Sword Art Online Progressive 4 Read online

  Copyright

  SWORD ART ONLINE PROGRESSIVE Volume 4

  ©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

  ©REKI KAWAHARA 2015

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2014 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

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

  English translation © 2016 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 eBook Edition: July 2017

  Originally published in paperback in October 2016 by Yen On.

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  ISBN: 978-0-316-47461-0

  E3-20170613-JV-PC

  1

  I NEVER EXPECTED THIS DAY TO COME, thought Asuna, the level-16 fencer, as she held up her Chivalric Rapier +5 in a mid-level stance.

  Sixteen feet ahead, a swordsman with black hair and a black coat was doing the same with his sword. His stance looked lazy and relaxed, but the sharp point of the blade stayed utterly still, gleaming coldly as it absorbed Asuna’s gaze.

  They were facing each other within a square surrounded by mossy, ancient ruins. The area was silent, with no hint of player or monster alike. The light coming through the outer aperture of the floating castle was weak, closing toward the dark purple of twilight moment by moment.

  Today was the fifty-second day since the official start of Sword Art Online, the game of death in which the loss of a player’s avatar ended the life of the player. In the real world, it was December 28, 2022. In four more days, a new year would arrive—assuming they lived to see it.

  I’ll survive until next year.

  When she first ventured out into the wilderness, she’d never even considered that possibility. She had taken store-bought rapiers, not bothered to do maintenance on them—hadn’t even realized that was possible, in fact—and used them up as she fought relentlessly against countless monsters, resigned to eventually run out of strength and die…A part of her had even hoped it would happen, looked forward to that oblivion.

  But at some point, that Todestrieb—that death drive—had disappeared. It wasn’t that Asuna had a clear hope for the future now. There was no certainty that they would one day defeat this macabre arena and be free to return to the real world. But she did want to live to see another day…to fight her way through this floor and see the next. That emotion was palpable within her.

  And the reason for that change was undoubtedly the black-haired boy before her, holding up his longsword. He had taught her a great deal about the game and how it worked. He had saved her from many perils. And not just that…Despite the soul-crushing danger that surrounded them all, he kept a breezy attitude, never forgot to smile and enjoy himself, and even lightened her heavy heart with the occasional silly mistake. As her constant partner in clearing the game, he gave her hope for tomorrow.

  But now, the only thing in the black eyes of Kirito, level-17 swordsman, was sharp, unsentimental concentration. There was no kindness or frivolity there. His sword and mind were one, ready to react to Asuna’s every movement without pause or delay.

  Yesterday—December 27—as they’d climbed the circular staircase from the fourth floor to the fifth, Asuna had turned to him and asked, “How long are you planning to work with me?”

  She wasn’t expecting to get a concrete answer. Perhaps she’d been led to that sentiment only after parting with the dark elves from the third and fourth floors. Kizmel and Viscount Yofilis were NPCs, but in a certain way, they were closer to her than any player had been.

  Kirito stared back into Asuna’s eyes, shrugged, and in his usual aloof manner, said, “Until you’re strong enough to not need me.”

  It was a practical response, devoid of emotion in his typical style, but Asuna still couldn’t move that suffocating weight from her heart. On the fifth floor, and likely the next after that, he’d continue to stand beside her as her partner, fighting at her back. She didn’t want to admit it, but the thought made her happy.

  And yet…

  “…If you’re not going to come at me, I’ll take the first move,” Kirito said suddenly, cutting through her wavering thoughts with a measured voice. The longsword in his right hand began to swing. The vanishing evening sun slid along its edge like a drop of red blood.

  Kirito’s Anneal Blade +8, which had served him all the way from the first floor, had broken at last in battle against a forest elf knight on the fourth floor, so now he was using the Elven Stout Sword that his opponent had dropped. The handle and hilt had fittingly delicate decorations for a weapon of elven make, but it was not a particularly elegant weapon. The polished blade gleamed coldly in the dusk.

  As a matter of fact, the base specs of the weapon were nearly as good as the Anneal at +8 level. In other words, if Asuna did not block or evade this attack, her HP—the numerical representation of her life—would suffer huge damage.

  But the same could be said of Kirito.

  The Chivalric Rapier in Asuna’s right hand was an excellent weapon augmented by the NPC blacksmith of the dark elf camp on the third floor. According to Kirito, its stats were abnormally high, which made its single attack strength higher than most longswords—a deadly quality for rapiers, which were meant to have frequent but weak attacks. It was hard to guess how much of Kirito’s HP would be taken if Asuna hit him cleanly with her best skill, the three-part combo Triangular.

  Each combatant’s vision narrowed, focusing solely on the moment either sword hit home on its target. Their breaths shortened. The normally unavoidable sound of boots scuffing against the hard stone ground grew distant.

  They had fought countless monsters up to this point, and not just nonhuman animals and insects. They’d fought a pitched battle at Yofel Castle on the fourth floor against forest elf soldiers who looked just like any player. Even that experience had not been as frightening as this.

  How can fighting another player be so different from that? Is it because…I’m fighting against Kirito?

  The tip of the Chivalric Rapier she held wavered. Kirito didn’t miss his chance, lunging forward on his left leg.

  The elvish sword was no longer held lazily, but dead still at eye level. He would either unleash a propulsive normal attack…or a leaping sword skill. She had to guess which one and react ahead of time. But her rapier wouldn’t stop trembling.

  “…No.”

  Another raspi
ng groan escaped her quavering lips before she realized it.

  “…No. I don’t want to do this.”

  She held down her misbehaving right hand with her left, pushing it toward the ground. Her eyes left Kirito’s face and settled on the stone below, indigo in the darkness.

  She knew it was a childish reaction, and there was no guarantee that Kirito would stop. But Asuna kept her face stubbornly pointed down.

  With time came the sound of boots scraping on stone. Next, the sound of a blade slicing air. The light ting of metal.

  When she looked up again, Kirito had returned his longsword to the sheath on his back and was throwing up his hands in exasperation.

  “So now you’ve changed your mind…” he said with a wry smile, checking the duel timer in the upper half of his vision. “You were the one who asked for a PvP lesson, Asuna.”

  Five minutes later, Kirito had started up a little campfire in the corner of the ruins that had been their dueling arena. He pulled an iron kettle out of his inventory and set some water to boil.

  To her surprise, he even had the branches to burn for the fire. “When did you pick up those?” she asked.

  “Hmm? Oh, here and there on the third and fourth floors,” he replied, smug for some reason. He pulled one of the lit sticks out of the fire. “See how the color of the flame is a bit different from your average fire?”

  Now that he mentioned it, the flame glowing on the tip of the branch looked a bit greenish.

  “This is a harvesting item called a Fossilwood Branch. They burn a lot longer than typical dead branches. I spotted them while walking around on the lower floors, so I picked some up just in case. After all…”

  He paused, and gestured with the branch at the stone ruins around them.

  “The fifth floor is a floor of ruins. There are very few trees here, so it won’t be easy to come across these supplies.”

  “Ohh…If you’d told me, I would have picked up a few of those, too, you know,” Asuna said, which earned her a skeptical smile from Kirito.

  “I dunno about that. You can only find Fossilwood half buried in damp soil. I have a hard time imagining fastidious Asuna placing such a muddy item in her storage.”

  “I-I wouldn’t mind that. It’s just a digital storage place, so it’s not like the other items would get mud on them.”

  “Also, when you pull them out of the ground, they sometimes have gross bugs on them, sooo…”

  “…”

  Asuna widened the distance between herself and the flaming stick in Kirito’s hand. The swordsman returned it to the campfire with a hearty laugh. By that time, white steam was issuing from the kettle, so Kirito poured the boiling water into the already-packed teapot, waited fifteen seconds, then poured the liquid into two cups.

  “Here.”

  She took the cup, thanked him, then breathed in its scent. She’d bought those leaves in Rovia, the main city of the fourth floor; they smelled somewhat like a fruit-flavored rooibos tea. With her arm around her knees, she took a sip of the hot liquid and sighed contentedly.

  The last bit of sunlight was gone now, and the area was covered in blue darkness. On the lower floors, the moonlight shining in through the outer aperture of Aincrad provided a little illumination to go by, but here on the fifth floor, there was hardly any light at all. If it weren’t for the campfire, Kirito would just be a black silhouette beside her.

  Yesterday they’d gone from the exit of the spiral staircase straight to the main town, and by the time night had fallen, they were resting at an inn. All day today, they were busy fulfilling quests, so she hadn’t realized the night was so dark here outside town. As a solo player by trade, Kirito had the Search skill, so he would warn her if a monster or some other danger was approaching, but she couldn’t stop her mind from imagining something lurking out there in the darkness, beyond the stone walls that surrounded the ruined square.

  Asuna unconsciously slid her rear an inch and three quarters closer to Kirito, then mumbled, “I’m sorry about earlier.”

  “Huh? For what?”

  She was expecting that response and immediately continued, “For quitting the duel that I asked you for in the first place.”

  “Oh…Well, look, I don’t mind at all…”

  Kirito took a huge swig of tea, then grimaced at the heat. He glanced over at her.

  “…It just seems a bit rare for you to give up on something you started.”

  “Mm…”

  She nodded and rested her chin on her knees as she hugged them with her left arm.

  “It just…wasn’t quite what I imagined. This duel…but it’s not really a duel because it was in the—what did you call it—first-strike mode? So since the first clean hit wins and it’s basically safe, I thought it would be more like…a match. A sports competition. But…”

  Asuna’s mouth worked soundlessly as she tried to come up with the words to describe the fear that snuck into her heart when blade matched blade. But before she succeeded, Kirito muttered, “There’s at least one major difference…between SAO duels and real-life sporting matches.”

  She glanced at the swordsman in the black coat sitting cross-legged on the stone. His eyes, blacker than the darkness, were looking into the fire. They were slightly narrowed, staring back into distant memories.

  “I think it’s the motive for fighting. In sports—even in competitive fighting—it’s victory you’re hoping to gain, right? The desire to win becomes a huge source of energy. On the surface, duels in this game are a lot like sports. When players of about the same level and gear fight on first-strike-finish mode, there’s absolutely no fear of HP dropping to a dangerous amount. But…”

  As Kirito trailed off, the piece of Fossilwood popped and burst. A shower of red sparks shot up, melting into the dark.

  Asuna traced the hilt of the Chivalric Rapier equipped on her left hip and picked up where Kirito had left off.

  “…But we’re not using bats or rackets or even bamboo shinai swords…They’re real steel. Sure, they’re digital lines of code, but if they touch your opponent, they take away real life…”

  “Exactly. The more seriously you take the duel, the less it becomes about seizing simple victory. Those who have no fear of slashing their opponents with steel weapons and taking their HP—those who most purely follow the purpose of ‘killing’ their foe—will get closest to victory. At its core, dueling is not a sport here. It’s just bloodshed for the sake of survival. Winning has nothing to do with it.”

  As those last words left his lips, Asuna felt a shiver run through her body. She recognized it as the very sensation that had foiled her hand earlier, in that attempt at a duel.

  “…I don’t want to have a fight to the death with you, Kirito,” she blurted out, then hastily clamped her mouth shut. He didn’t tease her, though.

  “Yeah. Me too. I don’t want to do that with you, either…Even if it’s just a first-strike-finish duel.”

  She looked over in mild surprise and saw that Kirito was looking at her, too. His black eyes reflecting the orange light of the campfire, her temporary partner continued, “But…I still think you ought to have some experience with dueling…with PvP, before we start tackling this floor in earnest.”

  “…”

  She stared back at him, unsure how to respond.

  Their aborted attempt at a duel was Asuna’s idea. But that idea had come from something Kirito had said the previous evening, as they climbed the spiral staircase to this floor.

  After they’d defeated Wythege the Hippocampus, boss of the fourth floor, with the help of Kizmel the dark elf knight and Viscount Yofilis, Asuna and Kirito had left the members of the other guilds back in the chamber and continued up the spiral staircase to the fifth floor.

  The wall of the staircase hall was carved, as was customary, with reliefs that symbolized the landscape and sights of the new floor, but most striking and memorable was always the one on the large door at the top of every staircase.

 
The relief was of a large, ancient castle. It was not an elegant manor like Yofel Castle standing in the middle of a lake, but a heavy, imposing fortress. As he’d looked up at the carving, Kirito sighed and said, “Looks like the basic terrain is the same as it was in the beta test…”

  Asuna had asked him what kind of terrain that was, and he’d shrugged and explained, “Ruins. Maybe thirty percent of the map is natural ground, and the rest is all mazelike ruins. Meaning the entire six-miles-across terrain is one huge dungeon, in a way…And it’s really dark…There was a lot of PK-ing going on there in the beta…”

  PK-ing: player-killing. And one who player-killed was a PKer.

  She was familiar with that as a gaming term. Kirito had once said he wanted to buy the same hooded cape she wore, to hide his face in town. When she’d pointed out that he could just as easily wear a burlap sack over his head, he had replied that he would be mistaken for a PKer if he did that.

  At the time, it was a lighthearted, silly conversation, so Asuna had essentially ignored and then forgotten the term. After all, there would never be PK-ing in Aincrad in its current state. Every player’s wish was to escape the virtual world, and attacking or, God forbid, actually killing another player could only set the progress through the game back. That was how Asuna always saw things, and she assumed she shared that opinion with Kirito.

  But when he’d mentioned the term PK in front of the door to the fifth floor, there was a firmness to his expression she’d never seen before. It had looked as if he was certain that the fifth floor and its ruins would be home to rampant PK-ing in the new, deadly SAO, just as it had been in the beta.

  The more she saw that look on his face, the more Asuna was convinced that after they activated the town portal and restocked their items, she should ask for a lesson on the basics of PvP combat.

  Their first attempt at a duel had reached a premature, pathetic end, and Asuna wasn’t in the mood to try again very soon. So as she sipped the sweet-smelling tea, she asked, “Kirito…do you really think…there will be PKers on this floor?”

  “Hmmm,” he replied, swirling the tea in his cup. He stopped abruptly and looked at her. “Do you remember the player I dueled on the third floor…near the forest elf camp?”