Sword Art Online - Volume 23 - Chapter 5

5

I’m glad I dived in without eating anything first.

Sinon stared at the chunk of meat before her, sizzling and snapping.

The rare steak was three inches thick and almost a foot in size. By real-world standards, it was so big that even a sumo wrestler would have trouble finishing it. But the birdmen seated around the gigantic table were all busy with steaks of the same size, carving with their knives and chewing vigorously.

Of course, this was a virtual world, and no matter what she ate, nothing went into her real stomach, but one of the strange features of full-diving was that the satiating feeling of a full belly lasted for a while, even after logging out. Sinon had a small appetite to begin with and wasn’t the biggest fan of meat, so a rare steak of this size was a major challenge for her. Especially since it wasn’t beef, or even pork.

Confirming that the birdmen on either side were completely absorbed in eating, Sinon quickly tapped the hunk of meat. The properties window said it was Sterocephalus Tail Meat Steak. It had previously belonged to the dinosaur she killed with a shot from the Hecate II.

Last night, Sinon had been on the brink of dying of dehydration just before reaching a pool of water. Surrounded by birdmen delighted at the defeat of their sterocephalus foe, she allowed them to escort her to their village.

As usual, the two sides couldn’t understand a word the other said, but she received a savior’s welcome in the village anyway. They showed her to a pretty little house in the center of the village, where she was able to log out safely. This evening, she drank some water as soon as she got home and promptly dived back in, where they more or less forced her into this celebration.

What surprised her a little—no, a lot—was the high level of civilization the birdmen enjoyed. The houses of the village were neatly arranged and built with fired bricks, and the perfectly circular outer edge of the village was surrounded by a sturdy stone wall. The tiled streets led to a large meeting space in the center of the village that was surrounded by shops.

She shouldn’t have been this surprised, she realized, because the fact that they used muskets already spoke to a culture of a certain level. So if she left the majority of her dinosaur steak, maybe they would be civilized enough not to be angry with her, she hoped…

“    ?”

A small birdperson who came up to her side poured red wine-like liquid into the glass in front of Sinon. Their words sounded like a question, but she still couldn’t understand them.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying to me,” she replied. The child’s yellow beak hung open partway in apparent confusion. Sinon was going to apologize again when a voice cut her off.

“The child is asking why you do not eat,” the voice said from her left. Sinon turned in that direction in utter shock.

The voice came from an elderly-looking birdman who had long gray feathers hanging from the edges of his beak.

“You…you understand my language?” she asked hoarsely.

One edge of the elderly birdman’s beak twitched upward. “When I was younger, I adventured all over the continent with humans. But…does the dinosaur meat not suit your tastes, human girl?”

“Er, no…it’s fine. Thank you,” she said, summoning her courage and picking up the knife and fork. She carved a bit off the end of the singed log of a steak and popped it into her mouth.

Once her teeth bit through the crispy exterior, they met much more resilience than she expected. But a firmer bite cut through it easily enough, and a fatty sweetness filled her mouth. It tasted like beef ribs but was more fibrous and gamy. There was no sauce on the meat, but the spices the birdmen cooked it with had a kick. It wasn’t bad.

“Um…how do I say delicious in your language?” she asked the elderly birdman. He made a sound like hyufol. She turned to the child and repeated the word the birdman had just taught her. The child looked befuddled.

“No. It is hyufol.”

“Hyufol.”

“Close. Hyufol.”

“Hyufol!”

After a few repetitions like this, the child finally understood her, and she beamed and shouted, “Hyufol!” Her head bobbed up and down excitedly, and then she walked away.

Instantly, there was a window in front of Sinon’s face that read Ornith skill gained. Proficiency has risen to 1.

She blinked, then listened to the conversations happening around her in the large room. Most of them still just sounded like strange chirping, but occasionally she heard snippets that she understood, like “Now the farm to the south will be…” and “I’ll have more wine…”

In their meeting after school, Yui said that the NPC language in Unital Ring was actually the Seed protocol’s Japanese language set but with several layers of filtering to make it impossible to understand. Most likely, thanks to gaining the Ornith skill, the game was decoding fragments of those filters now and then, so she could hear the Japanese. If she raised her proficiency further, the filter would eventually disappear altogether, she supposed.

But how to raise that proficiency? She took another bite of dinosaur steak, chewed it briskly, and replayed the conversation before the skill pop-up appeared. Then she swallowed her food and spoke to the elderly birdman again.

“Um, how do you say knife in Ornith?”

“Hmm? You mean fetu?”

“Fetu.”

“No, fetu.”

“Fetu.”

“Listen to me. It is fetu.”

“I am saying fetu!” Sinon snapped, and another message appeared, reading Ornith skill proficiency has risen to 2. The same child as before ran over and offered Sinon a new knife. That settled it—raising her Ornith proficiency required repeating the undecoded words perfectly. Why did it have to be annoying?

Once again, she turned to the elder.

“…How do you say thank you in Ornith?”

Forty minutes later, Sinon returned from the feast to her room and flopped face-first onto the bed.

Thankfully, the birdpeople, known as Orniths, did not have any barbarous customs of searing and devouring ungrateful guests who didn’t finish their food. Sinon stubbornly continued to pile dinosaur steak into her virtual stomach as she learned vocabulary words from the elder birdman, but her core was screaming at her to stop when she was only half done. Still, she must have devoured at least two pounds of it. She didn’t even want to think about eating meat again for a while, real or virtual.

But attending the feast was certainly worthwhile, because she got her Ornith skill up to 10 and learned much more valuable information as well. She rolled over onto her back, opened the ring menu, and flicked open the MAP icon.

The image it summoned showed the ruined city where she’d started, the wasteland to the east of it, the rocky outcropping where she’d fought the giant sterocephalus, and the Ornith village well to the north of that. She felt like she’d covered quite a lot of ground, but if she used two fingers to zoom out on the map, the lit portions shrank smaller and smaller until they were the size of grains of sand. If that represented the full size of the entire world map, then the vast distance she’d spent hours walking across represented less than 1 percent of the game world.

The real problem wasn’t the distance to the edge of the world, though, but how far away she was from Kirito and Asuna’s location.

At the end of the feast, Sinon asked virtually everyone who was present if they knew about the name Bashin. When even her elderly Ornith tutor, who had traveled the world, said “Never heard of ’em,” she felt desperate. But by some miracle, just one birdperson there said they’d heard the name before. So Sinon used all of her proficiency-10 Ornith skill to ask everything she possibly could.

That one birdperson had never met the Bashin, only heard a story from his grandfather, but the information in the story was worth its weight in gold: The Bashin village is past the vast Giyoru Savanna to the southeast. It was worth the trouble. Asuna’s log cabin had fallen near the Bashin village, supposedly, so if she went southeast, she should be able to catch up to them—possibly. Of course, if the Bashin had villages all over the world map, she could easily find herself on a wild-goose chase, but for now, she could only trust that her new lead was the right one.

“…Okay!”

Sinon closed the map and sat up forcefully. She’d already told the Orniths that she would leave before the end of the night. The reason they’d been waging that hopeless fight against the ferocious sterocephalus was because the dinosaur was attacking their farm to the south and devouring the valuable psittacos there.

It wasn’t clear what kind of livestock psittacos were, but when the Orniths learned that their new hero, vanquisher of the previously unbeatable sterocephalus, was leaving already, they were very disappointed. Sinon wanted to stick around and use the village as a base for leveling-up—after all, she could eat and stay for free—but more than that, she wanted to regroup with her friends. That fallen log cabin was a special place to her, too, and there wasn’t much of a point to solving the mysteries of Unital Ring if it wasn’t with Asuna and Kirito.

With the Bellatrix SL2 and Weasel Suit equipped again, Sinon left the building and looked around. Across the way, the lights were already out at the feast hall, and there was no one to be seen around the circular building. The time was only just after seven o’clock, but the Orniths did not seem to have a nightlife. No sooner had the thought occurred to her than Sinon muttered, “Dammit!” She was going to use her 100-el silver coin to buy some rations and drinking water, but all of the shops on the southern side of the village center had their shutters down. She’d been careless; NPC shops in ALO and GGO both ran essentially twenty-four hours a day, but normal VRMMO logic didn’t apply here.

“…And that probably means there’s no guarantee this village even takes silver el coins…,” she murmured, feeling dejected. After eating and drinking as much as her willpower could possibly allow, her SP and TP were full, but she never wanted to be foolish enough to head into the wilderness without water again. Should she wait until the morning for the shops to open? Or look for a place where she could get free water…?

“Miss Sinon!”

She spun to her right at the sound of her name. There were two Orniths trotting toward her, a young one and a child. At first, they’d all looked the same to her, but now she could tell them apart to a small degree, due to the colors and patterns of their feathers and the shape of their eyes and beaks.

The young Ornith was the musketeer she’d saved from the sterocephalus. The child was the birdgirl who’d been serving the table at the feast. The young one lowered the plumage over his eyes and asked, “Sinon, are you already    ?”

Her Ornith skill was only at a proficiency of 10, so part of the sentence was unclear, but she could guess that he was asking if she was leaving now, and she nodded in response.

“Yes. I must go to the Bashin village.”

He understood her response and seemed to frown, as far as she could tell. “I see…I don’t     anything about the Bashin, but if you are crossing the Giyoru Savanna to the southeast, you will need to prepare   . Please take this with you, Miss Sinon.”

He held out a shiny black musket. Sinon blinked, then shook her head vigorously. “No, I can’t! This gun is very important to you, isn’t it?”

“No!” shouted the birdgirl, who had light-brown feathers. She looked at the musket in the young birdman’s hands and explained, “That isn’t my brother’s. It belonged to our late grandfather. Father says there’s no    anymore, so he should    it to you for saving our village, Sinon.”

“That’s right. It’s an old gun, but the quality is   . Of course, it’s nowhere near as fine as your gun, but you wouldn’t want to use something so powerful on smaller beasts and insects, would you?”

He had a good point. She only had six of the Hecate’s .50 BMG bullets left, and they had to be saved for emergencies. The Bellatrix also had only 60 percent of its energy remaining. The chances of her getting more ammunition for either were low.

“…In that case, I’d be glad to use it,” Sinon said, and the young Ornith happily offered her the musket. There was a satisfying weight to it in her hands. He also gave her a leather bag slung over his shoulder.

“Those are the bullets and gunpowder. If you use them all up, the bullets can be from iron, and for the gunpowder, you can mix the secretions of bursting beetles and charcoal powder, then let it dry.”

“B-bursting beetles?” Sinon repeated, suspicious. The birdgirl, who seemed to be the older Ornith’s sister, formed a large circle with her hands.

“They’re at the base of cacti! Just watch out, because if you step on them, they’ll blow up and hurt you real bad!”

“Um…okay, I’ll be careful.”

Sadly, she couldn’t make out the name of the cactus itself, but that was all right. She wasn’t planning to go walking up to any cacti anytime soon.

Sinon slung the gun over her back, then hung the ammo bag on her shoulder. This time, it was the birdgirl who offered her yet another object, a large cloth bag.

“There’s water and butter and hard bread in here! Me and Mom and Grandma made them! There’s also a pelt cloak in there, so if a    comes, use it!”

If she refused now, it would probably be rude. She was very curious about what “if a    comes” was referring to, but she didn’t want to grill the birdgirl, so she thanked her and took the sack.

The birdgirl grinned and added, “The hard bread’s not very good, but it lasts a really long time! When    , sear it over a fire and spread the butter on it, and it’ll taste much   !”

“…Okay, I’ll try that. Thank you so much,” she said, bowing one more time, then took the birdgirl’s hands in her own. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Sure! I’m Fikki, and my brother is Ufelm!”

“Fikki…and Ufelm. I will return to this village someday. And I’ll bring you many gifts from my travels.”

“Yay!” Fikki exclaimed excitedly. Sinon fixed the image of the little birdgirl’s excitement in her mind and swore to herself that she would uphold that promise.

It was seven thirty PM. Sinon left the Ornith village, opened her map window, and looked for a landmark that would help her head southeast. Fortunately, there was a large moon shining in the sky, and with the help of the Night Vision skill, she could make out the terrain on her own. Upon gazing to the southeast, she noticed a rock growth in the distance that looked just like a gate.

“…There we go!”

With her motivation as fuel, Sinon strode across the dried earth. She had no idea how many miles across this Giyoru Savanna was, but she was determined to cross it and reach the Bashin village by the end of the night. After all, beating the sterocephalus field boss had put her all the way up to level-16, and she had a musket on her back and a Bellatrix SL2 at her side.

She certainly didn’t want to fight any more giant dinosaurs, but she felt confident she could beat any centipede or scorpion. Her HP was higher, her stats built up…

Right. Her stats. Unital Ring didn’t have basic character stats like STR and AGI. Instead, it had a varied system of abilities, which served a different function from skills. With the levels she’d gained, she now had fifteen ability points to spend, and there was no point hoarding them if she was going to try crossing the dangers of the wilderness alone.

“…I’m really not good at this sort of thing,” she murmured, switching from the map screen to the ability list. At the meeting after school, Kirito had said that it didn’t seem like you could re-spec your abilities once chosen, which was the same way it worked in GGO. The problem was that there were way too many choices in Unital Ring.

Perhaps she should return to the Ornith village, log out in a safe spot, then look up information on the abilities online. But no…barely twenty-four hours had passed since the incident began, so it wasn’t smart to believe anything you saw written on the Net at this point. She should think for herself about what she needed and make that choice on her own. That was a lesson the GGO player Zexceed had taught her before he was killed by Death Gun.

“…I guess I should use ten points now,” Sinon murmured and lifted her finger to pick from the four starter abilities.