP bar, which had stopped decreasing and no longer
had a freezing Debuff icon. I exhaled and turned back around. The
cave was pitch-black, with almost no visibility.
“Are you all here?” I whispered.
“Yes, Papa.” “I’m here.” “Sure am!”
Relieved, I started to put my sword back so that we could light the
torch again. But then I heard Leafa gasp “Wh-what’s that…?” and
spun around.
I still couldn’t see a thing. But after squinting long enough, I got a
message that said Night Vision skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.
And just like that, it became a tiny bit easier to see in the dark.

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And soon, I noticed it, too.
In the depths of the cave floated two blue lights. What is that? I
wondered. They went out, then lit again. Almost like a blink…
No. It was a blink. The eyes of the panther that had come in before
us.
We’d been noticed.
“Grrrr…”
The beast growled, and the blue eyes rose higher, suggesting that
the panther went from lying on its side to a standing position.
Obviously, its night vision was far better than ours, so if this turned
into a fight, we didn’t stand a chance.
“Yui, light the torch,” I murmured, holding the torch in my left hand
behind my back.
“Okay,” she replied and took it. I was going to hand her the
flintstones, but before I could, there was a strange sound.
It was a high-pitched creaking, something that did not sound like it
came from the panther. Wary of the enemy ahead of us, I quickly
spun around and saw that tiny white particles were sweeping in from
the mouth of the cave.
The moment the particles touched Lisbeth, who was the farthest
back, she sneezed loudly. Leafa shrieked, “It’s cold!” and Yui
moaned. Lastly, I shivered. It was worse than just cold. The freezing
Debuff icon was there again, and I could see my HP dropping. We
couldn’t avoid the chill from the mouth of the cave at this location. I
could even hear the whistling of the wind, which sounded like faint
screaming. I didn’t want to imagine what it was like out in the open.
“Big Brother, we have to go farther in!” Leafa urged nervously. I
shouted back “I know, but what about the panther?!” The monster in

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the back of the cave wasn’t attacking, but it continued to growl. It
wasn’t hard to imagine the beast pouncing on us if we got any closer.
My HP bar had dropped 10 percent. At this rate, it would hit zero in
less than three minutes. I supposed that we’d just have to fight the
panther, regardless of the disadvantages…but then I remembered
something we could still try out.
I dropped my sword back into my sheath and stuck my hand into my
tool bag, then removed a thin, flat object. It was the bear jerky Asuna
had made for us. The emergency ration was important, but I’d never
need to eat it if I died from the cold or the panther.
“C’mon, it’s yummy! It’s dinner!” I called out to the blue eyes in the
darkness and tossed the dried meat. It fell to the ground, attracting
the attention of the panther. It blinked. Then blinked again.
The blue eyes silently moved toward the meat. I sensed the panther
sniffing at the air. After several tense seconds, I heard a creaking
sound. The black panther had bitten the jerky. Instantly, there was a
glowing ring in the darkness, looking like a car speedometer. Around
one third of it was full from the lower left and colored red, while the
end of it jittered up and down. That was the beast-taming meter
Asuna said appeared when she was catching Aga.
I pulled out another piece of jerky, my last, and tossed it forward.
The panther immediately grabbed it, and the meter rose another 10
percent.
“Give me your jerky.”
I reached behind my back, and Yui promptly dropped a piece of meat
into my palm. Trying to sense when the panther was done eating, I
hurled the third stick of jerky. The meter went up farther to the
halfway point. The first piece of jerky put it at 30 percent, and the
next two added 10 percent each. Yui should have one piece of jerky,
plus two each from Liz and Leafa, which should give us just enough.
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Trusting in my calculation, I continued tossing the dried meat to the
panther. For each bit of the beast-taming meter we pushed upward,
our HP dropped. At level-13, I had more overall HP than the others,
who were only around level-4 or level-5. I could see on the party
readout below my own HP bar that their health was already under
the halfway point.
Hurry, hurry, I prayed. But I had a feeling that the timing of food lures
was the key to beast-taming success in this game: Wait for the
monster to finish eating so that the meter was rising when you gave
it the next piece of food. Any faster or slower, and it wouldn’t work.
Once I had given the panther the second piece of Yui’s jerky, then
both of Liz’s, the beast-taming meter was about 80 percent full.
Asuna had given Aga three pieces of bear meat to tame it, so this
panther was much harder. Either it was because we were giving it
dried meat rather than fresh or because the panther was a much
higher level.
“Leafa.”
“Okay.”
She placed the ninth piece of meat in my palm, and I tossed it. The
panther gobbled it up, taking the meter to 90 percent.
“Leafa.”
“That’s all.”
“……Huh?”
I spun around to face my little sister, whose silhouette I could only
just barely make out in the darkness. “What do you mean, that’s all?
Asuna gave us three pieces each! And we each ate one when we
stopped for a break, so we should all have two…”
“I ate two, actually.”

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“Huh?!”
“I couldn’t help it! I was hungry!”
“Wha…?”
I was aghast, but what was gone was gone. It was too late to get
back all the hyena meat we left behind, too. I had a feeling the
panther wouldn’t eat that hideous-smelling stuff anyway.
The panther’s beast-taming meter was now wavering around 90
percent. If we did nothing and it started to drop, all of our effort and
supplies would have amounted to nothing.
I heard Yui whimper, “Papa…my HP…”
“Yui,” I murmured, dropping the unlit torch and pulling my daughter
closer so I could wrap my arms around her. Even through her armor,
I could tell that her body was freezing cold and trembling. Her HP bar
was down to barely over 10 percent at this point. I couldn’t just let
her freeze to death.
My mind was made up. I inched forward, holding Yui. Getting farther
away from the entrance eased the cold, but the black panther
started to growl again. The beast-taming meter, still wavering,
started to shift into a negative trend.
There was no food left to give. But food couldn’t be the only way to
lift that meter.
“You don’t have to be afraid…I’m not your enemy,” I whispered to
the beast as I approached. The panther’s growling got louder, but it
was neither fleeing nor attacking for now.
I closed within six feet…three feet…two feet. At this distance, I could
finally see the creature’s outline. Its head was low, ready to pounce
at any moment. The beast-taming meter was down to 80 percent.

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Ready for it to be bitten off, I extended my hand. When I touched the
powerful neck of the panther, its body jolted.
“There you go. Good boy…”
I brushed its luxurious fur with my fingertips. The growling did not
stop. The meter was still dropping, bit by bit. But if I showed any fear
now, the panther was sure to attack right away. I continued to stroke
it with my right hand, holding Yui in my left. The panther’s muscles
tensed, relaxed, then tensed again.
“Grrr…rrrrr…”
As the growling got lower, the panther’s head followed. Was it a sign
of impending attack or something else?
“Rrrr…grorrr…”
The constant rumbling in the giant cat’s throat had changed
somewhat. It was more of a rolling sound now, like a giant version of
a cat purring.
At last, its powerful neck muscles relaxed, and the beast-taming
meter stopped descending and began to rise once again. The black
panther rolled onto its side and allowed me to pet it. The meter hit
80 percent and then went past 90.
“There you go…Good boy…,” I whispered, reaching back with my
other hand. Leafa had seen Aga get tamed and knew to hand me a
rope of ubiquigrass.
Annoyingly slowly, the beast-taming meter finally reached its full
length, and that was when I looped the end of the grass around the
panther’s neck to form a circle. With tense fingers, I closed it tight,
and the big cat’s body flashed, summoning a green circle over its
head. Underneath the ring-shaped HP bar was the species name:
Lapispine Dark Panther. There was also a message for me:
Domestication skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

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Page | 147
So it’s a dark panther, rather than a black panther. Okay. But what
does lapispine mean? I wondered, though there was no time for that
now. I shouted “Huddle around the panther!” to Leafa and Lisbeth,
and pressed Yui against the neck of the beast. The other girls draped
themselves over the thick, soft fur on its stomach.
The cat’s body temperature was high, and the warmth bloomed
through my near-freezing skin. I exhaled with relief. My HP stopped
dropping, and the freezing Debuff icon disappeared. The icy particles
were still streaming in from the entrance, but they didn’t reach the
back of this little cave.
Feeling secure at last, I asked a question to no one in particular.
“…What does lapispine mean? Like intestine?”
Leafa rubbed at the bluish part of the panther’s back and replied,
“Probably because of this lapis-blue patch on its spine, right?”
“Oh…lapis spine…”
Lisbeth asked, “So what are we calling it?”
“Hmm? Well…it’s black, so it should be Kuro,” I said after two quick
seconds of consideration. Leafa and Liz cried out “That’s so boring!”
in unison. But Yui said, “It’s simple and good.” I decided to ask the
creature in question.
“It’s a good name, right, Kuro?”
The black panther barked, “Graar!”

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7
“…I knew I should have asked…”
Sinon lifted the end of the pelt she had wrapped around her body to
look outside.
What had been dry grassland just minutes ago was now a field of
pure white. She reached out and scooped up some of the white stuff,
letting the fine particles trickle between her fingers. It was piled-up
hail pellets, not snow.
When Fikki the Ornith girl had given her this pelt cloak, she’d said, If
a comes, use it. The word Sinon couldn’t make out because of her
lack of language proficiency was probably something like hailstorm.
Or maybe it was blizzard from hell. It certainly felt like one when it
swept over. She’d dived into a little hollow beneath a boulder and
wrapped herself tight in the pelt cloak, but even then, it’d taken
away nearly half her HP bar.
Once she’d confirmed that the freezing Debuff icon didn’t activate
when she took off the cloak, Sinon emerged from under the rock.
She now stared in wonder at the world of silvery-white around her,
reflecting the light of the moon.
She’d run as much as she could in the hour since leaving the Ornith
village and probably covered twelve miles before the hailstorm
arrived. Looking at how much hail was covering the earth all the way
to the horizon, she was worried for the village. There was no turning
back now, however. She didn’t know how many miles it was to the
Bashin village, but if she didn’t get there tonight, she’d have to log
out in the middle of the wide-open Giyoru Savanna. The current
situation in Unital Ring was the biggest emergency in the VR gaming

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world since the SAO Incident in 2022, but Sinon wasn’t bold enough
to use that as an excuse to skip school.
She sat down again at the foot of the rock, resisting the urge to go on
the move again. The pelt went back into her inventory, replaced by
Fikki’s hard bread. It was indeed teeth-breakingly hard, and it didn’t
have much flavor, but she put up with it because she didn’t have
time to start a fire. Her HP and SP slowly began to recover. Once she
got her HP up to about 80 percent, she drank from her canteen.
She’d used up quite a lot with all the running, so she needed to look
for fresh water soon…
“…Oh! Unless…”
She scooped up some of the nearly infinite supply of hailstones and
trickled them into the canteen. After a moment, the ice melted, and
the level refilled a bit. After a couple repetitions, the container was
full again. The temperature was rising, too, so the hail on the ground
would melt soon. As long as she had a container, she could refill as
much water as she wanted. But of course, there were no canteens or
water jugs just lying around on the ground, and Sinon had neither
the materials nor the necessary skill to make one.
Sinon examined the details of the Ornith canteen closely. It seemed
to be made of waterproof leather. Though she hadn’t thought about
it before, it occurred to her now that the light and sturdy canteen
was probably more valuable than the life-giving water inside it.
Between the muskets and the contemporary-looking buildings, the
Orniths seemed to have quite an advanced civilization. Too bad she
wasn’t likely to visit them again for quite a while.
For now, she drank from the freshly chilled water to refill her TP bar,
then sloshed more hail into the canteen to top it off. If she ran
quickly, she could probably use it up and refill it one more time
before all the ice melted.

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Sinon picked up the musket from the side of the boulder, slung it
over her back, checked that her laser gun was still on her hip, then
began sprinting across the silvery plains.

Out of the fifteen ability points she had acquired, Sinon spent ten to
take the Swiftness ability and its two offshoots, Gallop and
Dexterous. From Swiftness, that gave her a bonus to ranged-weapon
damage, small-melee-weapon damage, and jumping distance; from
Gallop, reduced rate of SP and TP decrease when running; and from
Dexterous, a bonus to ranged-weapon accuracy and lock-picking
change. She was curious about the offshoots of Gallop, Sprint, and
Acrobat, and the offshoots of Dexterous, Vital Aim, and Adroit, but
she held off for now because the third-tier abilities cost three points
each. Saving five points was probably more cautious than she
needed to be, but she had a feeling she’d soon want abilities from
outside the Swiftness tree—particularly from the Toughness tree.
For now, the effect of the lower TP/SP cost from Gallop was huge. At
just rank-2, she could already tell that they were draining slower. She
couldn’t have run twelve miles in an hour without it.
Sinon ran persistently, eager to make up the time she’d lost because
of the storm. Before now, she’d had to avoid monsters as well as
their likely hiding places. But now that the storm had passed, it
seemed as though all the creatures had burrowed underground,
because she couldn’t see a single moving thing anymore as she
hurried southeast. Eight inches of hail on the ground made for a
crunchy surface underfoot, but unlike snow, it was tightly packed
and did not slow her down.
After fifteen minutes, the ice began to thaw. It was melting as the
temperature rose again. She stopped, drank from her water supply
to refill her TP, then scooped up more ice. More of it was melting
even as she did this, so the next time she drank, she’d need to find a

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new source to fill up her water. Hopefully, that’d be after she was
out of the savanna.
Up ahead near the horizon, lit by dim starlight now that the clouds
had blown past, she could see the dark outline of mountains…or a
cliff. She’d crossed eighteen miles of the flat expanse, and up ahead
it was split with a giant wall of a cliff.
Was that the end of the plains? Did that mean the Bashin village was
close to the wall?
With hope in her heart, Sinon gazed at the foot of the cliff from
north to south. But at no point did she see any sign of man-made
light. It was a bit before nine PM, which seemed early for lights in a
village to be out, but she had to have faith.
The ice was melting all around her now, returning the grassland to its
regular state. The beasts and insects that had burrowed to get away
from the chill would be active again soon. She reminded herself that
she’d need to be wary of monsters once more, and she continued
her run.
As she got closer, the scale of the cliff was far bigger than she
realized.
It was easily over 150 feet tall and almost entirely vertical, so
climbing it was out of the question. She couldn’t tell whether to go
north or south around it because there was no way to tell which side
of it ended sooner.
Sinon had never seen them for herself, but in the Underworld, there
were giant barriers called the Everlasting Walls, which split the four
empires into separate territories, and not even the nobles or
emperors themselves could cross them. That kind of absurdity
existed because it was a simulation, not a game. And because Unital
Ring was a game, there had to be some way to get through this wall.

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She looked around and found a large rock with a flat top, which she
climbed for a better vantage. Once she was sure there were no
monsters around, she opened her inventory and materialized the
Hecate II.
Sinon knew it was pointless, but just to be sure, she tried to lift the
heavy antimateriel gun. It would not budge. Even though Sinon was
level-16, it was over her Equip Weight limit. She sighed, then got
down and peered through the scope. She could pull it off the gun
and use it as a mini-telescope by hand, if she wanted, but then she’d
have to realign and adjust it again after reattaching it. The process
was much easier in virtual reality than in the real world, from what
she’d read, but you also needed to do a test fire to confirm it was
right, and that was a waste.
So she painfully realigned the Hecate’s direction until she could look
through the scope for a better view of the wall. The blackish surface
was so smooth that it didn’t even look natural. Free-climbing that
wall would be suicide. There were little trees growing here and there
out of the surface, but there were not nearly enough of them to
climb all the way up. Examining the northern side of the wall turned
up nothing more of interest, so she slowly spun the Hecate on its
bipod to point the other way, to the south, and looked through the
scope again.
“Ah…”
She zoomed in on the scope. There was a slope carved into the wall
at one point, like a set of stairs. Following the trail, feeling her heart
beating in her throat, she saw it vanish at the top into a tunnel, its
mouth black and yawning.
There was an unpleasant mixture of excitement at finding the
passage through the cliff wall and anxiety about heading through a
tight area, the bane of all snipers. In any case, she had no other
options. The Hecate went back into her inventory. Sinon stood up;
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her HP was full again, thanks to the hard bread, and her TP and SP
were almost 90 percent full. She wished she could put some of that
perpetually full MP to practice use, but for now, she had no idea how
to gain any magic skills.
She still had her Sniper Rifle Mastery skill from GGO. What if she
could become not a magic swordsman—but a magic gunman? That
would be cool.
With that enticing thought in mind, Sinon resumed running toward
the titanic wall.

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8
The sight of the pale moonlight shining down upon the white, ice-
crusted plains was so beautiful that I was left speechless, even
knowing it was all just a virtual rendering. It was our newest party
member, Kuro, the lapispine dark panther, who brought me back to
reality with a headbutt to my waist.
“Rrrr…,” it purred, telling me to get going. I gave its neck a scratch
and replied “Good idea. We’re almost to the Bashin village.”
In fact, the village wasn’t our final destination. We were going to ask
them for information about the birdpeople Sinon had met, and then
we’d have to continue from there. If we could meet up with Sinon by
midnight, that was probably the best outcome we could hope for.
Thanks to the hailstorm, the little monsters were out of the way, so it
was best if we ran as far as we could while the coast was clear. I was
about to give the signal to launch when Lisbeth cut me off.
“About that, Kirito.”
“About what…the Bashin?”
“Yeah. Remember how I said Silica, Yui, and I had a meal in the
Bashin’s big tent? Well…they had a bunch of fur rugs on the ground
in there.”
“And…?”
“I’m pretty sure I saw one of them that was a mixture of black and
blue…”
“…”

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I looked away from Liz to Kuro’s back. The shining black fur had a
streak of brilliant blue running down its spine, just as the species
name described.
Yui was already enamored with Kuro. She patted its back and added,
“Yes, there was a rug in the corner of the tent with this color
arrangement on it. It was a ninety-nine percent match with Kuro’s
fur.”
If Yui said it, then mistaken memory wasn’t a factor. That left no
doubt that the Bashin hunted lapispine dark panthers on the
savanna.
True or not, in a normal game, an NPC would never attack a player’s
tamed monster. Still, there was no guarantee it would work the same
way in Unital Ring.
“Hmm. In that case, what if we have you wait with Kuro outside the
village so that we can go and collect information inside?” Leafa
suggested. That was a logical idea, and I was going to add that they
should get some food for me, too, if they got fed.
But then Yui spoke again. “Actually, Papa, we might not need to go
into the village at all.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“The earlier storm was of considerable scope. If Sinon encountered
the same storm, it’s possible she could be on the opposite side of the
savanna.”
“…I see. That’s true…But how will we make contact with Sinon, then?
She’s not a registered friend or party member, so we can’t send
messages,” I said.
Yui beamed. “Why do you need to contact her in Unital Ring? Why
not in the real world?”

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Following my daughter’s advice, I logged out and sat upright. Going
from the icy white plains to my man-made room gave me a bout of
momentary dizziness until I looked to my side. On the left side of the
bed was Suguha, wearing her AmuSphere and looking defenseless in
her sleep…but of course, she wasn’t sleeping. Suguha was currently
in a far-off virtual world, protecting my avatar. We knew there were
no enemies in visible range, but there was always the possibility of a
dangerous monster popping into existence, so I needed to hurry.
I lifted the AmuSphere visor and grabbed my phone. With the
introduction of the Augma, it was quickly becoming an obsolete bit
of gadgetry, but I used it to call Sinon anyway.
She was probably in the midst of a UR dive, too, but the AmuSphere
had a linking feature to your smartphone that allowed you to receive
calls there. Assuming she had it turned on—and that she wasn’t in
the midst of battle or something else just as important—she should
answer. I waited patiently for thirty seconds, listening to the ring
signal.
“Make it quick!” came her response, getting right to the point. That
was Sinon’s voice, so I obliged her request by launching into the topic
at hand.
“Did you get stuck in the ice storm?!”
“Nearly froze to death about twenty minutes ago.”
“So you’re in the Giyoru Savanna, too?”
“Yes, I’m heading southeast from the northwest.”
“Got it. We’ll head northwest from the southeast! Is there any
terrain near you that makes for a good landmark?”
“You bet there is. There’s a gigantic natural wall running north to
south, probably through the middle of the savanna. I went into a
cave through the wall. That’s where I am right now.”

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“Cave in the wall…? Any monsters?”
“Tons. I logged out in a safe-ish place, but they could pop up at
any time, so I can’t stick around.”
She was doing the exact same thing I was, but while I had my
teammates and pet to protect me, Sinon was all alone. If she got
attacked while she was logged-out, she’d die in moments.
“All right. We’ll go into the wall from the east side. Just hang in
there.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
She hung up. I took a quick sip of water, then lay down on the bed
again and lowered the AmuSphere visor.

Back on the moonlit plains, the ice had begun to melt in the few
minutes I’d been logged-out. The girls scooped up the remaining ice
and drained it into the water jugs. No monsters had appeared in the
area yet.
“I’m back!” I called out, rising to my feet. Kuro rubbed its head on me
again. Despite its fierce appearance, it seemed to be very cuddly
once it took to you. After feeding it all the bear jerky, we’d need to
find some more food soon.
Lisbeth, Leafa, and Yui gathered around to listen to Sinon’s message.
“A natural wall…?” Leafa murmured, staring to the northwest. I did
the same, but there was nothing visible beyond the darkness of the
horizon. I started to worry that there was some huge
misunderstanding afoot. But Sinon had risked her character’s life to
pass on that information, so I just had to trust it.
“Let’s hurry,” I said. The girls nodded, and Kuro issued a quick chuff.
We ran across the plains, encountering two packs of the familiar
hyenas and one bison-like monster. The bison was a bit of a handful,

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but with Kuro distracting the beast and performing acrobatic feats,
we were free to use enough sword skills to whittle down its HP. The
rest of the girls each earned a level from that fight.
The bison also dropped a ton of raw meat, which Kuro was very
happy to eat, thankfully. Now I wouldn’t have to worry for a while
about the tamed effect wearing off due to hunger.
There were no more encounters after that point. Thirty minutes of
travel later, Yui pointed ahead and shouted, “I can see a wall!”
I stopped and squinted until a surface rising directly above the plains
was visible to me. The massive cliff ran from north to south, and its
scale reminded me of the Everlasting Walls from the Underworld.
“And somewhere in there is a cave where Sinon’s waiting?” asked
Lisbeth. That was correct, but the more I thought about it, the
tougher it was going to be to find one little cave mouth on a surface
that was miles long. Plus, there was no guarantee that there’d be
only one of them. I thought hard, trying not to panic about the task
ahead.
“…Papa, this might not be fair, but I’m going to enhance my eyesight
to look for the cave,” Yui announced, her eyes wide.
Of the four of us, Lisbeth, Leafa, and I were using our brains to “see”
the visual information the AmuSphere provided, but as an AI, Yui
could process the brightness and contrast of those details all she
wanted. I didn’t want to treat her like some kind of convenient
software tool, but we had to meet up with Sinon. Besides, if we’d
proceeded to the Bashin village like we’d originally planned, I’d be
asking her to interpret for us there anyway. One way or another, I
needed Yui’s help.
“I’d appreciate that,” I murmured. Yui briefly looked at me, smiled,
then turned back to concentrate. A few seconds later, she pointed at
a spot ahead of us.
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“I’ve found it! There’s a staircase and a cave entrance in this
direction!”
“Thanks, Yui!” said Leafa, hugging the little girl. Liz rubbed her head,
too.
From here, there was no way to tell how thick across the cliff wall
was, but I couldn’t imagine it being miles long. Even if the cave made
a dungeon, it wouldn’t be that big.
Hang in there just a bit longer, Sinon! I told her silently and started
running in the direction that Yui pointed.

The faint cliff off in the distance grew more and more substantial as
we approached, and once we were at its foot, the size of it left us
speechless. The cliff was about 150 feet tall, and though there were
wider elevation gaps in Alfheim, the distance this wall covered was
vast. A single line of vertical cliff that stretched from one end of the
horizon to the other was the sort of thing that typically looked like
lazy level-design in a game, but for some reason, in the world of
Unital Ring, it felt like a true natural wonder.
The dark rock face was hard and smooth; there was no way to climb
it by hand. Perhaps it might be possible to craft a ladder to place
against it, but there were no trees or vines nearby to harvest for
material. We’d have to use the stairs Yui’d spotted.
Those stairs were carved out of just a foot of space along the cliff
face, with nothing to hold on to. It was close to a hundred feet to get
to the cave entrance, so one bad misstep would mean certain death.
I wanted to place a guide rope on the wall, but over an hour had
passed since I contacted Sinon, and we couldn’t keep her waiting any
longer.

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“Kuro, can you get up these stairs?” I asked. The black panther
growled, then hopped ten feet up the steps without fear. It even
wagged its tail with excitement.
Well, it wouldn’t do for its master to be afraid of the challenge now.
“Okay…here I go,” I announced. Behind me, Lisbeth huffed “Come
on—hurry up already.”
Thankfully, we reached the top without any accidents, but we didn’t
dare relax until we were all inside the open mouth of the cave at the
end. The stairs were man-made, so I figured the cave was, too, but it
seemed to be natural. Meaning someone had carved out the steps
from the cliff in order to reach the hole yawning in the middle of the
wall. That would have been an NPC, not a player, of course. But was
it these Bashin people or someone else? There was no way to know.
In any case, this was the first proper dungeon to explore since our
forced conversion yesterday. I doubted any players had been in here
before us, so any materials or treasure chests—if they existed—
would be there for the taking. That made me want to chart out every
step of the place, but meeting up with Sinon was our top priority.
We’d run a long way to get here, so my SP bar was below 60 percent,
and my TP was below 50. We had plenty of drinking water, but the
only food was raw bison meat. For now, I decided to drink some
fluids and feed Kuro the meat and water, and we could eat
something after finding Sinon.
“This is kind of an unorthodox party, so how are you thinking we’ll
take formation?” asked Leafa once she had put away her water jug.
I considered that and replied, “Me and Kuro in the front, Liz and Yui
in the middle, and you take the rear, Leafa. Yui and I can hold the
torches.”
Lisbeth made a face like she wanted to say something. She was the
only one with a shield, so she probably wanted to stand up front to
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play a tank, but I wanted her to focus more on protecting Yui.
Thankfully, she took my point and didn’t argue.
“Fine, just switch out as soon as things get hairy.”
“Thanks. I’m counting on you.”
And with that, we had our 2-2-1 formation.
Among VRMMO players, there was a tendency to think that there
was plenty of time to assume formation once battle started, and
lining up while you were only on the move was dumb and uncool. I’d
probably agree with that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but in
Aincrad, it took only one moment of carelessness to lead to
tragedy—especially in a dungeon, where things were cramped and
chaotic. Even now that we weren’t in a death game anymore, I
tended to be thorough about battle formation.
“Tell me if you notice any monsters,” I whispered to Kuro, scratching
its neck. The panther answered “Graar.”
Sinon said there were “tons” of monsters over the phone, and that
did not turn out to be an exaggeration. There were plenty of slimy
amphibian-type monsters in the dank cave, and they had us
constantly on our heels. Fortunately, Kuro’s advanced searching
capabilities enabled it to growl a warning before we saw our
enemies, and we were able to fight back all of them easily. Even Yui
showed off the fruits of her training with Alice. She fought bravely
with her short sword, proving that I was a little too worried about
her.
Onward we went through the cave, slaying giant newts, legless
caecilians, and axolotls. Unfortunately, we didn’t come across any
treasure chests, but there were more than a few veins of iron and
bronze ore, so we stocked up on everything we could find.

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After twenty minutes, I was getting worried about my SP, but I didn’t
want to chow down on raw newt, either. From the rear, Leafa said,
“It’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”
“What’s weird?”
“We’re dealing with all of these amphibians, and there are so many
newts and salamanders, yet there hasn’t been a single—”
Blaaaam!
There was a dry, distant echoing sound that came from farther in,
causing Leafa to stop in the middle of her sentence.
I hadn’t heard that particular sound once in this dungeon—or in
Unital Ring at all. Kuro paused, twitching, and began to growl. That
had to be a gunpowder explosion: a gunshot.
“It’s Sinon!” I shouted, trying not to make too much noise, and
looked over my shoulder. “Yui, can you tell which direction that
came from?”
“I’m analyzing the echoes…It came from a hallway ahead and to the
right!” she stated. I thanked her and picked up my pace. At the next
fork, we went right and followed the tunnel as it curved and
descended somewhat.
Suddenly, the cave widened ahead. We were near the top of a huge
domed hollow. It had to be nearly fifty yards across. That was much
farther than the torches were capable of illuminating, but I could see
the overall size of the dome because of some kind of luminescent
moss growing on the walls.
A narrow sloped path ran from our location along the wall to the
floor of the dome. The floor was split between damp rocks and dark
water, and atop a boulder in the middle was a human silhouette.

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It wore a tight-fitting suit of armor and a white muffler. In its arms
was something like a long stick—a gun. There couldn’t be another
gunner here by coincidence. We’d finally found her.
“Si—,” I started to call out but swallowed the sound.
Behind the gunner were more humanoid shapes. But though they
were upright, they were not human. Pointed snouts, big round
ears…Their heads were clearly those of mice. They carried weapons
that looked like pitchforks. Their narrow tails swayed as they
advanced upon the gunner. There were two…no, three of them.
“Sinon, behind you!!” I called out, descending the steps on the side
of the dome as fast as I could. Kuro and the others followed close
behind me.
The gunner, Sinon, looked up and then behind her. There was no
more than fifteen feet separating her from the ratmen. She could
shoot one of them, but the other two would skewer her with their
weapons.
“Ryaaa!”
I leaped halfway down the path into a shallow pool. The jump
created a huge splash and took a few of my HP, but I didn’t care. I
pulled back, preparing to throw my torch at the closest ratman to
Sinon.
“No, Kirito! They’re not enemies!” I heard her shout, and I hastily
adjusted my grip on the torch. The panther was about to leap on
another one of them, so I told it, “Kuro, stop!”
The panther hit the brakes, and the three ratmen shrieked “ !” and
backed away toward the wall. There was another hallway mouth
there, a different one from the way we’d come inside.
My eyes met Sinon’s as she stood atop the boulder. She had light-
blue hair that was slightly pointed at the ends, and sharp, catlike

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eyes—it was undoubtedly Sinon. But the rifle she was holding looked
really old-fashioned and wasn’t all that similar to her usual weapon,
the PGM Ultima Ratio Hecate II. Assuming that the Hecate was over
her Equip Weight limit, much like my Blárkveld and Excalibur, where
did she get this gun? But it wasn’t like that mattered now.
“If these ratmen aren’t the enemy, then who are you fighting,
Sinon?!” I demanded as Lisbeth, Yui, and Leafa reached the floor of
the dome. Sinon’s expression softened when she saw them splashing
through the puddles, but it didn’t last long.
“Get up out of the water, everyone!” she shouted. “Preferably atop
tall rocks!”
Her tone brooked no argument, so I held my questions for later and
started to clamber up a nearby boulder. But before I could get up, I
heard a splash nearby.
Something was approaching under the water at tremendous speed.
There was no time to avoid it; something hit my right ankle. I’d been
bitten—no, grabbed?
Suddenly, my foot got wrenched aside, and I fell into the water. The
torch flew out of my hand and fizzled out. With the sword in my right
hand, I tried to sever the ropelike thing wrapped around my ankle,
but I couldn’t reach. It was going to drag me into the depths—
“Growwr!” Kuro snarled and plunged headfirst into the water, then
emerged holding the thing that was pulling me in its fangs.
It was not a rope. It was some kind of slimy, pink tentacle thing.
“Big Brother!”
Leafa lifted her katana and activated Sonic Leap. Shwa! She split the
surface of the water in two. It was a perfectly boosted attack,
performed with great skill by her real-life expert swordsmanship. The

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glowing green blade struck the tentacle Kuro was pulling—but did
not sever it.
Lisbeth’s steel katana sank a few inches into the pink tentacle but
stopped there. The rubbery appendage twanged and bounced back.
“Aaaah!” “Grrarp?!”
It threw Leafa and Kuro back together with a massive splash. But
their attack paid off, because the tentacle let go of my ankle and
sank back into the deeper water.
I helped Leafa up and got atop the rock for good this time. Yui and
Lisbeth retreated to different rocks, and Kuro leaped up next to me
in a single bound.
“What was that, Sinon?!” I gasped.
The gunner brandished her old-fashioned rifle and replied, “It’ll pop
out of the water soon! Keep your eyes peeled. It moves fast!”
No sooner had the words left her mouth than there was a loud
splash, and a dark shape leaped out of the water on the distant side
of the pool. It was large, about six feet long…and if its extremely long
and powerful legs stretched out, it could uncurl to twice that length.
The front legs, meanwhile, were weak and small, and its head was a
part of its torso.
The gigantic creature leaped from puddle to puddle with dizzying
speed, then landed and stuck to the wall of the dome. Lisbeth, Yui,
Leafa, and I all cried the same word at the same time.
“Frog!!”
Aside from the size of it, everything about the monster was perfectly
froggish. It had large, bulging eyes and a diamond-shaped torso. Its
legs folded in the middle and ended in long, flared fingers that
looked like suckers.

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At last, I understood what Leafa was trying to say before we heard
the gunshot. We had seen lots of newts and salamanders—but no
frogs.
“Hey, lucky you. Here’s the frog you wanted,” I said, staring up at the
signature amphibian stuck to the wall.
“I didn’t want there to be frogs.” Leafa pouted. “Especially gigantic
ones…”
“That’s got to be the boss of this cave…”
I wasn’t just guessing about that. I’d taken a tentacle attack to my
right leg, so I could see the ring cursor over the giant frog’s head. Its
individual name was Goliath Rana. All of the previous monsters we’d
met, including Kuro, had descriptive Japanese names, but this one
was in English, which I assumed had to mean something. Assuming it
was actually English, of course.
“…Goliath means ‘giant,’ right? What’s rana?” I murmured.
Yui replied, “I believe it’s the name of the family of true frogs. In
Japan, they’re labeled as red frogs.”
Sure enough, the body of the giant frog was dark red, and its eyes
flickered like flames.
The Goliath Rana’s bulging eyes blinked, and it began to climb the
wall at a relaxed pace. The more it climbed and the steeper the
negative angle became, the more eerily weightless it seemed, a cow-
sized shape refusing to fall.
“Wouldn’t this be the time to shoot it, Sinon?” I asked, realizing my
suggestion was probably unwanted.
The gunner kept the rifle at her side without budging. She stared up
at the frog and spat, “I’ve shot it several times already. But its back is
too tough for these musket bullets to pierce.”

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Thanks to The Three Musketeers and such, I knew that muskets were
an old-fashioned kind of gun. But you couldn’t call them “rifles,”
because there wasn’t any rifling on the inside of the barrels. This
made me wonder where she’d gotten such a thing, but this wasn’t
the time to be asking irrelevant questions.
“…Can you manage to shoot the Hecate with extra help?” I
wondered.
She shot me down at once. “Nope. We can’t get the angle while it’s
on the ceiling, and when it’s on the ground, it’s moving too fast to
aim at.”
“Good point…”
I was still curious about the ratpeople behind us, but as long as they
weren’t hostile, I could find out the answer later. This was the time
to figure out how to beat the Goliath Rana.
“Remember, Kirito, for most of the frog-type monsters in Aincrad,
the weak point was the stomach,” noted Lisbeth, holding her mace.
“Good point. Let’s get it to expose its belly before attacking.”
“But how?” asked Leafa.
“Ummm…”
Just then, the giant frog reached the very top of the hundred-foot-
tall dome and looked down at us with its creepy eyes, completely
upside-down.
“Here it comes!” Sinon shouted right as the frog’s powerful legs
launched it off the rock and straight at me with blinding speed.
“Aaaah!”
I did a backflip out of pure instinctual reaction to avoid the hit, but
the rock I was standing on got obliterated, pelting my body with
stone shards. I lost only 3 percent of my HP, but it would have been
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much worse if not for my metal armor. And without a single potion
to use, any accumulation of damage would eventually prove fatal.
The others hadn’t lost any HP, fortunately. But then I realized I was
forgetting something important. I backed farther away, called up the
ring menu, and hit the INVITE icon in the communication tab, then slid
down to Sinon’s name. She immediately accepted, adding a new
abbreviated bar to the list in the upper left corner of my vision.
The Goliath Rana remained in place for about three seconds after its
meteoric crash, then began to move again. It jumped into a nearby
pool of water and vanished.
“On top of the rocks!” Sinon instructed, so we jumped onto nearby
boulders again. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Yui and
Kuro climbing up, then asked Sinon, “So its attack patterns are a dive
into the water, followed by a tentacle attack, then climbing to the
ceiling and diving down? Just those two?”
“For now. And that’s its tongue, not a tentacle.”
“Oh…that makes more sense.”
So when the Goliath Rana grabbed my ankle, it wasn’t trying to
drown me but eat me. If I had only one life to live in Unital Ring, I
was going to do everything in my power to avoid going out like that.
After enough time waiting atop the rocks, we lured the frog out of
the water again, where it began to climb the wall. We didn’t have an
avenue to attack yet, but if we avoided the dive attack, at least we
wouldn’t take major damage…But that wasn’t the right line of
thought. Each one of its dives was destroying a safe rock to stand on,
so we would eventually lose our defense against its tongue attack.
“Liz, Leafa, once we avoid the dive, we’ve got to use sword skills
before it moves again. Try to aim for the underside of its body to flip
it over.”

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“Okay.” “Got it.”
“Sinon, Yui,” I continued, “follow up when the frog’s stomach is
exposed. Kuro, protect Yui.”
“Roger that!” “Yes, Papa!” “Grawr!”
I felt sure that the two girls understood my point but wasn’t as
positive about the panther. Here was hoping, though.
The giant frog’s suckered limbs made their way up the rock wall with
ease. Another ten seconds until it reached the top again. Could we
use the materials on hand to fashion a kind of trap where it was
going to land? Like making a line of spiked logs—assuming such a
thing existed in the Woodworking skill…
“Kirito!” Sinon shouted, startling me out of my thoughts. The Goliath
Rana wasn’t yet to the top of the dome, but its legs were bulging
with tensed power.
“Kwah!”
I jumped backward desperately, right as the frog kicked off the wall.
It obliterated the boulder before my eyes like a cannonball. Fist-sized
chunks of rock struck my shoulder and leg. They dented my iron
armor and caused notable HP loss.
Bastard!
I entered the stance for Rage Spike—a low thrusting skill—before I
landed. You usually had to lean forward as far as possible right over
the ground, so executing the proper motion while in the air was a
very high-level technique.
My sword took on a pale-blue sheen as soon as my feet hit a shallow
puddle. The instant the skill activated, I leaped forward, boosting the
action. Water frothed to the sides as I charged at the throat of the
briefly stunned frog.

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Without missing a beat, Leafa came in from the right and Lisbeth
from the left. They were using skills that targeted low, according to
the plan. With this many attacks happening at once, there was no
way we could fail to flip over the frog, no matter how big it was.
And in less than a second, my confidence turned to horror.
The Goliath Rana, which looked like a tiny mountain up close,
suddenly flattened, as though all of its bones had vanished. It
squashed itself absolutely horizontal against the ground, hiding its
neck and belly. But I couldn’t stop the sword skill. My sword hit the
frog’s snout, Leafa’s katana and Lisbeth’s mace hit its shoulders, and
the dark-red skin dented inward.
It felt like slicing a huge blob of rubber. The tip of my sword sank into
it, but I didn’t feel like I was cutting anything. Then there was a huge
resistance pushing back until it overpowered the thrust of the sword
skill.
All at once, the three of us yelped as we were hurtled backward.
There was no way to defend when your body was thrown into the
air. The frog’s mouth opened. Its vicious pink tongue withdrew,
tensing, ready to spring forward like a fleshy spear.
Blaaaam!
A huge roar assaulted my eardrums. Sinon had fired her musket. The
bullet split the frog’s tongue, sending crimson damage effects spilling
everywhere. It lost less than 10 percent of its HP, but the frog
croaked and fell backward, exposing its soft-looking throat.
“Yaaaa!” “Raaaar!”
Yui executed the sword skill Vertical, and Kuro charged, its huge
fangs exposed. Sword and teeth cut at the frog’s throat from either
side. There went another 10 percent of its HP.

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Yui’s and Kuro’s simultaneous attacks might have done modest
damage, but the real benefit was that they extended the toppling
effects of our offensive. The frog landed on its back in the water, still
exposed.
We have to add on! But Liz, Leafa, and I were still struggling from the
knockback effect. The frog’s short front legs and massive back legs
flopped and flailed, as though it were going to leap upright again
soon. Sinon was reloading and couldn’t fire again yet.
This combination was largely a product of coincidence and probably
couldn’t be recreated a second time. If we missed out on the chance
to extend this rally, our hopes of winning got smaller. I clenched my
teeth, desperately trying to right myself. I reached out with my left
hand, scratching at the empty air with my fingers, but my avatar
cruelly continued to topple…
“Keeee!”
A high-pitched screech filled the air.
It wasn’t the frog, and it couldn’t have been any of us. Was it a fresh
add—a new monster joining the fight? But what I saw leaping
forward into the fray was not amphibian in nature. It was small, clad
in simple clothes, and holding a rusty pitchfork in both hands—the
trio of ratmen who had completely vanished from my mind.
They rushed to the flipped-over Goliath Rana and stabbed its pale
belly deep with their pitchforks.
“Errrbit!” the frog roared furiously, jerking and contracting its entire
body and bounding upright again like a spring-wound toy. The
ratmen yelled “ !” and retreated to the edge of the dome.
They didn’t seem to be consistent participants in the battle, so
having this brief bit of extra damage inflicted was a huge help. The
HP bar of the frog was down 40 percent and had gone from white to
a much yellower shade.
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The Goliath Rana, now upright, leaped with a splash toward the wall,
where it began to climb. Liz, Leafa, and I scrambled to our feet to
prepare for one of its dive attacks.
After that sequence of events, it seemed clear that the Goliath Rana
battle was one where it was difficult to hit its weak point, but once
you did, there was a ton of damage to inflict. We could beat it after
just two more times of flipping it over—maybe once, if we were
lucky. But to do that, we needed to inflict damage on its mouth.
“Sinon, aim for the mouth!” I shouted. Sinon finished up reloading
and said, “Got it.”
To Lisbeth, I instructed, “When it dives for us, whack its head with
your mace! It’ll knock you back, but it’ll give us a chance to attack its
tongue…I think!”
“You thiiink?!” she howled but recovered quickly, squeezing the
handle of her mace. “Fine, then! Let’s do this!”
In tense fights that required great concentration, having a
moodmaker like Lisbeth was a major help. That was a personal skill I
could never replicate, I knew.
“Leafa, Yui, Kuro,” I continued, “use your strongest sword skills when
the frog flips over! Just watch out for its rear leg kick!”
“You got it!” “Yes, Papa!” “Grar!”
The three of them were ready. I glanced back toward the wall behind
us for one final instruction.
“You folks, be ready to do that again, too!”
I was speaking to the trio of ratpeople. They did not respond. I had
no choice but to trust they understood, because I had to focus on the
top of the dome. The Goliath Rana was already 70 percent of the
way up the wall. It could dive at us at any moment.

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Next time, I’ll dodge it right, I told myself, staring at the frog. Its limbs
stopped moving. Those bulging eyes turned red.
But the next moment, something happened that I did not see
coming.
Five or six warty bulges on the Goliath Rana’s back protruded farther
outward and shot deep-red flames. They diminished quickly but
maintained their strength from that point on, flickering in place. I
had no time to wonder what was going on before the frog opened its
mouth and pointed at the floor of the dome.
It was over seventy-five feet away. The frog’s tongue was long but
not that long…
…Right?
What appeared in its gaping mouth was a glowing red circle. There
were complex symbols inside the figure.
“A magic circle…?!” I gasped.
Leafa drowned me out, crying, “Look out, everybody!”
Before the words had left her mouth, an enormous ball of fire
belched from the frog’s mouth. I jumped to the right on sheer
instinct, grabbed Yui, and dived into the nearby water.
There was a roar, and red filled my vision. Waves of heat broiled my
back, lowering my HP bit by bit.
Once the explosion subsided, I stood up with Yui in my arms. “Is
everyone all right?!”
Sinon, Lisbeth, and Leafa called back in the affirmative, and Kuro
growled fiercely. The frog’s fireball had evaporated one of the pools
where it hit the floor, but nobody had been hit directly by the
projectile. The ratpeople against the wall were fine, if clearly shaken
by the event.

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Up above, the Goliath Rana was still in the same spot, bulging and
retracting its throat. It didn’t seem likely to descend for the time
being.
“A frog that shoots fire? It’s like a slug with salt attacks…,” I griped.
Lisbeth retorted “You can’t just make up sayings like
they’re…Actually, that does make sense.” So my language skill
retained its dignity, but the state of the battle was worse than
before. The only long-range attack we had was Sinon’s musket, so if
the monster kept shooting fireballs from the ceiling, the fight would
slip further out of our grasp.
It wasn’t like we had to defeat this frog. As long as we escaped to the
eastern side of the Giyoru Savanna with Sinon, we were fine. But
that would mean climbing the sloped path around the wall up to the
tunnel mouth, high up in the dome. The frog was unlikely to let us
pass.
The sloped path…
“…Guys, I’m going to rush up the side of the wall and use a leaping
skill to knock the frog down. You follow up the same way we said
earlier!” I said, seizing on the idea I’d just had. My companions
looked nervous, though.
“But then you’re going to fall down with it, Big Brother. You might
die if you fall from that height…,” Leafa worried.
“I’ll be fine,” I reassured her. “I won’t take any damage if I fall where
the water’s deep. This is the only way.”
“…”
She closed her mouth, but the concern in her green eyes did not go
away. Truth be told, I wasn’t positive I could manage to fall into a
spot of water deep enough to save me.

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It was a desperate gamble, but as I lowered Yui to the ground to
prepare, she abruptly announced, “No, Papa! I’ll do that part!”
Shocked, I stammered, “N-no, you don’t need to…”
“You have the highest attack of the party, so you should perform the
follow-up on the vulnerable spot, not the first strike.”
“But, Yui, you can’t use Sonic Leap…”
“If I head back into the tunnel and get a running start, I can reach it
with Vertical!”
“But…”
It seemed like the only thing I could do was offer rebuttals. Yui
looked me in the eyes and said, “Papa, I don’t want to spend my
whole life being protected.”
“…”
The earnest look in her eyes struck me as being very similar to
Asuna’s. And though I couldn’t say for sure, I guessed it was probably
similar to mine, as well.
“…All right. Go ahead,” I told her and set her down.
A fair distance away, Sinon shouted, “It’s moving again!”
I looked up at the dome and saw the giant frog plodding along
horizontally. It was probably going to shoot another fireball. Perhaps
it might aim at Yui as she was trying to climb the slope.
Lisbeth broke through my contemplation. “I’ll pull its aggro! Just let
her go!” She struck her round shield with her mace. Little ripple
effects appeared from her shield, which meant she must have
acquired some kind of taunting skill at some point.
The Goliath Rana stopped moving and began to pivot.

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“Here I go!” Yui cried and took off running with her short sword in
hand. Even I was stunned at the speed with which she leaped over
rocks and puddles. She turned at the wall and sped up the path to
the tunnel mouth.
The frog twisted its upper half backward and opened its mouth wide.
The direction made it clear it was targeting Lisbeth.
“Get back, everybody!” she instructed.
I dutifully retreated, shouting, “Make sure you dodge it, Liz!”
“Trust in the quality of my shield!”
Does that mean what I think it does? I wondered, right at the
moment that another red magic circle appeared in the Goliath Rana’s
mouth, shining brightly.
With an air-shaking roar, the beast shot a flaming projectile from its
mouth. But Lisbeth stood her ground. She held the round shield up
with her left arm and held her mace behind her.
The shield was made with the premium steel ingots she’d made from
melting down Blárkveld. In keeping with the high Blacksmithing
proficiency of its creator, the shield had to have a high defensive
quality. But it couldn’t possibly defend against a fire attack from a
dungeon boss without damage.
My right foot tensed, ready to push me forward into action. But I
grabbed my knee with my hand, holding it in place. If I jumped
forward and got caught in the blast, I might not be ready to attack
the frog after it fell. I had to trust in Liz and Yui and let them do what
they were determined to do.
The eighteen-inch flaming ball struck the shield directly. It flashed,
warping, billowing out red flames and black smoke that hid Liz from
view. I shielded my face with my arms to protect against the
explosion.

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In the upper left, I saw Lisbeth’s HP bar dropping. Down it went…70,
60, until it was below 50 in a blink…then stopped at around 40
percent.
“Liz!” I shouted, looking up.
Curled up in the center of the blast radius, Lisbeth lifted her thumb
to reassure me. She could have darted out of the way and probably
defended against it more successfully, but she took the hit to ensure
it couldn’t possibly be redirected toward Yui.
As for Yui, she was nearly to the top of the slope winding around the
edge of the dome. Even I would have a hard time sprinting up the
narrow ledge without a handhold of any kind. But Yui was pulling it
off with aplomb—not because she was an AI but because we had
raised her to have a real heart and real courage.
Once she reached the top of the path, she darted into the tunnel to
give herself some running space to make the leap toward the frog.
“Rrrbit…,” the Goliath Rana croaked, turning around so it could face
the tunnel. That was bad…If it attacked with its tongue, it might
knock Yui out of the air when she jumped.
“This way!” shouted Sinon. She pointed her loaded musket at the
frog stuck to the ceiling of the dome and promptly pulled the trigger.
The striker sent up sparks, and a moment later, the gun bellowed.
The bullet struck the Goliath Rana directly in the eye.
“Gribbaaaw!” the frog shrieked, turning once again.
Then a figure in white burst out of the tunnel.
She had a short sword readied at her right shoulder, her long black
hair streaming behind her. The weapon was glowing blue, but the
light was flickering. Executing a sword skill in midair when your
stance wasn’t solid was going to be very difficult for Yui, who hadn’t

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practiced doing that, but she was managing to keep the effect
glowing so far.
“Yaaaa!”
Her fierce war cry reached us down at the bottom. Once her right
foot was out into the air, Yui activated Vertical. The game system
boosted her small body, shooting her forward and leaving a brilliant
slice in the air. The tip of the sword homed in on the frog’s side.
While it did not cut through the skin, the shock of the attack pulled
the suckers from the frog’s toes off the wall.
The frog’s rubbery, resilient skin bounced Yui backward. The frog
then followed her, falling off the ceiling and waving its limbs wildly in
the air.

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Page | 180
If she landed in the water, all was fine. But if she hit a rock, she
would die. If I rushed to catch her, I wouldn’t be there to attack the
frog in time.
It was the biggest dilemma since the battle started. But then I heard
an unfamiliar—but strangely familiar—voice.
“I got Yuippe!”
Thanks, whoever you are! I thought and made the motion for Sharp
Nail, a three-part attack that was the strongest I could execute right
now. Beside me, Leafa readied the same move, and Lisbeth
recovered from the force of the fireball with her mace in hand. Sinon
was holding a small laser gun rather than the musket, and Kuro
bared its sharp fangs.
The Goliath Rana fell, belly up, onto one of the rock pillars and
bounced high. When it landed a second time, I shouted, “Now!”
Leafa, Lisbeth, Kuro, and I struck the defenseless frog’s stomach from
all sides with swords, mace, and teeth. Its HP bar instantly took a
huge drop, going under 20 percent. The four of us pulled back, and
the ratpeople shrieked as they charged in, stabbing it with their
pitchforks.
Ten percent left.
I struggled against the sword skill’s delay, trying to give it just a
normal swing to beat the frog for good. But a moment before I could,
the frog opened its mouth, still on its back.
“Grrrrrrrg-gooooooo!” it roared with fury, forming another big magic
circle. If it spit a fireball this close, there was no way to dodge…
“I don’t think so!”
Sinon leaped forward with great courage, jabbed her laser gun
directly through the magic circle, and pulled the trigger.

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It made a volley of sci-fi pew-pew-pew-pew! sounds, shooting light-
green energy bolts into the Goliath Rana’s open mouth and whittling
down its HP bar. The magic circle around Sinon’s arm flashed. Flames
flickered in the frog’s mouth, swirling into a tornado, rather than a
fireball…
And then its HP was gone.
“Gre-gurk!” the frog croaked, and the crimson magic circle turned
into black smoke that floated away. It looked very similar to the
effect of a magic spell being fumbled in ALO.
The beast’s massive body twitched a few times, getting steadily
weaker…until it stopped moving altogether.

In SAO and ALO, a dead monster would promptly burst into blue
particles, but here, the bodies stayed put—meaning you couldn’t be
sure it was dead yet. I was worried about Yui, but more important
was making sure the frog had croaked its last. I took a step forward,
sword at the ready.
Then something strange happened.
From the middle of the still, flipped-over frog, around the position of
its heart, a red light appeared, rising silently in the darkness. We’d
defeated many monsters by now, including the thornspike cave bear
that was just as strong, but I hadn’t seen this happen with any of
them.
“Kirito, look…!”
Urged on by Sinon’s voice, I took two steps, then jumped as high as I
could, reaching for the red light. But the instant my fingertips grazed
it, the light popped and vanished, just like a bubble. As I landed, I
checked my hand, but there was nothing on my palm.
Suddenly, all of the party members were surrounded by blue rings of
light. For an instant I panicked, thinking it was some kind of trap, but
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soon realized it was just the level-up effect. The frog was good and
dead. A message appeared telling me I was now level-16, but I hastily
got it out of the way and looked up.
Even in the darkness, Yui’s white dress was easily noticeable. She
hung in the air just below the tunnel exit, her skinny left arm
clutched by the extended arm of someone else hanging upside
down. That player had a rope tied around their ankle, which a
different player was holding tight from the tunnel entrance.
Yui and the mysterious player were swaying on the rope, drifting left
and right, while a faint creaking sound made it clear that the rope
was not strong enough to hold the weight of two people and was
steadily fraying.
The large man standing in the cave entrance steadily pulled the rope
upward. I darted forward to the position beneath Yui and called up,
“Hey, easy, easy!”
The man pulling the rope bellowed down, “I don’t have enough rope
to lower them down there, and the durability’s going to wear out in
less than twenty seconds!”
The other player—the man holding up Yui by the hand—replied,
“Don’t let that happen to me, Boss! Not after comin’ as far as we did!
You gotta pull me up!”
Strange, I thought, feeling a sense of déjà vu. I could swear I’ve
heard both of those voices before.
I dug in my heels to stop. Waiting below them wouldn’t help if I
couldn’t actually catch both Yui and the man together. I needed a
cushion instead. If I set out all the hyena pelts in my inventory, that
probably wouldn’t be enough to absorb the damage from a fall that
high.

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There was only one thing that could work here. I turned around,
raced back, and shouted to the others, “Help me carry this over,
guys!”
Then I grabbed the leg of the dead Goliath Rana. Instantly, everyone
else understood my meaning. Sinon jumped ahead of me, and
Lisbeth and Leafa grabbed the left leg. The four of us began to drag
the huge corpse.
With a quick yowl, Kuro bit the frog’s side to help us push, and even
the three ratpeople set down their pitchforks and assisted with the
head. Once we got going, the body slid faster than I thought it would
over the rocky ground. I checked over my shoulder as we pulled and
saw that Yui was halfway up the thirty feet or so to the tunnel
mouth, but the rope was visibly wearing out.
We were almost to the spot beneath the two of them when there
was a heartless snap!
“Sorry, Kirito! Do something!” shouted the large man who’d been
pulling the rope. I didn’t have time to wonder how he knew my
name.
“Aaaieeee!” wailed the other man. But it was admirable the way that
he managed to pull Yui close to him and make sure she’d land on top
of him, rather than the other way around. We had to make that
gesture pay off.
“Yaaaa!” I bellowed, wringing out the last of my strength. A new
message appeared, reading Physique skill proficiency has risen to 4,
and the frog’s body rose a tiny bit into the air. It landed in a puddle
and stopped.
A second later, Yui and the man disappeared into the Goliath Rana’s
stomach. Even dead, the body retained its resilience, and they
bounced back over three feet up into the air before landing again
safely.
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“Papa!” cried Yui, who hadn’t made a sound while she was hanging
or falling. She jumped onto me with arms spread wide. I grabbed her
and hugged her little body tight, careful not to crush her against the
metal armor.
“You did great,” I whispered. “The way you pulled off Vertical in
midair was masterful.”
For the first time since the battle against the Goliath Rana started,
Yui’s voice trembled. “Yes…I tried really hard!”
Yui had never been in a battle herself. Having her first experience be
against a terrible boss had to be overwhelming and terrifying in a
way I couldn’t imagine. And it wasn’t some carefully modeled
imitation of human emotion in typical AI fashion. At this point, Yui
had surpassed the limits of top-down artificial intelligence and
gained true emotions—in my opinion. It was the only explanation for
her self-sacrifice, I thought, stroking her hair.
Just then, the man resting with his limbs splayed out on the frog’s
stomach sat up, grumbling, “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’d
have died right there…”
His short brown hair was pushed upward by a dark-red bandana. His
face was long and thin, and scraggly hair dotted his chin. His armor
was leather, and a curved blade rested on his left side.
When I first heard that voice, there were two arguing opinions in the
back of my mind: Could be and No way. It seemed that the winner
was, indeed, Could be.
“Klein…what are you doing here?” I wondered in awe.
The katana warrior (now a scimitar warrior?) I’d known since the SAO
days spread his hands and complained, “Whoa, whoa, is that gonna
be the first thing out of your mouth, Kiri, my man? We rushed over
here thinkin’ you were in trouble and needed help!”

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“Yeah, and we appreciate it,” Lisbeth interjected. “But how did you
know we were here? Nobody contacted you on the other side, did
they?”
“I’ll answer that one,” said another voice from above, causing us all
to look upward.
Carefully descending the path around the side of the dome was an
imposing-looking man, big and bald and barrel-chested. This was
another familiar face, the ax warrior and merchant Agil. But on his
back wasn’t the trademark two-handed ax but a double-edged ax
that was noticeably smaller—though still much bigger than my
sword. Like Klein, he wore leather armor.
“Hiya, Agil,” I said, bumping knuckles with him as he reached the
floor. Then I greeted Klein the same way and asked, “So…how did
you get here? Did you start in the ruins to the south like the other
ALO players?”
“Yeah. And me and Klein were a day late. We finally got a chance to
dive in tonight, and the grace period was long over, plus the map all
around us had been picked clean. Somehow, I managed to meet up
with Klein, and we figured we’d head for your log cabin…”
“Huh? How did you know where it was?”
“Asuna drew us a map by hand.”
“Oh, really…” For a brief moment, I stopped to consider my
girlfriend, the former vice commander of the Knights of the Blood,
and her penchant for detail.
“Kiri, fess up. You completely forgot about us, didn’t you?” Klein
grunted reproachfully from the frog’s stomach. He was absolutely
right, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.

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“N-no…that’s not true. I mean, you and Agil have to work on
weekdays…so I was going to get in touch when things settled
down…”
Agil crossed his arms and said, “Our place is closed today.”
Klein followed up with, “And I took a half day and left after lunch.”
“Dicey Café has irregular hours, and I can’t read your mind to know
when you’ll take vacation days, Klein!” I argued.
Sinon stopped loading her musket to clear her throat. She grumbled,
“Can you get on with it? We’ve got things to do.”
“Oh, sorry, sorry.” Agil got back to the topic at hand. “Anyway, we
scraped together some gear and left the ruins for the forest, then got
attacked by a trio of PKers. We had stone weapons, and they had
iron, plus more armor, so I thought we were in big trouble.”
“That’s when you shoulda seen our combination work,” Klein
continued. “We chopped those PKers to pieces, one after the—”
Agil’s deep voice cut him off. “You just hid behind me the entire
time.”
“Well, what was I supposed to do? My carryover skill was…”
Klein stopped himself there rather suspiciously. I assumed it was
probably something about how his maxed-out Katana skill didn’t
apply to the scimitar he had equipped right now.
“So you took out the PKers?” I asked, looking to Agil.
“Yeah…they were an impromptu group, it seemed like, and their
teamwork was horrid. So we managed to get through it. But I forgot
we were after a grace period, and without thinking, I used an area-
attack skill that took out all three of them,” he said, scowling. Agil
was a gentle giant of a player, and if the PKers had tried to run, he
would have let them.

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Leafa approached and patted his burly arm. “Don’t let it bother you,
Agil. If they were PKing, they must have known they were likely to
get killed by one of their targets. We were attacked by a gang of
them yesterday, and Kirito absolutely destroyed them all!”
“H-hey, it’s not like I did it all on my own,” I clarified hastily, then
gestured to Agil. “And then what?”
He grinned and patted his gleaming leather armor. “The PKers
helpfully dropped some leather armor as well as an iron ax and a
scimitar. With that upgrade and the help of the map, we made it to
the log cabin, where Asuna said she was worried about you guys and
asked us to go help you.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, thanking my partner for her keen thinking. “But
wait…How would she know which route we took? How did you two
get to this cave…?”
Agil grinned once again, then jutted his chin toward Klein. The
scimitar warrior scratched the bandana around his forehead, then
inhaled, preparing himself to speak.
“That was through the use of the skill I brought over…”
“Huh? Your skill is Katana, right? What would that have to do with
this?” Lisbeth said, speaking for my thought process, too. Leafa,
Sinon, and Yui probably wondered the same thing. Everyone looked
at Klein, who wore an expression that was impossible to classify.
“It ain’t Katana.”
“Huh?”
“I inherited Pursuit.”
“Huh?!” we shouted together.
In ALO, the Pursuit skill was a useful one, highlighting the footprints
of players and monsters and making it easier to find the materials

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you wanted, but it took great patience to power up, and very few
players specifically worked at it. But Klein had worked his main
weapon skill of Katana up to the maximum proficiency of 1,000, if I
remembered correctly. If he didn’t carry over Katana, then he must
have also maxed out Pursuit…
“Why would you be so advanced in a skill like that?” Lisbeth asked,
exasperated. Then she realized something and cried, “Oh! Unless you
were using it to track and follow cute girls! You creep!”
“N-no! It’s not that! I just worked at it in order to complete the chase
quest that Skuld gave to me…”
“……Huh?” everyone but Agil muttered.
Skuld was the name of an NPC we met in the realm of Jotunheim,
underneath Alfheim. She was a graceful beauty reminiscent of
depictions of Norse Valkyries. Thinking back on it, I recalled that she
had given Klein something when we parted ways. So it was an item
that started a new quest…and that was the impetus for Klein to work
the Pursuit skill up to the max?
“So…did you beat the quest?” I asked.
Klein shook his head sadly. “I was almost finished with it…and then
this happened. I hope Skuld’s all right…”
I decided not to ask him what would have happened if he’d managed
to finish his Pursuit quest. Better to get back to the matter at hand.
“So you managed to catch up to us thanks to the Pursuit skill you
carried over. But the proficiency would have gone down to 100,
right? I’m amazed you were able to track us this far.”
“Yeah, well…you can’t actually choose to track a specific player’s
footprints at 100, but there was just one party’s worth of prints on
the plains. So I figured it must be you guys and followed them here.”

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“Ah, I see,” I murmured, satisfied at last. I bowed to Agil and Klein.
“You really saved our bacon. If you hadn’t caught her, Yui would have
fallen to the ground with the frog.”
“Agil, Klein, thank you!” Yui added, bowing. Both of the big, burly
men smiled with embarrassment.
“If only we could have made it in time for the battle,” Agil said.
“I dunno. I’m not a fan of those slimy monsters,” Klein muttered in a
tone of voice that suggested he was not at all joking. I pointed at the
object he was using as a seat cushion.
“You know that’s the frog’s carcass, right?”
“Huh…? Ueowaaaah!!” he shrieked, bouncing vertically into the air
with his legs still crossed. Even Sinon laughed at that.

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9
The three ratpeople fighting alongside Sinon were a minority people
in the world of Unital Ring called the Patter. There were only a
hundred or so of them living within the caves of this natural border
wall.
Sinon encountered them within the cave and learned about the
history of the Patter from an elder who could speak human language
(i.e., Japanese). According to him, the Patter once lived in a great city
on the northern side of the Giyoru Savanna, but a terrible natural
disaster laid it to waste overnight, and the survivors were chased by
the enormous carnivorous dinosaurs that prowled the plains and had
to live in the caves within the wall instead.
The Patter had a legend that, far to the east beyond the wall, there
was a rich, deep forest. Some of the younger members wished to
travel there and live in the forest, but to get to the eastern side of
the wall, they needed to pass through the dome where the ferocious
giant frog lurked. A number of valiant warriors had tested the frog,
and all had been killed, so the elder Patter had given up on the
dream of crossing the wall. But Sinon needed to get through to the
eastern side to meet up with us anyway, so three of the braver—by
their standards, at least—young Patter joined her in an attempt to
beat the frog.
The Goliath Rana, it turned out, was much tougher than she’d
expected, based on the story, and her musket was less useful than
she’d hoped. So despite her courage, Sinon considered retreat. That
was when our group jumped in to help beat the frog, with great
effort.

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Regardless of the trouble, we had completed the biggest goal of the
night, meeting up with Sinon, and had the added bonus of finding
Klein and Agil, too. The only thing left to do should have been going
back the way we’d come, but there was one more, rather
unexpected, part of the story. We had extra members of our
retinue—not just the three Patter who fought the Goliath Rana with
us but an entire twenty of them.

“…Do you think this is some kind of quest, Kirito?” Lisbeth whispered
to me. We were walking at the head of what was less a party and
more a full-blown procession.
I thought it over and shook my head. “No…I don’t think so…For one
thing, I checked the quest tab of my menu earlier, and there was
nothing written there…”
“When we reach the forest, do you think they’re just going to peace
out?”
“…Yerm.”
“And do you think we’re all going to reach the forest safely in the
first place?”
“…Yerm.”
“Is ‘yerm’ supposed to be a yes or a no?”
“Both.”
She loudly and transparently exhaled, then looked over her other
shoulder. “Leafa, is there something wrong with your brother?”
“Ha-ha-ha…Big Brother has a tendency to regress to his childhood
now and then…”
That was a mean thing to say, but I didn’t want to spend any time
arguing. Ever since the twenty Patter expressed a desire to come

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with us, I’d been desperately thinking of a way to make everything
work out.
I hadn’t given Liz a positive or negative answer to her question about
the Patter, but in truth, I couldn’t imagine them surviving once we
reached the log cabin’s forest—which they called the Great Zelletelio
Forest. There was plenty of water and food, yes, but also many
monsters, and if they came across one of those thornspike cave
bears, which were even stronger than the Goliath Rana, it would
wipe out all twenty of them.
I didn’t yet know what happened when the NPCs of this world died.
Perhaps they would come back to life after a certain amount of time
passed. But that didn’t mean we could just abandon them to a cruel
fate. We couldn’t have beaten the frog or been reunited with Sinon
without the three brave ratmen and their pitchforks.
On the other hand, it was going to be difficult to take in twenty
Patter at the log cabin. They might all fit inside, but there were more
of us now, too, which meant it was going to be nearly impossible to
find enough floor space for everyone to lie down at night. I glanced
over my shoulder, wondering what to do, and caught sight of Yui
walking with Sinon.
She must have been overjoyed at the reunion, because she was
holding Sinon’s hand and talking excitedly. Although it couldn’t have
been true, it also seemed like she was just a bit taller than before.
That had to be a trick of the mind after witnessing her growth as a
warrior today. She claimed she wanted to be a mage, but I felt like
she’d have been better off with Brawn or Swiftness, rather than
Sagacity. For one thing, a day and a half had passed, and we still
didn’t even know how to learn the magic skills.
Just then, I had a sudden thought and hurriedly brought up my ring
menu. Over on the inventory tab, I sorted my items, newest first, and
saw an unfamiliar name at the top of the list.
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 Fire magicrystal.
Now that was an enticing name. I tapped it to bring up the item
properties. Beneath the name and durability level was a short
description: A crystal made of the condensed essence of fire magic.
Grants the fire magic skill. If already acquired, adds a small
proficiency bonus.
Let’s gooo! I wanted to scream, but I held it in, lest I startle the
nervous Patter. They were already afraid of Kuro, who was walking
ahead of me.
It was clear to me now when I’d picked up the fire magicrystal. It was
the red light that rose from the Goliath Rana’s body. The moment I’d
grabbed it, the item had gone directly into my inventory.
So why did the light appear from the Goliath Rana’s body and not the
thornspike cave bear’s? Because the frog used fire magic. In other
words, learning magic skills in this world required defeating a
monster that used that kind of magic. It just wasn’t clear if that could
be any random monster or if it had to be a tougher, boss-type
enemy.
I tapped the open properties window, and it created a smaller
window labeled TIPS.
To use this item, you must materialize it, then crush it between
your teeth.
“……”
That was an intense method, I had to say, but seeing that it had
come from a monster’s body, I supposed it made sense. I closed that
notice, then hit the button on the properties window to make it
appear in physical space.
The magicrystal was not a bodiless light, the way it appeared when I
caught it. Now it was a translucent crystal less than an inch in size. It

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was a brilliant crimson color, with a tiny flame trapped in its center.
All I had to do was crunch it between my teeth like a hard candy to
earn the fire magic skill, but of course I wasn’t going to do that.
Instead, I turned and offered it to Yui.
“Here you go, Yui.”
“…? What is it?” she asked, tilting her head. She got a good look at
the magicrystal and beamed. “Ooh, it’s beautiful, Papa! I’ll take very
good care of it!”
“No, don’t do that…Try eating it.”
“………What?”
It wasn’t just Yui. Sinon, Lisbeth, and Leafa all looked skeptical. I
probably should have explained it from the start, but I was possessed
by a desire to make the magic skill a fun surprise for her.
“You’ll understand if you eat it. Give it a crunch?”
“……”
She gave me the exact same look Asuna did when she was feeling
suspicious of me, but she popped the magicrystal into her mouth
anyway. She rolled it around in her cheeks, then mumbled, “Papa, it
doesm’t tase like anyhing.”
“Kirito, do you know what you’re doing?” Sinon demanded. I
reassured her that it was fine and that I had it under control.
“Don’t suck on it, Yui. You have to bite through it.”
“Oh…okay.”
Yui took on a determined look, trapped the magicrystal between the
molars on her right side, then closed her eyes and chomped down
hard. It didn’t make the crunching sound I expected but a high-
pitched, ringing craaaack.
Flames burst out of Yui’s mouth.
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“Hwaaaaah!” Yui shrieked. I was about half as startled as she was,
but there had been no HP loss. Lisbeth screamed “Fire, fire, fire!”
and reached for her water to feed to the little girl, but the flames had
already gone out.
“Hey, Big Brother! That was a really mean prank!” Leafa rounded on
me, fists raised. I shook my head.
“N-no, no, it wasn’t a prank! Did you get the message, Yui?!”
“Hwaaah…Oh, I did…It says, fire magic skill gain— What?!”
Yui’s eyes flashed, and she instantly popped open the ring menu to
check her skills tab. She tapped the top of the list of acquired skills
and read the window that appeared.
“Wow, it says I can cast a magic spell called Flame Arrow!” she
exclaimed to the shock of the others.
I beamed at my daughter and egged her on. “Well? Give it a go.”
“Okay! It seems that magic in this world is executed with gestures,
unlike in ALO. Let’s see…” She looked up from the window and
arranged her hands in front of her body. “This is the basic gesture for
fire magic, it says.”
She clenched her left hand into a fist, then extended the fingers of
her right hand in a row and struck them against the fist from a
diagonal angle. A red aura bloomed around both hands.
“The next gesture will indicate the magic spell to use.”
She opened her left hand and thrust it forward, then raised her right
hand above her shoulder, like pulling back a bow. A glowing red line
appeared in the air, connecting the two hands. She looked around
quickly, then pointed her left hand at a rock about sixty feet ahead of
us.

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“This will be the activation gesture. Apparently, the more accurate
the physical gesture and rhythm, the more powerful and precise the
magic will be.”
She clenched both hands tightly. A small magic circle appeared
before her left hand, and the red line turned into a flaming arrow
that shot forward with a fwoosh! It arced very slightly and struck the
rock true, causing a small explosion. We all murmured with
appreciation and applauded. I expected the Patter to be alarmed,
but they were not that timid. Instead, they began to squeak among
themselves.
The spell couldn’t compare to the high-level magic used by master
mages in ALO, but it was the first magic I’d seen here, aside from the
Goliath Rana’s fireballs, and I felt greatly emboldened by it. And you
could increase magic skills not just by using them but also by
consuming more magicrystals, so there were more avenues to
improving them than there were with the weapon skills. Hopefully,
I’d get a chance to learn magic eventually, but for now it was better
to support Yui’s growth.
“How much of your MP did that cost, Yui?”
“Um, my maximum MP is 157, and that cost 15, so it was a little less
than ten percent.”
“Mm-hmm…And what’s the speed of your natural regeneration?”
“With my Concentration ability at a rank of 1, it takes six-point-two
seconds to recover a single magic point. That means it takes ninety-
three seconds to recover the cost of a single Flame Arrow. It’s not
suited to rapid, consecutive use, I’d say,” she admitted, looking
downcast.
I rubbed her head. “Don’t worry about it, kiddo. That’s what the
natural regeneration is in most games. I’m sure we’ll get some MP
potions soon or learn how to make them from ingredients.”
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“I hope so…”
“I’ll make sure to handle all of that—you don’t need to worry about
it, Yui. For now, I’d say you should use that spell whenever your MP
fully recovers. That way you’ll gain proficiency gradually over time.”
“Okay! I’ll do my best!” she said, smiling at last.
Leafa exclaimed, “In that case, I wanna learn the wind magic skill
soon! If you find a wind magic stone, Kirito, give it to me!”
“Sure thing. I wonder what’ll come out of your mouth if you eat the
wind stone,” I said purely out of curiosity. But for some reason, Leafa
pounded me under the left arm where I had no armor. I made a big
show of grunting in pain.
In the back of the party with Agil, Klein complained loudly enough
that everyone could hear him,
“Awww, man. Is it gonna be like this in UR, too?”

The travel back east over the Giyoru Savanna was stunningly easy
compared to what we went through to get to Sinon. Knowing where
to go and having the anticipation of home sweet home waiting at the
end made it possible to actually enjoy the scenery on the way.
As usual, hyenas and bats interrupted our travel, but we were
massively more powerful now, and there were no more terrifying
hailstorms along the way. Even water and food, the most
troublesome aspects of all, turned out fine, thanks to the huge
stockpile of frog meat from the Goliath Rana’s body, plus the natural
spring water from the cave. The girls did not seem to enjoy seared
frog meat, however.
What was very lucky was that in addition to the water and food, the
cave contained a bunch of iron and copper ore. This went to the
women, who resisted packing frog meat into their inventories and

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the little packs the Patter wore. Once we were able to smelt the ores
at our base, we’d have our ingot needs met for quite a while.
We finally finished crossing the Giyoru Savanna again after ten thirty
and entered the Zelletelio Forest. We just had to walk through the
woods for a bit, cross the river, and we’d be back at our log cabin.
The moment the huge trees came into view ahead, the twenty Patter
leaped about and hugged one another with excitement. Some even
burst into tears. To them, the Zelletelio Forest was a promised land
spoken of for generations, so it made sense that they’d be ecstatic,
but the forest was not safe, and certainly no paradise.
Since Sinon was the one person who could speak any Patter, I asked
her to tell them not to let their guards down before we went inside.
We continued east, defeating the new types of monsters inside, until
eventually the light began to flicker in the distance.
“Oh! That’s the river! We’re almost home!” Leafa cheered and began
to rush ahead.
“Don’t run in there! There are monsters in the river,” I shouted,
starting to give chase along with Kuro—until Leafa came to an abrupt
stop. “Hey, what’s the…?”
“Big Brother, look!!” she exclaimed, pointing. When I followed her
finger, my heart nearly stopped beating.
Beyond the trees lining the far bank of the river, the night sky was
burning red. I pulled up my map to check our location. In the
direction we were facing was…the log cabin. I listened closely, and
behind the roar of flames, there was the faint sound of metal
clashing. When it caught the burning odor on the night breeze, Kuro
growled softly.
“Asuna…Silica…Alice!”

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I began to run toward the cabin, thinking of the three we’d left
watching over it. The others hurried quickly behind me. I crossed the
rocky riverside, looking for a spot where the water was shallow, and
made it over the river there. Among the trees on the eastern side of
the river was a huge divot where a piece of New Aincrad fell. The
cabin would be shortly past that.
At this point, I could clearly see the flames through the trees. The
clashing of metal on metal was no longer muffled. It seemed
undeniable that the cabin was under attack, probably by a group of
PKers like Mocri and his gang last night.
I wanted to rush to aid those I’d left behind, but the first order of
business was deciding what to do about the twenty Patter. Their
armor was of simple cloth make, and their weapons—pitchforks and
scythes—were basically converted tools. Based on the fight with the
Goliath Rana, I estimated they were only level-2 or level-3. If they
rushed into a battle full of sword skills, some of them were going to
die.
“Sinon, tell the Patter to hide and wait here!”
She passed my message on, but after just two seconds of discussion,
they all shook their heads. It was difficult to register finer emotions
in their big black eyes, but I could sense the outrage in their voices as
they squeaked “ !”
“She says they want to fight, too.”
I almost replied with “She?” but decided the details could wait until
later. It didn’t solve my worry, but we didn’t have time to talk this
over.
“Fine, just tell them to stick together. Don’t split up.”
While Sinon translated that for the ratpeople, I turned to Leafa,
Lisbeth, Klein, Agil, and Yui.

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“We don’t know who’s attacking or how many of them are there, but
if we take too long observing, it’ll leave the three of them in danger.
We’ll have to charge in, take the enemy by surprise, and then adjust
on the fly.”
“If you want to fight with improvisation, I’m your man!” Klein
boasted, thumping his leather armor. I was kind enough not to
remind him that his best skill right now was merely Pursuit.
With our strategy set, we started running.
The furrow in the earth heading to the northeast from the river was
our path to the cabin. It didn’t take long for red flames to come into
view. Fortunately, it wasn’t the cabin itself that was burning but the
ancient spiral pines growing around the clearing. The ten-foot stone
wall and wooden gate were still standing strong.
Atop the wall, there were irregular flashes of silver light. That was
combat in progress. Our friends and the invaders were battling atop
that foot-wide wall. By the light of the burning trees, I could see
what looked like ten—no, more than twenty—figures launching
themselves at the wall and attempting to climb it. Perhaps they’d lit
the spiral pines for more light.
A particularly loud clang! sounded, and one of the attackers atop the
wall tumbled to the ground. Asuna, her long brown hair flying,
quickly turned the other way and thrust her rapier at another
invader climbing the wall. Not far away, Alice and Silica were fighting
just as hard. It seemed the three of them were focusing primarily on
knocking the attackers back off the wall.
Their intentions were clear. They were buying time, trusting that
we’d return with Sinon to help, and doing whatever they possibly
could to protect our home until then.
Based on how burnt the spiral pines were, the battle must have
started over thirty minutes ago. The invaders could wait and rest on
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the ground, but Asuna, Alice, and Silica had to keep fighting on that
narrow catwalk. Their HP and willpower had to be close to the
breaking point, I assumed. Another enemy approached Asuna from
behind. Silica and Alice were too busy fighting to notice. The flames
in the trees were roaring all around, so I knew they wouldn’t hear if I
yelled from a distance.
Even still, I sucked air into my virtual lungs, desperate to warn Asuna.
But before I could let it out, there was a gunshot behind me.
The enemy who was sneaking up behind Asuna reeled backward,
took a few toppling steps, then fell on the inside of the wall. Sinon
had picked him off with the musket. Her aim was as precise as ever,
but if he was on the inside, he’d be able to open the bolt on the gate.
But my concerns were wiped away by a ferocious “Quaaack!” from
what could only be Aga. Asuna’s pet long-billed giant agamid was
taking care of anyone who fell on the inside of the stone wall.
The sound of the musket firing was thankfully not too loud for the
burning spiral pines to cover up. I gestured to Sinon to reload, then
picked up my running speed.
Just ten yards separated me from the enemy group.
“Kuro, protect Yui!”
“Gaurr!” the panther snarled. I held my sword above shoulder level.
In yesterday’s battle, I’d had to fight PKers in my underwear with a
stone knife, which had been quite a struggle—it wouldn’t go like that
today. My sword vibrated subtly, taking on a light-green hue. The
instant I sensed the skill’s activation, I hurtled myself off the ground:
Sonic Leap.
At last, one of the attackers noticed me.
“Hey, behin—”

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But a tenth of a second later, my sword sank deep into his left
shoulder. Red HP bars appeared over all their heads at once, a sign
they had formed a raid party together.
The armor of the man was leather, and he carried an iron ax. I
couldn’t tell if that was what he’d brought from ALO or if he’d
acquired both here, but like I had with Mocri’s group last night, I
didn’t think it was low-level gear.
Still, thanks to rank-5 Brawn and rank-1 Bonebreaker, my single skill
took over 80 percent of his HP. It slammed him to the ground and
bounced him back upward, where an orange line split his left pec
from behind. That was not a snipe shot from Sinon but Yui’s Flame
Arrow. It eliminated the little HP he had remaining, and he fell to the
ground again. The ring-shaped cursor spun and grew, showing
numbers where the HP bar had previously been: 0001:01:41:26.
One day, one hour, forty-one minutes, and twenty-six seconds. That
was how long this man had survived in Unital Ring.
The rotating numbers then disappeared, and the spindle-shaped axle
of the cursor shot downward, piercing the man’s body. The soulless
avatar, equipment and all, morphed into a plethora of rings that
quickly unfolded into tiny ribbons that rose into the sky.
Right on cue, cries arose.
“Enemy attack! Enemy attaaack!”
“They came up from behind! Trap them and crush them!”
These came from a nearby player with a shield and a spearman who
seemed to be the leader of the group.
I found it highly offensive that they were calling this an “enemy
attack,” but now wasn’t the time to quibble with terminology.
Invaders with swords and spears immediately charged toward me
from either side along the curved stone wall. About half of them had

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iron weapons, and the remainder had stone. If they were able to
produce iron, they would have outfitted all of them with iron
weapons before invading, so I assumed that, like with Mocri’s group,
either their inherited gear didn’t hit the Equip Weight limit or they’d
bought, found, or stolen their weapons somewhere along the way.
In that case, where had they found out about the log cabin? It didn’t
look to me like they’d been exploring along the riverside and
randomly spotted the crash marks. I couldn’t be sure yet, but I got
the impression that these people knew about the base here and
prepared as much as they could before attacking. Had Mocri or his
friends leaked our info in revenge? They didn’t seem so vindictive
that they’d do something that wouldn’t earn them anything in
return…
But within the compressed time-space of my mind, I heard Mocri’s
mocking voice in my ears again.
Well, that’s just what Sensei teaches. Don’t only look at one part
of the opponent; grasp the whole. Then you’ll know what they’re
aiming for—and what they don’t like, you see.
It was what Mocri said when he had me on the ropes in our one-on-
one fight. His Sensei—someone who taught them the ropes of PvP
combat—was still alive in the world of Unital Ring. If this Sensei was
pulling the strings behind this attack, too, then I had to assume these
twenty-something combatants were all similarly well-versed in PvP
tactics.
The only question now was whether this Sensei had taught them
more than just one-on-one combat, like also how to fight as a group.
Either way, I should assume they knew.
In less than a second, I’d arrived at the answer. I called out to my
companions, “Into the woods! Don’t let them team up on you!”
Agil immediately replied, “We can’t! The fire’s in the trees!”

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“…!”
I sucked in a sharp breath, looked around, and saw that the flames
burning the spiral pines had already spread to the undergrowth. If
you jumped among those flames, you’d burn to a crisp in moments.
That was when I realized the attackers weren’t burning the forest
around the cabin for light but as a means of preventing guerrilla
tactics against themselves. To back that conjecture up, the groups
coming at us from the sides were led by shield-bearing tanks flanked
by attackers with swords and axes, then debuffers with long
weapons in the rear—an orthodox battle formation. The silver lining
was that they had no mages, but that wasn’t going to make things
any easier for us.
Atop the stone wall, the girls were still fighting bravely. Asuna
glanced back toward me for the briefest moment, and sparks flew
when our eyes met.
She didn’t seem to have any secret comeback plans up her sleeve,
but it was clear she was bristling with the intent to protect our
house, no matter the cost. The trio we’d left behind trusted in our
return and had focused on knocking the invaders off the wall. We
had to make their efforts count.
Our advantages were Lisbeth’s excellent iron weapons, Yui’s fire
magic, the twenty Patter, and Sinon’s Hecate II. The only one of
those things that had the potential to overturn the massive
numerical disadvantage we were suffering was the Hecate, but Sinon
said she had only six of its bullets left. It could defeat a dragon if the
shot hit a vital point—she said she’d killed a giant dinosaur with it—
but six shots wasn’t going to be enough to defeat a group of over
twenty players. This wasn’t the right time to use up all of the
greatest firepower in the entire world of Unital Ring.

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“Hey, what are we gonna do, Kiri?!” exclaimed Klein nervously,
holding his thin scimitar. “If we’re just gonna go for it, I’m with ya!”
“It’s too early to resort to desperation. There’s got to be a way to
turn this around.”
“Yeah, but when they’ve got such a tight formation, there’s no
proper way to break them down.”
Klein was right; the enemy was not rushing but carefully closing the
distance, keeping their shield users front and center. If we panicked
and used sword skills, the tanks would just guard, and they’d be able
to pick us off with counterattacks. It was almost like they knew we
were built for attacking, not so much for defense.
Should we retreat to the river? But then the attackers would just
continue their siege of the log cabin. Feeling the pressure from the
enemy, Kuro growled from the rear, where it was guarding Yui.
Behind them, the Patter were huddled together, speaking nervously.
If I were an utterly ruthless leader, I’d order them to charge into the
enemy’s midst and cause chaos so we could pick off the tanks. But I
couldn’t do that, of course. They had defeated their nemesis, the
Goliath Rana, and made their way to the promised land of the Great
Zelletelio Forest at last. Yes, there were dangerous monsters in the
area anyway, but the very last thing I wanted was for them to die
because of a squabble between players…
“…Oh!” I gasped.
I wasn’t sure if it was an advantage or not, but there was one major
uncertain variable in this forest. And if we could bring that into the
battle, the attackers would no longer be so confident.
“Klein, Agil,” I murmured to the two at my sides. “Throw all the frog
meat you have into the flames.”

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I opened the ring menu and got busy without waiting for an answer,
materializing all of the Goliath Rana meat I had filling up my
inventory capacity. Bright-red chunks of flesh appeared atop the
window, and I grabbed them and tossed them into the blaze to the
left.
Within a few moments, Klein and Agil began doing the same thing. It
was only the fact that we’d known one another for so long that kept
them from wondering why we were busying ourselves with such a
ridiculous task, given the present danger. Although if this didn’t
work, they were bound to lose a lot of confidence in me anyway.
“…What are they doing? Clearing out their junk?” asked one of the
enemy fighters.
Another player replied, “They’re cooking meat. What, are they gonna
lure us out with food?”
“They don’t think we’re NPCs, do they?”
As they bantered, the frog meat cooked in the flames, creating a
fragrant smell. The pink was a little too bright, but the meat was
quite a fine ingredient, and it somehow smelled like we’d added
black pepper and rosemary, just from being seared in the fire.
That alone, of course, was not going to make the attackers give up.
Their spearman leader called out from the back, “Let’s finish them
off before they try something funny. Go to plan B!”
The rest of the group called out, “Yes, sir!”
But there was no way to know what kind of strategy plan B was.
There was a deep rumbling from the forest, like a gigantic mortar
and pestle grinding.
“Grrrrr…”
There it was.

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The ground began to tremble. A new kind of horror chilled my spine.
The frog meat had brought that uncertain variable into play—and it
was a double-edged sword.
The left of the two groups of enemies visibly began to panic.
“Hey, there’s something behind us…”
“Gurrraaaa!”
The roar was like thunder, and one of the nearby burning spiral pines
snapped at the base. A tremendous four-legged beast, over six feet
tall even with all of its feet on the ground, emerged from the flames.
That was the tyrant of the forest, the creature that had terrified us
last night—the thornspike cave bear. The smell of the frying frog
meat had stimulated its hunger; drool hung from its thick teeth, and
its red eyes looked greedily upon the scene.
“Aaaah!”
An enemy fighter charged, thrusting out his sword. The bear was
unimpressed and jumped with surprising speed, easily swiping the
attacker out of the way.
“Gaaah!”
He slammed against the stone wall around the cabin with a nasty
crunch, as light as if he were a scrap of cloth, and bounced back
about ten feet before hitting the ground. The core of his cursor shot
down and disintegrated his avatar, which turned into a tangle of
ribbons that flew into the sky.
It wasn’t the heaviest armor, but that player had fairly decent
equipment, and he lasted all of a single swipe. The thornspike cave
bear had even higher stats than I’d realized. It couldn’t use magic, so
its physical attack power was definitely higher than the Goliath
Rana’s.

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This told me that it was indeed a true miracle that we’d beaten the
bear last night by rolling those logs off the roof. Klein, Agil, and I
slowly backed away from the creature.
I’d expected the players to panic and flee in various directions after
they saw their companion slaughtered in a single second, but I was
disappointed. The spearman recovered from the shock immediately,
raised his weapon—a fancifully designed fauchard, a kind of hooked
polearm that was clearly inherited from his previous game—and
bellowed, “Don’t panic! A and B teams, regroup and take boss
formation!”
His hair was a dark-red color, and his skin was bronzed. In ALO, he
would be a salamander. I didn’t recognize him, but I could imagine
he’d been one of the lancers serving under General Eugene in the
territorial wars.
In that case, I couldn’t help but wonder, who was this Sensei capable
of enlisting such talented, hardcore players…?
The two groups of attackers quickly assembled, forming one massive
raid party. The formation of tanks, attackers, and debuffers was the
same as before. Even the three fighting with Asuna, Alice, and Silica
jumped down to join the group.
“Grrraaaah!!”
The thornspike cave bear roared and scratched at the ground, then
launched into a tremendous charge. It was the same thing it did
when it nearly destroyed the wall of the cabin.
Claaank! A resounding crash filled the air. The four tanks formed a
line and just barely managed to absorb the bear’s momentum. I
couldn’t help but exclaim “Whoa,” under my breath.
But now wasn’t the time to sit around and be impressed. We had to
make full use of this time while things were at their most chaotic.

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“Kirito! What are we doing?!” Lisbeth demanded, yanking on my
arm.
I thought hard. The enemy had their sides exposed to us, so I wanted
to attack, but if we drew the bear’s attention, that would be making
a bad situation worse.
Though I didn’t like it, perhaps it would be best to sit back and watch
them fight for now. If the bear was winning, great, and if it lost, it
was sure to inflict plenty of damage on the players, making it easier
for us to finish them off…
It was a cruel but rational tactic. But I didn’t get a chance to explain.
“Kirito,” said a voice from the right. Somehow Silica was there, not
on top of the stone wall anymore. I was going to applaud her long,
tiring struggle to defend the cabin, but she held out her hand to stop
me. “Kirito, that huge bear is the thornspike cave bear you wanted
me to tame, right?”
“Er…yeah, that’s right. But I was thinking more in the long term…”
“But even still, if I’m going to turn it into a pet one day, I can’t just
abandon it to a horrible fate now,” she said, very determined. Pina,
the little dragon perched atop her head, cried “Kyuu…”
Whether that bear wins or loses, the one you’re going to try taming
in the future is a different individual, I could have said, but I didn’t.
Silica had been a beast-tamer ever since SAO, and it wasn’t that kind
of logical decision on her part. If we used this thornspike cave bear as
a sacrificial pawn now, then when she eventually tamed some other
bear, she wasn’t going to feel truly connected to it. I understood that
mindset, and I respected it.
I stared back into those determined eyes, then looked at Asuna and
Alice atop the distant wall. They stood there, rapier and longsword in
hand, hair swaying in the wind, and nodded as though reassuring me
that they’d accept my decision, whatever it was.
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“…All right. We’ll let the bear handle the front line and attack from
the rear,” I announced. Silica exclaimed “Okay!” and Klein smacked
me on the back with a “That’s the spirit!”
Up ahead, the thornspike cave bear and the invaders were locked in
fierce combat. The bear’s main attacks were swiping with its front
paws and charging, and the four tanks were desperately defending
against them so that the swordsmen could damage it from the sides,
and the spearmen from the back row. Their teamwork was too
practiced to be an impromptu raid party, but I hadn’t made contact
with the bear yet, so I couldn’t see if they were doing any real
damage to its HP bar. Depending on our timing, we might wind up
battling against a furious thornspike cave bear at peak health, but if
that happened, then so be it.
I made eye contact with the others to get us on the same page, then
lifted my sword, waited for the bear to charge once again—and
swung it down.
Agil, Klein, and I sprinted forward in a row. We were heading for the
spearman leader, who was taking charge from the middle of the back
row. Agil took the first attack by using the wide-range Two-Handed
Ax skill Whirlwind, knocking away the two players guarding the
leader.
“Whoa…”
“They’re here!” shouted the two as they fell, drawing the attention
of the entire back row of the enemy. Another two players rounded
on Agil with admirable reflexes, taking advantage of his post-skill
delay.
“I don’t think so!”
Klein used the basic Reaver skill for one-handed curved swords, and I
used Vertical. The perfectly synchronized attacks took down the two
foes.
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We’d sent four enemies into a tumbled state, but now all three of us
were stuck in a delay. The enemy leader reared back with his
fauchard and bellowed, “It was poor form to attack us now, Kirito!”
How do all of these people know who I am? I grumbled to myself as I
watched the sharp tip of the fauchard glow aquamarine. That was
the color of Whirlpool, an area skill for two-handed spears. It was
less powerful than the Two-Handed Ax skill Whirlwind, but it caused
a dazed Debuff effect.
At that point, I finally saw the name Schulz above the enemy leader’s
HP bar. I didn’t recognize the name, but I had a feeling that, like
Mocri, I wasn’t going to forget it now.
Just before his Whirlpool could knock all three of us off our feet,
there were two different bursting sounds behind it, and two
different kinds of fire struck Schulz’s chest and shoulder. That was
Yui’s magic and Sinon’s gun. He lost his skill opportunity and faltered
backward. Lisbeth and Silica jumped in, adding on with normal mace
and dagger attacks and knocking him to the ground.
Released from my delay at last, I leaned forward as far as I could go
and raised my sword.
If I hit him with all three blows of Sharp Nail, I could probably take
Schulz’s HP down to zero. But if I executed it the way it normally
worked, the slashes wouldn’t hit a target collapsed on the ground. At
times like that, you had to sink down close to the ground—but take a
stance that was too irregular, and the sword skill wouldn’t work.
So I dug my toes into the ground in an effort to get more support,
and I entered the proper motion as low as I possibly could. My iron
sword glowed red, vibrating at a high pitch.
The instant I launched myself off the ground, I met Schulz’s gaze.
His eyes contained surprise, frustration, and something else.
Doubt…? About what?
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Very belatedly, I realized I wanted to hear what he had to say. How
did he learn where the log cabin was? How did he put together such
a large force? Why did they attack like this? But it was too late. I
couldn’t stop the sword skill once it was in motion.
With the help of the game system, I leaped five yards in a single step.
Schulz didn’t bother to get up. He did hold up his fauchard in an
attempt to guard, but he estimated my slash being too high. The first
swing of Sharp Nail, coming in a ground-hugging dash, snuck past the
handle of the polearm and hit Schulz in the neck.
My sword bounced back and struck again a second and third time,
ignoring the laws of inertia. The motions carved red claw marks in
the air that mingled with the bloodred damage effects.
His HP bar promptly emptied.
“Kirito…you’re…really…”
Before he could finish, the spindle from his HP bar pierced his body
and dissolved it into rings.
I’m really what?!
I didn’t scream the question on my mind because it didn’t seem like
appropriate parting words for a man who was leaving this world
forever after fair combat. Plus, the fighting wasn’t done yet.

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Page | 214
I straightened and looked at the enemy players around me. “Your
leader is dead! We won’t pursue if you run for your lives now!”
When fighting the pack of goblins in the cave near Rulid in the
Underworld, that was enough to make the goblins split immediately,
but the players in my vicinity only gave me suspicious looks.
“Shut up! We can’t turn tail and run now!” shouted one of them. He
charged with a short spear, which I hastily blocked. That attitude
made sense, so I switched to battle mode, pushed back, and blew
him off his feet with Vertical.
From that point on, it was an all-out melee, with no tactics or
teamwork or planning, just chaos.
Half the enemy fighters were dealing with the thornspike cave bear,
so I made sure not to get too close to them, and I focused on cutting
down the other half of their group. Sinon’s musket and Yui’s fire
magic were a huge help, and they identified each player who tried to
unleash a major sword skill to counter me, and took them out. That
let me focus on only the opponent I was facing at each moment. Of
course, the enemy wasn’t stupid, either, so some of them tried to
neutralize Sinon and Yui, but Kuro and the group of Patter helped
prevent that.
What really decided the course of battle was Asuna and Alice, who
determined that no one was going after the cabin anymore and
jumped down from the wall to join the fight. They took out their
frustration over the long defensive battle against the enemy and, in
less than five minutes, eliminated the eight members of the rear
guard.
When we finally got a moment to breathe, I turned to the two of
them and said, “Good job keeping things under control. Sorry we’re
so…”
“Groaaagh!!”
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A roar at a higher volume and ferocity than before cut me off. I
looked to my left and saw the eight remaining attackers and, beyond
them, the thornspike cave bear with its front legs open wide. We’d
seen that movement last night. And it meant the bear’s next attack
was…
“Uh-oh…Everyone, hit the deck!!” I shouted, throwing myself to the
ground. Half a second later, my friends did the same.
The next moment, the lightning pattern in the bear’s chest flashed.
A blizzard of needles sprayed outward, blasting the eight enemy
combatants.
Even wearing her plate mail from the old game last night, Alice was
brought half to death by the attack. But I wasn’t able to see its
effects on the players. I had to keep my face pressed to the ground
because a stray quill grazed the top of my head.
I could hear the metallic needles striking the dirt, trees, and rocks all
around us. Thankfully, I could still see the party’s HP bars with my
face in the dirt, so I prayed that no one would die before the attack
was over.
Someone off to the side behind me shrieked “Yeow!” and Klein’s HP
bar took a big hit. Agil suffered some damage next, and then one
quill pierced my left shoulder. If you couldn’t even avoid the quills
while flat on the ground, then the only ways to avoid them were to
burrow underground or fly in the air. It seemed like a game-breaking
design…but then again, a lot of this was our fault for being in a place
over fifteen miles away from the starting point. I prayed to myself,
Okay, okay, we shouldn’t be here. Just give us the chance to gain
levels like we should!
With one last jab in the dirt just inches from my nose, the storm of
needles finally ceased.

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I looked up carefully to see the thornspike cave bear lower its front
legs to the ground and the eight players closer to us standing in a
huddle. The four tanks were in a row, shields raised, with the four
damage dealers hiding behind them. They had seemingly blocked the
hail of spikes up close, an admirable bit of bold strategy and
defensive power…
But then the sharp spindles in the middle of the ring cursors over
their heads shot downward together. Eight avatars unraveled as one,
sending millions of ribbons flying up into the night sky.
When the ribbons were gone, a group of black bags containing their
belongings fell to the ground with a thud, but now was not the time
to be distracted. From my stomach, I groaned, “No way…”
The thornspike cave bear grunted. Its shining red eyes glared at us.
The bear was clearly targeting us, but I couldn’t decide on a
moment’s notice if we should run or fight yet.
I’d taken one of the needles to my shoulder, so I could see the bear’s
cursor. It was at a bit above 60 percent health. The attackers had put
up a good fight against the bear, but as I feared, it was still in quite
good condition. With our group, I knew we had a better than zero
chance of winning, but I couldn’t be sure we’d triumph without
fatalities.
No, wait a second. We weren’t talking about fighting the bear…
That was when, emerging from the back and leaping past me, Klein,
and Agil, a small figure made its appearance. It was Silica, Pina on her
right shoulder and her hands empty. She approached the cave bear.
“H-hey, Silica!” I called out, getting up off my stomach.
She didn’t turn back. “Let me handle this!” she hissed.
I understood, of course, that she wasn’t talking about killing the bear
but taming it. But that honestly seemed even harder than beating it.

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It was practically a miracle that I’d tamed Kuro the lapispine dark
panther, but that happened when the both of us were taking shelter
from the hailstorm, and it might have been a factor in my success.
On the other hand, the thornspike cave bear was in an enraged state
after suffering many attacks over a long period, and even after
slaughtering its eight attackers in an instant, it showed no signs of
being satisfied. This was the reverse of the situation with Kuro, and it
just didn’t seem like a beast that Silica could conquer without
inheriting her Beast-Taming skill.
But she approached the bear without fear, despite its bared fangs
and menacing growl. In its paw, it was clutching a large blob of
something. It was a piece of frog meat, well-done from the flames.
Instantly, I realized what I should be doing.
“Klein, Agil, go find the meat from the woods.”
“G-got it.”
“Sure thing.”
We moved carefully, staying low and keeping Silica in our sights so as
not to aggravate the bear. The fire had finished burning through all
the spiral pines around the log cabin and was mostly out by now. We
looked around the blackened ground, picking up hunks of sizzling
frog meat and placing them back in our virtual item storage.
Silica, meanwhile, was within six feet of the growling thornspike cave
bear, and she carefully tossed a chunk of meat. “Dinnertime, Mr.
Bear,” she said.
“Grrgroaaah!” it roared in response.
The thornspike cave bear stood up on its rear legs and brandished a
menacing paw with knifelike claws. Upright, it was easily ten feet tall,
and Silica was the smallest of our group after Yui. The difference in
size couldn’t have been starker, but physical size did not correspond
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to avatar strength in a VRMMO. Even still, I could practically see one
vicious swipe of its paws disintegrating Silica the way it just did to
those other players.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the bear lowered its paws and returned to all fours. It
snuffled at the frog meat in front of it, then took the chunk into its
mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed it.
“…”
I stopped collecting meat for a moment to watch the face-off
between Silica and the bear. She was probably already seeing a
circular beast-taming meter for her target. She waited for the right
timing, then offered it more meat from her other hand. The bear
took it right away.
When she opened her inventory, hands empty, I quickly hissed to
Agil and Klein, “Trade me all the meat you’ve picked up.”
It wasn’t just Agil and Klein; I received trade windows from Leafa,
Asuna, and Alice as well. I smacked the YES buttons in quick
succession, then snuck within eight feet of Silica, the maximum
distance for a trade request. She accepted my trade as soon as it
went through, meaning Silica had all of the cooked frog meat in her
inventory now.
The only thing left for us to do was pray.
Silica took cues from a meter that only she could see, tossing the
pieces of frog meat one after the other. The bear bit and swallowed
them in succession, with no sign of growing tired. There were over
thirty pieces of meat I’d traded to Silica, but at the current rate, they
were going to be gone within three minutes. If that wasn’t enough to
successfully tame the beast, we were back to the question of
whether to fight or run.

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Over her shoulder, I could see the inventory display of Seared Goliath
Rana Meat dwindling. Ten pieces went down to five, then three, two,
one…zero.
After tossing the final piece of meat, Silica whispered tensely, “The
meter’s been stuck at ninety-nine percent for a little while.”
“…Okay, I’m sure there’s one more piece of meat we missed. We’ll
go find it,” I said, turning back to the forest.
But Silica shook her head. “No, another piece of the same meat isn’t
going to make up that one percent. I’m going to try taming it in this
state.”
There was already a long rope in her left hand. If she looped it
around the thornspike cave bear’s neck and tied it tight, the beast-
taming attempt was successful, but I couldn’t help but feel that the
missing 1 percent was going to be the deciding factor.
“Wait, maybe there’s some other food…”
I opened my inventory, scrolling through it in a hurry. I had a ton of
random materials in there, considering that we’d only been in this
virtual world for a day and a half, but almost no food ingredients.
Hyena meat, salamander tail, bat wings…None of them seemed like
foods a bear would like. What did a bear like to eat anyway? Salmon?
Apples? Bamboo shoots? I hadn’t seen any of them yet.
I was about to give up on the idea of getting the meter past 99
percent when a voice said, “Silica, here.”
Sinon had snuck up behind me and offered a blue pot the size of a
fist. I couldn’t begin to guess what was inside. But Sinon had started
in a different location and crossed the vast Giyoru Savanna on her
own. I could only put my faith in her.

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Silica accepted the jar, stuck her hand directly inside, and scooped
out the contents. It was a whitish semisolid blob. She couldn’t throw
it because it was soft, so she carefully approached the bear instead.
“Here, it’s yummy,” she whispered, extending her hand. The
thornspike cave bear eyed it warily.
“Gruh…,” it grunted, sniffing. But it didn’t seem to have any further
reaction. Sinon muttered “I guess it’s not good enough in a raw
state…”
That made sense to me. The thornspike cave bear might not have
been a boss monster, but it was definitely a rare type, and it might
require all of its food lures to be properly cooked or treated in some
way. But how would you prepare that white blob?
A small shadow darted between me and Sinon. Out of the corner of
my eye, it looked to be Yui’s size, but it wasn’t her. The figure had
brown fur and a long, narrow tail—one of the Patter. The leader of
the group, if I recalled.
The Patter rushed with true rodent speed toward Silica and tilted the
yellow jar she held over Silica’s hand. A viscous golden liquid
dolloped over the white object. Once that was done, the Patter raced
back to the rear just as fast.
“……?”
Sinon and I stared, mouths agape. And then—the thornspike cave
bear sniffed the object again and licked up the bizarre glob resting on
Silica’s hand in one slobbery go.
Her other hand moved immediately, draping the long rope around
the bear’s thick neck and forming a loop that she tugged shut. The
thornspike cave bear’s body flashed—and the crimson ring cursor
turned green.
In the silence that followed, Silica slumped to the ground.

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“Hrar!” the bear barked and licked her cheek with a massive tongue.
Behind me, I heard a voice ask, “Was it…a success?”
It was Alice. Even at night, the sapphire blue of her eyes lost none of
its brilliance, though her eyes looked skeptical now. I couldn’t
necessarily believe it myself, but the cursor had undeniably gone
from red to green.
“I think…it was.”
“I did not believe this would work. Perhaps Silica has the skill to tame
a wild dragon from the western empire.”
“We’ll have to take her to the Underworld one day to test that idea
out,” I replied before looking to Sinon. “So, uh…what was that white
thing?”
“Butter.”
“B-butter?! Where did you get that?!”
“An Ornith child gave it to me.”
“……Oh…”
I shook away the confusion and glanced over my shoulder at the
Patter.
“…And what did that mouse kid put on the butter?”
“Dunno.” Sinon shrugged.
It was Yui who answered, approaching with her hand in Asuna’s. “I
think that’s honey, Papa.”
“H-honey?! Where did they…?”
“Long, long ago, the Patter collected honey from the Giyoru Savanna.
Apparently, that honey is a treasure that was handed down in their
clan for hundreds of years.”

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“Really? That was honey with a vintage of centuries? Why did they
give us something so valuable…?” I asked, glancing back at the Patter
again.
Yui said, “I didn’t ask them. Should I?”
“It’s probably best not to do that,” Asuna said with a smile before I
could answer. “You wouldn’t want people asking you why you saved
someone, would you?”
“Well…I suppose that’s a good point…”
Though usually I’m the one getting saved, I thought. Kuro rubbed its
head against my hip and yowled in a way that sounded suspiciously
like a knowing chuckle.
“Well, if that was the case, I can see how it helped us tame that
bear!” Leafa said.
Lisbeth gave her a funny look. “Why do you say that?”
“I mean, it’s honey and butter! It’s an irresistible combination!”
“Maybe for you,” I murmured, except my stomach chose that very
moment to gurgle loudly. Agil and Klein burst out laughing, and the
girls all joined in.

In the end, we never got the chance to find out why Schulz’s group
was attacking the log cabin.
But if it happened twice, it was bound to happen three times. And
we all agreed that the third time was likely to be much bigger than
the first two.
So we only briefly celebrated reuniting with Sinon, Agil, and Klein and
sat around a campfire in the front yard of the cabin to discuss the
topic of defense.
At the southwestern end of the walled yard, the thornspike cave
bear, Misha (named by Silica), was slumbering on its side with Kuro
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and Aga fast asleep on its luxurious-looking stomach fur. It was such
a peaceful sight that it was hard to believe there’d just been a
devastating battle on the other side of the wall. If we somehow lost
our tamed status on Misha due to lack of food, that hellish scene
would repeat itself, so once our meeting was over, we needed to
leave at once to look for some food a bear would like.
The twenty Patter were resting in the living room of the log cabin.
But we needed to be in a safe location to log out safely, too, so we’d
have to build a new structure for them at some point. As usual, there
were tons of things to do. But for now…
“Gotta beef up this wall, right?” Klein said, spreading his arms. “And
make it twice as tall.”
Alice nodded. “That last group scaled the wall without fear. We’ll
need one tall enough to cause serious damage if they fall off. And
we’ll also want to flatten out all the divots and lumps on the outside
surface.”
I had to fight to resist grinning, realizing that she was thinking of the
ideal defensive structure: the chalk-white walls of Central Cathedral.
Even then, I couldn’t hide from the knight’s sharp senses, and she
fixed me with a piercing stare.
“You haven’t said anything yet, Kirito. Don’t you have an opinion?”
“Sorry, sorry. Just thinking,” I murmured, bobbing my head and
clearing my throat. “Well…I have no objection to strengthening our
defenses, but I think there’s going to be an eventual limit to what we
can do in that regard. We can make the wall taller, but then they’ll
use ladders. And as players get to a higher level, they’ll gain more
kinds of ranged offense…”
“So how do you expect to defend this place, then?” Lisbeth snapped
impatiently. I decided to offer the idea I’d been mulling over since
the Patter asked to join our traveling party.
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“Does it seem to you like the reason we keep getting attacked is
because we’re just one little player house isolated in the
wilderness?”
“Huh? You want to build more houses?”
“Yeah. But not one or two. We’ll build a town here.”
“……”
Nine pairs of eyes stared at me in stunned silence.
Asuna was the first to speak. “Just constructing a lot of buildings
doesn’t make a town, Kirito. You need people to live in them.”
“Well, the Patter are going to need homes, aren’t they? If we build
five or six for them, that should make it more town-like, right?”
“So you want to use them as a shield?” Sinon asked sharply.
I shook my head. “No, no, we’ll keep them safe, too. It just means we
might be using them to help puff ourselves up and make this location
harder for other players to attack…”
I could see that my argument wasn’t convincing my friends, whose
expressions grew harder as I went on.
“After crossing half the Giyoru Savanna, I realized that we’re blessed
by lots of natural resources in this location. There’s a nearly
unlimited amount of stone and lumber for building houses here. Iron
ore was our biggest problem, but now that Silica’s tamed the
thornspike cave bear, that solves the major difficulty there.”
Leafa jumped in to ask, “Wait…the bear’s not going to respawn?”
“It will if we defeat it, but not if we tame it, I bet. Because then it
would mean we could harvest an unlimited army of unstoppable
monsters. We could have ten giant bears fighting for us.”

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“I don’t want to try that one again,” protested Silica, shivering. Atop
her head, Pina opened one eye and squeaked as though to say
“Agreed.” We chuckled at that one.
“We can visit the cave again later to see if it’s true about the
respawning…but for now, I don’t think it’ll be too difficult for us to
make more buildings. But the Patter alone won’t be enough to fill
out a whole town, so we’ll need to scout out some more NPCs.”
“The Bashin would be very reassuring to have on our side!” chirped
Yui. Lisbeth nodded firmly. Convincing NPCs to move homes was
unthinkable in any other VRMMO, but here, it felt like it was just a
successful negotiation away. The Bashin would be great to recruit,
but I was hoping for the Ornith birdpeople Sinon met on the western
side of the Giyoru Savanna. Having a group of people skilled with
muskets would make our defenses so much more formidable…
“But, Kirito,” Agil said, causing me to spin around, “you’re playing
this game to beat it, right? If we’re heading for the ‘land revealed by
the heavenly light,’ we’re going to have to leave this forest
eventually.”
To my embarrassment, I’d completely forgotten about that
announcement until he pointed it out. I blinked a few times, then
nodded quickly.
“Er…yeah…good point. But there’s a big difference between leaving
from a secure base of operations and just striking out from nothing.
For one thing, we’re all lugging around incredibly heavy inherited
gear. If it has to stay in our inventory all the time, it’s just cramping
our carrying space. And if we’re going to keep it in our home storage,
we’ll want to make sure that it’s as secure as possible…”
The others considered this suggestion gravely. Sinon’s Hecate II was
the most significant of these, of course, but everyone’s inherited
weapons and armor were important to them. Sadly, I’d had to

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sacrifice my beloved Blárkveld to create our metal weapons, but I
still had Excalibur, which had to be protected at all costs. I knew the
others felt the same way about theirs.
“Well, I’m in agreement with Kirito’s idea to build a town. What do
the rest of you think?” Alice announced. The others all murmured
their assent. With that established, she looked to me. “But if we’re
starting from the planning stage, it’s going to be a major project. It
could take a week, or even an entire month. What if there is a third
attack before we’re finished?”
“No!” I bounced to my feet and clenched my fist, causing my iron
gauntlet to clank loudly. “It won’t even take a week! It’s eleven
o’clock right now, so I’ll have the basic plan for the town built by
three o’clock! That’s four hours!”
Alice squawked, “Huh?! Four hours?!”
Asuna smirked. “We’re going to be short on sleep again.”
Yui cheered, “Let’s give it our all!”

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10
It was 1:35 PM the next day, Tuesday, September 29th.
I stood on the Seibu Shinjuku express train, fighting off the sandman.
If possible, I would have loved to make good use of this time to zonk
out and catch up on some sleep, but that wasn’t possible—because
sitting next to me was the mysterious new transfer student Tomo
Hosaka, aka Argo the Rat. If I fell asleep and leaned on her shoulder
or, even worse, drooled on her, I’d never live it down for years to
come.
So instead, I was desperately fighting back against the power that
compelled my eyelids to shut. A mirthful voice said, “You seem
sleepy, Kiri-boy. Want some eye drops?”
“N-no, I’m good. And what is it with you and wanting to give people
eye drops?”
“Not just anyone.”
“Oh, okay…Well, why are you following me, then?”
“Hey, that’s kinda cruel to say to the person who taught you the
secret life hack to gettin’ out of school without ditching, huh?”
“Hrmm…”
Well, she had me there.
To make the arrangement to be in Ginza by three o’clock—a task
that was nigh impossible for a high schooler—I was planning, despite
my reservations, to ditch fifth and sixth periods. But when I
mentioned that to Argo before the start of school, she informed me
that I could get out of afternoon classes by applying for a workplace
visit with the school.
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Of course, I’d need an electronic signature from the business to be
visited, but I had the man who was summoning me whip up
something for that. The school accepted the application, so I wasn’t
branded with being delinquent from class, although it didn’t change
the fact that I was missing lessons. If this ended up being a waste of
time, I was going to make full use of it by stuffing myself to the gills
with expensive cake.
“I hear ya had a hell of a time last night, huh? Your base got attacked
by a huge raid party?” Argo asked me out of nowhere.
“………How did you know that?” I asked after a healthy pause.
“A player who was takin’ part in it was tweetin’ all kinds of details
out. The account was private, but that means nothin’ to the great
Argo.”
“No way…”
I was muttering about the player tweeting out details, of course, not
about Argo’s information-collecting ability. It wouldn’t be long
before every former ALO player still alive in Unital Ring knew about
our base.
I stifled the urge to sigh and replied, “Yeah, it was a hell of a thing.
They were intending to wipe out our base from the very start. We
managed to make it through because they didn’t have magic, but if
they had two or three mages, we would have lost.” I paused, then
considered what I had just said. “In fact…how did they have so many
players, and none of them with magic? There should have been a
bunch of players who inherited magic skills at the start of the
game…”
“Ya can’t use magic skills just by inheriting them into the game.”
“Huh? Really?”

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“The skill will show up in yer list of acquired skills, but it’s inactive. Ya
gotta use a magicrystal to unlock it. Once people figured that out,
they went crazy looking for monsters that drop magicrystals around
the Stiss Ruins starter area.”
“Uh…uh-huh,” I replied awkwardly. Then I hastily added, “But isn’t
that putting a huge handicap on magic classes? You might as well be
beginning without any skill head start at all.”
“I agree with ya. But if they didn’t put any limitations, the magic skills
woulda been way overpowered, I bet. It’d mean that in those first
four hours before the grace period wore off, you’d have all the top-
class devastating magic spells at your disposal, ya know? They could
power-level on tough mobs and waste all the other players.”
“Ahhh…Yeah, I get that…”
The MP recovery probably wouldn’t allow for unlimited magic
blasting, but if you gained enough levels, that wouldn’t matter
anymore. Like Argo said, if they hadn’t placed those limitations,
Unital Ring would likely be a mage-centric battleground by now. But
even still, having to find and eat a magicrystal after your skill
proficiency was lowered to 100 seemed a bit too restrictive to me.
The express train arrived at Kami-Shakujii Station, dropped off just a
few passengers, then began moving again. Knowing the morning and
evening rush hours, I had trouble imagining how these cars could be
so empty. The afternoon sunlight shone through the windows and
created a lattice pattern on the floor. Relaxing on the bench seating
was making me sleepy again.
Ultimately, I stuck around until five last night—er, this morning. I did
my best to live up to my promise to create the town in four hours,
but it took one hour to gather the materials for the well, then
another hour to find the plants to make our crop fields, and that just
delayed the rest of the plans further.

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But we worked hard together and managed to create something that
resembled a town—at least, by video game standards.
We’d cut down parts of the forest outside the fifty-foot walled
perimeter (which was easy because most of those trees had burned
in the attack) and created another circular wall, dividing the interior
into four separate areas. The eastern area was the living quarters for
the Patter, the western area would be for future NPC settlers, the
southern area was for commerce, and the northern area would be
fields and pet stables. The western area was just a stone foundation
for now, and there wasn’t a single shop in the southern area yet, but
it was looking much more like a town already. It wasn’t until Alice
pointed it out that I realized the circular four-quarter construction
was exactly the same structure as Centoria in the Underworld—
though our town was only two hundred feet across, smaller than a
single district in the city of North Centoria.
Even still, in a single night, we managed to whip up an erstwhile
town that was much better than I’d envisioned, much of which was
thanks to Silica’s new partner, Misha. Asuna used her Tailoring and
Woodworking skills to fashion a large beast pack for Misha, giving it a
seemingly infinite carrying ability for all the stone and logs we
needed. Of course, the harder you worked a pet, the more its SP bar
drained, so acquiring enough food to keep it going was an issue. But
thanks to a fishing net that Asuna made and some additional
proficiency in the Net-Casting skill, the river to the south actually
started turning up some good-sized fish. Aga and Kuro loved the
grilled fish, too, so that was a good solution to the problem of
feeding our pets for now.
After that, the only question was whether this would create a sense
of aversion and intimidation among the players who were likely to
try attacking us in the future again. I certainly wouldn’t ever want to
do something like that, but some people might only find it a more

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enticing target this way, so we would just have to wait and find out.
Perhaps there were new attackers sneaking toward our town at this
very moment, while I was being rocked to sleep by the train.
The problem is this Sensei character…
I rested my head against the pole at the end of the seat, thinking
about the player who might be behind the string of invasions. The
evocation of a teacher of PvP (PK) tactics made me think first of PoH,
leader of Laughing Coffin, the murderous guild in Aincrad. But his
fluctlight had been irrevocably damaged in the Underworld, so it was
hard to imagine him showing up in Unital Ring and getting involved
with PKing for fun. Plus, the whole mental instruction about “grasp
the whole, not just one part” was not PoH’s style. What he taught
was how to lie and mislead people and give them poisoned water to
drink.
So who was this Sensei…?
“Hey, Argo,” I said. Her head was resting on my left shoulder, and it
rose with a grunted “Nwuh? Wh-what…?”
“That locked account you saw. Did they say anything about why they
attacked our base?”
“Hmm? No reason…I think the most he wrote was that a salamander
friend of his invited him.”
“Uh-huh…”
The salamander in question had to be Schulz. Which meant that he
might have been the only person in contact with this Sensei.
Kirito…you’re…really…
Those were Schulz’s last words before he left the game for good. It
had been an entire night since he said them, but I still had no idea
what was supposed to come after “really.” Of course, Schulz wasn’t

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really dead, so it was possible I could use real-world means to make
contact and hear what he meant to say…
“Hey, Argo.”
“I’m gonna start charging you for my services.”
“I’ll buy you an expensive piece of cake in Ginza. Anyway…you have
any idea what player in ALO might go by the title Sensei?”
“Yep.”
I was stunned. The last thing I expected her to do was say yes.
“A-are you serious?” I asked, staring between those curls at her face.
“Yep. Though they usually call you the Black Swordsman, instead.”
“……”
I snorted. It was certainly an answer but not the one I wanted.
“Forget that guy. Anyone else come to mind?”
“Hmm,” she murmured but eventually shook her head. “Nope. Can’t
think of one. Seems like a number of ALO players who converted into
UR have formed new teams of their own, so it could be the leader of
one of ’em. I’d have to look into it to find out.”
“When you say ‘teams,’ you mean like a guild?”
“A bit looser than that. More like groups based around sharing intel.
They make up silly names, like the Absolute Survivor Squad, or the
Announcer Fan Club, or the Weed Eaters, or the Virtual Study
Society…”
“Yeah, those are pretty goofy…Anyway, can you look up who’s
leading those groups?”
“That’s gonna cost ya more than a single piece of cake.” Argo
pouted, though her cheeks looked strange without the characteristic
whiskers painted on.
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“Hang on, Argo. At the meeting yesterday, you said you hadn’t
logged in to Unital Ring yet. How do you know so much about what’s
going on inside?” I asked.
“If you’re thorough about collecting all the information being traded
online, you can figure out most things. Back in the SAO days, I had ta
walk around and collect all of that myself. Nowadays it’s so much
easier, I’m back to gaining weight,” she joked, but it was clear to see
beneath her jacket and uniform that her torso was just as skinny as it
had been in SAO. I wanted to call her bluff and tickle her stomach but
had to remind myself that she wasn’t just the androgynous Rat
anymore but a young woman one year above me in high school.
“Buuut,” she drawled, “I’ll admit that I’m thinkin’ of loggin’ in at last.
Will you offer me an armed escort from the start point to your base,
Kiri-boy?”
“Well…I did want to check out what the Stiss Ruins look like, so I
guess that’s fine…”
“Great! Tonight, then!”
It seemed like today’s adventure was going to be another long one, I
realized, looking up at the information panel over the train doorway.
We’d just left Saginomiya Station.

We got off at Takadanobaba Station, changed lines, then finally

reached Ginza, where the streets were bustling, despite its being a
weekday. There were rich ladies in fine clothing and foreign tourists
all over, which made me feel the slightest bit out of place in my
school uniform.
We marched down the main street, its sides bristling with flagship
stores of expensive luxury brands, and entered a distinctive red
building at an intersection on the seventh block. The place we were
heading was on the third floor. When we got off the elevator, the

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classical music playing made it immediately clear what a fancy place
we were visiting, but I used my Incarnation power to dispel its
intimidation before walking through the door.
“Welcome. Table for two?” asked a waiter, bowing deeply. I told him
we were meeting someone and glanced around the spacious café.
From a window-side table in the back came a loud, impolite voice.
“Hey! Kirito! Over here!”
I wanted to grab him and demand, Are you doing this on purpose?!
Instead, I quietly hurried across the floor toward the source of the
voice.
It was still five minutes to three o’clock, but the man with the dark-
brown suit, flashy striped tie, and black-framed glasses was already
half-finished with his fruit sandwich.
The first time I’d met Seijirou Kikuoka, he was a member of the
Ministry of Internal Affairs; the next time, he was a lieutenant
colonel of the Self-Defense Force; and now, I had no idea what he
was, besides being the sketchiest person I knew by far. He grinned
and raised a hand in greeting—but when he saw Argo standing next
to me, his grin vanished, and he blinked in surprise.
“Hmm…Well, take a seat for now.”
We sat across from him while the waiter set down glasses of cold
water for us. Kikuoka exhaled, grumbling.
“So if this isn’t Asuna or Suguha or Shino…who is this young lady,
Kirito?”
But before I could open my mouth, Argo smirked and replied, “I
believe you already know me quite well. At last we meet,
Chrysheight.”

(To be continued)

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Page | 237
 AFTERWORD

Thank you for reading Sword Art Online 23: Unital Ring II.
First off, I’d like to apologize for the strange publishing structure,
that after Volume 21, Unital Ring I, Volume 22 was Kiss and Fly, only
to continue with Unital Ring II here. We considered making Kiss and
Fly a standalone short story collection so that this book could be
Volume 22, but since Volumes 2 and 8 are also collections, I couldn’t
help but want to preserve that consistency with the series. Sorry
about the interruption!
Anyway…it’s taken a year, but here is the continuation of the Unital
Ring arc. The last one ended with the production of iron, so I wanted
our goal at the end of this book to be getting the whole group back
together, but to my surprise, we shot past that right into creating a
town. But only in the sense of clearing the land and putting down
buildings. How Kirito and friends will function as a town and what
that will mean for getting ahead in the game is something I’d like to
elaborate upon in the next volume.
I wrote this volume in August and September 2019, for the most
part, but at the time in the anime, the latter half of the Alicization
season, the War of the Underworld, was just getting started. In that
part of the story, Alice was tucked away in the distant Rulid Village,
taking care of Kirito in his comatose state, working as a lumberjack to
make a living, and chasing off Eldrie. I couldn’t help but be aware of
the huge gap between Alice there and in the Unital Ring arc!
However, on the inside, she’s just the same as she was in the

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Underworld: always giving everything she’s got. That mental strength
will make her a pillar of Kirito’s team going forward, I’m sure.
And with the introduction of that bespectacled fellow at the very
end, it sure feels like the Underworld is going to get involved in the
story again! What’s going on in the human realm and the dark
realm? I’m curious to find out, too, so I’m hoping to be able to depict
that next time. But the world of Unital Ring demands constant
attention, so we’ll just have to see if that happens. I’ll do my best to
make sure it doesn’t take an entire year for the next book!
On the personal side, for the first time in about five years, I’m back
on my bicycle. The first time I tried to climb the side of a riverbed, my
legs screamed bloody murder at me, but after a few months, I can
make it up without losing much speed at all. The human body is a
wonder. I’d like to keep up with that habit. Also, my schedule getting
crunched to the last minute had nothing to do with my bicycle; it was
simply the laws of the universe at work. I’m sorry, editor and abec!

Reki Kawahara—October 2019

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