Sword Art Online - Volume 22 - Chapter 1.5

5 

“…Wh-what’s the point of you comin’ up here?!” were the first words out of the mouth of the player in the log cabin who’d been pleading for help. 

About ninety seconds earlier… 

Asuna and the dog and I were sucked up into the sky toward the flying cabin. The whirlwind took us over the roof, then down a chimney yawning at one end of it. After going through a cramped, dark tunnel, we landed on our behinds on the wood-paneled floor of the living room, where a female player looked down at us, aghast. 

Once I could think straight again after that astonishing event, I looked up into the face of the cabin’s inhabitant. To my shock, it was a very familiar one, but I wasn’t really capable of wringing out the strength to act further shocked. 

Instead, I said, “Hiya. It’s been a while.” 

And that was what earned me that response. 

At any rate, the first step was trading information. 

But my suggestion, while met with agreement by the other player, also elicited a disappointed slump of her shoulders. She pointed toward a round table fixed to the floor of the living room. I sat next to Asuna, who was still holding the dog. The female player kept her distance and sat on the other side. 

By this point, Asuna had recovered her normal wits, too. She greeted the woman, whom the both of us knew quite well. 

“It’s nice to see you again, Argo.” 

“…Hullo, A-chan. Same to you, Kiri-boy,” she said with a wave and an indecipherable expression. There were three lines painted on each of her cheeks to look like whiskers. For the nearly two years since the start of this game of death—in fact, add an extra month for the beta test—she had stuck with that face paint, because it matched her nickname, Argo the Rat. She was the finest info dealer in all of Aincrad. 

Asuna and I had known her since the earliest days of the game, and we’d bought and sold her info countless times since then. Even outside of business circumstances, we’d helped her and been helped in return many times, and we’d never been on outright hostile terms. It didn’t sit right with me that she’d act guarded around us, but there were more pressing matters for now. 

“So, Argo…what’s going on here?” 

I gestured with my right arm around the room, indicating the tremendously airborne building. The info dealer’s eyes blinked, framed by her golden-brown curls. 

“You don’t know? You had to’ve picked it up ta get here! The quest, man, the quest!” 

“Oh…r-right…” 

I glanced over at the pup, who was looking sleepy in Asuna’s arms. The ? over its head was still active. That meant there was a quest in progress… 

“But it wasn’t as much that we accepted the quest as it happened to us…” 

Asuna nodded. “That’s right. I picked up this dog, and then all of a sudden, we were getting blown all the way up into this house. In fact, it was almost like someone else had started a quest and left…it…behind…” 

She trailed off, and I looked over at her. I knew exactly what thought had just popped into her head: 

If a quest someone else had started was the cause of all this, then the guilty party could not be anyone other than Argo the Rat here. 

Our heads turned with a crack to stare at Argo, who hunched her shoulders guiltily and said, “Guess I’ll explain from the top.” 

See, lately I’ve been pickin’ up word of strange new quests bein’ generated on the lower floors of Aincrad. Like masked ogres that just keep respawning, no matter how many ya kill, or fire-breathin’ tortoises that do spinning jumps, or an undead woman dressed in white who comes crawlin’ out of a cursed message window. 

Since I’m the one putting out the Complete, Unabridged Quest Guidebook, I gotta get the scoop on every new quest as soon as I can. So the day before yesterday, I came here to the southwest region of the twenty-second floor to investigate a quest, and I found the starting point right away. But there’s a problem with the content. I hopped inside this house without bringing along a key character for the quest, and all of a sudden, the whole house just shoots up into the air! I’ve been stuck inside this place for the last two days, just hopin’ someone would come along and reset the quest for me. 

At that point, Argo just threw up her hands in resignation. 

Resetting a quest was an operation performed from the menu, when an active quest had been ignored for a long period of time. There were more than a few quests in SAO that could only be attempted by one player at a time, which was why the function existed. Of course, you had to be in the vicinity of the NPC who started the quest in the first place. 

In other words, at the point that we spotted the pup named Toto under the cedar tree and noticed the ? over its head, if we had opened our menus and opened the quest tab, there should have been a quest-reset button there. But now that we had piggybacked onto the quest in progress, neither Asuna nor I could reset it. 

“…Well, I guess that kind of explains the situation…but there are still plenty of mysteries. Argo, you said there was a problem with the content of the quest?” I asked. 

The info dealer adopted the same conflicted expression from before, and she glanced at Asuna—or more accurately, the little animal sleeping in Asuna’s arms. 

“W-well, the thing is…even I’ve got certain things I’m better at than others…” 

“Ooh, I get it! You’re afraid of dogs!” Asuna said with a smile. The whiskers painted on Argo’s cheeks twitched awkwardly. 

“I—I can’t help it! That’s my default status! As if you’re perfect—I’ve heard you’re afraid of astral-type mobs, A-chan!” 

“B-but those are ghosts! Of course people are scared of ghosts. But puppies are cute! Come on—just hold him!” 

“N-no! Stop! Let the dog sleep!” 

I stood to the side, allowing Argo and Asuna to bicker so I could mull over the facts. Argo (despite being a rat) was afraid of dogs, and there was a quest marker open over the dog’s head, which meant… 

“Aha, I get it. Argo, you started the quest, but because the quest character was a dog, you ran for the house with all your Agility stat and shut yourself inside, which advanced the quest and shot it up into the air, but the dog wasn’t able to keep up and get inside the house with you, so the quest got stuck, and you were trapped inside a flying building for two whole days…Ha-ha-ha, oh, the fun you get into on your own. You should write about your exploits in the Great Adventures of Argo one day. You’ll make a fortune,” I jabbed, laughing. 

Argo briefly made a tempted face—“A fortune?”—but then exploded, “This isn’t funny! It means that both you and A-chan are stuck here in the house now, too!” 

“Oh, you’re exaggerating. If we really have to, we can just use a teleport crystal to zip over to a town,” I replied, chuckling—until I saw both Argo and Asuna making the same expression. 

Asuna glanced at her, then back at me. “Um, Kirito…don’t you think Argo would have tried that already?” 

“Eh?” 

“It can vary depending on the quest, but usually in forced-event quests like this, they prevent you from teleporting out of trouble. Right, Argo?” 

“You betcha!” 

“…Are you serious?” I asked, feeling a cold sweat break out. 

Argo just shook her head in disappointment. “Well, I suppose there’s always the final option of jumpin’ out the window and teleporting just before ya hit the ground…but I don’t have the guts to try that.” 

“Y-yeah, I don’t think I do, either…,” I said, glancing at all the space outside the window. 

I gave the matter more consideration. What was this quest, anyway? You take a quest from the dog, then go inside the house with it, and it gets blown into the sky on a whirlwind? The premise just didn’t make sense. SAO’s game server couldn’t be under the control of its developer, Argus, anymore, so I doubted that anyone at Argus had written this script. So who came up with this pointless scenario? And without a function to call for GM help, how were we going to get out of being stuck…? 

“…Oh…wait a second,” I called out. 

Asuna looked up from petting Toto’s head, and Argo looked away from keeping an eye on the fearsome beast. 

“If the reason the quest is stuck is that the dog, Toto, was left on the ground…then hasn’t that been solved? Wouldn’t that mean the quest is functioning normally again…?” 

“Ah…!” 

Argo snapped her fingers. She bolted over for the window with alarming speed and looked down toward the ground. 

“W-we’re moving! In fact, we’re almost back down again!” 

“R-really?! Great, then we can get back home before it gets dark,” Asuna said with relief, walking toward the window, but I was not feeling so optimistic. I had a bad feeling about this. 

As far as quest openings go, throwing an entire house into the sky was a drastic one. A story that began that dramatically would not end this easily. It might involve several steps, like going here and finding something, going there and helping someone…And most important, beating the quest did not guarantee this house would return to its former status as a purchasable asset. And at this rate, I didn’t know when Asuna and I would ever be marri— 

“Ooh!” I grunted and glanced over at Argo, who was maintaining an awkward distance from Asuna—or more specifically, the dog in her arms. 

She was an old friend, but it was imperative that Asuna and I didn’t let her catch on to our eloping before it happened. As soon as she knew about it, it’d be front-page news in Weekly Argo, and I’d be cursed to the grave by Asuna’s fan club. 

So the longer we worked on this quest together, the more dangerous it would be. We needed to beat it quick and say our good-byes before the Rat’s keen sense of smell sniffed out what was going on. 

I straightened up with a newfound sense of purpose—right as the log house came crashing to the ground in an unknown place.