Sword Art Online Progressive 6 Read online

  Kizmel was Kizmel, of course, but at this point, Asuna might be stronger than me in pure fighting prowess as well. Even still, I felt a powerful urge to protect the two of them surge up from my heart as I trotted over to join them.

  We were ushered out of the castle gates by the sound of the light bells and the silent gazes of the guards. After barely a minute of walking across the bridge built over the sandy valley floor, devoid of so much as a blade of grass, an unfamiliar debuff icon appeared on Kizmel’s HP bar.

  The symbol of a person hanging their head was the status icon for weakness, I recalled. I only suffered it once in the beta, fighting against the snake priests in the Castle of a Thousand Serpents on the tenth floor. It wiped out a large portion of my strength and agility stats, which put me in an encumbered state. Unable to run away to safety, I was killed soon after that.

  Kizmel didn’t look to be that bad, but I could tell in the brief time it had been that her rich, coffee-brown skin was looking noticeably paler now. Asuna called out her name in concern and tried to offer her an arm, but the knight boldly pushed her away and removed a thin cape from a pouch she kept fixed to her back.

  “…I thought…that I could last longer…but this is merely a reminder that we elves are powerless without the bounty of the forest and water,” she grunted, switching out her usual hiding cloak for the cape.

  Like Asuna’s, this cape was hooded, and it was a mysterious shade of green with silver tinting—I could even make out a pattern that looked like leaf veins. The moment she pulled the hood over her head, Kizmel’s weakness icon disappeared and was replaced by a new buff icon.

  “Whew…” Already the color was returning to her face. Asuna and I were so stunned by the immediate improvement that the knight gave us a proud little grin. “This cape is a special treasure that has been kept within the kingdom since before the Great Separation. It is carefully sewn together from the precious leaves of the Holy Tree, which hardly ever fall, even in midwinter…Among all the castles and fortresses together there are no more than ten of these capes remaining.”

  “Ooooh…That’s fascinating,” Asuna whispered, examining the cape itself. “So it’s made from the leaves of the Holy Tree…”

  Meanwhile, I was more curious about the effects of the new leaf icon—but I couldn’t just go tapping Kizmel’s cape while she was wearing it. I made a mental note to ask her permission to examine it once we got back to Castle Galey and opened my main menu to check the quest log.

  We were about to tackle the main story for the “Elf War” campaign quest on the sixth floor, known as the “Agate Key.” The format of the quest itself was simple—collect the key from the dungeon in the south area and return it to the castle—but the problem was that out of the five radial areas around the center of the sixth floor, we were in the northwest, meaning we’d have to get through the west area just to get to the south.

  That meant getting through two of the boundary dungeons that separated each area—the first of which was a decent challenge for a full raid party with the ALS and DKB, plus the Bro Squad for backup. Even with Kizmel, that was not going to be easy…Just in case, I checked our route there.

  “Um, Kizmel, about our destination…I presume we’re heading for the Key Shrine at the southernmost part of the sixth floor?”

  “That is correct. I am impressed you knew the shrine was in the south,” Kizmel said with marvel. Obviously, I couldn’t tell her I’d been there in the beta test, so I gave her a pat answer about understanding as much with my book of Mystic Scribing. As a matter of fact, the quest log did include the location of the dungeon, so it wasn’t really a lie.

  “I see. Your human magical charms are powerful, indeed,” the knight remarked. I walked up to show her the full map of the sixth floor, which Asuna examined from the opposite side. They traced the pathway to our destination with a finger.

  “Our present location is here, and the shrine with the key is somewhere around here. That means we have to get through the passageway under the mountains both here and here…That’s going to be a serious challenge if we attempt to tackle them head-on, but if there happens to be some kind of secret shortcut known only to dark elves, then…” I prompted. Asuna elbowed me in the side.

  “Now, don’t be tacky. I’m sorry, Kizmel, please ignore him.”

  “Hrmm. I do not remember hearing anything about a shortcut,” the knight replied. She looked up and grinned. “But there is no need to cross the mountains at all.”

  “Uh…why not?”

  “We can save that surprise for later. Let’s head to the center lake first.”

  Kizmel put a hand on my back and Asuna’s and pushed us onward, so I had to close my window and start walking.

  The star-shaped body of water in the center of the floor was named Lake Talpha, and it would indeed cut down on travel time significantly if you could cross it. In the beta, many players did use buoyant materials in an attempt to swim across it, but the lake was home to a devastatingly powerful giant starfish monster that grabbed every person attempting to cross and dragged them down to watery graves.

  That would be a thrilling bit of entertainment in a normal game, but encountering that starfish in SAO now was nothing short of suicide. The thought of Kizmel’s intentions was troubling, but I had no choice at present other than to trust her.

  The three of us crossed the stone bridge and headed into the labyrinth of canyon walls. Sandy monsters promptly began to spawn around us, but Kizmel was even stronger than when we worked with her on the sacred key quest of the fifth floor, and with ease, she dispatched the desert spiders and death worms that gave us so much trouble.

  In terms of leveling efficiency, SAO was a lonely game in which the best way to level was going solo, but for now, there was no experience-point adjustment based on the level gap between monster and player—meaning that power leveling, where one or two over-leveled players could boost a party by taking down huge numbers of monsters by themselves, was surprisingly easy. This was exactly the present case, so I wished we could find a good high-frequency monster area and hang out for two or three hours—maybe even half a day or a full day—to gain levels. But given that we were on an important quest to recover the sacred keys, I couldn’t ask Kizmel to do that. (In fact, didn’t I consider that very idea on the third floor already?)

  To my disappointment, we mostly avoided combat as we proceeded southward through the sandy canyons, and we reached the hills on the other end of the area by ten o’clock.

  The five equal-sized areas of the sixth floor were spread out like a fan, so the closer you got to the lake in the center, the narrower the band of terrain became. About five hundred meters to our left was a sheer rocky cliff face, and if I squinted, I could see the entrance to the cave path we came through yesterday at the base of the rocks far ahead.

  There was a similar rock wall on the right side, but the tunnel through that range was located toward the outer perimeter of the floor—and not visible from here. The walls would steadily close tighter and tighter until we hit star-shaped Lake Talpha at the center.

  “Whew…Finally, we’ve made it through the dry valley,” remarked Kizmel, pulling off her green hood.

  “H-hey, is it safe for you to take that off yet?” I balked.

  “It is. There are at least a few plants in this region, with the occasional spring of water.”

  But as far as I could see, the surrounding wasteland was just barren, reddish-brown ground, with the only visible plants being spiky cacti and succulents. It did not seem to be overflowing with the “bounty of forest and water,” but the knight removed her cape anyway.

  The debuff icon did not reappear, but even after two hours under the cape, her face still looked pale and uncomfortable. Asuna noticed it, too, and asked, “Are you sure you shouldn’t keep it on until we reach the lake?”

  “Yes…As I said earlier, this Greenleaf Cape is very precious. It would be a disgrace to our ancestors if I wore it where it was not necessa
ry and damaged it in combat,” Kizmel replied, folding the cape carefully and storing it in a pouch. She removed her cloak of hiding with a long exhale and put that on instead.

  I opened my inventory and materialized a bottle of water for her, which she accepted gratefully. Then I retrieved two more for Asuna and me, and the three of us quenched our thirst standing in a row. For some reason, I felt like striking a pose with my left hand on my waist, but I didn’t, out of fear that my companions wouldn’t join in.

  When the bottle was half empty, I stowed it. A player could carry as much food and water as the carrying limit would allow, but the elves didn’t have fancy player inventories and had to carry around all their belongings by hand.

  The same went for human NPCs, which meant that when Morte killed Cylon, all the gold and silver coins that he dropped were stored somewhere under his robes.

  I bet the lord of the town has a pretty heavy purse, I thought, which was neither here nor there, but the thought gave me pause. When Cylon died, he dropped both the golden key he stole from us and an iron key. By this logic, he either carried it around with him at all times, or he took it out of his mansion to use it. If the latter, it would only make sense that wherever Cylon intended to take Asuna and me while we were paralyzed, the iron key would be needed.

  When I finished the paralysis event by myself in the beta, Pithagrus’s servant and secret protégé, Theano, had saved me in the back streets of Stachion, so I didn’t know where the carriage was supposed to end up. And I didn’t recall any iron key being involved in the series of quests that followed. So if Morte hadn’t killed Cylon, I doubted we would have seen any iron keys this time, either.

  Meaning that the key I had in my inventory now was an item the game only generated when Cylon died in the middle of the quest…and that there was an alternate “dead Cylon” route to the “Curse of Stachion” quest, most likely.

  Without thinking, I was scrolling through my open inventory window looking for the iron key. I had to grab my wrist with the other hand to stop it. Now was the time to focus on the “Agate Key” quest, not the “Curse of Stachion.” We could return to Stachion at any time, and more importantly, if Kizmel could help us cross Lake Talpha, we could probably jump ahead of the other frontier players making their way counterclockwise around the map.

  “Okay, let’s go—” I started to say, but then I noticed that Asuna and Kizmel were busy with their backs to me, facing a rather large cactus. I walked over to check what they were doing and saw that they were plucking something red from between the cactus spikes and lifting it to their mouths.

  “Hey! You’re eating something!” I shouted. Asuna glanced at me briefly before returning to her harvest. She was even doing it two-handed now, popping the red objects into her mouth at twice the speed.

  Determined not to be left out, I circled around to the other side of the cactus and examined the base of the nearly ten-centimeter long spikes of the red object there. Gingerly, I reached in and plucked out a round fruit less than three centimeters across. When I hesitantly bit down on it, juice burst forth that was sweet and cold and sour and fizzy, numbing my mind with pleasure.

  Immediately certain that the flavor was greater than even the B-rank half-fish sweet potatoes, I went in for another one, but perhaps because my hands were bigger than theirs, I couldn’t pick the fruit as quickly. By the time I had pulled off a third fruit, Asuna was already rotating her way around from the other side.

  She’s going to eat my share! I fretted, and in my haste to grab a fourth fruit, my hand slipped and embedded itself onto a cactus spike.

  “Yeow!!”

  Like with the sensations of combat, it wasn’t real pain, but I snatched my hand away out of sheer instinct anyway. Asuna took the opportunity to snatch the fruit and pop it into her mouth.

  In the end, I only got about ten of the fruit by the time the entire cactus was picked clean. I looked at my two satisfied companions and grumbled. “I can’t believe this. You could have told me before you started eating them…”

  “Ha-ha, I am sorry for that, Kirito.” Kizmel, who seemed to be in much better spirits, laughed. Perhaps the cactus fruit had some healing properties. “These Celusian Fruit have the most exquisite taste, but the flowers bloom and produce fruit only once a year. And what’s more, the fruit can appear during any season, because the fruits fall just thirty minutes after they grow. So when you see them, you must eat them as quickly as you can.”

  “Th-thirty minutes…?” I repeated, looking out on the desert wastes. There were over a hundred cacti dotting the landscape just from what I could see, but a year would be 8,760 hours long, meaning 525,600 minutes, only thirty of which would feature any fruit on an individual cactus. The odds of actually happening across a fruiting cactus had to be devastatingly low. It wouldn’t be worth wandering across the desert in search of them, no matter how tasty they were, so that might be the first and last time I would ever get the chance. I turned to my temporary partner, who still seemed to be basking in the afterglow of her meal.

  “Um, Asuna?”

  “Ahhh…what?”

  “How many of those cactus fruits did you eat?”

  “Around forty or fifty. I could go for more, though…Just give me a whole bathtub full of them.”

  “Hrrr…!” I moaned, swearing to myself that I would have to come back to search for them after all.

  Kizmel clapped me on the shoulder. “Let us be on our way now. At this point, those pesky insect monsters will not bother us anymore.”

  As she said, the monsters that popped up in the hilly region mainly resembled coyotes and lizards, and neither had venom, making them much easier to dispatch. Instead, we spent the last kilometer or so listening to Kizmel tell us stories about her sister Tilnel, which had been a focus of Asuna’s curiosity.

  The story about how she took out a rowboat into the lake near the royal city on the ninth floor, all by herself as a child, and got lost for a full day. The story about how she put too much extract of juniper into the bath and smelled like a tree for a week. The story of how she gave Kizmel an experimental tonic during her herbalist studies that turned Kizmel’s hair as green as a dryad’s.

  Asuna giggled at all the stories, and they reminded me of the experiences I had with my sister Suguha years ago, but I couldn’t help entertaining one unsettling thought in the back of my mind. If all of Kizmel’s memories of Tilnel were just “backstory,” implanted memories, then they were all things that the staff of Argus, some scenario writer, had come up with originally.

  But would they really give such a rich backstory to Kizmel, who was just one of potentially countless NPCs that populated Aincrad? There seemed to be no end to the knight’s stories; it was as though she recalled every single day that she had spent with her sister Tilnel. If it wasn’t just special NPCs like Kizmel and Viscount Yofilis who had such richness of memory, but every single NPC in the game…it would be impossible for even a team of writers to come up with so much material.

  For close to an hour we walked, Kizmel’s stories entering my left ear and smoke from my overheating brain exiting the right. At last, the gap between the two mountain walls ahead reached barely half a kilometer, with the shining blue surface of the lake visible beyond.

  We shared a glance, then sprinted the rest of the way until we reached the water.

  “Ooooh, wow!” Asuna exclaimed, and I couldn’t blame her. The sharply curved water’s edge was a pure-white beach with stunningly clear water lapping at its sand. The surface was dazzling in the sunlight, the water transitioning from emerald green to cobalt blue as it deepened. Even the air seemed a bit warmer here.

  Compared to the ten-kilometer diameter of the first floor, Lake Talpha was not all that big, but it was still over half a kilometer across, the far bank fading into the distance. However, the rocky walls that split the floor into five equal sections were clearly visible on the far right and left—and straight ahead of us. It was clear at a glance that this was th
e center where the five areas met.

  “Hey, can I go in the water for just a bit?” Asuna asked. She was inching closer and closer to the sand. I was going to warn her, but Kizmel beat me to it.

  “No, you must not. This lake is home to a dreadful starfish monster…I have never seen it for myself, but they say its tremendously long arms can reach the shore all the way from the depths of the lake.”

  Asuna immediately shrank away.

  So the giant starfish, which went by the name Ophiometus, was still in place at the bottom of the lake in the release version. Now I was really curious and worried about Kizmel’s plan to get to the far bank.

  The knight sensed my eyes on her and smiled confidently. She pulled a new item out of her carrying pouch: a small glass bottle no bigger than her thumb. There was a pure-blue liquid inside it.

  “Kirito, show me the bottom of your boot.”

  “O…kay,” I agreed, but even in a virtual world, lifting my leg high enough for the sole of my shoe to be visible was easier said than done. I managed to get my right leg up, trying to stretch my ankle and pelvis as far as they could go, but about when I had the leg perpendicular to the ground, I lost my balance, yelped, waved my arms, and toppled onto the sandy beach.

  Asuna’s spontaneous laughter was stifled with a muffled Poom!

  Embarrassed, I wanted to jump back to my feet, but Kizmel said “Perfect, that will do,” and she had me lie back with my feet sticking straight up into the air, which didn’t make me feel any better.

  She carefully unstopped the bottle and put a single drop each on my soles. The shoes began to glow blue all over, and another unfamiliar icon lit up over my HP bar. I could guess what it meant, given the illustration of a shoe standing on water, but I waited for Kizmel to explain it anyway.

  “You may stand,” she said. I pulled my legs back over the position of my head, then snapped them forward to jump up to my feet in one motion. I needed to be in the best possible vantage point to witness my partner’s sense of balance, after she had so kindly laughed at me falling on my butt.