Chapter 320: Chapter 21: A Real Bug
Clear the game’s hundredth floor, and everyone could return to the real world—that was what Kayaba Akihiko had announced on the game’s very first day.
But this palace, the last of them all, the room that should have belonged to [An Incarnation of the Radius]—the final boss—held nothing that fit the profile of a boss at all. Then again, even if it had, Yimi probably wouldn’t have understood what she was looking at.
As she stepped, puzzled, through the middle of the chamber, the floor’s telltale signs revealed themselves little by little with each shift of her view: gaps opened between the hall’s walls, like textures that hadn’t quite mapped flush, and in places overhead the ceiling even showed the jumbled disorder of a program that had failed to load.
Odd conditions like this were something Yimi had never once seen in any other world. And it truly was abnormal. For the sake of optimization, SAO did blur scenery you weren’t directly looking at—but scene loading ran continuously all the same. Plenty of places set traps that demanded quick reactions to dodge; being ambushed and killed because a texture hadn’t loaded was a hundred percent impossible.
It wasn’t just the one spot; the more she moved around, the more such flaws she turned up. Drawing close, she shut one eye and pressed the other right up to the gap, and what she saw didn’t seem to be the scene on the other side of the wall at all, but a broad, jarringly out-of-place stretch of green lawn.
"Mm?"
Faintly, there was a sense of déjà vu, too: when she’d first arrived in this world, the spot she’d landed in had been a wide grassy field—though at the time she’d been too busy crying her heart out to be in any mood to admire the scenery around her.
Her grasp of this world was only rudimentary. The chubby middle-aged man who often bought Kitty Cuisine had told her a new floor would surely have even tastier things—but here there was nothing whatsoever.
Yimi turned and walked to the next gap, and caught sight, through this crevice no more than two meters (about six feet) from the last, of a scene utterly unlike the one before—dim and gloomy, though in truth it was just the standard labyrinth zone every floor had. Behind a humanoid monster sat an unopened treasure chest, and Yimi couldn’t help leaning in toward it. But at the wall that should have blocked her, her body passed slightly through instead—a gap about the width of a grown adult’s thigh, just enough for her to squeeze into.
Her whole body had come out into the labyrinth, yet when she looked back she couldn’t see the narrow passage she’d come through, and taking a couple of steps that way wouldn’t bring her back either. Here, at last, SAO had produced a real bug.
Yimi couldn’t make heads or tails of what was happening. She walked toward the chest, and the monster that seemed to be standing guard woke at once—yet only stood there dumbly, not attacking her right away.
"Tornado Slash!"
It was a good habit she’d picked up from Kaido-sensei—calling out the move’s name before she struck.
A single horizontal sweep of her spear knocked out a full quarter of the monster’s HP—a rather surprising result. Before she’d run into Kirito, Yimi had lived out in the wild for a few days, and every monster she’d met, without exception, had gone down in one hit. Yimi whirled her spear and, unusually, stayed on the ground to chain a full combo and finish the monster off—though of course she couldn’t collect the heap of experience it dropped.
The monster wasn’t the point anyway. With it dead, she trotted up to the chest. It wasn’t locked—the kind you could just open. More than whatever it might hold, Yimi was more interested in the chest itself, big enough to fit her human form inside.
But just as she reached out, the chest suddenly flew open on its own.
"Rraaah—"
It bared a mouthful of fangs and clamped straight down on her upper body.
Delicious child.
"Mmf!"
Yimi kicked out with her little legs, the tail behind her lashing along with them. She hurriedly stuffed the chest into her inventory to free herself—but the thing then took up a good chunk of the space she’d only just cleared after finishing her catnip.
Too weird. This place didn’t have anything tasty at all, and there were creepy things besides!
Losing interest, Yimi took out the Teleport Crystal and returned to the Knights of the Blood on Floor 55.
"Bleargh—I never want to eat that thing again as long as I live!"
She happened to catch the sound of the guild members returning in triumph.
"Ha ha, there are still forty-some floors to go. We’ll definitely be using it again, so get used to it bit by bit."
"If I’d known this boss was this easy, there’s no way I’d have eaten it!"
"Or maybe it felt easy precisely because so many of us ate the dish. Nobody even had to use their revival chance. Going forward, if we can manage it, everyone should have one for boss fights. And—keep your voice down, don’t let—"
Don’t let the little one hear, or she’ll probably get upset.
After all, the Rat Soup’s requirement was to "eat it all"—though not so strict that not a scrap could remain; roughly finishing it off was enough. But mid-boss-fight there was certainly no room to test the waters—were they going to wait until they were losing, then all start chugging soup together? Life here came only once; no one dared make that kind of joke.
"I’m back." Asuna pushed open the door, looking at Yimi, who sat in a chair pretending to be perfectly well-behaved.
Asuna did have a residence outside headquarters, but ever since Yimi came along she’d basically been living inside HQ.
"I didn’t do anything." To keep Asuna from suspecting she’d wandered off, Yimi spoke up first to head off her doubts.
Guiltily, she felt for the Mimic tucked away in her Storage Space.
"...Oh-ho?"
Asuna set her hands on her hips and looked down at the haphazardly cut cloth on the table, assuming the girl felt guilty over leaving a mess.
"Thanks to you, this operation didn’t have a single casualty." Kirito, who’d come in with Asuna, set a box of sweets he’d made a point of buying into Yimi’s hands.
Because of this child, he’d lately taken to dropping by the Knights of the Blood constantly, and since both Heathcliff and Asuna had given him the green light, more than a few members who pined after Asuna were grinding their teeth with envy.
Heathcliff’s attitude toward him was a little strange; Kirito knew full well the man had almost certainly seen him use Dual Blades during the earlier GeoCrawler operation.
He gently touched the cloth on the table. "You’ve already learned to make pleated trim? You’re improving fast—at this rate you’ll be turning out pretty clothes in no time, won’t you?"
No doubt the game’s built-in correction had a hand in it, too.
Yimi hugged the sweets he’d given her, her mood much improved. "When I make something pretty later, you get to wear it first."
"Oh, now that’s something to look forward to..."
"Hold on—didn’t you just say yesterday that the pretty clothes would go to me first?" Asuna cut in, put out.
It was like last time, too—Kirito had inexplicably claimed the child’s affinity for him ran higher, but the one keeping the little thing company every single day now was her!
Kirito sighed helplessly. "What a baffling little fit of jealousy. Looks like Vice Commander Asuna hasn’t actually changed a bit in the better part of a year."
"Stop calling me Vice Commander!"
"All right, all right." Kirito waved a hand, then flicked a glance from Asuna toward Yimi.
The little cat’s ears drooped as her head turned back and forth between Kirito and Asuna; feeling a touch guilty, she’d clean forgotten the thing she’d promised Asuna and just now blurted a promise to Kirito instead.
"Sorry, I was only teasing just now—did I scare you?" Asuna hurriedly patted her head to soothe her.
Yimi lowered her head, thinking.
Then later, once she made a pretty little dress, she’d just make two sets and give one each to Asuna and Kirito.
"Speaking of changes just now—you’ve changed quite a lot, Kirito-kun."
Asuna turned her gaze back to him and, after a moment’s hesitation, raised the topic the two of them had always deliberately skirted. "It might be rude to ask, but—after that, what did you go off and do?"
Floor 25 had been a watershed for the early Clearers: a misjudgment there had dealt the group a heavy blow, the single greatest loss of life in its history. Under public pressure, the major guilds that made up the Clearers pulled back from the front lines to Floor 1, the group’s structure changed completely, and the Knights of the Blood had been founded more or less after that.
Kirito scratched his cheek. "There’s nothing much I can’t tell you. After that, I joined a low-level guild."
Its members were only around level twenty or thirty—students who’d known each other and been close in reality. Kirito, forever the solo player, so envied the warmth among them that he’d hidden his level—already among the very highest on the server at the time—and joined up. Back then he’d also grown close with one of them, an insecure girl, and they often confided in each other.
Because the beta testers had, on launch day, run off alone to seize resources they’d known about from the closed beta, hardly any were willing to help newbies; to new players who didn’t even grasp the game’s mechanics, their behavior was no better than that of thieving scum. Not wanting everyone to turn hostile toward the beta testers as a whole, Kirito had simply classed himself as a beta tester who’d explored the higher floors, and after the first boss fight he’d loudly mocked all the beta testers, drawing the ordinary players’ collective hostility squarely onto his own head.
"Beater"—saddled with that nickname, he was treated coldly by others for a long time. Maybe he feared that revealing his level would earn him the same scorn from these people, or feared it would keep him from fitting into their little circle; whatever the reason, he simply kept it hidden. It had been a pleasant stretch of time; he, who hadn’t connected with anyone in ages, had finally found some warmth.
But precisely because he’d hidden his level, on one group outing they reached a hidden room in the labyrinth—a special room where crystals couldn’t be used—with an unopened treasure chest sitting there all alone. Kirito, sensing something wrong, tried to stop them, but coming from someone with the standing of merely "the same level and just an ordinary member," his warning was taken in the moment for ordinary worry—and then they sprang the trap.
"Right after that, the game crashed. If it hadn’t, we’d have very nearly been wiped out on the spot." Kirito looked down at Yimi, eating so daintily.
Of course, high-leveled as he was, he most likely wouldn’t have died—but in this world of nothing but blades and swords, no magic to be had, protecting that many people out of a swarm of monsters was simply too hard. After the crash was fixed, there’d been about a day of "no-monster" time, and it was thanks to that alone that they’d escaped.
"A crash, huh..." Asuna pressed a hand to her chest.
That was the main source of her lost sense of security. Because that crash had lasted so long—they couldn’t actually check the time—the agony of sitting in pitch blackness, able to do nothing, let the mind spiral without end. Most players coped by sleeping; no small number, like her, couldn’t sleep for fear that once they did, they’d never wake again.
Seeing her distress, Kirito hurried to change the subject. "Come to think of it, after that crash there were all sorts of bugs with gaps opening in the textures—but they were patched inside a day. Kayaba Akihiko really is a genius."
Asuna smiled. "If he were a genius, there wouldn’t have been a crash in the first place, would there? So—you already have a guild now, and that’s why you won’t join anywhere else?"
Kirito shook his head, rueful. "My level got exposed after that incident. The leader told me, ’A player like you should be putting in the work on the front lines, not wasting your time playing weak to hide your strength at our side,’ and drove me out."
The truth was, after that incident the guild’s members had grown fiercely protective of their own lives, and might never again dare venture into unknown territory. Most likely they’d cut him loose for fear their group’s decision to stop pushing forward would drag him down—though even now they still kept in touch from time to time.
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