Sword Art Online - Volume 23 - Chapter 8.2

If she landed in the water, all was fine. But if she hit a rock, she would die. If I rushed to catch her, I wouldn’t be there to attack the frog in time.

It was the biggest dilemma since the battle started. But then I heard an unfamiliar—but strangely familiar—voice.

“I got Yuippe!”

Thanks, whoever you are! I thought and made the motion for Sharp Nail, a three-part attack that was the strongest I could execute right now. Beside me, Leafa readied the same move, and Lisbeth recovered from the force of the fireball with her mace in hand. Sinon was holding a small laser gun rather than the musket, and Kuro bared its sharp fangs.

The Goliath Rana fell, belly up, onto one of the rock pillars and bounced high. When it landed a second time, I shouted, “Now!”

Leafa, Lisbeth, Kuro, and I struck the defenseless frog’s stomach from all sides with swords, mace, and teeth. Its HP bar instantly took a huge drop, going under 20 percent. The four of us pulled back, and the ratpeople shrieked as they charged in, stabbing it with their pitchforks.

Ten percent left.

I struggled against the sword skill’s delay, trying to give it just a normal swing to beat the frog for good. But a moment before I could, the frog opened its mouth, still on its back.

“Grrrrrrrg-gooooooo!” it roared with fury, forming another big magic circle. If it spit a fireball this close, there was no way to dodge…

“I don’t think so!”

Sinon leaped forward with great courage, jabbed her laser gun directly through the magic circle, and pulled the trigger.

It made a volley of sci-fi pew-pew-pew-pew! sounds, shooting light-green energy bolts into the Goliath Rana’s open mouth and whittling down its HP bar. The magic circle around Sinon’s arm flashed. Flames flickered in the frog’s mouth, swirling into a tornado, rather than a fireball…

And then its HP was gone.

“Gre-gurk!” the frog croaked, and the crimson magic circle turned into black smoke that floated away. It looked very similar to the effect of a magic spell being fumbled in ALO.

The beast’s massive body twitched a few times, getting steadily weaker…until it stopped moving altogether.

In SAO and ALO, a dead monster would promptly burst into blue particles, but here, the bodies stayed put—meaning you couldn’t be sure it was dead yet. I was worried about Yui, but more important was making sure the frog had croaked its last. I took a step forward, sword at the ready.

Then something strange happened.

From the middle of the still, flipped-over frog, around the position of its heart, a red light appeared, rising silently in the darkness. We’d defeated many monsters by now, including the thornspike cave bear that was just as strong, but I hadn’t seen this happen with any of them.

“Kirito, look…!”

Urged on by Sinon’s voice, I took two steps, then jumped as high as I could, reaching for the red light. But the instant my fingertips grazed it, the light popped and vanished, just like a bubble. As I landed, I checked my hand, but there was nothing on my palm.

Suddenly, all of the party members were surrounded by blue rings of light. For an instant I panicked, thinking it was some kind of trap, but soon realized it was just the level-up effect. The frog was good and dead. A message appeared telling me I was now level-16, but I hastily got it out of the way and looked up.

Even in the darkness, Yui’s white dress was easily noticeable. She hung in the air just below the tunnel exit, her skinny left arm clutched by the extended arm of someone else hanging upside down. That player had a rope tied around their ankle, which a different player was holding tight from the tunnel entrance.

Yui and the mysterious player were swaying on the rope, drifting left and right, while a faint creaking sound made it clear that the rope was not strong enough to hold the weight of two people and was steadily fraying.

The large man standing in the cave entrance steadily pulled the rope upward. I darted forward to the position beneath Yui and called up, “Hey, easy, easy!”

The man pulling the rope bellowed down, “I don’t have enough rope to lower them down there, and the durability’s going to wear out in less than twenty seconds!”

The other player—the man holding up Yui by the hand—replied, “Don’t let that happen to me, Boss! Not after comin’ as far as we did! You gotta pull me up!”

Strange, I thought, feeling a sense of déjà vu. I could swear I’ve heard both of those voices before.

I dug in my heels to stop. Waiting below them wouldn’t help if I couldn’t actually catch both Yui and the man together. I needed a cushion instead. If I set out all the hyena pelts in my inventory, that probably wouldn’t be enough to absorb the damage from a fall that high.

There was only one thing that could work here. I turned around, raced back, and shouted to the others, “Help me carry this over, guys!”

Then I grabbed the leg of the dead Goliath Rana. Instantly, everyone else understood my meaning. Sinon jumped ahead of me, and Lisbeth and Leafa grabbed the left leg. The four of us began to drag the huge corpse.

With a quick yowl, Kuro bit the frog’s side to help us push, and even the three ratpeople set down their pitchforks and assisted with the head. Once we got going, the body slid faster than I thought it would over the rocky ground. I checked over my shoulder as we pulled and saw that Yui was halfway up the thirty feet or so to the tunnel mouth, but the rope was visibly wearing out.

We were almost to the spot beneath the two of them when there was a heartless snap!

“Sorry, Kirito! Do something!” shouted the large man who’d been pulling the rope. I didn’t have time to wonder how he knew my name.

“Aaaieeee!” wailed the other man. But it was admirable the way that he managed to pull Yui close to him and make sure she’d land on top of him, rather than the other way around. We had to make that gesture pay off.

“Yaaaa!” I bellowed, wringing out the last of my strength. A new message appeared, reading Physique skill proficiency has risen to 4, and the frog’s body rose a tiny bit into the air. It landed in a puddle and stopped.

A second later, Yui and the man disappeared into the Goliath Rana’s stomach. Even dead, the body retained its resilience, and they bounced back over three feet up into the air before landing again safely.

“Papa!” cried Yui, who hadn’t made a sound while she was hanging or falling. She jumped onto me with arms spread wide. I grabbed her and hugged her little body tight, careful not to crush her against the metal armor.

“You did great,” I whispered. “The way you pulled off Vertical in midair was masterful.”

For the first time since the battle against the Goliath Rana started, Yui’s voice trembled. “Yes…I tried really hard!”

Yui had never been in a battle herself. Having her first experience be against a terrible boss had to be overwhelming and terrifying in a way I couldn’t imagine. And it wasn’t some carefully modeled imitation of human emotion in typical AI fashion. At this point, Yui had surpassed the limits of top-down artificial intelligence and gained true emotions—in my opinion. It was the only explanation for her self-sacrifice, I thought, stroking her hair.

Just then, the man resting with his limbs splayed out on the frog’s stomach sat up, grumbling, “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’d have died right there…”

His short brown hair was pushed upward by a dark-red bandana. His face was long and thin, and scraggly hair dotted his chin. His armor was leather, and a curved blade rested on his left side.

When I first heard that voice, there were two arguing opinions in the back of my mind: Could be and No way. It seemed that the winner was, indeed, Could be.

“Klein…what are you doing here?” I wondered in awe.

The katana warrior (now a scimitar warrior?) I’d known since the SAO days spread his hands and complained, “Whoa, whoa, is that gonna be the first thing out of your mouth, Kiri, my man? We rushed over here thinkin’ you were in trouble and needed help!”

“Yeah, and we appreciate it,” Lisbeth interjected. “But how did you know we were here? Nobody contacted you on the other side, did they?”

“I’ll answer that one,” said another voice from above, causing us all to look upward.

Carefully descending the path around the side of the dome was an imposing-looking man, big and bald and barrel-chested. This was another familiar face, the ax warrior and merchant Agil. But on his back wasn’t the trademark two-handed ax but a double-edged ax that was noticeably smaller—though still much bigger than my sword. Like Klein, he wore leather armor.

“Hiya, Agil,” I said, bumping knuckles with him as he reached the floor. Then I greeted Klein the same way and asked, “So…how did you get here? Did you start in the ruins to the south like the other ALO players?”

“Yeah. And me and Klein were a day late. We finally got a chance to dive in tonight, and the grace period was long over, plus the map all around us had been picked clean. Somehow, I managed to meet up with Klein, and we figured we’d head for your log cabin…”

“Huh? How did you know where it was?”

“Asuna drew us a map by hand.”

“Oh, really…” For a brief moment, I stopped to consider my girlfriend, the former vice commander of the Knights of the Blood, and her penchant for detail.

“Kiri, fess up. You completely forgot about us, didn’t you?” Klein grunted reproachfully from the frog’s stomach. He was absolutely right, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.

“N-no…that’s not true. I mean, you and Agil have to work on weekdays…so I was going to get in touch when things settled down…”

Agil crossed his arms and said, “Our place is closed today.”

Klein followed up with, “And I took a half day and left after lunch.”

“Dicey Café has irregular hours, and I can’t read your mind to know when you’ll take vacation days, Klein!” I argued.

Sinon stopped loading her musket to clear her throat. She grumbled, “Can you get on with it? We’ve got things to do.”

“Oh, sorry, sorry.” Agil got back to the topic at hand. “Anyway, we scraped together some gear and left the ruins for the forest, then got attacked by a trio of PKers. We had stone weapons, and they had iron, plus more armor, so I thought we were in big trouble.”

“That’s when you shoulda seen our combination work,” Klein continued. “We chopped those PKers to pieces, one after the—”

Agil’s deep voice cut him off. “You just hid behind me the entire time.”

“Well, what was I supposed to do? My carryover skill was…”

Klein stopped himself there rather suspiciously. I assumed it was probably something about how his maxed-out Katana skill didn’t apply to the scimitar he had equipped right now.

“So you took out the PKers?” I asked, looking to Agil.

“Yeah…they were an impromptu group, it seemed like, and their teamwork was horrid. So we managed to get through it. But I forgot we were after a grace period, and without thinking, I used an area-attack skill that took out all three of them,” he said, scowling. Agil was a gentle giant of a player, and if the PKers had tried to run, he would have let them.

Leafa approached and patted his burly arm. “Don’t let it bother you, Agil. If they were PKing, they must have known they were likely to get killed by one of their targets. We were attacked by a gang of them yesterday, and Kirito absolutely destroyed them all!”

“H-hey, it’s not like I did it all on my own,” I clarified hastily, then gestured to Agil. “And then what?”

He grinned and patted his gleaming leather armor. “The PKers helpfully dropped some leather armor as well as an iron ax and a scimitar. With that upgrade and the help of the map, we made it to the log cabin, where Asuna said she was worried about you guys and asked us to go help you.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, thanking my partner for her keen thinking. “But wait…How would she know which route we took? How did you two get to this cave…?”

Agil grinned once again, then jutted his chin toward Klein. The scimitar warrior scratched the bandana around his forehead, then inhaled, preparing himself to speak.

“That was through the use of the skill I brought over…”

“Huh? Your skill is Katana, right? What would that have to do with this?” Lisbeth said, speaking for my thought process, too. Leafa, Sinon, and Yui probably wondered the same thing. Everyone looked at Klein, who wore an expression that was impossible to classify.

“It ain’t Katana.”

“Huh?”

“I inherited Pursuit.”

“Huh?!” we shouted together.

In ALO, the Pursuit skill was a useful one, highlighting the footprints of players and monsters and making it easier to find the materials you wanted, but it took great patience to power up, and very few players specifically worked at it. But Klein had worked his main weapon skill of Katana up to the maximum proficiency of 1,000, if I remembered correctly. If he didn’t carry over Katana, then he must have also maxed out Pursuit…

“Why would you be so advanced in a skill like that?” Lisbeth asked, exasperated. Then she realized something and cried, “Oh! Unless you were using it to track and follow cute girls! You creep!”

“N-no! It’s not that! I just worked at it in order to complete the chase quest that Skuld gave to me…”

“……Huh?” everyone but Agil muttered.

Skuld was the name of an NPC we met in the realm of Jotunheim, underneath Alfheim. She was a graceful beauty reminiscent of depictions of Norse Valkyries. Thinking back on it, I recalled that she had given Klein something when we parted ways. So it was an item that started a new quest…and that was the impetus for Klein to work the Pursuit skill up to the max?

“So…did you beat the quest?” I asked.

Klein shook his head sadly. “I was almost finished with it…and then this happened. I hope Skuld’s all right…”

I decided not to ask him what would have happened if he’d managed to finish his Pursuit quest. Better to get back to the matter at hand.

“So you managed to catch up to us thanks to the Pursuit skill you carried over. But the proficiency would have gone down to 100, right? I’m amazed you were able to track us this far.”

“Yeah, well…you can’t actually choose to track a specific player’s footprints at 100, but there was just one party’s worth of prints on the plains. So I figured it must be you guys and followed them here.”

“Ah, I see,” I murmured, satisfied at last. I bowed to Agil and Klein. “You really saved our bacon. If you hadn’t caught her, Yui would have fallen to the ground with the frog.”

“Agil, Klein, thank you!” Yui added, bowing. Both of the big, burly men smiled with embarrassment.

“If only we could have made it in time for the battle,” Agil said.

“I dunno. I’m not a fan of those slimy monsters,” Klein muttered in a tone of voice that suggested he was not at all joking. I pointed at the object he was using as a seat cushion.

“You know that’s the frog’s carcass, right?”

“Huh…? Ueowaaaah!!” he shrieked, bouncing vertically into the air with his legs still crossed. Even Sinon laughed at that.