Sword Art Online Progressive - Volume 01 Read online

  I grabbed the green scabbard and lifted it out of the pile, then turned around to face Asuna. Her eyes had the look of one deciding a suitable means of execution, but they grew wide when she saw the sword she’d thought was gone forever. Her lips trembling, a tiny little squeak escaped her throat.

  “......No way...”

  6

  Later–much, much later–Asuna smiled angelically and told me that if I hadn’t found her sword at that moment, she would have thrown me through the window of the inn.

  In truth, I hadn’t spared a single thought for what might have happened if my suspicion had been false. It wasn’t confidence in my logic as much as it was panic, knowing that there were only seconds to spare before the time limit hit. So when I barged into Asuna’s room without asking, forced her to open her window, and yelled at her to press those buttons and eject all of her stuff, I wasn’t acting in my right mind. At least, I hoped I wasn’t.

  Order finally returned out of chaos three minutes after I held out the Wind Fleuret +4 to Asuna.

  All of the many items spilled over the inn room floor were back in item storage. Asuna sat on the side of her bed, dressed in her normal tunic and leather skirt. She silently cradled her precious, miraculous weapon in her hands, her face a mixture of emotion–probably caught between the polar extremes of joy and rage.

  As for me, I sat in a guest chair in the corner of the room, breaking into a cold sweat as I reflected on what I’d actually just done. There was no time to explain anything until I got her to press that Materialize All Items button several layers deep in the menu. But once that step was complete, there was no more time limit, which meant I had no reason to search for the sword myself.

  Perhaps I had gone a step too far by ransacking the crown of delicate snow that was Asuna’s undergarments on top of the pile. On the other hand, I still couldn’t fathom why she would need so many of them. If my hazy memory served, there were enough of them that she could change every day for two weeks without reusing any. Yes, they were light enough that you could store a nearly infinite supply, but those weren’t cheap. The silky smooth ones cost quite a pretty penny at the NPC shops, and surely that kind of scratch was better spent raising one of the properties of her armor–

  “So, I’ve done some self-examination,” came a voice from the other side of the room. I hurriedly sat up straight.

  “Y-yes?”

  “If the anger I’m feeling represents ninety-nine g, then my joy is a hundred g. Therefore, the one leftover g represents my gratitude to you,” she said, light flashing in her eyes.

  “So, um...why is it represented in g?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? If my anger had been the greater force, I would have pummeled you to make up the difference.”

  “Oh...so you’re talking about g as in gravity, not gold? I...guess that makes sense.”

  “I’m glad you understand. Now, will you please explain? Why was my supposedly shattered sword left in my inventory...and why did you barge into my room like this?”

  “O-o-of course. But it’s a very long story. And I’m not even sure exactly how it works, myself...”

  “I don’t mind. We’ve got all night.”

  And the fencer, her beloved sword back in hand, finally cracked a menacing smile.

  I went down to the check-in counter and bought a small bottle of herb wine and a mysterious bag of assorted nuts. When I got back to the door to room 207, I politely knocked and waited for an answer before opening.

  Once the wine was poured, we shared a toast to the recovery of her fleuret, though there was still a dangerous air to her attitude.

  I moistened my tongue with a sip of the sweetly sour nonalcoholic wine and decided that getting right to the point was in my best interest.

  “A minute ago, you asked why your shattered sword was in your item storage.”

  “Yes...and?”

  “That was the hitch...the trick...the centerpiece of an upgrading scam.”

  Her eyes narrowed at the clear direction of the conversation after that last word. She nodded silently, pressing me onward.

  “It might be faster to show you than to explain,” I said, swinging my hand to call up my own menu and hitting the visibility button. I touched the top and bottom of the screen and flipped it around until I got it to an angle that was easily visible to the both of us, then pointed out a spot.

  Right here. See how the right-hand cell in my equipment mannequin has an icon for my Anneal Blade plus six?” Her hazel eyes glanced at the sword grip poking out over my back, and she nodded. I reached backward and removed the entire scabbard, which was affixed to my coat, and dropped it to the floor with a heavy thud. A few seconds later, the icon on my menu was grayed out.

  “This indicates that the equipped weapon has been dropped. It happens if you fumble the weapon in battle, or an enemy uses a disarm attack on you.”

  “Yes, I’m familiar. It can be quite alarming if you’re not used to it.”

  “You can always stay calm and pick it up once you evade the next attack, but it’s tricky at first. The Swamp Kobold Trappers in the middle of the first floor were the first to use disarms. I hear there were quite a few casualties around then...”

  “In Argo’s strategy guide, she warns not to attempt to pick it up right away...When I had to fight them, I dropped a spare rapier first, almost like a good luck charm.”

  “Ahh...that’s a good idea. You can do that if you’ve got plenty of the same weapon.”

  I was impressed. It wasn’t the kind of idea you expected a new player to implement...although maybe her lack of experience gave her greater creativity in tackling the game’s challenges.

  “But I digress. If you don’t pick up the dropped weapon, it eventually goes into an Abandoned state, which gradually decreases its durability rating. Asuna, go ahead and pick up that sword.” She raised an eyebrow but dutifully stuck the Wind Fleuret onto her waist attachment point and bent down to my scabbard. Asuna lifted the simple one-handed longsword with both hands, grunting, “This is heavy. Am I doing it right?”

  “That’s good. Now take a look.” I poked at my window, still floating above the table. The cell with my Anneal Blade grayed out had gone empty the moment Asuna picked it up.

  “In combat, this is called weapon-snatching. Unlike a disarm attack, snatching enemies don’t show up until much later in the game. For a solo player, that can be deadly. There’s a weapon skill modification called Quick Change that you’ll have to get before you fight them...but that’s not the point.”

  I cleared my throat and attempted to get back on topic again. “You can give your equipped weapon to your friends, even when you’re not in battle. Instead of a ‘snatch’ that’s called a ‘handover.’ So anyway...if someone picks up your weapon or you hand it to them, the weapon cell in your menu goes blank. Including situations like the one where you gave the blacksmith your Wind Fleuret.”

  “...!”

  She must have seen where I was taking this at last. Her eyes went wide, then filled with a sharp light.

  “But here’s the thing. The equipment cell might be empty, as though you’re not equipping anything...but that Anneal Blade’s equipper info hasn’t been deleted. And the equipment rights are protected much more tightly than simple ownership rights. For example, if I take an unequipped weapon out of storage and give it to you, my ownership of that item disappears in just three hundred seconds–that’s five minutes. As soon as it goes into someone else’s inventory, it is owned by that player. But the length of ownership for an equipped item is far longer. It won’t be overwritten until either three thousand six hundred seconds have passed, or the original owner equips a different weapon in that slot.”

  Asuna’s eyelashes dropped as she mulled over this information. Her response caught me by surprise.

  “Meaning that if your main weapon gets snatched and you do a

  Quick Change to a backup weapon, you should pu
t it in your left hand rather than your right?”

  “Eh...?”

  I was momentarily taken aback, but I eventually understood her point. It was indeed true that if a monster stole the players weapon and they put a backup in the same hand, the equipment right of the stolen weapon would vanish. If thee player had to retreat for survival and couldn’t immediately kill the monster to retrieve the weapon, the results could be disastrous. Once the player was back in the safe haven of town, there would be virtually no way to get it back.

  “Ah, I see...Yes, that’s a good point. But it’s a lot harder to swing a sword with your non-dominant hand.” Even as I said it, though, I made a mental note to practice sword skills with my left hand.

  “And one other thing. When you barged into my room and forced yourself a peek at my equipment mannequin, that’s what you were checking, yes? That I hadn’t equipped another weapon in its place. So if that was the very first condition...”

  I nodded slowly as she stared directly into my eyes. “Yes, that’s right. The second condition was that it had to be within three thousand six hundred seconds of letting go: one hour. As long as those two conditions were fulfilled, we had a shot–one ultimate method of pulling back your equipment, no matter where it happened to be. Remember that you asked me how your supposedly shattered sword was in your item storage?”

  “In reality, my sword wasn’t shattered, and it wasn’t in my inventory, either. So that’s why...” She took a deep breath and resumed glaring up at me. “And your last-ditch method of bringing back my sword was the Materialize All Items command. And because there was not a second to spare, you had no choice but to invade my room and force me to flip through my menu. Is that what you’re claiming?”

  “Umm, I think that sums it up...I guess?” I trailed upward at the end in an attempt to sound innocent, but Asuna only snorted, unconvinced. Fortunately, she seemed more interested in getting to the bottom of the situation than holding me responsible. She handed back the Anneal Blade and changed topics.

  “So anyway...why was that materialize button buried so deep in the menus? It’s almost like they don’t want you to use it...And why does it have to be all of the items? If you could just select the items that aren’t on hand already, there would be no need for that pile of my und...my other equipment.”

  “You just said the answer yourself. They want to make it harder to use.”

  “Huh...? Why would they do that?” she asked, shapely eyebrows squinting in suspicion. I shrugged.

  “It’s basically a last-resort option. If you drop your weapon, leave it behind, or lose it to a monster and have to run away, those are all the player’s fault. In a sense, you should probably just accept your loss and move on. But they probably decided that it would make the game a bit too hard, so they added this option in case of an emergency. They just made it less convenient so you can’t use it like a crutch. Hence, it’s stuck under a pile of menus and you can’t just pick and choose what to materialize. Boy, you should hear this story from the beta test...”

  I grabbed a star-shaped nut from the dish on the table, flipped it into the air, and caught it in my mouth. Even this trifling action was affected by agility, the brightness of the surroundings, and the hidden influence of luck.

  “So, the first snatching mob appears in the fifth-floor labyrinth. A guy loses his main weapon and doesn’t have a backup for a quick change. So he turns tail and manages to escape the monster. However, he doesn’t feel like trekking all the way back to a safe room. Instead, he finds a spot he thinks is safe, then does the Materialize All Items trick. Sure enough, in the pile is his stolen sword. The problem is, the snatch mobs aren’t the only guys to watch out for there...there are also, looting mobs! All these little gremlins come pouring out of the woodwork and grab everything off the floor, stuff it into their sacks, and scamper off.”

  “That does sound awful...But couldn’t he just find an actual safe haven and do that same trick again to get it all back?”

  “That’s the thing. Most looter mobs have the Robbing skill, which immediately rewrites the items ownership. Fortunately for him, nobody else had been to that area yet, so he crawled the entire dungeon to hunt down all the gremlins and managed to get his stuff back by hand. I tell you, it brought tears to my eyes...”

  I flipped another nut into the air, sighing in exasperation.

  “That story sounded like there was some personal experience behind it,” Asuna noted wryly. My internal panic system must have kicked in, because the nut landed in my hair rather than my mouth. I shook my head and tried to look aggrieved. “It’s...just a story I heard, nothing more. Anyways, where was I...”

  “You were explaining how the Materialize All command is useful but has its limitations, she sighed,” and reached out to pluck the star-shaped nut off my head. Before I could ask what she planned to do with it, she flicked it with a finger directly into the open crack of my mouth. I crunched it with my teeth, marveling at her accuracy.

  “At any rate, now I understand the logic of how my sword came back,” she said, taking a sip of her wine. When the glass left her lips, that dangerous light was back in her eyes. “But that’s only half of the story, isn’t it? After all, I saw the sword I gave the blacksmith shatter on top of that anvil. If the Wind Fleuret that came back was my original sword...what sword was it that broke into pieces?”

  A very good question. I nodded slowly, trying to piece together the fragments of information and suspicion into an easily explainable form.

  “To be honest, I don’t have a full explanation of that train of logic. What I can say for certain is this: At some point from the time you handed your Wind Fleuret to Nezha, to the time it shattered into pieces, he switched it out for another item of the same type. At first, I suspected that he’d found a way to intentionally destroy other players’ weapons, but that wasn’t it. He’s the first blacksmith in Aincrad, and the first upgrade scammer...”

  Upgrade scams, enchantment scams, forging scams, refinement scams.

  The name varied depending on the title of the game, but it was a classic, traditional means of deception that had been around since the early days of MMORPGs,

  The method was simple. The blacksmith (or other type of crafter) put out a sign advertising his weapon upgrade service, charged his clients expensive fees, then embezzled the funds by pretending the upgrade attempt destroyed the item. In games where weapon destruction wasn’t one of the failure states, they had a variety of other options to fool clients, such as replacing the item with the same one a single level lower, or just keeping the crafting materials for themselves without attempting to upgrade.

  In the original pre-full-dive games played on a monitor, the player’s weapon was completely lost from view as soon as they handed it over to the blacksmith. The entire process happened on the other player’s screen, so there was no means of telling whether any fraud had taken place.

  Leaning too heavily on such deception would quickly lead to the kind of bad reputation that kept any more players from using their services, but rare gear in MMOs could be incredibly valuable. Even the occasional bit of trickery might reap huge benefits. There were almost no bad rumors about Nezha, so the rate of his fraud must still be quite low. However...

  “The problem is, this is the world’s first VRMMO. Even after handing over the weapon, we can see it. It can’t be easy to switch it out–in fact, it must be incredibly hard.”

  My long explanation finally concluded, Asuna frowned and murmured, “I see...I thought I kept the sword in my sights the entire time after giving it to him. The blacksmith held my sword in his left hand and did all of the controls and hammering with his right. He couldn’t possibly have opened a window, put my sword into storage, and brought out a fake.”

  “I absolutely agree. He had a number of pre-forged weapons on his store display, but the best ones were Iron Rapiers, and none were Wind Fleurets. So be couldn’t have just switched them like that. How
ever...”

  “However?”

  “However, there was a brief point where my eyes left the sword.

  The time when Nezha tossed your materials into the forge and it started glowing blue. It was three seconds at the most. I wanted to make sure that he used all of the materials we spent so much time collecting...”

  I trailed off. Asuna’s hazel eyes went wide.

  “Oh! I...I think I was watching the furnace the entire time... but only because I thought the blue flames were pretty.”

  “Um, okay. Anyway, we weren’t watching the sword in his hand while it happened. I think anyone would be staring at the flames. The materials burn and melt and change into the color of the property, so it’s a big show to those watching. I think he might be using that as misdirection, the way a magician would...”

  “So he switched out the sword in the three seconds we were watching the forge? Without opening his menu?” She started to shake her head in disbelief but stopped just as quickly. “On the other hand, that’s the only moment it could have happened. He must have pulled off some kind of trick in those three seconds. I can’t imagine what it is, but if we can just witness him doing the same thing again...”

  “Agreed. Then we can watch his left hand the entire time. But that’ll be difficult ...”

  “Why?”

  “Nezha must have noticed by now that the Wind Fleuret plus four he supposedly stole is gone. Meaning that the player he tricked–in this case, you–utilized the Materialize All command, because you probably saw through his deception. He’ll be spooked, and either not set up his shop for a while, or if he does, he won’t attempt that scam again.”

  “...I see. He didn’t seem to be that excited about it to begin with...In fact...”

  Asuna paused, but I knew exactly what she was about to say. In fact, he didn’t seem like the kind of person to commit fraud.

  “Yeah...I agree,” I said. She glanced over at me and smiled shyly. I went on, my voice quiet. “We’ll lay low and gather information. Both on the switch-out trick and on Nezha himself. Either way, we’ve got to get back to the front line tomorrow.”