Sword Art Online - Volume 26 - Chapter 11

11

“Lobelia flowers…”

After some consideration, Sinon concluded that she had no memory of any items by that name.

But before she could ask Chett for more details, Silica and Lisbeth both cried, “Lobelia?!”

“Wait, you know it?” Sinon asked. They nodded, but their faces were grim with fear and alarm.

“…It’s an ingredient for a level-5 paralysis and damage poison,” Silica said in a quiet rasp.

“Is that…in ALO?” Sinon asked.

“No. Not ALO,” said Lisbeth, shaking her head. All eyes trained on her. Her answer took them all by surprise. “Lobelia flowers were from SAO.”

Why would a poisonous flower from the world of Sword Art Online, which had been gone for nearly two years, exist in the world of Unital Ring? That mystery would have to wait. They asked Chett for more information.

She said that lobelia, the necessary item to defeat the giant green wasps, grew at the base of old, dead trees. For one thing, there were no trees on the arid Giyoru Savanna, and any trees that did die would crumble away within moments, so the Patter’s ancestors had been unable to gather enough to stop the giant wasps. But there were tons and tons of trees in the Great Zelletelio Forest, and the dead trees would not just vanish. There were, in fact, dead trees devoid of leaves here and there throughout the forest wherever they walked.

If they had known this was the case, they would have been gathering lobelia flowers from such trees all along, but this was just how RPGs worked. On top of that, they didn’t know what the flowers looked like. Chett had never seen lobelia flowers for herself, so originally they would have needed to go by the description her father had told her. But because Lisbeth, Silica, Argo, Klein, and Agil had been in SAO, they had seen the real plant in Aincrad.

The five SAO players spread out to look for large dead trees. Agil was the first to raise his hand and call out, “Found some!” The others gathered around him.

The ax warrior pointed out a tiny flower hidden at the foot of a decaying tree. Its four petals were a beautiful violet blue, but the way its stalk twisted as though in agony was a bit creepy. The leaves were a purplish green, and the pistil and stamen were black.

“Aww, it’s so cute. It doesn’t look violently poisonous at all,” opined Dikkos, the leader of the Weed Eaters. He crouched down toward the flower, his scale armor clinking loudly, and reached for it.

“Ah!” exclaimed Silica and Agil, but it was too late. He grabbed the base of the lobelia stalk with his bare fingers and pulled it loose.

“Hgyaaaah!” Dikkos screamed immediately, arching his back. Then he toppled to the ground on his left side. His HP bar was now accompanied by an icon of a blue flower on a black background. Dikkos was frozen still, and his HP was slowly decreasing, meaning the Debuff was doing both paralysis and damage.

“C’mon, pal, don’t pluck it with yer bare hand!” exclaimed Argo with exasperation. She took a little bottle from her belt pouch, pulled out the stopper, and stuck it in Dikkos’s mouth. It was an antidote potion that Asuna and Sinon had made with the Pharmaceutical skill, but it was made with random leaves and nuts found nearby and low skill proficiency. If this didn’t work, Dikkos’s adventure in Unital Ring might be about to end.

Fortunately, however, his HP stopped falling after a third or so, and the Debuff icon vanished shortly thereafter. Dikkos sat up unsteadily, moved away from the nearby lobelia flower, and groaned, “Man, that one got me good…I thought the Antivenom and Resistance abilities would help me, but even still, it hit me with a poison status just from plucking it.”

“We warned you it was really dangerous. If you had eaten it, you’d be dead by now,” Lisbeth scolded him.

Wistfully, Chett added, “I thought all humans were smart.”

Despite the unnecessary trouble, everyone had the chance to see what a lobelia looked like, so from that point on, they were able to split into groups of three or four to search and harvest the plants.

At three o’clock, they came back together and tossed their flowers into a large stew pot Klein pulled from his inventory. Despite twenty people searching over a wide area, they didn’t have enough to fill even half the pot. Luckily, Chett told them it was enough.

They set up a hearth and table in front of their storage hut, filled the pot with enough water to soak all the lobelia flowers, then started a low fire beneath it. It started steaming almost instantly, so Sinon quietly asked Chett, “Is it safe to breathe in this steam?”

“It is fine. But Daddy said to never, ever taste the broth.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Sinon said with a smirk, and leaned over the pot. Instantly, her nostrils were full of a smell like nothing of this world—though technically, a virtual world was not “of this world.” The pleasant scent filled her head and left her in a momentary daze.

It was a scent that was sweet and fresh and rich all at once; she imagined that high-end perfumes costing tens of thousands of yen a bottle probably smelled like this, not that she had ever used one. At some point, Silica, Lisbeth, and Leafa had gathered around the pot, breathing it in deeply.

Sinon made sure to get another lungful to enjoy, then exhaled. “I see…No wonder they have to warn people not to taste it.”

“I know what you mean. It smells so sweet,” Silica agreed.

At some point, the pot’s contents had turned the same bright blue as the flower petals. The flowers themselves had wilted, soon to dissolve altogether, it seemed.

Simply plucking one of these flowers barehanded was enough to be nearly fatal, so what kind of poison would you get by boiling an entire pot of them? If someone were to grab the pot and slosh it over everyone here, it would probably be enough to kill every last person in the group. The thought made Sinon shiver.

“…If we can make this poison, then other groups could, too…like Mutasina’s forces,” she murmured. The others nodded, considering the same point. Even aloof Klein was grimacing like he’d eaten something bitter.

“The PKers used plenty of poisons in SAO, too,” he noted. “If this really is a level-5 poison, it’s pretty scary that you can craft it already at this point…”

“We gotta develop an antidote to this stuff quick, too,” Argo added.

Chett’s thin tail swung back and forth. “Lobelia poison is scary, but it’s not scary.”

“Wh-what does that mean?” asked Lisbeth.

The Patter’s little body leaned back as far as it could comfortably go. “Thirty minutes after it is finished, this poison’s color and smell will leach out. Then it becomes water again.”

“……”

The group shared a look. If its efficacy as a poison lasted only half an hour, it would be difficult to use in a large-scale PK attack. But that also meant they needed to start the assault—no, finish—against the wasps within that time frame.

“Chett, how many more minutes until it’s ready?” Sinon asked.

The Patter girl peered into the pot and frowned. “Once all the flowers have melted. Probably about five minutes.”

“Hey, we can’t sit back on our haunches, then,” said Klein. He, Agil, and Argo rushed around to the other members of the group chatting in the area to explain the situation. Sinon, Silica, and Lisbeth arranged little pottery jars on the table and prepared to portion out the poison.

It was impossible to say if their improvised plan would work on the first try. There was a decent chance something unexpected would throw a wrench into whatever plan they had, as with the battle against Mutasina last night. But the strength of VRMMO players was in considering all the different possibilities and stubbornly developing contingency plans. Sinon had learned that from Kirito, and so had the others. No matter how muddy and wretched, whoever survived to the end was the winner. It was the case in GGO’s Bullet of Bullets, and it was true here in Unital Ring, too.

Sinon looked up at the hazy sky, thought about Kirito, Asuna, and Alice, who were off fighting under a different sky entirely, and thought, We’re doing our best over here, too.