Early and Late Read online

“And if he was walking with that girl Yolko beforehand, it couldn’t possibly have been a sleep-PK,” Asuna added, swirling her mug over the small round table.

  “Plus, the details are too complex for a spontaneous duel. I think we can assume that this was a preplanned PK. So that brings us…to this,” I said, opening my menu and manifesting the rope from my inventory, so that I could hand it to Agil.

  Naturally, the knot that had been tied around the table leg was undone when I’d retrieved the rope, but the other end was still done into the large noose. Agil dangled the loop in front of his face, snorted with disgust, and tapped it.

  He chose the “Appraisal” menu from the pop-up window. If Asuna or I had tried that, we’d just get a failure notice, since we lacked the proper skill level, but Agil the merchant would be able to learn more about it.

  The large man looked over the window, which was visible only to him, and described the contents in his deep voice.

  “I’m afraid this wasn’t player-made, just your garden variety NPC-sold rope. Not a high-ranking item. It’s got about half of the durability left.”

  I replayed the horrible sight in my mind and nodded. “That figures. It was holding a guy in heavy armor; that had to be a considerable load to bear.”

  But all the killer needed was for the rope to hold out the few dozen seconds necessary for the man to lose his remaining HP and explode into nothing.

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting much from the rope to begin with. The real kicker is this one,” I said, tapping my still-open inventory to materialize another item.

  The dark, gleaming spear and its heavy presence cast an eerie mood over the cramped room. As a weapon, it belonged to a rank far, far below those Asuna and I equipped, but that wasn’t the point. This spear was a murder weapon, a tool that had cruelly taken a player’s life.

  I handed the spear to Agil, careful not to let it bump against anything. The entire weapon was made of a single black metal, a rarity for that category. It was about five feet long, with a foot-long grip, a long handle, and a sharp six-inch point at the end.

  Its main feature was the rows of short, sharp barbs that ran along the entire length of the handle. They served to make it harder to remove the spear once it had stabbed its target. It therefore required very high strength to pull out.

  In this case, strength referred to both the player’s numerical strength stat, and also the force of the brain’s mental signal being absorbed by the NerveGear. In that moment, Kains had been too gripped by the fear of death to produce a clear, crisp signal to move his body. He could hardly be blamed for not being able to move the spear.

  That only strengthened my hunch that this was not a spontaneous PK but something premeditated, planned. There was nothing crueler than death by continuous piercing damage. He wasn’t felled by an opponent’s skill or superior weaponry—but by his own terror.

  Agil brought me out of my thoughts as he finished examining it.

  “It’s PC-made.”

  Both Asuna and I suddenly bolted upright. “Really?!” I shouted.

  If it were PC-made—crafted by a player with the Smithing skill—the name of that player would be listed there. And that spear was likely a one-off special-order weapon. If we could ask the crafter directly, there was a very good chance we’d learn who ordered and paid for it.

  “Who made it?” Asuna prodded him. Agil looked down at the system window.

  “Grimlock…Never heard of ’im. At any rate, it’s not top craftsmanship…Still, it’s not like regular players have never thought of boosting Smithing to craft their own weapons…”

  If Agil the merchant didn’t know this crafter, then Asuna and I certainly wouldn’t. Silence fell on the cramped room again.

  But it didn’t take long for Asuna to note, “We should still be able to track him down. I can’t imagine that a solo player would have gotten to the point of being able to craft a weapon of this type. If we ask around in the mid-level floors, we’re sure to find someone who’s been in a party with a ‘Grimlock’ before.”

  “True. There aren’t many idiots like this guy,” Agil agreed. He and Asuna looked at me—the idiot.

  “Wh-what? I join a party every now and then.”

  “Only for boss fights,” she quipped. I had no rebuttal to that.

  Asuna snorted and examined the spear in Agil’s hands again. “Based on this…I’m not sure if I really want to have a nice chat with Grimlock, even if we do find him…”

  I had to agree. It must have been some unknown red player who commissioned and used this spear, not Grimlock the blacksmith. Killing someone in SAO with your own handcrafted weapon, where your name was permanently saved on it, would be like writing your own name on a knife you stabbed someone with in real life. On the other hand, any crafter with a certain amount of smarts and experience should recognize what a weapon like this was designed to do.

  Piercing damage over time had a very limited effectiveness against monsters. That was because monsters were just a series of algorithms that felt no fear. If stuck with a piercing weapon, they would simply pull it out once they got the chance. And since no monster would thoughtfully hand back the weapon, it usually got tossed far away, irretrievable until the battle was over.

  Which meant that this spear could only have been crafted for the purpose of PvP. All of the crafters I knew, at least, would have refused the job when they learned what it was for.

  But this Grimlock had not.

  It was very unlikely that this was the name of the killer himself—given how easy it was to pin down the name—but it was possible that this crafter was at least a person of loose morals or perhaps secretly affiliated with a red guild.

  “…At any rate, we’re not likely to get an answer for free. If we’re forced to pay for the information…” I murmured. Agil shook his head, and Asuna fixed me with a piercing glare.

  “We’ll split the cost.”

  “…Fine. No turning back now,” I said, giving in. I turned to the shrewd merchant and asked, “I doubt it’ll be much of a clue, but I might as well ask what the name of the weapon is.”

  The bald man considered the invisible window for a third time.

  “It says it’s called…Guilty Thorn.”

  “…Hmm.”

  I looked at the barbs bristling out of the short spear’s handle again. Of course, the name was simply randomly generated by the game. So there couldn’t be any personal will behind those particular words.

  But…

  “Guilty…Thorn…”

  Asuna’s whisper imbued the words with a chilly edge.

  3

  Asuna and I, with Agil in tow, stepped through the teleport gate in Algade to visit the very bottom floor: The Town of Beginnings.

  We needed to check the Monument of Life found in Blackiron Palace. The first step to contacting Grimlock the blacksmith was ensuring that he was alive to speak to us.

  For being springtime, the Town of Beginnings was cloaked in dreariness. This was not just due to the weather parameters—few players strolled the wide streets at night, and it seemed as though the NPC musicians providing BGM were all in a minor-key mood.

  I’d heard the rumors: Lately, the Aincrad Liberation Front, largest of the guilds and governing force of the lower floors, had supposedly enacted a night curfew. It sounded like a joke, but based on this, it might be true. The only people we saw were ALF guards, all wearing matching gunmetal armor.

  Even worse, the way they raced over when they saw us was nerve-wracking—I felt like a middle-schooler being chastened by police officers. One absolute-zero glare from Asuna was usually enough to send them scurrying.

  “No wonder Algade is booming, despite the price of living,” Agil murmured, then noted lowly, “I hear the Army intends to start taxing players.”

  “Huh? Taxes?! How do they intend to collect them?”

  “I don’t know…Maybe they automatically skim off the top from monster drops.”

  “Or maybe they’
ll confiscate a portion of your sales.”

  Agil and I bickered pointlessly for a while, but once we stepped into the interior of Blackiron Palace, we fell silent.

  As the name suggested, the building was a massive structure constructed solely of metal beams and plates, filled with an even colder atmosphere than outside. Even Asuna rubbed her bare arms as she walked ahead of us.

  There were no other people inside, probably due to the time. In the middle of the day, the cries were endless, as players came to confirm the deaths of friends and lovers, faced with the cruel horizontal lines striking through the names of the deceased. Tomorrow, the friend and witness of Kains’s death, Yolko, would likely pay her own visit. I, too, had done the same thing, not too far in the past. I still wasn’t completely over that bitter memory.

  We quickly strode through the empty hall, which was lit by lanterns with bluish flames. Once we reached the Monument of Life, which stretched for dozens of feet side to side, we looked for the G section of the alphabetized list.

  Agil kept walking to the right, while Asuna and I examined the rows of player names, finally finding the right one at the same time.

  Grimlock—no line.

  “…So he’s still alive.”

  “Yep.”

  We breathed sighs of relief. Meanwhile, Agil came back from the K block and said, “Kains is indeed dead. Died in the Month of Cherry Blossoms, April 22nd, 6:27 PM.”

  “…The date and time match up perfectly. That’s just after we left the restaurant tonight,” Asuna noted. She looked away, her long lashes downcast. Agil and I held a short vigil. We also knew it was the right man, because Yolko had told us how to spell “Kains.”

  Once everything was done and we promptly exited Blackiron Palace, the three of us let out held-in breaths. The in-town BGM was now in late-night waltz mode. The NPC shops were all shuttered, and the only light on the streets was from the occasional streetlamp. There were no Army patrols at this hour either, it seemed.

  We proceeded silently to the teleport square, at which point Asuna turned around and said, “Let’s begin the search for Grimlock tomorrow.”

  “Good idea,” I agreed.

  Agil’s powerful brows tilted downward. “You two realize that my main occupation isn’t ‘warrior,’ it’s ‘merchant’…”

  “Understood. You are hereby laid off from assistant duty here,” I reassured him, patting him on the back. He grunted a relieved thanks.

  Thoughtful Agil was not truly prioritizing his business, nor shirking the responsibility to investigate—he just didn’t want to come face-to-face with the person who crafted that wicked-looking spear. Not out of fear, but out of the possibility that the rage he normally reserved for monsters might explode out of his control.

  Agil wished us luck and disappeared through the portal. Asuna needed to return to her guild HQ for a minute, so we decided to call it a day.

  “Let’s meet at nine o’clock before the fifty-seventh-floor portal tomorrow. No sleeping in!”

  She was like a teacher or an older sister—not that I would know, not having one in real life.

  “Fine, fine. And you’d better get a proper night’s sleep. If you need it, I could sleep next to—”

  “No, thank you!” the vice commander of the KoB snapped, then spun on her heels and leaped into the portal, leaving only a blur of white and red.

  All alone now, I stood in front of the wavering blue gateway, reflecting on the day’s events. It started off as a day with very nice weather, but once I got roped into standing guard over Asuna the Flash’s nap, we ended up having dinner, only to leave early when a sudden murder took place within town, thus thrusting me into the role of detective—or assistant.

  Naturally, every day I spent within the floating castle Aincrad was “abnormal,” but now that a year and a half had passed since the start of the deadly game on November 6th, 2022, most of the players—at least in the mid-levels or higher—were able to consciously forget their lives from the real world and engage in a “normal” schedule of swords, battle, gold coins, and dungeons.

  But today’s incident had once again drawn me to a kind of abnormality. Perhaps it was the harbinger of some kind of perpetual change to our status quo…

  I took a few steps forward into the blue portal. I called out “Lindarth,” the city on the forty-eighth floor where my current lodgings were found, and felt a momentary loss of weight as the portal flashed around me.

  When my boots touched ground again on stone of a different color, the surrounding scenery was nothing like the place I’d just been. I’d only set up base in Lindarth about a week earlier, but I liked the canals that ran through the town in every direction, dotted with peaceful waterwheels. Of course, after ten o’clock, the curtain of night had descended here, too, with no blacksmith hammers to be heard.

  I was just considering whether I should heed the vice commander’s advice, and get to sleep early, or find an NPC pub for a drink first, when, just steps out of the portal, I was rushed by a group of six or seven players.

  At first, I nearly drew my sword. The assumption that one was safe in town, even surrounded by dozens of people, had just been shaken to its core in the last few hours.

  But I managed to control my instinct, holding it to just the twitch of a finger. I recognized the faces in this group—they were members of the Divine Dragon Alliance, the largest of the front-line guilds. I found the member who seemed to be the leader of the semicircle and said, “Good evening, Schmitt,” with a smile.

  The tall lancer paused for a moment, then spoke quickly, his voice troubled. “We were waiting here, hoping to ask you something, Kirito.”

  “Oh yeah? I’m guessing it’s not my birthday or blood type…” I joked automatically. Beneath Schmitt’s sports-captain buzz cut, his thick eyebrows trembled.

  As fellow front-line fighters, we weren’t exactly enemies, but the Divine Dragon Alliance and I did not generally see eye to eye. I was probably on better terms with Asuna’s Knights of the Blood.

  I couldn’t help but feel that while the KoB’s goal was “beating the game as fast as possible,” the DDA’s particular aim was to “bask in the glory of being the strongest guild.” They didn’t form parties with nonmembers, and they never shared their knowledge of game info. They were also unpleasantly fixated on scoring the Last Attack on every boss—the final blow that gave its winner extra item rewards.

  In a way, they were enjoying SAO more than anyone else, so I’d never raised a fuss about them, but I had turned down two invitations to join their guild. So we weren’t particularly close, to say the least.

  Even now, as I leaned against the stone wall of the teleport square, surrounded by the seven in a half circle, there was an odd sense of distance between us. It wasn’t quite the “boxing in” harassment method of preventing a player from moving; it was more like a “boxed in by manners” state, where the need to make rude physical contact to break out of the circle kept those concerned with etiquette where they were.

  I held in a sigh and offered to Schmitt, “I’ll answer any questions you have. What’s up?”

  “It’s about the PK that happened on the fifty-seventh floor tonight.”

  Obviously, that had been coming. I nodded and folded my arms, still leaning against the wall, then prompted him to continue with a glance.

  “Is it true…that it wasn’t a duel?” he asked in a hushed tone. I thought it over and shrugged.

  “At the very least, no one witnessed a victory display screen. I suppose we can’t deny the possibility that somehow everyone present missed it.”

  “…”

  Schmitt’s square jaw clenched hard. The armored plate at the base of his neck creaked. The DDA members all wore silver plate armor with blue highlights. His lance jutted upward to six feet tall, the guild flag hanging from its sharp point.

  After a long silence, he spoke again, even softer this time. “I heard the victim’s name was Kains…Is this correct?”


  “That’s what the friend who witnessed the incident said. We went to check at Blackiron Palace, and the date and time matched up.”

  I noticed his throat twitch and, for the first time, realized that something was going on. “Did you know him?”

  “…It’s none of your business.”

  “Hey, you asked your questions, you can’t just ignore mine—” I started to protest, but Schmitt’s bellow cut me off.

  “You’re not the police! I understand you’ve been working with the KoB’s vice commander, but you don’t have the right to monopolize that information!”

  His voice must have carried all the way to the edge of the plaza. The other members there looked at one another in concern. Apparently Schmitt had rustled them up without giving a full explanation.

  Which meant that any likely connection to this incident came not from the DDA as a whole, but from Schmitt himself. I tucked that fact away for future reference. Suddenly, a gauntleted hand was pointing directly at my face.

  “I know that you collected the weapon that was used in the PK. You’ve had your turn to examine it; now hand it over.”

  “…Oh, come on.”

  This was an obvious breach of manners. In SAO, weapons that weren’t equipped on one’s figure reverted to having no ownership rights after three hundred seconds of being left on the ground, or handed to someone else, or left stabbed in a monster, or so on. At that point, it was both system protocol and commonly accepted fact that whomever picked it up next owned it. The black short spear had no listed owner by the time it took Kains’s life. So according to the game system, it now belonged to me.

  Demanding another player’s weapon was beyond rude, but on the other hand, that spear was a piece of evidence in a crime, more than it was just a weapon. A small part of me did agree that, as I was neither a policeman nor a soldier, it wasn’t right for me to hog that evidence for myself.

  So this time I sighed openly and waved a hand to engage my inventory window. Once the black spear had materialized in my hand, I made a show of jamming it down into the cobblestones between us.

  Schmitt faltered back half a step at the tremendous clatter and shower of sparks the metal spear produced.