Sword Art Online Progressive 6 Read online

  Copyright

  SWORD ART ONLINE PROGRESSIVE Volume 6

  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 6

  © 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 © 2019 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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  First Yen On Edition: July 2019

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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–

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016029472 | ISBN 9780316259361 (v. 1 : pbk) | ISBN 9780316342179 (v. 2 : pbk) | ISBN 9780316348836 (v. 3 : pbk) | ISBN 9780316545426 (v. 4 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975328146 (v. 5 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975383336 (v. 6 : pbk)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Virtual reality—Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.K1755 Swr 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029472

  ISBNs: 978-1-9753-8333-6 (paperback)

  978-1-9753-8334-3 (ebook)

  E3-20190603-JV-NF-ORI

  6

  I AWOKE TO MOVEMENTS THAT WEREN’T MINE, warmth that wasn’t mine, and breathing that wasn’t mine.

  Through cracked eyelids, I saw the faint, white-gray light of morning. Based on the color, I gauged it to be around five in the morning. Normally, I’d still be asleep at this hour, but I’d gone to bed very early and had already gotten nine hours of sleep. We were set to meet with Kizmel in the mess hall at seven, so there was still time to relax, but I decided it was better not to be lazy.

  And yet, my eyes closed again. The chilly air of the early January morning versus the absolute comfort and warmth of the bed was simply an unfair fight. My partially awakened mind sank back down into the darkness.

  Just thirty more minutes…No, twenty, I thought like a middle schooler on a Monday morning and then tried to turn off my brain.

  But then there was a faint “Mmh…” and a sensation of wriggling next to me. At first, I thought I was having a dream about owning a cat, but then I realized it was neither a cat nor a dream.

  My eyelids were so heavy that they felt like they’d been glued together; even though the virtual world didn’t make use of your actual eyes, the way it made it impossible to focus when in a half-asleep state was oddly true to life—probably an issue between the brain and the NerveGear. I blinked repeatedly until the gray blur sharpened into a proper image.

  The upper half of my field of view was dominated by a large pillow, while the bottom half was a light-brown something. I was resting on my right side, I could tell, and my right arm was extended forward, trapped between the brown object and the pillow.

  My left arm was resting on a soft object, and my legs felt intertwined with something, as well. They were either trapping it or being entrapped themselves; it was hard to tell for sure. I blinked some more, using my free arm to try to push away the enigma stuck to my body…

  “Nnuh…” came another murmur, from somewhere under my chin. The soft object my left hand was touching suddenly wriggled.

  It wasn’t a cat or any other small animal. It was a large animal, about my size—a human. A player. Specifically, it was my temporary partner, Lady Asuna. The brown object resting on my right arm was Asuna’s head.

  The instant the situation registered in my mind, it accelerated from a dazed state past normal attention into hyper-focus. As my mind got up to speed, I chose my course of action.

  Apparently, I had offered my arm as pillow space and had my free hand holding her shoulder. I was on my right side, and Asuna was on her left, meaning that our fronts were nearly in total contact, and I couldn’t tell what was going on with our legs. I moved my eyes without craning my neck to glance up at the headboard. I was firmly on the left side of the bed—meaning that I was the one violating the territorial treaty. We were only holding pinkies when we went to sleep, so during the night I had somehow advanced all the way from east to west.

  “Uyu…”

  Asuna budged again. The intervals of her activity were getting shorter, and within minutes…perhaps less than a minute, she would likely awaken. I had to retreat to my territory on the right side of the bed before that happened.

  Carefully, I let go of Asuna’s shoulder and let my hand hover in the air. But my right arm was still trapped between her head and the pillow, and removing it would prove difficult. Not to mention our legs, which were all tangled. At this point, the only way to free myself without disturbing Asuna would require a teleport crystal, but those only allowed for teleport to the various town teleport gates—and more importantly, they weren’t available on the sixth floor.

  Still, I had time to attempt it, should I believe in miracles—and I didn’t have much other choice. I tried to use my left hand to lift up Asuna’s head. If I could get my right arm free, I might be able to undo our legs and escape.

  “Mmmh…”

  The moment my fingers brushed the back of her head, Asuna grimaced. I quickly moved my hand away. She wriggled for a few more seconds, then unfolded her hand right in front of her and clenched my shirt collar.

  I’m so dead.

  At this point, all I could do was let my muscles go limp and wait for the fateful moment to occur.

  Two hours later…

  “…Why are you putting your fish on Asuna’s plate, Kirito? Do you not like fish?” Kizmel asked me. We were in the dining hall.

  With a sad, secretive smile, I replied, “No, I love fish,” in the dry tone of a sample sentence in a language textbook.

  “Then why are you giving it all away?”

  “Um…”

  I was at a loss for an appropriate response. Instead, Asuna stuck her fork into the fried fish I was offering her and happily explained, “Kirito did something bad, so he’s paying for his crime.”

  “Oh…What did he do?”

  “Well…” Asuna started, but before she could detail the entire incident, I interjected.

  “You see, I kind of invaded Asuna’s personal space…er, meaning that I got a little too physically close for her comfort,” I said, to explain the
English terminology of personal space. I got a cold glare from the fencer for my comment. Yes, the act of embracing someone in a bed was beyond the level of “violation of personal space,” but if Kizmel was going to be disgusted with me, too, I might as well spend the entire day doing squats in the corner of the castle by myself.

  I prayed she would understand and accept this explanation, assuming that she actually wouldn’t. But to my good fortune, Kizmel nodded deeply and earnestly. “I see. It is the first time I have heard this term, but I understand your meaning. In elf society, too, it is considered to be a violation of norms to approach another too closely.”

  “Oh, really?” asked Asuna to my right. She set down her cup of herbal tea and wondered, “But…when you’re around us, you don’t seem to keep your distance, Kizmel…In the queen spider’s dungeon on the third floor, you ushered us under your cape of hiding, for example.”

  Indeed, I recalled being rather flustered at how much contact there had been with her arms and legs and other body parts. The elf knight smiled wistfully and glanced at her own hands.

  “…Yes, I do recall that. It would seem that, compared to other dark elves, my persi…personal space…is rather narrow. Tilnel did like to cling to me, after all…We were practically joined at the hip when we were children, so I suppose I became used to the feeling.”

  I could sense Asuna’s eyes widening when Kizmel mentioned the name of her late sister, who had died in battle with a Forest Elven Falconer on the third floor.

  Asuna and I never met Tilnel. In fact, I was under the assumption that there had never actually been a dark elf NPC in Aincrad named Tilnel. Kizmel’s childhood with her beloved sister, the point at which she became a knight and Tilnel became an herbalist, and Tilnel’s death during the mission to recover the sacred key…All these things had to be backstory, details invented and placed in Kizmel’s memory. For one thing, elves were long-lived, so Kizmel was older than she appeared, perhaps fifty or sixty, or even older than that. Yet, the world of Aincrad itself had only been around since November 6, 2022, less than two months ago in the real world.

  But after all my interactions with Kizmel, Viscount Yofilis, and even old Romolo and the camp blacksmith, that way of thinking was slowly evolving. These things seemed too rich and complex to just be simple generated memories that were implanted to define the characters and give them individuality.

  In the present day of 2022—er, no, it was 2023 now, I had to remind myself—humanity had yet to develop a properly functioning AGI, or artificial general intelligence.

  Artificial intelligence itself had made great strides in the five years since 2017, which was now considered the first year of the AI era. There were shogi and go apps you could install on your smartphone that were tougher than any pro players, programs for stock and currency trading that could perform thousands of transactions per second for efficient gains, and hospitals now had tools to automatically perform diagnostics with high-res imaging. It wouldn’t be long now before we reached level 5, the point where fully automated cars were driving around on public streets.

  But compared to the rapid advancements of these “narrow AI,” which were focused on specific tasks, we still had a long way to go to develop a “general AI” that was capable of learning on its own and communicating on the same level as a human being. Once that level of intelligence had been achieved, the AI could then be applied to a wide variety of areas. Smart speakers were found in homes all over the world, helping with schedule management, home appliances, and information searches, but they were clearly unable to contribute meaningfully to conversation.

  For one thing, AI are good at learning about things with clear outcomes—winning and losing, correct and incorrect—but struggle greatly when there is no correct answer to discern. The concepts of winning and losing don’t apply to normal conversation.

  Yet, here before me, sipping her herbal tea with a pensive, thoughtful look, was a dark elf NPC in a video game—not exactly the pinnacle of cutting-edge AI development—who had never once given us a nonsense response to any statement. Perhaps that was partly because we’d been avoiding bringing up any topics that Kizmel would not understand, but even then, her ability to make conversation was essentially at a human level.

  How had Argus—had Akihiko Kayaba—managed to implement such a high-functioning AI in a video game? There was only one way I could imagine: to build up an enormous text corpus of conversations between a vast number of humans and AI on specific topics and then reduce statistical noise and computational stress. That would not be easy, of course. It would be hard enough just to get hundreds of people to participate and explain what was allowed to discuss and what was off-limits. And there would be the issue of how to recruit them and how to pay them for their time and efforts.

  But in a VRMMO world…

  Players would generally only speak about in-game topics and quests, and who needed to pay them when they would happily log in and spend hours in the game at a time? If a thousand players spoke with AI over the course of a month, you would accumulate the kind of data that no company or researchers had ever gotten their hands on before.

  Then, using that text corpus, they could have AIs talk to one another. Once actual humans were out of the picture, that conversation could be simulated much, much faster. In two months, you could simulate centuries or more of dialogue between individual AIs.

  Meaning that it was possible that Kizmel and the dark elves…and forest elves, and fallen elves, and human NPCs…had all built up an actual history that started from the creation of Aincrad before SAO officially launched. And among them were special AIs with conversational abilities close to a general intelligence, such as Kizmel and Viscount Yofilis.

  If my imagination—no, my daydream—was even in the vicinity of the truth, then SAO’s AI capability was already in that “near-future” realm.

  Now you had ten times as many players as in the beta, a full ten thousand in Aincrad, all trading words with AIs every day. Could that data be accumulated, refined, and polished enough to lead to the production of a crown jewel of true artificial intelligence? I certainly couldn’t categorically rule it out…

  “…Um, Kirito.”

  A poke at my elbow brought me to a rapid series of blinks.

  “Hweh? Wh…what?”

  “Don’t what me. Was it that much of a shock that I took your fish? You’ve barely eaten a bite so far.”

  “Oh…”

  I looked down at my plate, where I still had two pieces of fried fish after the one I’d offered to Asuna, and I hadn’t even touched my salad or toast. The day’s adventure was expected to be a long one, so I needed to fuel up while I could—even if the calories weren’t real. I stabbed a piece of fish with my fork and shoved the whole thing in my mouth. The crisply fried portion crumbled apart, giving way to a juicy chunk of white meat. As I cleaned my plate, I couldn’t help but wonder if Kizmel and her kind felt the same sensations of taste and contentment. Once I had polished off my food, I gulped down my herbal tea.

  “I wasn’t asking you to inhale it, you know,” Asuna muttered. I leaned over and bit down on the elliptical baby tomato stuck on the end of her fork, pulling it off. “Aaah! What was that for?!”

  Asuna raised her fork to swing, and I held my knife to defend against it. Kizmel only shook her head, a big-sister gesture if I’d ever seen one. Asuna noticed it and lowered her arm.

  “Hey, Kizmel, can you tell us more about Tilnel?”

  “Hmm…? Why, yes, of course. I shall tell you some stories on our travels today.”

  “Great. I can’t wait to hear them.” Asuna beamed, earning her a grin from the dark elf. There was no hint of shadow in her expression this time.

  After our meal, Kizmel guided us to the supply station of Castle Galey. They were very generous, offering us five healing potions, five antidote potions, and a bag with rations and snacks, once per day, for free. Sadly, the antidotes were only level 1, so they couldn’t counteract the level-
2 paralyzing poison from Morte’s Spine of Shmargor throwing picks.

  The prospect of finding an antidote that was effective against the poision had me excited to hear from the storyteller that Kizmel had mentioned last night, but unfortunately, we could only meet them in the library between noon and three o’clock.

  I didn’t like the idea of continuing our questing without a means to neutralize the poison picks, but we would probably be fine as long as Kizmel was with us. She had a ring with magical antidote charms, and I couldn’t imagine that Morte’s gang would attack an elite knight whose level was so high that her color cursor must seem black. Based on the way the dagger user, aka Black Hood Number Two, had given up his main weapon to try to save Morte—or Mamoru, as he called him—they hadn’t engaged in that stunt expecting to sacrifice their lives.

  But that just meant that when they tried to attack us again, it would be under even more advantageous circumstances than the other night. The next time, they would do whatever it took to kill us; and they were probably working on their diabolical plan at this very moment.

  I felt a fresh wave of apprehension about the idea of just waiting for them to make their next move, but I couldn’t think of a way we could strike them first; and even if I did have a plan, I would need willpower on a different level than what I was working with now. For one thing, assuming we knew where their hideout was, there was no surefire method for apprehending a player in Aincrad for long periods of time. The only way to prevent them from committing any more evil would be to permanently log them out of the game.

  And the only way to do that for sure at this point in time was to reduce their HP to zero. Which would bring about the death of the player in real life…

  “Hey, Kirito, we’re going to head out!”

  “Don’t make us leave you behind!”

  I lifted my gaze from the tiles on the floor to the distance, where I saw the knight and fencer beckoning me toward the spring at the roots of the spirit tree.

  The branches and leaves of the massive tree, which emerged from the center of the pool, glistened dazzlingly with countless droplets of dew that caught the morning sun and dripped down like golden threads. The sight of the two women against this backdrop was astonishingly beautiful.