Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 5 - Chapter 1

1 
EVEN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TELEPORT GATE, the air was still chilly. 
Unlike Karluin, the fifth floor’s main town that existed in the ruins of an ancient city, Stachion was a pristinely built town on the sixth floor. The main material of construction was a shiny gray rock like polished granite, and every single structure was made of blocks exactly the same size in a grid pattern, about eight inches to a side—meaning that everything was straight lines and angles. The effect was so striking that when I first visited this place in the beta test, my reaction was—well, exactly the same as Asuna’s now: 
“Ooh…It’s so blocky…” 
“Well, we are trapped in a video game,” I replied, the standard joke in Stachion. It earned me a piercing, cold glare that lowered my body temperature even further. 
I tugged the collar of my coat up, but it did nothing to keep the chill away. It was still much better than actual winter, but one of the more annoying parts of the virtual world was that once you noticed it was warm or cold, the only way to stop feeling it required some kind of in-game logic. 
It was three o’clock in the morning, January 1, 2023. 
The frontline population’s New Year’s enthusiasm had burned itself out with the fireworks show, and hardly a soul could be found in the teleport gate square of Stachion. A dry north wind blew through the empty space, which was about fifty yards to a side. I figured it would be cold for Asuna and her miniskirt, but between the fleece-lined cape and tights, she seemed to be protected enough. 
Or perhaps the chill I’m feeling now is more than just the NerveGear’s artificial sensations… 
In the old castle ruins to the east of Karluin, where Asuna and I were going to watch the fireworks show, I’d left to get food and run straight into an attack by a mysterious figure in a black poncho. The castle was within the protective limits of the town, of course, so his plan had been to cleverly trick me into thinking I was still inside the anti-criminal code zone while he lured me into the castle’s basement, which was actually outside the safe area. 
The man in the black poncho had snuck up right behind me, despite my proficiency in the Search skill, pointed a knife to my back, and whispered, “It’s showtime.” The coldness of that voice would not leave my ears…The way it richly lilted as though in song—and yet alien in how it betrayed no discernable emotion. 
I was nearly too late to detect his bluff. I rattled off a series of sword skills within the safe zone, hoping to push him into a simulated stunned state, but he used an unfamiliar smoke screen item to escape. I rushed back to the room where I’d left Asuna and was so relieved to see my temporary partner safe that I hugged her—earning me a vicious hook to the right flank. But that hadn’t solved the underlying problem. 
My guess was that the man in the black poncho was the boss of Morte, the axman who had tried to kill me in a duel. The leader of the PK group agitators who had tempted the Legend Braves into their equipment-upgrading scam and who’d tried to get the Dragon Knights Brigade (DKB) and Aincrad Liberation Squad (ALS) to go to war against each other. 
Thanks to me and Asuna intervening, neither of those incidents developed into disaster. That was why the man in the black poncho came to eliminate me directly, I assumed—but they weren’t going to give up from a single failed attempt. I’d have to watch out for danger at all times from now on. 
And there was one even larger problem: 
There was a high possibility that they’d go after Asuna, too. That, above all else, I had to prevent, and yet, I still hadn’t told her about the attack I’d just suffered. 
I wasn’t going to keep it a secret, of course. By tonight’s inn stay at the latest, I’d tell her all about the man in detail and give her another primer on the basic tenets of PvP combat. But all I could grapple with at the moment was what had happened right after we ascended to the fifth floor. 
It was Asuna who’d asked for a lesson in player-versus-player battle—whether you called it PvP or dueling or whatever. After the fight against Morte on the fourth floor, I immediately recognized the importance of this lesson, so in an empty corner of the ruins, we engaged in a proper duel. 
But once we actually faced each other with swords up, she couldn’t move. Instead, she tearfully lowered her blade and said she didn’t want to do it. 
It wasn’t that she had no talent for PvP. When one of the PKers had nearly taken her Chivalric Rapier in the ruins dungeon of the fifth floor, the way she utilized a looting monster to get it back was brilliant work. Once that imagination of hers had both knowledge and experience to bolster it, she’d be able to put her already considerable talent to use in the arena of man-to-man combat. 
But under the current rules of SAO, where dying in-game meant dying in real life, a player duel was therefore a fight to the death. If both sides were evenly matched, the winner would be whoever had less hesitation about taking the other’s life. Or in other words, without that level of cruelty, any potential victory in a close fight was likely to result in a loss. 
If I was going to teach Asuna how to fight another player, it was more important that she learned that cold rationality than any fiddly mechanical techniques I might teach her. I’d never killed another player myself, of course, but if it was necessary to protect myself or my partner, I believed I could do it. Or phrased another way, I wasn’t a good enough person at heart to hesitate in the heat of the moment. 
But Asuna was different. She was much more kindhearted than me—with an upright and honest soul. I didn’t want to tell her that she should be cold and cruel and ready to kill… 
“…Hey, Kirito.” I looked up and saw my partner right in front of me, concerned. “Why did you clam up all of a sudden? You aren’t hungry already, are you?” 
“N-no, that’s not it…” 
“Then can I ask my first question of the sixth floor?” 
“G-go right ahead,” I prompted. We’d been in the middle of the tenth floor when the beta test ended, so including this floor, there were only four and a half left where I could actually answer Asuna’s questions. After all that’s happened, we’re already on the sixth floor, I marveled. 
Then the fencer asked simply, “What’s this?” 
“Eh?” 
Asuna pointed down at our feet. I followed her slender index finger to one of the gray tiles that paved the teleport square. Like the blocks that made up the buildings, it was just ordinary stone about eight inches to a side, but one in every four or so tiles had an Arabic numeral from one to nine on it. 
“Ahh…yes, these…” I took two steps back and pointed down, just like she did. “See how the line between them is thicker here?” 
“You’re right…” 
“This thicker line is where the tiles are split into nine-by-nine grids of eighty-one tiles total. Does this look familiar to you?” 
“Nine by nine…” Asuna mumbled. She blinked three times, then looked up and grinned. “Ohhh, I get it. This is a sudoku puzzle! I was pretty good at them. Interesting, so the tiles of the square make a puzz…le…” 
She trailed off as she got another look around the teleport square. If you ignored the actual teleport gate in the middle, the entire square, fifty yards to a side, was covered in these tiles. And those sudoku puzzles with their number hints ran from end to end. 
“…How many of these puzzles are there?” 
“If it hasn’t changed from the beta, there are twenty-seven rows and columns of these eighty-one-tile sets. Since the exact middle one is taken up by the gate, that means it’s twenty-seven squared, minus one. Which equals seven hundred twenty-eight.” 
“Seven hun—” Asuna gasped quietly. She looked away from the numbers at her feet. “For a moment, I was interested in solving them all. I am no longer interested.” 
“A wise decision,” I said with a sage tone channeling that of any given village elder NPC. “During the beta test, those youngsters who fell prey to the lures of sudoku and gave up on helping us advance the game were called sudokers out of respect…” 
“That’s an even sadder nickname than the ‘hoarders’ who got addicted to finding coins in the ruins. But given how many of these puzzles there are, does that mean there’s some mammoth reward if you solve them all?” 
“You’d think so,” I said, normally this time. “I was under that assumption during the beta, and the sudokers certainly believed it. But the nasty part about this is…all the hint numbers get switched up at midnight every night.” 
“What?! So you’re saying…if you wanted to solve the whole batch, you’d have to do seven hundred twenty-eight sudoku puzzles in a span of twenty-four hours?” Asuna exclaimed. She started counting with her fingers. “Let’s see…At a glance, these look like maximum difficulty, so even an expert would take a good twenty minutes to solve one. Multiplying that by seven hundred twenty-eight would be fourteen thousand five hundred sixty minutes…divided by sixty makes two hundred forty-two hours and forty minutes…” 
I had to admit that the speed of this calculation backed up her claim to be “pretty good” at math puzzles. 
“That’s over ten days!” she exclaimed, her shock turning to annoyance. “That’s impossible! I’m not going to do them!” 
“N-nobody said you had to…At any rate, the sudokers split up as a group to try to tackle them, and even then, they weren’t fast enough to beat it by midnight. So on the last day of the beta, they resorted to forbidden measures.” 
“Forbidden…?” 
“Since you could log in or out as much as you wanted in the beta, they would memorize the placement of the hints, then log out and use an external program to solve the problem…” 
“Oh, I see,” Asuna said, smirking. 
I concluded the heroes’ tale. “They beat the whole lot just an hour before the end of the test. Now, do you see how just one tile out of the eighty-one is a darker color?” 
“Hmm, you’re right.” 
“The numbers in those tiles are some kind of key. So at the end of all that work, the sudokers got seven hundred twenty-eight key numbers…” 
“Uh-huh?” 
“And that was it.” 
“Huh?” 
“Nobody knew what to do with them. They say that for the last hour until the end of the test, the tragic sudokers were reduced to running around the square in their underpants, screaming the numbers and going mad.” 
“…” 
Asuna’s annoyance turned to pity. She gazed out at the wide space of flat stone and numbers, lonely in the moonlight. Without another word on the matter, she closed her eyes for a moment, then waved her right hand to bring up the menu. 
“Oh my, it’s past three. We should go to the inn already. I assume the DKB and ALS will be sleeping in, too, but I’d still like to get up and back to business by ten o’clock.” 

“Good idea,” I agreed, reminded of my earlier anxiety. But Asuna’s smile was earnest and innocent. 
“Here’s question two, then. What’s your recommended place to stay in Stachion?” 
For about three minutes, we walked east down a road paved with the same tiles as the square, until I led Asuna to a nondescript, midsize inn—though, given the way everything in the town was built out of the same little blocks, it was hard for any of them to acquire distinguishing features. 
I pushed open the wooden door (at least that was different) and checked in at the counter, reserving two adjacent rooms on the second floor. The empty hallway up there turned out to be ten blocks wide, just over six feet, with no place to hide. 
I’d kept my hackles up from the moment we’d arrived at this level of Aincrad till we got to this inn, but no one had been following or watching us—at least, so I thought. But I couldn’t be absolutely certain, because now that I suspected the man in the black poncho had a Hiding skill at least as good as my Search, I could no longer trust my eyes and ears. 
I walked to the end of the hallway, keenly aware of the stress of being in potential danger. Asuna was in Room 201 in the corner, while I was in 202 just before it. 
The fencer yawned gracefully in front of her door and glanced at me. “Um…shall we meet in the restaurant downstairs at eight…or, no, nine o’clock?” 
“That’s fine with me.” 
“Then good night, Kirito.” 
She waved and grabbed the door handle. But the handle rattled in place and resisted her pressure. 
“Wh…whoops? Is the other one my room…?” she wondered, shuffling over with sleepy eyes. I grabbed her shoulders. 
“Nope, you had the right one.” 
“Uh…why isn’t it opening, then?” 
Her question was a reasonable one. Inn rooms in Aincrad didn’t have keys as a general rule; doors automatically unlocked for the owner (or their registered friends and party members)—a system choice made for player convenience. And we were in a party together, so even if she’d gotten my room, the door should have opened. 
I walked over to Asuna, who was half sleepy and half skeptical, and pointed at the 201 attached to her door. On closer look, the square plate was split into a four-by-four grid, with the other squares having fainter numbers of their own and a single blank space in the bottom right corner. 
“Doesn’t this look familiar, too?” I prompted. 
Asuna blinked about five times and finally said, “Oh…is this a fifteen puzzle…?” 
“Bingo. Only in this case, the numbers go from zero to fourteen.” 
“……Are you saying that if I don’t solve this puzzle, the door won’t open?” 
“Correct.” 
“………” 
Now her expression was 20 percent sleepiness, 20 percent suspicion, and 60 percent disgust. I hastily added, “B-but don’t worry. There’s a trick to this…” 
I reached up to the plate and started sliding the wooden numbers around, which were randomly placed aside from the Room 201 numbers. 
“See, it’s easy to get zero through seven in the top two rows, right? After that, you just line up the eight and twelve in the lower left, then put the nine and thirteen next to them, and the rest is natural…” 
The moment I slid the fourteen into the right spot, there was an audible click as the door unlocked. Then I pushed down the handle, and the door opened inward this time. 
“…Thank you,” Asuna said, but her expression did not suggest gratitude. I’d brought her to this inn for a reason—of all the puzzle doors in Stachion, the ones here were on the simple side. 
But there was something more important to explain to her now—more important than the facts of this town or this entire floor. Asuna was quite exhausted, and I was reaching the peak of my fatigue, too, but the last thing I wanted to do now was put off this decision until tomorrow, only to regret it. 
“Well, good night…” Asuna started to vanish through the doorway. 
I raised my voice just 5 percent higher than normal. “Asuna!” 
“What?” she asked, eyes bleary. I felt guilty, but there was no going back now. 
“I…I have something important to tell you. Do you mind if I come into your room for a bit?” 
“Mm…go ahead…” 
Her permission came shockingly easy. She tottered through the doorway. I hurried after her before the door automatically locked itself. 
As the corner room, 201 had large windows on the east and south sides, but there was no skyline to look at now. The room was maybe 175 square feet and had standard furniture: a bed that was spacious enough for one but not two, a sofa set, and a writing desk. The floor was dark brown but checkered in that familiar eight-inch pattern. 
Asuna floated weightlessly to the bed and plopped down onto its soft surface. She waited for me to speak, just barely preventing herself from flopping over into a sleeping position. 
“So what’s this important thing you have to…tell……Important thing?” she repeated, blinking thrice. 
Suddenly, her eyes were wide open. She stared around the room, then back at me. For some reason, her left hand reached for a large pillow, and she clutched it in front of her as she stammered, “Uh…wait…import…I…W-wait, I’m, uh, I’m not, ready for…” 
It wasn’t clear what Asuna was imagining, but fortunately for me, whatever it was had woken her up a bit. I took a step closer. 
“Listen, Asuna.” 
“No, wa…w-wait, just wait.” 
“No. I can’t wait.” 
“What?”  

She was clutching the pillow so hard it was fit to burst. I took another step closer. 
“Asuna…in the morning, I want you to practice human combat with me.” 
“………Hweh?” 
“I know you hate PvP. But we’re coming to the point where there’s no getting around it. Before we start heading out to tackle this floor, we should at least spend half a day practicing…” 
“Stop.” 
Her hand darted out at the speed of lightning, cutting me off. She took several deep breaths. Eventually, she got to her feet, still holding the pillow. 
“……I knew that I couldn’t keep running away from it. So I agree with your point about the training. I’m ready for it.” 
“Oh…c-cool.” 
“But let me just say one thing first.” 
The fencer grinned at me kindly, switched the pillow over to her right hand, then cocked it back. 
“That was…extremely misleading!!!!” she screamed, hurling it at me overhand with a bit of rotation, like a major league pitcher. The pillow hurtled audibly toward me hard enough to flash up the purple barrier effect when it landed, no matter how soft it was. 
A cold drink of water helped calm Asuna down, after which I briefly explained what had happened in the castle ruins of Karluin. While she was furious at necro-poncho—and somewhat concerned for me as well—she largely accepted the situation calmly and rationally and agreed to resume dueling practice. 
By the end of this, it was already 3:40, so we delayed the next day’s meeting until nine thirty, and I left Room 201. 
Suddenly, the sandman’s bags weighed heavily on my eyelids, now that I was no longer holding him at bay with sheer willpower. But there was another job I had to do before I opened the door to my own room. 
Unlike Room 201, the fifteen puzzle to open Room 202 had a pair of twos, and the highest number was thirteen. While I did make a few mistakes because of it, I managed to finish the puzzle in under thirty seconds. I opened the door into my own room, removed my gear as I shuffled forward, and plunged into the bed face-first. 
I had time for just a few thoughts in the three seconds before I fell asleep. 
You know, I forgot to actually tell Asuna that the entire theme of this floor is puzzles. 
And what did she mean by “misleading”?