Sword Art Online Progressive 5 Read online

  Copyright

  SWORD ART ONLINE PROGRESSIVE Volume 5

  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 PROGRESSIVE Volume 5

  © REKI KAWAHARA 2018

  First published in Japan in 2018 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2018 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 review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kawahara, Reki, author. | Paul, Stephen (Translator), translator.

  Title: Sword art online progressive / Reki Kawahara; translation by Stephen Paul.

  Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen On, 2016–5s69wer

  “PAH-CHOO!”

  I spun around to ascertain the nature of the odd sound behind my back.

  The fencer who was my temporary partner had her hands over her nose. A few seconds later, she arched her back and loosed another “Pah-choo!”

  “…Was that a sneeze, or are you saying you want patchouli for your bath tonight?” I quipped, earning myself a glare.

  “I don’t like patchouli.”

  “What about pumpkin spice?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe parsnip?”

  “Nope…Hey, that’s not even a thing!” she snapped, bringing the joke full circle. Asuna, the level-18 swordswoman, sighed. “It was a sneeze…I think. I’m not sure.”

  “Huh? Wh-what does that mean? Shouldn’t you be able to tell if you sneezed or not…?” I wondered, seriously this time. I came to a stop in the middle of the path.

  Just an hour or two ago, the central street of Karluin, the main town of the fifth floor of Aincrad, had been packed with people, but now it was completely empty. The countdown party with fireworks to celebrate the arrival of the year 2023 was over, and the players had cleared out, returning to their inn rooms—or back to the wilderness to hunt.

  Asuna and I watched the fireworks from the old castle ruins outside town and waited for the area to grow quiet before we left. This was because we’d had a dangerous, unexpected encounter in the ruins. Even with my excellent Search skill, it would be harder to detect someone trailing us in a crowd.

  I casually checked behind me as I waited for Asuna to reply. To my surprise, she had a very rational response: “Sneezes are involuntary bodily functions designed to either raise your body temperature when it’s cold or expel a foreign object from the nasal cavity, right? Neither are necessary for a player avatar to do.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess…that’s a good point…”

  “So if the SAO system is artificially reproducing some kind of sneezing function, I’m not certain that can be called a ‘real’ sneeze…That’s my point.”

  “I see…” I murmured, impressed. Then my own nose started to tickle. It was either the chill or the repetition of the word sneeze that was making me conscious of it. Eventually, I couldn’t hold it any longer.

  “Broosh!” I exploded.

  Asuna grinned smugly at me. “What’s that? Are you saying you want bruschetta for breakfast tomorrow?”

  “…What’s bruschetta?”

  “It’s a kind of Italian finger food.”

  “That actually sounds kind of good,” I murmured, imagining what this bruschetta might look like and unconsciously tugging the collar of my coat tighter before I realized what I was doing. “Hey…is it just me or is it kinda cold here?”

  “…Yes, it’s rather chilly…”

  Asuna wore a hooded wool cape, but it was over a miniskirt that didn’t seem to defend much against the elements. A man who was smooth and considerate would put his own coat on her without saying a word, but as a loser gamer and shut-in, I wasn’t equipped with any skills that I couldn’t earn in a video game.

  Fortunately, before I said or did anything to embarrass myself, Asuna opened her menu and adjusted her equipment mannequin. Light covered the pale legs exposed by her leather battle skirt, then faded into white tights.

  There shouldn’t be any artificial fibers in this world, given the setting, but somehow, the skintight material seemed to shine in the light—I couldn’t help but stare. Before, she would’ve retaliated with a cold look, sharp words, and perhaps even some kind of physical attack—but this time, Asuna just cleared her throat and looked up at the bottom of the floor above, visible in the dark.

  “…Well, it is the beginning of the year, so you would expect it to be cold…and yet, the fourth floor was quite warm when we were down there recently. How does Aincrad handle the seasons of the year?”

  “Um…it was August in the beta test, but even though the sun felt hot at midday, it wasn’t, like, unpleasantly hot. And it was nothing like the suffocating muggy heat of midsummer in real life.”

  “Hmm…I suppose if it were really that hot, nobody would be able to bother with full plate armor and the like.”

  “Good point. Makes me wonder what those old European knights did during the summer…”

  “The Knights Templar of the Kingdom of Jerusalem lost to Saladin’s forces because the heat sapped their strength.”

  “Ah…I see.”

  As usual, Asuna had plenty of facts to back herself up. I started getting the nasty feeling that she might eventually learn more about Aincrad than even I knew, so I quickly brought us back to the matter at hand:

  “The point is…Aincrad does model the seasons to an extent, but I don’t think it actually simulates heat and cold to a level that is uncomfortable. I mean, this isn’t nearly as bad as the midwinter weather we’d be feeling in the real world, right?”

  “Even dressed like this, the worst it does is make me sneeze.”

  “But there are exceptions. I seem to remember reading about floors that are winter or summer all year round…according to a magazine article or something…”

  “Hmm…”

  Asuna glanced up once more, then wondered, “You didn’t find this floor of eternal summer during the beta test?”

  “Well, it was summer at the time…but I do remember a beach on the south side of floor seven. It had white sand, coconut trees, and a bunch of players enjoying their summer vacation in swimsuits.”

  “The way you say that makes me assume you didn’t take part,” she noted insightfully.

  “Well, a guy celebrating his vacation a
ll alone is kinda sad, right?” I admitted. “It’s fine. I was focused on getting through the game.”

  This desperate excuse made Asuna grin enough to forget the cold. She patted me on the back. “South side of the seventh floor? I’ll remember that. If it really is an area of eternal summer…”

  “…Then?”

  “Mmm. I think I’ll keep it under wraps until then. Let’s get going to the next main town. The sixth floor starts in earnest tomorrow…er, today.”

  The fencer walked off at a brisk pace, and I had to rush to catch up, feeling skeptical. It had been more than a month since our temporary partnership began, and I still couldn’t tell what she was thinking most of the time.

  But I guess that’s part of her charm, I thought, which was uncharacteristic of me. I shook my head, and my nostrils began itching again. It was harmless enough in the safety of town, but if I sneezed in a dungeon while trying to hide, the consequences could be disastrous. I’d have to study how to suppress the urge.

  I tried holding my nose, then my breath, but neither worked. Eventually, my itchiness meter reached its peak.

  “Vah-kesh!”

  Asuna stopped and turned around to look at me with a 60 percent annoyed glare and 40 percent enigmatic smile.

  “Are you that excited about summer vacation?” she asked.

  “N-no, I…”

  “Then we’d better get through the sixth floor as quickly as we can.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not like that!”

  But no matter how much I protested, the smirk never left the fencer’s face. In the end, I wasn’t even sure if I really wanted the seventh floor to be an everlasting summer paradise or not.

  1

  EVEN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TELEPORT GATE, the air was still chilly.

  Unlike Karluin, the fifth floor’s main town that existed in the ruins of an ancient city, Stachion was a pristinely built town on the sixth floor. The main material of construction was a shiny gray rock like polished granite, and every single structure was made of blocks exactly the same size in a grid pattern, about eight inches to a side—meaning that everything was straight lines and angles. The effect was so striking that when I first visited this place in the beta test, my reaction was—well, exactly the same as Asuna’s now:

  “Ooh…It’s so blocky…”

  “Well, we are trapped in a video game,” I replied, the standard joke in Stachion. It earned me a piercing, cold glare that lowered my body temperature even further.

  I tugged the collar of my coat up, but it did nothing to keep the chill away. It was still much better than actual winter, but one of the more annoying parts of the virtual world was that once you noticed it was warm or cold, the only way to stop feeling it required some kind of in-game logic.

  It was three o’clock in the morning, January 1, 2023.

  The frontline population’s New Year’s enthusiasm had burned itself out with the fireworks show, and hardly a soul could be found in the teleport gate square of Stachion. A dry north wind blew through the empty space, which was about fifty yards to a side. I figured it would be cold for Asuna and her miniskirt, but between the fleece-lined cape and tights, she seemed to be protected enough.

  Or perhaps the chill I’m feeling now is more than just the NerveGear’s artificial sensations…

  In the old castle ruins to the east of Karluin, where Asuna and I were going to watch the fireworks show, I’d left to get food and run straight into an attack by a mysterious figure in a black poncho. The castle was within the protective limits of the town, of course, so his plan had been to cleverly trick me into thinking I was still inside the anti-criminal code zone while he lured me into the castle’s basement, which was actually outside the safe area.

  The man in the black poncho had snuck up right behind me, despite my proficiency in the Search skill, pointed a knife to my back, and whispered, “It’s showtime.” The coldness of that voice would not leave my ears…The way it richly lilted as though in song—and yet alien in how it betrayed no discernable emotion.

  I was nearly too late to detect his bluff. I rattled off a series of sword skills within the safe zone, hoping to push him into a simulated stunned state, but he used an unfamiliar smoke screen item to escape. I rushed back to the room where I’d left Asuna and was so relieved to see my temporary partner safe that I hugged her—earning me a vicious hook to the right flank. But that hadn’t solved the underlying problem.

  My guess was that the man in the black poncho was the boss of Morte, the axman who had tried to kill me in a duel. The leader of the PK group agitators who had tempted the Legend Braves into their equipment-upgrading scam and who’d tried to get the Dragon Knights Brigade (DKB) and Aincrad Liberation Squad (ALS) to go to war against each other.

  Thanks to me and Asuna intervening, neither of those incidents developed into disaster. That was why the man in the black poncho came to eliminate me directly, I assumed—but they weren’t going to give up from a single failed attempt. I’d have to watch out for danger at all times from now on.

  And there was one even larger problem:

  There was a high possibility that they’d go after Asuna, too. That, above all else, I had to prevent, and yet, I still hadn’t told her about the attack I’d just suffered.

  I wasn’t going to keep it a secret, of course. By tonight’s inn stay at the latest, I’d tell her all about the man in detail and give her another primer on the basic tenets of PvP combat. But all I could grapple with at the moment was what had happened right after we ascended to the fifth floor.

  It was Asuna who’d asked for a lesson in player-versus-player battle—whether you called it PvP or dueling or whatever. After the fight against Morte on the fourth floor, I immediately recognized the importance of this lesson, so in an empty corner of the ruins, we engaged in a proper duel.

  But once we actually faced each other with swords up, she couldn’t move. Instead, she tearfully lowered her blade and said she didn’t want to do it.

  It wasn’t that she had no talent for PvP. When one of the PKers had nearly taken her Chivalric Rapier in the ruins dungeon of the fifth floor, the way she utilized a looting monster to get it back was brilliant work. Once that imagination of hers had both knowledge and experience to bolster it, she’d be able to put her already considerable talent to use in the arena of man-to-man combat.

  But under the current rules of SAO, where dying in-game meant dying in real life, a player duel was therefore a fight to the death. If both sides were evenly matched, the winner would be whoever had less hesitation about taking the other’s life. Or in other words, without that level of cruelty, any potential victory in a close fight was likely to result in a loss.

  If I was going to teach Asuna how to fight another player, it was more important that she learned that cold rationality than any fiddly mechanical techniques I might teach her. I’d never killed another player myself, of course, but if it was necessary to protect myself or my partner, I believed I could do it. Or phrased another way, I wasn’t a good enough person at heart to hesitate in the heat of the moment.

  But Asuna was different. She was much more kindhearted than me—with an upright and honest soul. I didn’t want to tell her that she should be cold and cruel and ready to kill…

  “…Hey, Kirito.” I looked up and saw my partner right in front of me, concerned. “Why did you clam up all of a sudden? You aren’t hungry already, are you?”

  “N-no, that’s not it…”

  “Then can I ask my first question of the sixth floor?”

  “G-go right ahead,” I prompted. We’d been in the middle of the tenth floor when the beta test ended, so including this floor, there were only four and a half left where I could actually answer Asuna’s questions. After all that’s happened, we’re already on the sixth floor, I marveled.

  Then the fencer asked simply, “What’s this?”

  “Eh?”

  Asuna pointed down at our feet. I followed her slender index fi
nger to one of the gray tiles that paved the teleport square. Like the blocks that made up the buildings, it was just ordinary stone about eight inches to a side, but one in every four or so tiles had an Arabic numeral from one to nine on it.

  “Ahh…yes, these…” I took two steps back and pointed down, just like she did. “See how the line between them is thicker here?”

  “You’re right…”

  “This thicker line is where the tiles are split into nine-by-nine grids of eighty-one tiles total. Does this look familiar to you?”

  “Nine by nine…” Asuna mumbled. She blinked three times, then looked up and grinned. “Ohhh, I get it. This is a sudoku puzzle! I was pretty good at them. Interesting, so the tiles of the square make a puzz…le…”

  She trailed off as she got another look around the teleport square. If you ignored the actual teleport gate in the middle, the entire square, fifty yards to a side, was covered in these tiles. And those sudoku puzzles with their number hints ran from end to end.

  “…How many of these puzzles are there?”

  “If it hasn’t changed from the beta, there are twenty-seven rows and columns of these eighty-one-tile sets. Since the exact middle one is taken up by the gate, that means it’s twenty-seven squared, minus one. Which equals seven hundred twenty-eight.”

  “Seven hun—” Asuna gasped quietly. She looked away from the numbers at her feet. “For a moment, I was interested in solving them all. I am no longer interested.”

  “A wise decision,” I said with a sage tone channeling that of any given village elder NPC. “During the beta test, those youngsters who fell prey to the lures of sudoku and gave up on helping us advance the game were called sudokers out of respect…”

  “That’s an even sadder nickname than the ‘hoarders’ who got addicted to finding coins in the ruins. But given how many of these puzzles there are, does that mean there’s some mammoth reward if you solve them all?”

  “You’d think so,” I said, normally this time. “I was under that assumption during the beta, and the sudokers certainly believed it. But the nasty part about this is…all the hint numbers get switched up at midnight every night.”