Sword Art Online - Volume 28 - Chapter 7

7

“Wow…Wh…what a view…,” murmured Lisbeth slowly.

“It really is,” Silica agreed, taking a step forward. Lisbeth immediately reached out and grabbed the strap of her leather armor.

“Hey, watch it!”

“Look, I’m not a child,” Silica protested, but stepped obediently back into her original position.

Barely two yards from where they were standing, the rocky ground was cut vertically clean away, revealing a sheer cliff that ran down for two hundred yards. In the world of Unital Ring, where players couldn’t fly, falling was a death sentence.

But the view to the south of the cliff was so vast, so grand, it made her forget all about the fear of death. In the foreground was lush, thick forest, while in the middle distance on the right was a large, snaking river. In the distance was a seemingly endless plain, broken up by one abnormally sharp range of rocky mountains. And, of course, a pale full moon shone quietly down upon all of it.

The scale of the map felt like that of Alfheim, and there were plenty of two-hundred-yard cliffs all over that world. And hey, their home base of New Aincrad, where they tended to play and start their adventures, was floating over ten thousand yards in the sky.

But gazing at the landscape of Unital Ring seemed to speak to her soul in a way she never felt in ALO. It wasn’t just a high level of fidelity and resolution. The way the breeze brushed her cheek, the smell of the earth and grass and water, the howling of the beasts in the distance—all that sensory information held such an overwhelming realism and made her feel like she was truly on a journey in another, equal world. She hadn’t felt that kind of sensation since being trapped inside Sword Art Online.

Except for one other time. It was early in the morning of July 7 that year, a day she would never forget, when she accepted Yui’s invitation and dived into the Underworld, a true alternate universe. They appeared in a barren hellscape called the Dark Territory, but she was stunned to see how each and every grain of sand was modeled in exquisite detail.

It had been nearly three months since then in the real world. Silica didn’t know all the details of the Otherworld War, but as she understood it, blood was shed, and events continued to roil within the accelerated universe of the Underworld. Kirito and Asuna had stayed behind and worked very hard to bring about an age of peace, and she assumed it had managed to hold, but…

Silica turned and looked to the north.

On her left was a mostly collapsed stone enclosure that was the exit to the very long staircase dungeon that had brought them up there.

From there, a small, faint path wound through wild land to the north. After about ten minutes of running, it ran into a large river, though not quite as big as the Maruba River on the first tier below. On the far bank of that river was the remainder of a small town where all of Silica’s and Lisbeth’s companions were staying: Sinon, Klein, Argo, Leafa, Yui, Holgar, Zarion, Ceecee, Friscoll, their pets Aga and Kuro, and the then-logged-out Kirito and Asuna.

Silica and Lisbeth had gone back across the river and run almost two miles to return to this point to perform reconnaissance on the route from the staircase enclosure to the village ruins.

Though they hadn’t seen the whole thing, their understanding was that the world of Unital Ring was a circular map made of three concentric steppes. The Stiss Ruins, where all the ALO players started, was at nearly the exact southern tip of the first tier. About twenty-five miles north of that was Ruis na Ríg, formerly known as Kirito Town, and another few miles north of that was the two-hundred-yard Last Wall. After ascending the staircase dungeon inside the cliff, you reached the spot where Silica and Lisbeth stood, the entrance to the second tier of the map.

The goal of all the players funneled into Unital Ring was to reach the place revealed by the heavenly light at the center of the unseen third tier before anyone else did. Naturally, their group was trying for the same thing, but this world was too dangerous to simply rush straight ahead without thinking.

The existence of stamina points (SP), thirst points (TP), and an extraordinarily elaborate crafting system pointed to the focus of Unital Ring as a survival RPG. In other words, being able to replenish supplies was the highest priority. That meant their first objective after reaching the second tier should be to build a new base and establish a supply line from Ruis na Ríg, their main base. Running back and forth through the monster-infested staircase dungeon was a very inefficient method.

“It doesn’t seem like any monsters pop up along the route from here to the ruined village,” Lisbeth commented.

Silica reached up to pet Pina, who was sleeping on her left shoulder. “Agreed… I think making our second base in the village would be a good idea.”

“Plus, we can make use of the buildings. The only question is how to connect it to Ruis na Ríg. I wonder if we could build a staircase on the outside of the cliff.”

“Kirito was saying he thought there would be some gimmick that makes that impossible. Like a nest of super-strong monsters partway down the cliff…”

“Oh, I can see that happening. I mean, they already send bears and boars and stuff to attack you when you try to build a house. Hmm…”

Lisbeth grunted and turned back toward the cliff. She hemmed and hawed, then started walking. Silica noticed what she was doing and shouted, “H-hey! You just warned me about how dangerous that is!”

“Huh…? Oh, sorry, sorry,” Lisbeth said, sticking out her tongue. She opened her inventory and pulled out a rope wrapped around a stick.

When they had first been sent to this world, they could only use Crude Thin Rope made of woven ubiquigrass, which was found everywhere. Now that Ruis na Ríg had developed quite a bit, however, they had Sturdy Linen Rope made of three strands of hemp fiber, which the Bashin sold from their general store.

Lisbeth undid the much tougher rope and tied it around the trunk of a shrub growing near the cliffside, then passed the other end around her belt and tossed it toward Silica.

“Loop it through your belt, too, and tie it around that tree.”

“…All right.”

Silica did as Lisbeth said and pulled hard on the rope, just to test it out. Because it was a virtual world, she knew it would be fine as long as the rope, belt, or shrub never reached a durability of zero. But the prickly sensation of the hemp fiber was so realistic, she felt she needed to double-check.

“Well, it’s tied… You’re not thinking of descending the cliff, are you?”

“No, no! We don’t have anywhere near enough length to get down,” Lisbeth pointed out. She approached the edge and got down on her stomach so she could poke her head over the edge and look straight down.

Silica hoped she wasn’t just trying to get a cheap thrill. She set Pina down, then lay down next to Lisbeth and inched her way forward until she was looking down the cliff, too.

She was instantly overcome with mild vertigo. Two hundred yards was about the same height as the observation deck on the Metropolitan Government Building in Tokyo. There were no streetlights, but thanks to the bright virtual moonlight and her Night Vision skill, she could clearly see the forest below.

The little part of the vast Zelletelio Forest that was glowing a warm orange was Ruis na Ríg. Looking straight down, she saw an especially large and round broadleaf tree. The domed space beneath its canopy was where they found the nest of dangerous gilnaris hornets. Despite having twenty-four people, they nearly suffered major fatalities, so hearing from Kirito’s group that the hornet swarm hadn’t repopulated afterward was a major relief.

But there was no guarantee the hornets wouldn’t come back at some point, and there were more weakling monsters in the staircase dungeon hidden behind the nest, so they definitely wanted a detour that would allow them to safely and reliably replenish supplies while avoiding the dome and the dungeon. Also, Misha, the thornspike cave bear Silica had tamed, was too big to squeeze through the dungeon, so they’d need a different means of getting up if they wanted it to travel to the second tier with them. Unlike Aincrad and Alfheim, this was the rare virtual world that allowed for free building, so they had to use the tools available to them.

“The wall is virtually vertical, so as long as we have the materials, we should be capable of building an external staircase,” Silica murmured.

“Exactly,” Lisbeth agreed. “But then, look…you see that?”

She leaned out another six inches so she could point out a spot on the cliff. It occurred to Silica that they were tied to the same rope, so if Lisbeth slid over the edge, she’d go down with her. But she inched forward a bit anyway and peered harder.

Around the middle of the cliff, a hundred yards from the ground, it looked like there was a divot in the wall, triangular in shape. The divot was about as tall and wide as a two-story house. They couldn’t tell how deep it went, but based on the light and shadow, it seemed like it went in even farther than that.

“Why didn’t we notice such a huge depression when we were looking up at the cliff…?” Silica grumbled.

Lisbeth waved away her concern. “Because the forest is so thick that there are no gaps in the canopy. You could barely even see the cliff while walking down there, and right at the foot of the cliff, the angle’s too steep to see it, I bet.”

“Okay…so how did you know it was there, Liz?”

“When we were going up the dungeon, I thought I heard this groaning sound while we were partway up the stairs. I was thinking it was the boss, but the boss turned out to be that golem, right?”

“Really? That’s all it took for you to think it was on the outside of the cliff?”

“I mean, it just makes sense, right?” Lisbeth said with total confidence. She did have a point, though. In classic, pre-full-dive open-world RPGs, faint footsteps and groans were a classic hint and warning to the player. If you heard something making a sound, that meant it was somewhere nearby.

“…I think Kirito’s guess is right. There’s probably a super-powerful monster in that alcove that attacks anyone trying to climb up the outside of the wall…”

“The only question is how far its reaction radius goes.”

“I’m guessing it’s not just a simple sphere, either… The cliff goes for hundreds of miles to the east and west. Each guardian probably has to cover a very wide area.”

“I wonder if it’ll attack once you climb about halfway up.”

“Hopefully there’s a way to figure that out without risking any harm…”

The pair stopped to consider this. Whoever created this game might have designed the Last Wall to be difficult to reach so players had to start over from scratch in the second tier. But according to the therians from Apocalyptic Date who tried to kidnap Yui, no one else aside from Kirito’s team had been able to build a large base or town just a few miles from the wall yet. They had to press the advantage.

“I’d at least like to get a peek at this monster, you know?”

“Hmmm,” mumbled Silica. She opened her inventory without a real plan and scrolled through the list of random odds and ends she’d collected over the week since the forced conversion into this game. Over half of them were materials like stones and logs, with the next most frequent being water and food. There wasn’t a single fashionable piece of equipment. In ALO, she could have started her own shop; she’d had so many.

Nothing seemed like it was going to be useful here, she concluded, scrolling all the way to the bottom of the list ordered by recency. Among the narrow ropes and little stones, there was one item that said simply: Bisque Pot.

All their drinking water was stored in ceramic bottles they’d made at the log cabin in Ruis na Ríg; the item name was Water-Filled Bisque Bottle. She would have expected it to be an empty pot, but in that case, it would say Bisque Pot (empty).

Silica pushed herself backward, then sat up, tapped the name of the pot, and materialized it. A small pot appeared above the window, its lid sealed with a material that looked like wax. She tapped it to bring up the properties window. Below the item name, weight, and durability was a small description.

A bisque pot with something inside. You can’t tell what the contents are until you open it.

“What does that mean?!” she shouted, drawing a funny look from Lisbeth.

“What’s that thing, Silica?”

“I don’t actually know… Based on the order when I sorted by time of acquisition, I must have picked it up on the first day.”

“Hmm…Well, go on and open it,” Lisbeth said casually. Silica pushed the pot forward with both hands.

“Then you do it, Liz.”

“Why me?! It’s your thing!”

“If there’s something nice inside, you can have it.”

“Okay, you said it! No take-backsies if it’s stuffed full of valuable jewels!” Lisbeth grinned, taking the pot. She took a knife from her belt—not a stone knife, but her own steel knife—and cut into the wax sealing the lid to the pot.

Once the tip had done a full circle around, the entire pot flashed faintly. The item name had presumably changed, too, but it would be quicker to just open it up.

Lisbeth slowly put the knife back in its sheath, taking her sweet time, then gripped the edges of the lid with her fingertips. After milking the moment for three more seconds, she popped the lid off. The reaction was instantaneous.

“It smells!!” they screamed together. Even Pina, who had been peacefully sleeping in the grass nearby, hissed, “Kyupe!” which was a sound they’d never heard before.

The stench was tremendous. It wasn’t just a bad smell or a rotting smell. It was like an ultra-dense, fermenting stench of countless olfactory elements compressed to maximum saturation, all penetrating their nostrils at once and stinging them straight in the center of the brain.

“W-wad id diz?!” Lisbeth wailed. Silica was avoiding breathing through her nose, too.

“Wiz! De wid, de wid!”

“Wid? Whad do you mean…? Oh, lid.”

Even after the lid was back on, the stink stubbornly hung in the air, refusing to move on in the breeze. It only went away after ten long seconds.

Silica took several breaths to clear out the smell, then reached forward to tap the pot again and bring up the properties window. As expected, the item’s name had updated. It went from Bisque Pot to Pot of Thoroughly Fermented Whither Soup.

“Thoroughly Fermented Whither Soup…?” they said together in total disbelief. Whither was the name of a type of grass that grew on Giyoru Savanna…but that put another idea in their heads.

“Shirodatsu!” Lisbeth shouted.

“Niimoji!” Silica shouted back. They glared at each other.

According to Yui, both shirodatsu and niimoji were regional names for taro stalk. The Bashin people who lived in the basin of the Giyoru Savanna loved to boil woven whithergrass and eat it, and the resulting texture was identical to that of taro stalk. On their first night, Silica and Lisbeth and Yui met the Bashin and were invited into their tent to have whither soup. Silica even had seconds. She was willing to have more of it, it was true, but why was it in her inventory, and why did it smell so horrendous?

She read the descriptive text on the window.

Whither soup that has been sealed and fermented over a week. The fermentation process is rarely successful, and usually expands to shatter the pot. The Bashin consider thoroughly fermented soup to be the greatest of delicacies, and those who can eat an entire pot are hailed as heroes.

“…What would’ve happened if it exploded in my inventory…?” Silica wondered. The mental image caused her to shiver. “It’s a mystery why I had a pot of whither soup in my inventory, but it seems like it fermented over the past week… I thought food in item storage wasn’t supposed to go bad, but I guess fermentation works differently…”

“Is it just me, or is there a contradiction in the fact that it’s the greatest delicacy, but it takes a hero to actually finish it?” Lisbeth pointed out. They would have to ask the Bashin to figure that one out. In any case, Silica wasn’t up for the challenge, and she wasn’t going to put it back in her inventory, either.

“You want to have it, Liz?” she suggested. Lisbeth violently shook her head no, so Silica picked up the pot and set it down on a nearby rock. However long the durability would last in the open, there was always the possibility it might save some starving person later.

It was almost midnight. They didn’t lure out the monster lurking in the cliff depression, but at least they confirmed the safety of the route to the village ruins.

“Well, we should get—”

Silica stopped herself from finishing that sentence. She stared at the pot she’d just set down, then turned to Lisbeth.

“Hey, Liz.”

“You’re gonna eat it after all?”

“No! I was going to say…what do you think will happen if we drop the pot into the cliff depression?”

“……”

Lisbeth considered this for a while, then said, “I think any monster with a sense of smell will be pissed off.”

“Do you think it’ll climb up here?”

“If it does, we can just cut the rope and run to the staircase down, right? It’s not going to chase us down into the dungeon.”

“…I’m going to take your word on that, Liz!” Silica said, beaming. She picked up the pot of fermented whither soup, made sure the rope tied to her belt was snug around the tree, tiptoed to the cliffside, and peered down.

The floor of the depression in the wall formed a stone lip that extended about one yard outward from the cliff. She could probably drop the pot right next to the cliff face and get it to land on the lip, but aiming was tricky enough that it might hit some little bump on the cliff face and either break there or deflect and shoot past the stone lip.

She stuck the pot out over empty space and carefully took aim. If she added any sideways force when dropping it, there was no telling where it would end up. She focused all her concentration on the weight in her hands, willing it to fall directly vertically. When she felt the weight was equal on both hands, she carefully let go.

Immediately, her body lurched forward. But Lisbeth was behind her, ready for that to happen, and pulled on the lifeline, preventing her from plunging to her death.

The excitement was worth the trouble; the pot fell straight down with uniformly accelerated motion, then disappeared into the darkness. About four or five seconds later, they heard a faint crashing sound.

Both of them wrinkled their noses, sniffing for the smell. She didn’t think they would be able to smell it from one hundred yards away, but sure enough, that indescribably awful fermenting stench reached them faintly on an updraft.

She had just taken a step back from the edge when there was a bizarre sound from below, like a long leather strap being swung around at high speed. It took a little while for her to recognize it as the roar of a living creature.

The girls shared a look, then peered down the cliff again.

At that very moment, a dark shadow flew out of the depression in the cliffside far below. It was more than three yards wide and nearly twice as long. The finer details were unclear, but it was not a mammal, a bird, or a dragon. The sides of its long, simple torso seemed to be rippling rapidly. Those were…legs. Small and short segmented legs, but still twenty inches long, located by the dozens on the sides of its body—and they gripped the rock face firmly. It looked like a gigantic sea roach or wood louse.

The giant arthropod stopped a few yards above the depression that was its nest, long antennae waving. It found what it was looking for, then roared, “Byurrrruuuu!” and began to race directly up the cliff with a speed that did not match its size.

“…That’s not coming all the way up here, is it?” Silica said.

Lisbeth said, “I think it might.”

Pina peered down between them and cried, “Kwee.”

Perhaps the fragrance of the fermented whither soup counted as an attack; there was a dark red spindle cursor above the giant sea roach’s head. Its proper name was Genoligia, and, like the Life Harvester they’d fought three days before, it had three HP bars. She had no idea what that meant.

The Genoligia raced up the cliff, its multitude of legs rippling in waves, and in no time at all, it had crossed the halfway point up to the top, with no sign of stopping.

“Let’s run!” Silica cried, scooping up Pina. Lisbeth had no argument, pulling her knife free and cutting the rope. They turned and started to run for the stone enclosure that held the entrance to the staircase—but before they could run in, the wavelike sound of the Genoligia’s feet stopped.

They paused in mid-run, listening carefully. But all they heard was the sound of the breeze rustling the shrubbery around them.

This is totally the kind of thing where you think you’re in the clear, and then it jumps right in front of you, Silica thought, but against her better judgment, she approached the cliff and peered down.

The Genoligia was about thirty yards below her, stopped at a total of a hundred and seventy yards off the forest floor below. Its antennae, nearly half the length of its body, waved back and forth. From this distance, the moonlight put its features in much clearer relief.

The huge body was six yards long and comprised a myriad of segments with an uncountable number of legs. The rounded head had two curving compound eyes and a row of four simple eyes, and a set of huge, jutting jaws like steel cutters. Even Zarion the beetle-man and his thick body armor would be split in half in seconds by those things.

The Genoligia had clearly sensed Silica and Lisbeth. Not only that, but it seemed to recognize they were the culprits behind the hideous stink bomb dropped on its nest. But it would not move beyond the thirty-yard line. Within moments, it turned around in disappointment and slowly descended the cliff face.

Lisbeth exhaled with relief. Still clutching the knife, she said, “Looks like it can’t go any higher than that…”

“I agree. I suppose it can’t go more than seventy yards or so from its nest in either direction, vertically.”

“Yeah. But I’m thinking it can probably go for miles horizontally. If you look at where it stopped, you can see how the color of the cliff—or more like the texture itself—is different above it, right?”

Indeed, the area below the line where the Genoligia stopped had a slightly brighter sheen to its surface.

“So you think…the area where it crawls is polished because the friction of its legs has worn it down?”

“Yeah, probably. If we check during the daytime from a spot in the forest with a good view, we might be able to narrow down its movement range.”

“So if we stay outside that range, we might be able to build a staircase of our own…”

“I’m not sure. Maybe we can avoid that huge-ass wood louse’s territory, but there’s a good chance it’ll just put us in range of some other monster guarding the cliff.”

“Oh… Maybe the reason the Patter and the Bashin have a rule that you must not climb the Last Wall is because if you try to climb it, you’ll always get attacked by a monster like that, no matter where you are.”

“Yeah. It’s disappointing, but I don’t think we can build a resupply route on this cliff,” Lisbeth said.

Silica agreed. A boss monster that could climb freely up and down a sheer cliff and had three HP bars was far too dangerous to fight when the only arena was a two-hundred-yard cliff. Maybe there was some other way—like pouring oil onto the nest from above and lighting it on fire—but you never knew if that would cause it to cross its territorial line and attack. It had been that angry over a pot of spilled soup that was a little stinky. Okay, a lot stinky.

“…Let’s consider this a win for getting some information on the obstacle boss,” she said, and lifted Pina onto her head.

Before they left, she took one more gaze at the forest below and the patch of orange light in the distance. If they were going to build a new base on the second tier, they might not be back in Ruis na Ríg for a long time.

It had been a lucky accident that the log cabin landed in a place surrounded by so many resources. Plus the fact that it hadn’t been smashed in the fall, that they had been able to protect it from various dangers, and that it had grown into such a big town. That was thanks to the hard work of the team, of course, but it was also a product of just about as much luck.

Kirito and Asuna were the owners of the house, but to Silica, and probably to Lisbeth and their other friends, that log cabin was home…their home in the virtual world.

We will be back, she said silently to Ruis na Ríg’s lights, and turned away. Lisbeth was holding the severed ends of the rope and staring at them closely.

“…I’m sorry you had to cut the rope. I have some hemp fibers, so I can repair it when we get to the ruins,” Silica apologized.

“Oh, no, it’s not that,” Lisbeth insisted, shaking her head. “I was wondering how long you can make ropes in this world.”

“Huh?” Silica replied. This was not the response she expected. “Well…if the rope ends are the same type, you can use some material items to connect them together… So if it’s like the real world, you can probably make it as long as you want. It’s just…”

She imagined an impossibly long rope and tried to explain.

“The longer you make it, the heavier it will be, so eventually, I feel like the weight will surpass the rope’s durability, and it might just snap once that weight is dragging on it in the air.”

“True…,” said Lisbeth, bobbing her head up and down. “But it means that if you have a suuuper-light, suuuper-long rope, you can probably hang it a suuuper-long way, right?”

“W-well, maybe… Are you talking about a distance of, like, a hundred yards?”

“No. Three miles.”

“Th-three miles?!” Silica shrieked.

She’d heard the ropeway in Hakone was about four miles long, but that “rope” was made of thick steel and had over ten support towers. She didn’t know the world record length for a suspended rope without intermediate supports, but three miles seemed simply impossible. If it wasn’t possible with real-world science, then there was no way they’d get it done in Unital Ring, where they could only weave hemp ropes. But why was Lisbeth thinking about this…?

Silica considered the question until a particular image floated into the back of her mind. She spun around and looked at the lights of Ruis na Ríg again. Then she glanced at the rope hanging from Lisbeth’s hands.

“…Are you suggesting we connect this spot to Ruis na Ríg with one of those…diagonal ropes you slide down with a pulley…?”

“Zip line.”

“That! You want to connect a zip line?”

“Yes!”

Lisbeth held up the rope to show her. Silica stared at it. Five seconds later, she opened her mouth to correct one mistake.

“…Three miles of rope won’t be enough. This spot is two hundred yards higher than Ruis na Ríg, so using the Pythagorean theorem…”

“Oh, right. Umm, if the base is three thousand and the height is two hundred, then the diagonal length is…ummm…”

“Liz, aren’t you studying for college?”

“Please don’t bring back traumatic memories,” Lisbeth pouted. Despite that, she managed to calculate the length rather quickly. “Three thousand squared is nine million, two hundred squared is forty thousand, so combine the numbers to make nine million and forty thousand, the square root of which is…three thousand and six-point-something? It’s barely any different!”

“If you factor in some slack for the rope and the length you’ll need to secure them at the ends, you’d want an extra hundred yards, I suppose. Plus…the angle is barely four degrees or so, so the question remains if you can even slide down it the whole way…”

“Don’t play games with a four-degree incline! That’s really hard to climb on a bike without help!”

“Sure, sure,” said Silica, turning to look at Ruis na Ríg one more time.

The idea sounded crazy the first time, but the image in her head wasn’t going away. If anything, it seemed even more vivid and possible as time went on.

How cool would it be to have a rope connecting this spot to Ruis na Ríg, so you could slide all the way down at terrific speed? A zip line would mean they didn’t need to be anywhere near the cliff face. Even if the Genoligia had the means to attack from a distance, the rope would still be over four hundred yards from the cliff by the time you’d descended thirty yards from the top. There was no way any ranged attack would cover that kind of distance.

“Whether it’s feasible or not aside, I think it’s worth suggesting to the group,” Silica said, watching their little town in the distance.

Lisbeth walked up next to her and said dramatically, “Believe you can, and you’re halfway there…Theodore Roosevelt.”