Sword Art Online - Volume 25 - Chapter 7

7

The sound of an army of boots scraping against the gravel of the riverbank echoed heavily in the dark of night.

It was a raiding party of nearly ninety, and despite being cobbled together from players threatened into line, there was not a single idle comment from the group. They had originally come together for the purpose of conquering Unital Ring, so their discipline was better than I’d given them credit for.

But our morale was just as high, if not higher. Between the ALO and Insectsite players, we presented a more motley collection, but the forty-four of us lurked in total silence among the woods on both sides of the Maruba. I couldn’t even hear anyone breathing.

Mutasina’s group was traveling along the wide east bank of the river at a measured pace. I could make out not just their torchlight, but also the dull gleam of the flames’ light reflecting off their leather armor.

The real issue was where in the line Mutasina was. We couldn’t activate the trap until we’d identified her location. Currently, the Kirito Army—I had no choice but to begrudgingly accept the name—was split into two groups hiding in the trees on either side of the river. I was in charge of the eastern team, while Asuna led the western team. Only Asuna, Sinon, and I, waiting far upriver, had our ring menus open so we could send a friend message to the other two as soon as we spotted Mutasina, alerting them to her location. So far there had been no word from the other two.

The reason only the three of us had our menus open was because the light of the windows threatened to give away our hiding spots. The three of us were each hiding in brush covered by a thick, light-blocking black cloth. If we had more of that cloth, we could have more players with their windows open, but Asuna hadn’t developed black dye yet. We had repurposed the fabric from black clothing dropped by deceased players.

I stared at the riverbed through a narrow gap in the cloth. The lead torch swaying at the front of the group was under sixty feet away now, and I could clearly see the players.

The front line was made up of tanks, equipped with studded leather armor and round leather shields. Their large bodies and shields were blocking my view of those behind them. I’d have to wait for the first group to pass to search for Mutasina, but being only three feet higher in the woods than along the river, we invited a higher chance of being spotted the longer we waited here.

Just to my right, Kuro’s sinuous body tensed. I ran a gentle hand down its back, mentally willing the panther to stay calm. Misha was also on the east bank, while Aga was waiting with Asuna on the west bank. We’d just have to pray that all three beasts stayed quiet.

The three tanks in the front row passed by, just fifteen feet away.

I recognized the middle of the three, who was especially tall. He was the leader of the Absolute Survivor Squad who’d put together the meetup at the Stiss Ruins: Holgar. He played a cheerful MC onstage, but the look on his face as he walked past was tense and determined.

The studded armor on the tanks was heavy as far as leather was concerned, but they had no throat guards, so their necks were clearly visible. I could see the black rings clearly by the orange light of the torches.

Mutasina said that cursed noose was what would bind the ALO players together and guide them to the final destination. But that wasn’t going to be the end of the game. Where was the fun in playing a game where you carried out orders due to nothing but the terror of suffocation?

I wasn’t crying foul over Mutasina’s play style. She was just taking the best option available to her as one of many players trapped in Unital Ring. And we were doing everything we could to compete with her, too.

Once Holgar and the other tanks had passed, the next group was the lightly armored scouts, dressed in cloth armor and bearing short swords and daggers. No sign of Mutasina yet. Could she be elsewhere? But then you would expect these players to at least chat a little. No, the witch had to be somewhere among the ranks.

Where? Where could she be?

In less than three minutes, the head of the procession would reach the trap. Whatever the case, we had to activate it at that moment. But once it happened, our chances of stopping Mutasina dropped drastically.

Sinon had to be feeling extremely frustrated upriver. I wanted to send her a reassuring message of patience, but I couldn’t spare the attention. I kept my eyes open as wide as I could, staring carefully at the silent army before me.

Night Vision proficiency has risen to 7, said a sudden pop-up window, blocking my sight. I swept it aside, trying to keep my irritation in check.

At that very moment, a silhouette firmly lodged in my memory came into view: a long staff, rising from the center of the group of attackers equipped with leather armor and longswords.

A staff with a huge gemstone embedded into its diamond-shaped head—held by a slender player wearing a white robe with the hood pulled low. That could be none other than Mutasina the witch.

There were two shorter swordsmen in front of Mutasina. Their blackish armor, done in the same style, looked quite expensive for being leather. They wore hats of similar material, and I couldn’t make out their faces, but I presumed that was Viola and Dia, like Friscoll had told us.

And behind her was a tall mage wearing a pitch-black robe. The mage’s staff was quite long but otherwise unremarkable. That had to be the dark mage named Magis. So those four were the entirety of the Virtual Study Society.

Two swordsmen and two mages was a good grouping for a quartet, but it seemed unbalanced to have both spellcasters be dark mages. Presumably, they had inherited the dark magic skill from ALO, but in Unital Ring, magic skills started off locked, and you could only activate them by finding and using a magicrystal of that type. Those were rare enough to begin with; where had they found two crystals, both darkness-type?

I really wanted to find out, but I knew I wouldn’t have the chance to ask. In no more than ten minutes, either Mutasina or I would be dead.

She was coming closer and closer, surrounded by swordsmen like her personal guard. Despite the fist-sized rocks all over the riverbank, her avatar’s upper half stayed almost perfectly still. The other three were the same way…They were extremely used to the full-dive environment. That would mean their senses were proportionately sharp. The moment they were closest to me would be the moment our ambush was most in danger of being exposed.

They were approaching directly, their pace undisturbed. They got closer and closer to the brush where I was hiding…and then passed, heading upriver. Holgar’s front line was already lost in the darkness behind me.

Ahead of their march was a small waterfall about six feet tall, which splashed cheerily. Naturally, the riverbank was blocked off by a steep slope the same height, but the ground was worn away in steps, so even the heavily armored soldiers would be able to get up without trouble.

However, they would not be climbing the slope and proceeding upriver.

The falls rushing over the slope here did not exist two and a half hours ago. We chose a spot where the woods encroached on the water from both sides and then worked together with tons of logs and stone to back up the river, creating an impromptu dam.

I got the hint for this idea when returning from the Stiss Ruins two nights ago, when I used the crafting system to block the entrance to the cave behind the waterfall. I assumed that it would be impossible, but Argo’s insistence that this game was challenging its players’ common gaming wisdom turned into a new perspective for me.

In Unital Ring, players had greater freedom than in SAO or ALO. That included the freedom to change the landscape to a degree. You couldn’t abruptly block off a river with a wall of stone, but if you gave the flowing water a new place to run, it was eminently possible to craft objects within the flow.

First, I stuck sturdy logs into the fifteen-foot-wide river, about three feet apart. Between the logs, I stuck not stone walls, but one-foot stone barriers, slowly and methodically raising the barrier each time.

From upriver, it was obvious that it was an artificial object blocking the flow of the river. But from downriver, the falls where the river spilled over the dam hid it from view. Even farther still, I’d gone down a huge waterfall a hundred feet tall with Alice and Argo in the canoe, so surely the presence of six-foot falls here wouldn’t seem unnatural. Sure enough, the lead of the procession wasn’t stopping. They marched right up to the stair-shaped slope on the right side of the falls. Mutasina was not giving the order to halt.

I could practically feel the prickling nerves of my companions, lying in wait. Every one of them had to be thinking, Hurry, hurry. But not quite…We needed Mutasina’s group to get as close to the falls as possible, or they would be able to rush up the side of the bank to safety.

Just a little closer…Three more feet………

Now.

I hit the SEND button on the message written up in my window.

The simple command FIRE! traveled to Asuna and Sinon at once.

Half a second later, a massive hole appeared in the middle of the fifteen-foot-wide falls, and a pillar of water shot up from the river surface in front of it. Almost as quickly after that, a roar like thunder filled the air.

“Whoa!!”

“Was that lightning?!”

Mutasina’s army was suddenly out of order, players speaking up in alarm. But the real shock was only just starting.

There were five pillars holding up our dam. The four on the left and right were made from good old spiral pine, but the one in the center was rarer, stronger Zelle teak.

The log that had withstood the incredible water pressure against the dam for two and a half hours had just shattered spectacularly, courtesy of a 12.7 mm bullet from Sinon’s Hecate II. One of her six precious bullets remaining, probably never to be replaced.

At our meeting at the log cabin, we naturally considered using the Hecate to snipe Mutasina herself. But the inherited weapon was a true monster, equivalent to my Excalibur or even greater, and demanded stats to match it. In her current state, Sinon couldn’t equip it. Klein suggested creating a transportable rifle stand, and Agil offered to carry it himself, but neither plan would make precision firing possible.

Instead, I suggested fixing the Hecate tight to some logs, preventing any aim adjustment but allowing it to fire at one precise point. Our aim would be pointed not at a player, but at the Zelle teak log holding up the dam.

A direct hit from a bullet that would probably kill the Life Harvester in one shot proved to be more than enough to shatter the twenty-inch-thick log. As for what happened after that…

With a tremendous roar load enough to wipe away any trace of the memory of the gunshot a second earlier, the dam crumbled from the center without its core support.

A deluge of water, littered with shards of stone and wood, was fully unleashed. The front line of Mutasina’s army was swallowed up without a prayer of escape. Even a heavily armored warrior couldn’t withstand the pent-up energy of water held behind a dam for two and a half hours. A number of them tried to cross the flow to climb the banks, but they never got close, screaming as the turgid maelstrom overwhelmed them.

As the chaos unfolded, I watched the center of the formation very closely.

In impressive fashion, the four members of the Virtual Study Society did not succumb to panic in the face of the flash flood. Mutasina did come to a stop, but the swordswomen in black, Viola and Dia, shouted in unison, “Everyone, climb the bank!”

They moved to evacuate to the east of the river—toward the woods where we lurked—but having dozens of damage dealers crowded in such tight formation backfired on them. The tanks and scouts, swept backward by the rush, collided with the damage dealers, tangling up with them and creating a huge obstacle.

Mutasina’s quartet was still for one moment, then swallowed up by water. Whether calm or panicked, no player could stand their ground against the flood.

As soon as I had visual confirmation that her group was flushed, I sent the next message.

GO!

This one was for Asuna, although I sent it to Sinon as well. Together, we leaped from the undergrowth and gave hand signals to our parties lying in wait nearby.

With Kuro very slightly in the lead, I ran at a full sprint on the boundary right between the forest and riverbed. Even at full speed, I could just barely catch up to Mutasina’s group in the water. Perhaps some of the players noticed us, but trapped in the rapids as they were, it was all they could do just to keep from drowning.

As I ran, the force of the rushing water gradually weakened. First, the heavily armored players snagged on rocks or branches on the river floor, then the mid-tier players tangled up with them. At the head of the lightly armored players, still floating on the surface, were Magis and Mutasina, who had to be the lightest of all in terms of equipment weight. They’d been pulled away from Viola and Dia.

So far, everything had gone to plan. Now we just had to wait for Mutasina to stop. I was worried about Magis being so close, but a mage wouldn’t be able to react quickly to a rush attack.

The level of the surge was growing lower. Even the light-armor players were getting stuck now, clambering up onto the shore of their own power. Ahead of Mutasina and Magis, who were still rushing along, was a large sandbank. They course corrected to head for it, jabbing the ends of their staffs into the gravelly front end of the sandbank…and stopping.

This was it.

“Let’s go!” I shouted tersely, and I burst out from the woods, jumping down to the riverbed three feet below. As soon as I landed, my sword was free, and I was running full-bore at Mutasina, who was less than sixty feet ahead. The river flowed between the riverbed and sandbank, but because it was being diverted around that bank, the flow was less than fifteen feet wide, and I could leap over it with the help of a sword skill.

On the far side of the river, Asuna’s team jumped down at the same time, sprinting forward. I could hear the cries and roars of the light-armor units farther upriver as they spotted us, but I had Misha leading a separate group to deal with them.

My job was to remove Mutasina from Unital Ring forever. Going for the kill without mercy did not really resonate with my personal ethos, but I knew from the moment she put the symbol around my throat that she would not compromise through dialogue. Freeing the shackled players and preventing my friends from suffering the same fate required me to do the mission like this, right now.

At the tip of the sandbar, Mutasina and Magis were finally getting up, having noticed our ambush, but their movements were awkward, either from dizziness at being tossed about by the water or because their waterlogged robes were too heavy. Even if they tried to use magic, I could stop their gestures with a sword skill at this distance.

I rested my sword on my right shoulder, prepping for the Sonic Leap skill.

Three steps until I was in range. Two…

Suddenly, the riverbed beneath my feet glowed bluish-purple.

And not just that. There were curves, patterns, and symbols appearing on the rocky surface in a complex texture. It was a magic circle. In fact…

It was the precursor effect to the Noose of the Accursed spell.

The vast circle, 150 feet across, completely spanned both my team and Asuna’s. But why? Mutasina was right in front of me, using her staff to prop herself up. She wasn’t making the activation gesture. The same was true of Magis.

But the last thing I should do was stand around being shocked. I was already under the Noose’s effects, but I couldn’t let the same happen to my friends.

Behind the stunned witch, a monster arose that looked like nothing but some horrible god. It had the torso of a woman, sitting atop a writhing mass of tentacles. Its four arms had two joints each, and its head was all bristling spikes.

“Everyone, get out of the magic circle!! You too, Kuro!!” I shouted as loudly as I could, activating Sonic Leap. I didn’t know how they activated the spell, but as long as I defeated Mutasina, the Noose would be dispelled permanently, even if the others couldn’t escape in time.

“Haah!”

I launched myself off the ground the moment I sensed the system acceleration kicking in, crossing the fifteen feet of river in a single bound and slashing at Mutasina’s helpless, unprotected shoulder.

Kachiiiing! There was a tremendous clatter, and a hard shock ran through my arm, numbing up to my elbow. Behind Mutasina, Magis had stuck out his staff with frightening speed—and his weapon, which looked for all the world like a gnarled tree branch, stopped my sword. The steel blade sank several inches into the head of the staff, but his weapon was clearly finer than it looked, because it stopped my attack cold.

The force of the sword skill dispersed from there, blowing back Mutasina’s hood with a gust of wind. Jet-black long hair whipped violently, and the light of the magic circle revealed a pale face.

Her features were fine and beautiful, just as I recalled. But there was a sharp pang in my mind, a needle of wrongness. The source was…her eyes. Though there was no emotion in her face, there was a patina of fright in her wide gray eyes. The Mutasina I saw in the ruins would not have been alarmed in the least, even with the tip of a sword a hairbreadth from her eyeball.

This was someone else. A body double.

My moment of realization coincided with beams of light shooting from all four of the monster’s arms.

Greeeee!

The beams shrieked like a monster, striking all my companions as they attempted to escape the circle. Unfortunately, I had to assume that no one had enough time to get away. Even the body double before me buckled as the beam struck her exposed throat. Once enough beams had shot out for everyone present, the monstrosity crumbled into nothingness.

Mutasina was somewhere nearby and had arranged for a body double with an identical staff, just to lure us into the range of her Noose—and then cast the suffocation spell on everyone, without mercy. I recalled now that Mutasina had included the members of the Virtual Study Society at the meeting at the Stiss Ruins in order to win the trust of the others—and swept them all up in it. Her companions probably agreed to be part of the lure, and it was a clever plan, no doubt about it—but it made me sick to think about.

With my sword still trapped in Magis’s staff, I asked the unfamiliar body double, “Is this really what you want?”

It was not she who answered, but Magis, who loomed behind her back like a reaper.

“Good grief,” he exclaimed, from the darkness of his hood. “Listen, Kirito. I’m not denying your right to pursue your heroic ideals, but we’re doing our best to beat this game here. Is this really the place for pushing your standards on others?”

His voice was deep and soft, like a teacher’s, but his words were sharp. Yes, everyone had a right to play an MMORPG in their own way, and you couldn’t lecture others on how they should follow your own moral superiority. In fact, it wasn’t just his voice and tone—even his point sounded teacherly…

Suddenly, it struck me:

This was “Sensei.” He was the mystery person who taught Mocri’s party how to fight other players—and possibly instigated Schulz’s group into making their attack. If so, then even this unnecessary conversation was probably masking some strategic purpose of his.

Mutasina had already achieved her goal of casting the Noose on us; all she had to do was activate the effect to bend all of us to her will. All she had to do was bang the butt of her staff against the ground, so why wasn’t she doing it?

Can she not do it yet? Is she in some place where she can’t?

Maybe it was a place without solid ground. Like the river. Or…

“The sky!”

I pushed forward with my sword for all I was worth and looked at the sky.

Although there was no moon, the stars were out. By opening my eyes for all they were worth, my Night Vision effect kicked in, brightening the details a little. Against the dark-gray sky was a black shape, circling silently. It was a huge bird with a wingspan of at least ten feet. I couldn’t see from the ground, but most likely Mutasina was on its back. Perhaps it was circling because it was looking for a safe place to land in the forest.

Once she landed, that would be checkmate. We had to do something while she was still airborne. But I couldn’t reach her with a sword skill, and the only ranged attacks we had were Yui’s fire magic, my decay magic, and Sinon’s Hecate. With the sniper rifle’s aim fixed in place, that was out; and the Flame Arrow starting spell wasn’t going to be strong enough to take down that giant bird. My Rotten Shot spell wouldn’t be much more than a nasty prank.

I briefly glanced upstream, where the enemy forces swept up in the flash flood were starting to recover. Once they recognized the situation, they would follow their initial orders and attack us. It wasn’t clear if the lieutenants would stop them, but we couldn’t just let things play out like this.

About the only option left was to pick up a rock and throw it. I started thinking frantically in that direction when a ferocious roar erupted from behind me.

“Groaaaahh!”

Standing on two legs on the riverbank was Misha the thornspike cave bear, both paws extended to their full length. The zigzagging white pattern on its chest glowed in the faint starlight.

That was right—we did have one ranged attack.

Misha’s chest pattern flashed. The plethora of needles that shot from it sped through the night sky like antiair missiles, enveloping the huge bird that was circling nearly two hundred feet overhead. Feathers exploded without a sound.

It did not succeed at eliminating all of the bird’s HP, but it did cause the creature to lose its balance. The bird started to plummet toward the ground, beating its wings frantically to regain lift.

That was bad. Mutasina still had the option of simply fleeing the area. If she pulled the bird away and out of sight, we’d never get another chance to kill her.

Fall! Please fall! I willed.

Then another burst of feathers fell from the bird’s right breast. I heard a gunshot resound: Baaang…It was not the rumbling boom of the Hecate. Sinon must have left her position to come closer, then shot at the bird with a musket.

The added damage was too much for the monstrous bird to withstand this time. It clumsily flapped its wings and began to descend toward the river. As it flew lower, the figure on the bird’s back came into view.

Mutasina had avoided the needles’ direct blast, but she had no choice of landing spots now. Could I defeat her the instant she came down? That would determine the outcome of this battle.

I let the tension go out of my knees and sank without warning. My sword, still sunk into Magis’s staff, pulled back above my right shoulder. With a very slight adjustment in my stance, the blade began to glow blue. When you couldn’t move your sword, you could move your body to force it into the proper motion for a sword skill.

“Mmm…?” Magis grunted. He tried to leap away, but it was too late.

Pushing the stunned body double out of the way with my free hand, I activated the single-hit Vertical skill with my sword arm.

Shunk! The blade cut through both the long staff and the fingers of the man holding it. Now the mage could not perform any magic spell gestures until he recovered from the localized damage. I would have liked to finish him off right away, but there were more pressing matters.

“Everyone, aim for the spot where the bird falls!” I shouted, leaping over the fallen Magis and launching into a sprint.

I prayed that she would fall somewhere without any impediments downriver, but of course it wasn’t going to be that convenient. The nose-diving bird was going to crash onto the west side of the river, about twenty yards upstream of the sandbank.

Mutasina’s forces were bristling along the right edge of the water, but they either weren’t recovered from the shock of the flash flood yet or were intimidated by Misha’s roar; they were reacting slowly. I would probably still have a chance to get one good hit in on Mutasina after she landed.

I crossed the water with a normal jump this time, over to the west bank. On my left, I was joined by Asuna, her rapier drawn.

A moment’s glance in her direction was enough to spot the dark ring around her slender throat. But there wasn’t a shred of fear in her features. There was only pure concentration in her eyes as she raced for our destination, fully inhabiting the Flash identity once more.

Mutasina’s mount was a bird of prey with dark feathers. I couldn’t tell if it was an eagle or a hawk, but its sharp talons and beak would surely pack a nasty punch. For now, however, it was all it could do to slow down its falling speed, so I didn’t feel the need to count it as an enemy. My only target was Mutasina. I would cut her in two the moment she jumped off the bird’s back and descended to the ground.

As I ran, I measured the timing for my sword skill.

In the back of my head, I envisioned what would happen in several seconds. Mutasina would jump off the giant bird’s back just before it slammed into the riverbank, land, and jam her staff into the ground. I started a mental countdown until the time I’d need to let the Sonic Leap fly, so that I hit her at the same time she landed. Seven, six, five…

Just then, a small figure separated from the falling bird. Mutasina had leaped off.

“…!!”

I held my breath as I ran. She was still at least seventy feet up in the air. There was no way she could land steadily from a height like that. She would suffer huge damage in that fall, unless she’d taken the Landing ability in the Swiftness tree and raised it up to a rank of 10.

Or maybe she had some other method of neutralizing her speed—but Mutasina fell to earth even faster than the bird. Rather than spreading her limbs in an attempt to increase wind resistance, she straightened herself out, jutting the staff in her right hand forward toward the ground.

Suddenly, I realized what she was planning to do. Nearby, Asuna gasped.

“Rgh…”

We picked up our speed. I went into the windup motion for Sonic Leap, while Asuna did the same for Shooting Star. Light infused my longsword and her rapier, and they began to vibrate with high-pitched whines…But before I could launch myself forward, the butt of Mutasina’s staff made contact with a large rock on the riverbank.

Craaaaack! With a sound like a gunshot, the stone split in two.

Mutasina’s hand let go of the staff. She hit the bank shoulder-first, bounced violently, did a somersault, and fell to the ground.

The sigil around our necks—the Noose of the Accursed—began to glow a blue-purple color.

Something sticky blocked my windpipe. I couldn’t breathe in or out. It was that realistic sense of suffocation, the thing I never wanted to experience again.

Ignore it! This is an illusion! I told myself with all the willpower I had, activating Sonic Leap. While Asuna’s attempt stumbled somewhat, she also succeeded at executing a Shooting Star.

Up ahead, the witch in the white robe was lifting herself up. The Noose must have counted as an attack, but her spindle cursor was active over her head. While jabbing the rock with the staff had countered some of the shock of impact, her hit points were still at no more than 20 percent.

Either attack of ours would be enough to finish her off, if they hit her.

“……!!” I roared silently, swinging the glowing green sword right down toward Mutasina’s left shoulder.

The deadly sword tip lunged toward the downcast witch—and then, with phenomenal speed, a dark shadow darted before me and deflected my attack with a slender longsword. Next to me, Asuna’s rapier was handled by another shadow. Two metallic clashes rang out, and orange sparks illuminated the figures.

They were both short women dressed in black leather armor, wearing leather hats of the same color. It was Viola and Dia of the Virtual Study Society. My foe glared at me with fearsome glee and hostility. There was a glowing ring around her narrow neck. Neither of them could breathe, either, but they’d leaped out of the river to defend Mutasina.

The glowing light on my sword and Asuna’s guttered out.

At the same time, the pain in my throat reached its peak, and I fell to my knees. Asuna, too, crumbled on my left. I wanted to help her escape, at the least, but then Viola and Dia fell to the ground, too. Despite knowing about the effect of the spell, the Virtual Study Society members could not withstand its agony, either.

I couldn’t blame them. Even knowing that your real body was still perfectly fine, the sensation of being unable to breathe summoned a primordial fear that numbed the limbs and sapped your ability to think. My heart raced, and the blood pumped tirelessly in my ears.

Straining to look behind me, I could see all our companions kneeling on the riverbed or fallen to the ground. The Bashin, the Patter, and even the pets were included. It was difficult to watch Kuro, Aga, and Misha curled up in agony, the Noose shining around their necks.

On the right, nearly a hundred players had fallen back into the water, struggling mightily. No one could speak, so the only sounds were the rushing of the water and the weak beating of the giant bird’s injured wings, now that it, too, had landed on the riverbed.

In the midst of this quiet hell, the witch slowly rose to her feet.

She squeezed the staff, still stuck between the pieces of the rock, and pulled it out of the ground. The gemstone embedded in the head was glowing the same eerie blue-purple color as the Noose.

Mutasina swept her hood back, revealing her beauty, and surveyed the area. Her facial features were indeed similar to the body double’s, but there was something faintly inhuman about the air of the real thing.

Facing forward once more, her thin lips curved into a hint of a smile.

“Splendidly done,” she murmured, walking up to Asuna and me. She stopped just behind the struggling Viola and Dia and continued, “I had a feeling you would not be so boring as to hide in your base…But I never expected you to dam the river. I’d no idea the crafting system could perform feats like that. Your plan completely surpassed my expectations. I assumed that I would not take more than a tenth of my health in damage all the way to the end of the game, but you nearly killed me by forcing me to jump from my flying mount.”

She chuckled gleefully, and her face blurred into two, then united again. Was it a visual artifact of the Noose, or was it because my biological brain was surging with adrenaline? I could beat Mutasina if I could just slice her now, but there was no strength with which I could hold my sword. Against the panic of the suffocation, it was all I could do to keep my body still.

Asuna had her left hand to her throat, with her right stuck into the sand of the riverbank. The sight of her brought me a fresh wave of fury at the woman before me, but even that was overwhelmed by the horrible inability to breathe.

I had believed that, despite whatever horrible magic Mutasina possessed, she was still nothing but another Unital Ring player. That her cruel methods and mannerisms were simply her particular play style. But I was naive. This woman wasn’t an ordinary person playing the role of the evil witch. She was challenging this world not as a VRMMO gamer, but as something from another dimension entirely.

As though sensing the horror coursing through my mind, she said, “So are you reaching your limit? When I tested this before, no one could break through the three-minute barrier. There is only one way to escape the Noose: to log out. Of course, that will leave your avatar right here, entirely helpless.”

She waved the butt of the long staff in the air teasingly. If we could get her to hit the ground with it, the agony would end.

Suddenly, Mutasina’s smile vanished. With a detached expression, she stared down at me and announced, “Kirito the Black Swordsman. Asuna the Flash. If you would swear loyalty to me in exchange for the end of your suffering, offer your sword hilts.”

In game terms, this was utterly meaningless. If I offered her my sword, I would have plenty of chances to take Mutasina by surprise and ambush her later.

But neither I, nor Asuna, nor any of our companions (I suspected) had the personality…or the beliefs that would allow this. If we pledged loyalty in exchange for our lives, we would have no choice but to play out that choice. Mutasina was demanding an oath on my sword, knowing this about me.

So this is as far as we get.

I couldn’t continue exposing Asuna, our friends, and even Yui to this horrible agony any longer.

With fingers that had barely any feeling, I somehow managed to grab the hilt of my sword, and I tried to lift it.

At that very moment, I heard a splash on the right, followed by light, quick footsteps. Mutasina’s head turned. Despite the stiffness, I managed to turn to my right.

Running through the water, splashing mightily, with long black hair and a white dress…was Yui.

She rushed straight at Mutasina with a determined look in her eyes. Her sword wasn’t drawn, but there was red light in her hands, and the Noose glowed blue around her tiny neck.

Yui was an AI, but she could receive sensory information through her avatar. That included heat, cold, and pain, which she interpreted as pleasant or unpleasant, like a human would. That was one of the core aspects of Akihiko Kayaba’s AI design, and even Yui herself said that she expected not being able to breathe would immobilize her with the same agony that we felt. So how…?

When Mutasina saw her, she leaped backward and tucked the staff under her arm, starting a dark magic by hand. But her motion was awkward since she was holding the staff with her arm against her side.

Noticing this, Yui made an arrow-pulling motion with her reddened hands. Her left hand extended, and with the right pulled back to her shoulder, a narrow line of flames appeared. It was the starter Fire Magic skill technique, Flame Arrow.

Yui aimed it as she ran and clenched her hands without hesitation.

Shwa! The arrow flew forward. Mutasina grabbed her staff again and knocked it away. The arrow burst into sparks and dispersed. That was a similar trick to my spell-blasting technique—but it forced her to cancel the dark magic gesture, and she didn’t have time to start over.

Now just ten feet away, Yui drew her short sword from her left side and jumped mightily.

“Yaaaaah!” she roared, fierce despite her youth. Her small body arched as far as it could in the air, unleashing a vicious strike.

Mutasina, meanwhile, lifted the staff with both hands to block Yui’s sword.

Claaaang! It caused a metallic clash, throwing out white sparks that lit the countenances of the combatants.

The glowing bluish-purple gem in the tip of Mutasina’s staff flickered for just a moment. And at that moment, I felt the sticky object stuck in my throat quiver. So it was true…The effect of the Noose was connected to that staff.

Yui bounced backward and resumed her attack as soon as she landed again. This time, she did not attempt a large swing, but a blindingly fast sequence of swipes. However, Mutasina accurately blocked each one with her staff.

I couldn’t help but be stunned—when had Yui’s skill with the blade gotten so good? She must have been practicing for all she was worth with Alice while we were away at school. I sensed a kind of kindred style with the knight in her movements.

But sadly, her moves were too honest.

That wasn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. If anything, it was a shortcut to improvement. She could learn tricks like feints and sleight of hand later.

But the reason that Alice’s precise and bold style worked was because of the tremendous speed and weight behind it. Yui’s style had plenty of speed, but not much weight. And that meant that even a mage like Mutasina could easily deflect her attacks.

She made to block Yui’s high slice—but it was a feint, and she stepped out of the way to avoid it. Yui’s sword hit nothing but air, and she lost her balance. Mutasina responded with a left knee. The plated long boots she wore went up over the knee, and that hard surface smashed Yui’s little body away as she lunged forward.

My rage at Mutasina and my own impotence reached its peak, and my vision doubled again.

Nearby, Asuna was growling somehow, despite her blocked windpipe, and trying to get up. But she stumbled and fell to the ground again. The suffocation was overriding all of her senses, preventing her avatar from moving.

Yui fell onto the rocks on her back and yelped, “Augh!” That single blow took out nearly 20 percent off her HP. But it only stopped her for a second; she rose quickly, brushing the sand off her cheek and readying her sword again.

Mutasina, who’d been handling her without expression, let her mouth curl with displeasure. She moved the staff to one hand and stuck her free hand into her robe to extract a thin dagger. The blade was as sharp as a clock hand and gleamed coldly in the light exuding from the staff head.

Mutasina was going to kill her.

I struggled against the burning pain in my lungs, trying to think. I couldn’t stand with willpower alone. I had to do something to put the suffocating feeling at bay, if just for a few seconds. Could I overwrite it with something stronger, like pain? No, the pain setting in this game wasn’t as bad as in the Underworld, and I couldn’t hold my sword anyway. I could move my hands, but at best, I could only curl my fingers…

A single idea popped into my head, crackling with electricity.

There were no guarantees it would work. If I failed, I would probably be cut off by the AmuSphere’s safety measures. But I had to try it.

Awkwardly spreading my fingers, I formed a circle with my hands, touching the fingertips together: the gesture for decay magic. That was just enough to be recognized as a successful motion, as a green-gray light spread over my hands.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Yui readying her short sword, while Mutasina responded by flipping her dagger over into a backhand grip.

Not yet. Mutasina hadn’t noticed my plan yet. Right in front of me, Dia had her eyes clamped shut as she withstood the agony, so she hadn’t noticed the color of my magic. Using her body as a visual shield, I judged the proper timing.

Yui’s little form was bent fully forward, her sword held back on the right side. That was the motion for Rage Spike, a low charging skill. Light blue covered her blade, and the air was full of a high-pitched thrum…

Now!

I opened my mouth as wide as I could and pointed my hands at it. At point-blank range, I didn’t need to aim. I clenched my hands, and the gray sphere held in them—the Decay Magic starter spell, Rotten Shot—flew into my mouth with a horrifying squelch.

First, my nose stung with a truly indescribable stench, far worse than any and every smell I’d experienced in my life to that point. Next, a flavor like boiled despair spread throughout my mouth. Tears welled up in my eyes, and my stomach roiled. An overwhelming urge to vomit rose from my gut, tearing open the blockage I felt deep in my throat. It didn’t mean I could breathe again, but at least the paralysis was gone.

I could move.

“Aaaaaaaaah!!”

I turned my urge to hurl into a roar, squeezing my sword and leaping up from my prone position. In an instant, I had leaped over Dia and rushed toward Mutasina. The witch glanced my way, and her eyes bolted open with shock. On pure reflexes, she lifted the staff with her right hand.

Gray light spilled through my gritted teeth as I wound up my sword in the air. The instant my body went into the Vertical posture, the sword itself told me, “You can go farther.” I deepened the stance, and the sword’s vibration strengthened.

“Yaaaah!!” I roared again, activating the four-part Vertical Square, whose proficiency requirements I suspected had only just recently been unlocked.

Mutasina’s long staff blocked the first strike from above, producing an ear-wrenching sound. The blade sank nearly half an inch into the staff’s head, and although the gem flickered violently, it was not enough to sever it. If I’d only used Vertical, I’d probably have taken a dagger counterattack to my side, too.

The second and third attacks were thrusting slashes, high and low. Mutasina rotated her staff and blocked them both. Based on the speed of her reaction, she was familiar with Vertical Square. Undeterred, I placed all my strength into the fourth and final swing downward.

Mutasina dropped her dagger and used both hands to hold the staff up sideways.

The blue light of my sword skill reflected in her dark, wide-open eyes.

I swung the sword not toward the staff, but at the spot between those eyes.

This one did not have the same powerful shock to it. Instead, there was a pleasing crack! and the sword’s path continued down close to the ground, where the rest of its force dissipated into a circle of rising dust.

All was silent for a moment.

Mutasina’s right and left hands held the long staff—but they were now separated by space.

Black flames spurted from the sliced ends of each half of the staff and quickly spread to the entire weapon. The blue-purple gem crumbled quietly, and the shards burned away in the air.

Next, a red damage effect glowed on Mutasina’s forehead. She tossed the burning staff aside, pressed her left hand to the space between her eyes, and took a stumbling step backward.

There was also heatless flames burning on my neck as I waited for the post-skill paralysis to wane. The instant I could feel that the Noose was burning away, the blockage in my throat simply vanished.

“Ahhh…”

I expelled all the air from my lungs, then greedily sucked in a breath of cold, fresh air. The aftertaste of the Rotten Shot still lingered in my mouth, but the deliciousness of the air helped cover up the stench. I could have stood there, just enjoying the act of breathing for several minutes, but the battle wasn’t over. Right behind me were Viola and Dia, and farther back on the sandbank were Magis and the body double, who had all been freed from the Noose as well. I had to eliminate Mutasina from this world before any of them could interfere.

I squeezed the sword in my hand and rose.

The witch stared at me with her right eye, still holding her forehead. I couldn’t see any traces of anger or hatred in her half-exposed features. If anything, there was a faint smile on her lips. It didn’t seem like a bluff…She probably still had some come-from-behind trick up her sleeve.

Behind me, I heard the high-pitched clang of swords meeting, and a voice cried out, “Go, Kirito!”

Most likely, Asuna was holding back the recovered twins on her own. The others were fanning out along the water’s edge to keep the rest of Mutasina’s army at bay. I couldn’t hesitate now. If Mutasina had a secret attack ready, I had to cut her down with it.

I pulled the sword back on the right and leaned forward, in the stance for the low charging skill, Rage Spike. Without her staff or dagger, Mutasina had no means of defending against it.

The witch was still smiling. I stared into her eyes, which seemed as dark as the vacuum of space, and prepared to activate the skill.

But at that very moment, thick, choking smoke billowed up from the left side, blotting out my vision. I smelled nothing and had no difficulty breathing. It wasn’t smoke, specifically, but pure darkness with no physical form.

Suddenly, I felt a presence just to my left. A voice said, “You have my highest compliments for this, Kirito. I hope we meet again.”

It was the voice of “Sensei” Magis, the dark mage who should have been all the way back on the sandbar. I canceled the Rage Spike and slashed out on the left side but felt nothing.

“Nobody move!” I warned my friends, waiting for the blackness to dissipate. If this was made of magic, it wouldn’t last long.

As I suspected, the darkness began to fade in just ten seconds. If Magis’s words weren’t a ruse, he and Mutasina would have disengaged from the scene, but they couldn’t have gotten far yet. Once the starlight was about half its previous brightness, I raced for the spot where Mutasina had stood.

But there was no sign of the witch or Magis. I swept my eyes from the upstream riverbed, to the woods at my west, then downstream, but I couldn’t spot any human figures. It was as though they had completely vanished with the smoke.

“Kirito…,” whispered a nervous voice. I turned around to see Asuna with her rapier in hand—and fortunately unhurt. Relieved, I asked, “Where are Viola and Dia…?”

“They vanished within seconds of being engulfed in that smoke. Though, they couldn’t have gone far…”

“Exactly…”

Perhaps it was a double deception spell, and they were still hiding nearby. If we searched behind every rock and tree, we might find them, but there wasn’t time for that—not when nearly a hundred players were facing off against Agil and Klein with weapons drawn at the water’s edge.

But actually, there was one more thing.

Asuna was thinking it, too. We raced to the center of the riverbed, where Yui was standing stock-still.

“Yui!”

“Yui, honey!”

The little girl, still holding her short sword in shock, flinched and looked in our direction. An innocent smile lit up her sand-caked face.

“Papa, Mama!” Yui ran over toward us, and Asuna and I knelt down to catch and embrace her.

I still didn’t know how she’d been able to move under the effect of the Noose of the Accursed, but we would have plenty of time for questions later. If Yui hadn’t done her best, we would have either surrendered to Mutasina’s army or been slaughtered.

How long had we been doing this?

It felt like the mood had softened, so I looked up. Over in the river, all the players in Mutasina’s army had lowered their weapons and were looking at us with new expressions.

I spotted Holgar among them and got to my feet. Now that the Noose had been dispelled, they were probably realizing that they didn’t need to fight anymore. But not only had they been in a wartime mood for the past three days, they’d just been swept down the river by our trap, so they might not be able to change their minds in the moment. I needed to start a serious dialogue with Holgar, who held a leadership position.

After just a step or two toward the river, another thought struck my mind, and I looked downstream at the sandbar.

But the body double I’d knocked over there was already gone.